China said Wednesday it was "severely concerned" over the arrest of one of its citizens in the U.S., one of six Chinese nationals charged with economic espionage.

U.S. prosecutors accused the Chinese suspects, who include three university professors, with a years-long scheme to steal mobile phone technology trade secrets for Beijing's benefit.

Two Russians captured by Ukrainian forces during a firefight in the ex-Soviet state's separatist east have admitted to serving in the Kremlin's armed forces, the OSCE said on Thursday.

"Both individuals claimed that they were members of a unit of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. They claimed that they were on a reconnaissance mission. They were armed but had no orders to attack," the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe reported after conducting interviews with the two wounded men in a Kiev hospital.

More than 300 leading migration experts denounced Thursday the European Union's plans for a military operation to fight people smugglers in the Mediterranean.

EU ministers approved the proposals this week although plans to destroy boats belonging to human traffickers in Libyan waters still need U.N. approval.

U.S. President Barack Obama has described the loss of key Iraqi territory to Islamic State as a tactical setback, while insisting the war against the jihadist group is not being lost.

"I don't think we're losing," Obama said in an interview with news magazine The Atlantic published Thursday, days after the Iraqi city of Ramadi was overrun.

Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said Thursday that "only remnants of terrorism" remain in Algeria, where authorities say 25 Islamist militants were killed in an army sweep this week.

Special forces were mobilized for the sweep, the minister said, quoted by national news agency APS. "Only remnants of terrorism are left in Algeria."

One day after a deadly 2012 attack on a U.S. mission in Libya, then secretary of state Hillary Clinton was told confidentially al-Qaida-linked militants were likely behind the assault, a U.S. daily said Thursday, publishing some of her emails.

Yet it took several days for the White House to admit it was probing whether al-Qaida had any links to the storming of the mission in Benghazi in which U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed.

The U.S. National Security Agency developed plans to hack into data links to app stores operated by Google and Samsung to plant spyware on smartphones, a media report said Thursday.

The online news site The Intercept said U.S. intelligence developed the plan with allies in Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, a group known as the "Five Eyes" alliance.

The U.S. Treasury placed restrictive sanctions Thursday on an Iraqi middleman company which obtained and sold nine Airbus aircraft to Iran's already-blacklisted Mahan Air.

The Treasury said Al-Naser Airlines, based in Iraq, was used as a "cutout" to procure eight Airbus A340 aircraft and one A320 for transfer early this month to Mahan Air, which was placed under sanctions in 2011 for providing transport services to Iran's Revolutionary Guards, or IRGC-QF, and Lebanon's Hizbullah.

A senior Iranian military official warned on Thursday that any Israeli attack would unleash a firestorm of missiles on its cities fired by the Islamic republic's Hizbullah allies in Lebanon.

The Lebanese group has more than 80,000 rockets ready to fire at Tel Aviv and Haifa, said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Two Roman Catholic nuns have shaken up the campaign ahead of weekend local elections in Spain by openly backing Catalan separatist candidates, in defiance of the Vatican.

Instead of leading cloistered lives in their convents in Catalonia, the two nuns regularly appear in their habits on television chat shows and at conferences, and both are active on social media.