The White House on Thursday poured cold water on leader Kim Jong-Un's suggestion that North Korea has developed a hydrogen bomb.

Spokesman Josh Earnest said the White House had concerns about the "destabilizing actions" of the regime, but said available information "calls into serious question" claims that Pyongyang has a thermonuclear device.

Connecticut announced plans Thursday to ban sales of weapons to terror suspects, in what would be the first such measure in the United States as it seeks to fight a scourge of gun violence.

"Like all Americans, I have been horrified by the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Paris," Governor Dan Malloy said in a statement.

North and South Korea were set to hold rare, high-level talks Friday, with each side looking to wrestle concessions from the other on stalled cross-border programs in which both their leaders have a political stake.

The vice minister-level dialogue, held in the Kaesong joint industrial zone on the North Korean side of the border, is the fruit of crisis talks in August to ease sky-high military tensions on the divided peninsula.

The head of Afghanistan's main intelligence agency resigned Thursday, laying bare disagreements with President Ashraf Ghani over his diplomatic outreach to Pakistan aimed at reviving peace talks with the resurgent Taliban.

The resignation of Rahmatullah Nabil comes as Afghanistan grapples with string of major Taliban attacks, including a 27-hour siege of Kandahar airport this week which killed at least 50 people.

Using radar and backed by a large patrol vessel, Turkey's coastguard picked up over 150 migrants seeking to cross to Greece in flimsy dinghies during a nighttime swoop on their routes across the Aegean Sea.

Turkish coastguards patrolling off the resort of Cesme in western Turkey picked up on a single night 152 migrants seeking to travel the short distance to the Greek island of Chios.

U.S. presidential hopeful Donald Trump said Thursday he should be thanked for investing in Scotland, after the country ditched him as a business ambassador and a university revoked his honorary degree.

The Republican frontrunner said British politicians were "pandering to political correctness" after they queued up to denounce him over his latest outspoken remarks.

A polemic has erupted in Austria between top government officials and the city of Vienna over its Muslim preschools, after a state-funded pilot study released earlier this week warned some were potential hotbeds for the radicalization of children.

The incendiary findings assessed that the religious education preached by several of the capital's 150 Muslim establishments led to "theologically-motivated isolation" and robbed children of their autonomy through "intimidation."

Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the Islamic Republic of Iran's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, is entering politics with plans to seek election next year to the country's powerful Assembly of Experts.

Khomeini, 43, the best-known of the former supreme leader's 15 grandchildren, has chosen to stand in the February 26 ballot after receiving broad support, the ISNA news agency reported.

The number of terror suspects apprehended in Britain has reached a record high, fueled by a surge in arrests related to international terror, according to official figures released Thursday.

A Home Office (interior ministry) report said there were 315 terror-related arrests in the year to September -- an increase of a third over the preceding 12 months.

EU regulators on Thursday issued a special warning over traveling on airlines from Thailand but stopped short of following last week's damaging U.S. safety downgrade for a country heavily dependent on tourism.

The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said Thailand would be closely monitored as it updated the bloc's air safety blacklist.