Eight senior figures from Islamic State were killed in an air strike while meeting in a town in western Iraq, but the group's reclusive leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did not appear to be among them, residents of the town and hospital sources said.

The US Department of Defense will seek to make "condolence payments" to families of victims of a US air strike that mistakenly hit a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing 22 people, the Pentagon said on October 10.

An Israeli air strike on a Hamas target in the Gaza Strip on October 11 brought down a nearby house killing a Palestinian woman and her daughter, hospital officials said, as a wave of violence in the region triggered fears of wider escalation.

At least 95 people were killed when two suspected suicide bombers struck a rally of pro-Kurdish and labor activists outside Ankara's main train station just weeks before elections, in the worst attack of its kind on Turkish soil.

Islamic State fighters have seized villages close to the northern city of Aleppo from rival insurgents, a monitoring group said on October 9, despite an intensifying Russian air-and-sea campaign that Moscow says has targeted the militant group.

The Obama administration has privately reminded foreign governments and US bankers that sanctions against Iran remain in effect, cautioning against a rush by Western companies to invest in Iran's oil industry and other businesses until the country fully complies with the July nuclear agreement.

At least 220 bodies have been recovered after a massive landslide buried part of a town in Guatemala last week while about 350 people are missing, national disaster agency Conred said on October 8.

Euro-zone governments, Greece's biggest creditors, agree that debt relief for Athens should be accomplished by capping its debt servicing costs at 15% of gross domestic annually, the chairman of the euro zone finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said on October 8.

European Union governments agreed on October 8 to step up deportations of illegal immigrants and discussed creating an EU border force among measures to cope with hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria's civil war.

European Union governments are set to agree on October 7 to step up deportations of illegal immigrants among the hundreds of thousands who have failed to win asylum as they try to cope with a surge in refugees from war-torn Syria.