President Barack Obama has approved sending up to 1,500 additional troops to Iraq to aid Baghdad government and Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State group, roughly doubling the number of U.S. troops in the country, the White House said Friday. 

The 1,500 troops will include a group of advisers to help Iraqi forces plan operations and a group of trainers who will be deployed across the country, officials said, as Washington steps up the pressure on the IS militants.

The United States is putting Hungary under "great pressure" over its energy ties to Russia because of the Ukraine crisis, Prime Minister Viktor Orban was quoted as saying for the first time Friday.

"The U.S. is putting Hungary under great pressure," Hungarian media cited Orban as saying in Munich, Germany late Thursday after a meeting with Bavarian state premier Horst Seehofer.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will meet U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Beijing on Saturday ahead of next week's APEC summit, Russian news agencies reported on Friday.

"The meeting between Lavrov and Kerry is planned for November 8 on the sidelines of the preparations for the APEC summit in Beijing," the agencies quoted a source at the foreign ministry as saying.

Lawyers for a Saudi accused of masterminding a deadly attack on the USS Cole asked a judge Thursday that he be tested for brain damage allegedly suffered during CIA waterboarding.

Dressed in a white tunic and without handcuffs, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri listened quietly to his defense lawyers explain the "complex and untreated" chronic post-traumatic stress disorder three experts have diagnosed, attributed to his time in a secret CIA prison.

U.S. President Barack Obama has secretly written to Iran's supreme leader to discuss possible cooperation in the fight against Islamic militants providing there is a nuclear deal, a U.S. daily reported Thursday.

Obama sent the letter last month to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and described what he called a "shared fight" against the Sunni militant Islamic State group, the Wall Street Journal said, citing "people briefed on the correspondence."

Syria has asked Russia to speed up delivery of S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, concerned about a possible U.S. attack, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem said in an interview published Thursday.

Speaking to Lebanon's Al-Akhbar newspaper, Muallem said Washington had pledged that U.S.-led air strikes against the Islamic State group would not hit the Syrian army.

A Kuwaiti, who had been held for 13 years at the controversial U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, arrived home Thursday as Washington steps up releases, his father said.

Fawzi al-Odah had been one of just two Kuwaitis still detained in the holding centre for U.S. "war on terror" prisoners that President Barack Obama has long promised to shut down.

U.S. authorities are investigating a member of Russian President Vladimir Putin's inner circle for money-laundering, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

In a politically thorny tightening of screws on Putin's billionaire allies, the Justice Department and New York state prosecutors are looking into whether Gennady Timchenko transferred funds linked to allegedly corrupt deals in Russia through the U.S. financial system, the Journal reported citing a number of unnamed people familiar with the case.

The defense team for a Saudi man accused of organizing the attack on the USS Cole asked a Guantanamo Bay judge Wednesday to stop him from facing capital punishment.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri faces the death penalty if convicted of charges stemming the Cole suicide bombing, and from the attack on the MV Limburg French oil tanker.

U.S. commanders are weighing a delay in the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan after the country's protracted election set back preparations for the transition, Washington defense officials said Wednesday.

Under the current plan outlined by President Barack Obama, the U.S. force will dwindle to 9,800 troops by January along with roughly 2,000 allied forces, and all American soldiers will be out by the end of 2016.