Australia hit back Friday at criticism of its response to thousands of migrants stranded at sea in Southeast Asia, saying it was generous towards refugees in the region.

When asked Thursday whether Australia would offer to resettle the migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar's oppressed Rohingya minority, Prime Minister Tony Abbott replied, "nope, nope, nope".

A grand jury indicted six Baltimore police officers Thursday over the death of African-American Freddie Gray in their custody last month, a state attorney said. 

The six officers were previously charged and are now indicted in connection with the arrest and death of 25-year-old Gray, who succumbed to a serious spinal injury suffered while in the back of a police van in April. One officer is indicted for second-degree murder.

Mexican authorities found on Thursday the bodies of a second elderly Canadian man and an American man in a lake where they had gone out sailing earlier this week.

The three men went out in a sailboat on Monday on Lake Chapala, a popular location among North American retirees in western Jalisco state.

It's another sun-drenched day but the deckchairs of a four-star hotel on the island of Djerba stand empty, in a sign of the "catastrophic" summer on the horizon for Tunisian tourism.

"It's dead. It's all over for this year," was the blunt verdict from Adel Tarres, manager of the hotel on the holiday island off the south coast of Tunisia that has in past years been a magnet for tourists from Italy across the Mediterranean.

A U.S. city mayor called for calm Thursday after police shot and injured two African American men allegedly being chased for shoplifting.

The two suspects allegedly assaulted employees after trying to steal beer at a Safeway supermarket in the early hours in Olympia, the capital of northwestern Washington state. 

The United States plotted to find Osama bin Laden by concealing tracking devices in medical supplies, possibly through Red Cross hospitals, a report said Thursday, citing documents leaked by former security contractor Edward Snowden.

The Intercept news site quoted from a National Security Agency slide presentation dated June 2010 which discussed the possibility of going from "Pharma to Target" by penetrating "the non-electronic moat" that protected bin Laden from surveillance in his Pakistan hideout.

Chile's embattled President Michelle Bachelet sought to get her reform agenda back on track in her annual address to Congress Thursday, as anti-government protests outside descended into clashes with police.

Bachelet, who has been struggling to reboot her administration amid a series of corruption scandals, fulfilled a key promise from her 2013 election campaign by announcing a bill to provide free university education to 260,000 of the poorest students, starting next year.

U.S. air strikes against Islamist extremists in Syria killed two children by mistake, officials said Thursday, marking the first time the American military acknowledged inflicting civilian casualties in the war.

"We regret the unintentional loss of lives," Lieutenant General James Terry, head of the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State group, said in a statement, citing the results of an investigation.

A strong 6.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the Solomon Islands early Friday, the U.S. Geological Survey said, but there were no initial reports of damage and no tsunami warning was issued. 

The quake hit at a depth of 10 kilometers (six miles), 56 kilometers from the capital Honiara. 

Jihadists from the Islamic State group seized the last Syrian regime-controlled crossing on the border with Iraq late Thursday, a monitoring group said.

"IS seized control of the al-Tanaf border crossing on the Syrian-Iraqi border... after regime forces withdrew, leaving the Syrian regime with no control over its border with Iraq," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.