Kuwait will host international talks next week aimed at finding ways to undermine the slick online campaign attracting foreign fighters to the ranks of Islamic militants battling in Iraq and Syria.

"The conference will present an opportunity for an in-depth exchange of ideas for increasing cooperation among coalition partners," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Thursday.

The Islamic State has become the world's wealthiest terror group, generating tens of millions of dollars a month from black market oil sales, ransoms and extortion, officials said Thursday.

It earns $1 million a day alone by selling crude oil from fields captured when the group swept across Iraq and Syria earlier this year, said David Cohen, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

A dozen U.S.-led air strikes have helped fend off an assault by Islamic State jihadists on the strategic Mosul dam in Iraq, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

"There was an offensive action by the enemy in the vicinity of Mosul dam, a combination of U.S. air strikes and Iraqi forces were able to repel that," spokesman Colonel Steven Warren told reporters.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited remnants of the Berlin Wall on Wednesday and warned that East-West tensions again threaten freedom in Europe, 25 years after its collapse.

Speaking where the Cold War frontier once split the German city, Kerry said what was left of the Wall served as a reminder that freedoms "are still being threatened in too many parts of the world, and they are even being threatened right here in Europe".

An American man held for five months in North Korea has arrived back in the United States, U.S. television reported Wednesday, showing his plane landing at an airport in Ohio.

Jeffrey Fowle, 56, whose release was announced Tuesday, arrived at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, according to the television reports.

East African leaders met South Sudan President Salva Kiir on Wednesday in the latest push to end over 10 months of a civil war that has devastated the young nation.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and Ugandan Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda visited the war-torn nation's capital on a one-day visit to discuss the "on-going peace process", a spokesman in Kiir's office told AFP.

A U.S. Marine accused of murdering a transgender woman was moved to the Philippines' military headquarters Wednesday, authorities said, following huge public pressure for him to be moved off an American warship.

A U.S. helicopter delivered Private First Class Joseph Scott Pemberton to Camp Aguinaldo in Manila and will be jointly guarded by American and local troops, military chief General Gregorio Catapang said.

Malala Yousafzai, the child rights activist and youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, received the Liberty Medal Tuesday and pledged her $100,000 award to education in her homeland Pakistan.

Yousafzai won the annual prize from the National Constitution Center for her "courage and resilience in the face of adversity and for serving as a powerful voice for those who have been denied their basic human rights and liberties," the NCC said.  

Lebanon will witness in the upcoming days a diplomatic movement that will begin with a visit by Former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who will meet senior Lebanese officials.

According to al-Joumhouria newspaper, Fillon will visit Lebanon for the second time in less than a year.

The United States on Monday urged Kinshasa to reverse a decision to expel the U.N.'s rights envoy to the Democratic Republic of Congo after a damning report on police violence.

Washington was "deeply concerned" by the decision to expel Scott Campbell, the envoy of U.N. Human Rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein to the strife-torn country, the State Department said.