North Korea's top military body issued fresh warnings Thursday to the United States and South Korea over their "hostile" policies towards Pyongyang, as Seoul conducted a series of naval live-fire drills.

The National Defence Commission (NDC) criticised U.S. sanctions imposed after the North's alleged cyber attack on Sony Pictures and said Pyongyang would respond forcefully to continued provocation.

Yemen's top security body has blamed al-Qaida for a bomb blast at a police academy in Sanaa, as authorities gave a new toll Thursday of 40 killed in the attack.

The car bomb on Wednesday targeted dozens of potential recruits lined up to register at the academy in the center of the Yemeni capital.

U.S. President Barack Obama led global condemnation of the shooting at a French magazine on Wednesday which left 12 people dead, with world leaders and media groups branding it an act of terror and an attack on free speech.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and Queen Elizabeth II also offered their sympathy, after masked men armed with Kalashnikov automatic rifles opened fire at the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

China and Venezuela will step up co-operation this year, Presidents Xi Jinping and Nicolas Maduro said in Beijing Wednesday as falling oil prices threaten the Latin American nation's economy.

Maduro was widely expected to ask for a new cash injection to shore up oil-rich Venezuela's finances during his visit as elections loom and a faltering economy could hurt his left-wing party's chances.

Heavily armed men shouting "Allahu akbar" stormed the Paris headquarters of a satirical weekly on Wednesday, killing 12 people in an attack that brought more than 100,000 protesters onto streets across France. 

The assault on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, the worst attack in France in decades, sparked a massive manhunt as the two gunmen in black commando gear escaped, executing a wounded police officer with a shot to the head.

The U.S. military is reviewing several incidents in which civilians may have been killed in coalition air strikes against Islamic State jihadists in Iraq and Syria, officials said Tuesday.

The comments marked the first time the U.S. military has acknowledged that the air war may have exacted a toll on civilians.

Two people were killed Tuesday including an alleged shooter at a military medical center in Texas, the facility's commanding officer said.

The Veterans Affairs (VA) clinic at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, went onto lockdown after an "active shooting" situation was reported around mid-afternoon, said the base's commander Major General Stephen Twitty. 

The United States Tuesday condemned a strike by Libyan aircraft that bombed an oil tanker off the Islamist-held port of Derna, killing two crew members.

The crewmen -- a Greek and a Romanian -- were killed on the Liberian-registered vessel, the Araevo.

A report by the OPCW chemical watchdog has concluded "with a high degree of confidence" that chlorine gas was used in attacks on three villages in Syria last year.

At least 13 people died among the 350 to 500 casualties from the attacks, according to the report by a fact-finding mission of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, obtained by Agence France Presse on Tuesday.

North Korea on Wednesday slammed the South after activists sent anti-Pyongyang leaflets over the border in balloons, warning that such launches have scuppered high-level talks in the past.

The isolated nation cautioned Seoul that the "reckless act" of leaflet scattering by North Korean defectors -- who it called "human scum" -- could threaten the tentative dialogue, state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.