Washington Friday condemned the "brutality and cowardice" of the killing of an American blogger of Bangladeshi origin and called his murder an assault on the country's "proud tradition" of free speech.

"The United States condemns in the strongest terms the brutal murder of Avijit Roy," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

President Barack Obama will receive his Afghan counterpart Ashraf Ghani at the White House on March 24 as Washington weighs slowing down the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

The two presidents will discuss security issues, economic development and U.S. support for a reconciliation process, White House secretary Josh Earnest said Friday.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on Friday praised President Barack Obama's "extraordinary" leadership in the fight against the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

With Liberia now in recovery from the worst outbreak ever of the deadly virus, the United States ended its military mission in the region Thursday.

The United States and Turkey will begin training and equipping thousands of moderate Syrian rebel forces on Sunday as part of a deal the two NATO allies signed last week, an official said.

"I can say that the train-and-equip (program) will begin as of March 1," Tanju Bilgic, spokesman for the Turkish foreign ministry, was quoted as saying by the state-run Anatolia news agency.

The United States rebuffed a Cuban demand to be taken off the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror Friday as they opened a second round of historic talks to restore long severed diplomatic ties.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the terror designation, in place since 1982, would be reviewed separately but was not a matter for negotiation.

A court in India on Friday cleared six men of murdering four people including three British nationals during 2002 religious riots in the prime minister's home state of Gujarat.

At least 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed in a frenzy of communal violence in 2002 in the western state where Narendra Modi was chief minister before he was elected prime minister last year.

The United States has flown its most advanced surveillance plane from a military base in the Philippines over flashpoint areas of the South China Sea, Filipino authorities said Friday.

With Filipino soldiers on board, the US Navy flew the P-8A Poseidon from a former American airbase about 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Manila and over the disputed sea on February 17, they said.

Turkey does not place a high priority on fighting Islamic State jihadists and as a result foreign fighters are able to travel through the country into Syria, U.S. intelligence chief James Clapper said Thursday.

When asked, Clapper told senators he wasn't optimistic Turkey would take a more active role in the war against the IS group.

Pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine will likely wait until the spring to attack the port of Mariupol, US intelligence chief James Clapper predicted Thursday, adding such a move did not seem imminent.

Clapper said Russian President Vladimir Putin's aim was to establish a land bridge to Crimea, which was annexed by Moscow a year ago after the fall of a pro-Moscow leader in Kiev.

After fighting with rebels in Libya and embracing the revolt in Syria, Matthew VanDyke has rolled up in northern Iraq, but the celebrity American revolutionary-cum-filmmaker has traded his fatigues for a three-piece suit.

VanDyke, who rose to fame as a foreign fighter backing Libyan rebels against Moammar Gadhafi, has just finished leading his new military contracting firm through its first assignment -- training Christian volunteers to take on jihadists.