Religious leaders in Asia on Thursday condemned Donald Trump's inflammatory comments on Muslims, warning that the U.S. presidential hopeful was helping the Islamic State group's cause and diminishing America's global stature.

In Bangladesh, Indonesia and Pakistan, together home to more than a third of the world's 1.5 billion followers of Islam, anger at the bouffant billionaire's incendiary proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States ran high.

Under fire for anti-Muslim remarks, Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump said Thursday he was postponing a planned trip to Israel because he didn't want to put pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump had been scheduled to meet with Netanyahu on December 28, but changed his plans after his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States met with a chorus of international condemnation.

Police in Geneva raised the terror alert level and were searching Geneva on Thursday for several suspected jihadists believed to have links to the Islamic State group, security sources said. 

A statement from the Canton of Geneva's security department said it had received information on Wednesday from Swiss federal authorities concerning "suspicious individuals likely to be in Geneva or the Geneva area."

EU lawmakers on Thursday backed plans to track airline passenger names as part of efforts to prevent a repeat of the Paris attacks, some of whose perpetrators traveled freely across Europe before the carnage.

The European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee voted 38 for and 19 against to approve the deal negotiated with the 28 member states last week, a statement said.

The Pentagon is going to develop two prototypes of machines that can destroy chemical weapons on the spot and avoid the complex logistics of transporting such arsenals.

Most of the 1,300 cubic meters (46,000 cubic feet) of chemical weapons that the Syrian regime handed to the international community were neutralized in 2014 on a U.S. Navy ship, then transformed into waste that was treated in different sites around the world.

Human rights activists slammed Islamabad authorities Thursday after court documents showed the Pakistani capital's development body had cracked down on illegal slums because it feared their growing Christian population would threaten the city's Muslim majority.

In 2014 the Capital Development Authority declared a war against illegal slums in leafy, affluent Islamabad, saying the areas -- known as "katchi abadies" in Urdu and largely populated by Christians and Afghan refugees -- are illegal and havens for militants.

Former French president Jacques Chirac is in hospital for a check-up, but his state of health is not a cause for concern, his daughter told AFP on Thursday.

Chirac, 83, who was head of state from 1995 to 2007, was taken to hospital in Paris on Wednesday and is expected to remain under observation for several days, his daughter Claude Chirac said.

Heavy overnight rain on Thursday piled further misery on parts of northwest England still reeling from Storm Desmond, which left two people dead, with police warning the situation remained "extremely dangerous".

Britain deployed army personnel, lifeboats and a military helicopter to rescue people trapped by floods that deluged parts of the country at the weekend, with the northwest bearing the brunt.

One of nine top fugitive Rwandan genocide suspects, a former mayor accused of slaughtering thousands of people and organizing mass rapes in 1994, has been arrested, the United Nations said.

Ladislas Ntaganzwa, who had a $5 million (4.6 million euro) U.S. bounty on his head, has been indicted by a U.N.-backed court for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The head of Berlin's main asylum seeker registration center has been forced to resign over the chaos plaguing the office, which is struggling to process a record number of newcomers.

The resignation by Franz Allert late Wednesday came shortly after the German capital's mayor Michael Mueller made an open call on public broadcaster RBB for "new leadership for Lageso."