US Secretary of State John Kerry will meet his Russian counterpart in Switzerland on October 15 to discuss Syria, officials said on October 12, as a devastating bombing campaign of the city of Aleppo intensified.

Heavy air strikes on rebel-held areas in the Syrian city of Aleppo killed 25 people on October 12, most of them at a market, a rescue service said, as the Syrian government and Russia pursued their joint offensive to capture the whole city.

Islamic State on October 12 claimed responsibility for a mass shooting that killed at least 18 worshippers at a shrine in the Afghan capital, raising fears of sectarian violence after a string of attacks on the country's Shi'ite minority.

Migrants arriving by sea to Italy are now the main problem faced by the European Union in its efforts to stem mass immigration to the bloc, the head of the EU border agency said on October 12.

Russian jets resumed heavy bombing of rebel-held eastern Aleppo on October 11 after several days of relative calm, a rebel official and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

Donald Trump has fallen further behind Hillary Clinton and now trails her by 8 points among likely voters, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, with 1 in 5 Republicans saying his vulgar comments about groping women disqualify him from the presidency.

Rebels attacked trucks carrying civilians in South Sudan, killing 21 people, the government said, as violence between rival forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and his former vice president risks dragging the country back into civil war.

Turkey and Russia signed an agreement on October 10 for the construction of a major undersea gas pipeline and vowed to seek common ground on the war in Syria, accelerating a normalization in ties nearly a year after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane.

A suspected car bomb on October 10 killed at least 10 police amid increased Taliban attacks on the besieged capital of the southwestern Afghan province of Helmand, with the toll expected to rise, a security official said.

The head of Germany's domestic intelligence agency (BfV) said a Syrian suspect arrested on October 10 was building a bomb and probably planned to attack one of the airports in Berlin.