Russia has not agreed to train troops in Iraq as proposed by United States Secretary of State John Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a televised interview Saturday.

"There was no agreement that we will send our instructors to train the army in Iraq," Lavrov told Rossiya-1 television.

Sultan Muslim, a Syrian Kurd, had no doubt what to name her seventh child when he was born, safely in Turkey, after a harrowing month-long flight from her home in Kobane: Obama.

Desperate to flee the flashpoint Syrian border town, the heavily pregnant mother, her husband and six other children made it across the frontier just in time for the boy's arrival. 

A former commander of Colombia's leftist FARC rebels was jailed for 27 years on Friday for his role in the 2003 kidnap of three U.S. citizens held captive for five years, the U.S. Justice Department said.

Alexander Beltran Herrera, 38, pleaded guilty in March to three counts of hostage-taking relating to the abduction of Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell.

For once, the debate gripping Washington is not about party politics.

It's about the White House fence. Is it high enough? Should it be electrified? Are tourists allowed to get too close to the building?

A hatchet attack on New York police officers was a "terrorist act" carried out by a self-radicalized Muslim convert who had been in the military and browsed al-Qaida websites, police said Friday.

"This was a terrorist act," police commissioner Bill Bratton told a news conference on Friday, one day after the attack, saying he was "very comfortable" describing it as a "terrorist attack."

The commander of U.S. forces in South Korea said Friday that North Korea likely has the ability to produce a nuclear warhead that could be mounted on a missile, but officials later sought to downplay his remarks.

The comments by the commander echoed an internal debate among U.S. spy agencies that came to light last year, in which the military's intelligence service warned the North was closer to achieving a nuclear-tipped missile than previously believed. 

The man who attacked New York City police officers with a hatchet before being shot dead was reported to have Islamic "extremist leanings" police and a monitoring group said.

The man, identified in the U.S. media as Zale Thompson, had posted an array of statements on YouTube and Facebook that "display a hyper-racial focus in both religious and historical contexts, and ultimately hint at his extremist leanings," the SITE monitoring group said.

Israel deployed police in force in Jerusalem Friday for weekly Muslim prayers and restricted access to a flashpoint mosque, after a deadly attack by a Palestinian sent tensions soaring.

Clashes broke out for a second night after the Palestinian ploughed his car into a crowd of pedestrians on Wednesday, killing a baby and injuring six other people before he was shot dead by police.

Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will reportedly visit Lebanon during the upcoming days.

According to al-Liwaa newspaper published on Friday, Dempsey will travel to Lebanon to discuss the latest developments in light of Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji's recent visit to the U.S. capital Washington.

America's top negotiator leading talks to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions Thursday called on Iranian leaders to "make the right choice," saying now was the time to reach a deal.

"If Iran truly wants to resolve its differences with the international community -- and facilitate the lifting of economic sanctions -- it will have no better chance than between now and November 24," Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman said.