The United States and Cuba will hold their second round of talks on normalizing relations in Washington on February 27, the State Department said Tuesday.

"I can confirm that the talks will be held on the 27th here at the State Department - the 27th of February," State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters.

The United States announced Tuesday it will provide an additional $125 million (110 million euros) in emergency food aid for Syrians affected by the civil war.

The U.S. State Department's Kelly Clements said the money will go to the U.N. World Food Program, which feeds nearly six million Syrians inside and outside the country every month.

A train carrying more than 100 tankers of crude oil derailed during a snowstorm in southern West Virginia on Monday, sending at least one tanker into a river, igniting at least 14, and sending a fireball hundreds of feet into the sky, officials and residents said.

Part of the derailed train slammed into a house, residents said. Officials evacuated hundreds of families and shut down two water treatment plants threatened by oil seeping into the river. And fires were still burning nearly nine hours after the accident, according to state public safety division spokesman Lawrence Messina. The plan is to let those tankers on fire burn out, he said.

The eastern United States braced for an arctic onslaught Monday, as forecasters predicted another blast of snow and cold in what already has been a merciless winter. 

As many as 50 million people were in the path of the glacial weather, which will see temperatures far more frigid than normal, the National Weather Service warned.

The Palestinian Authority condemned Saturday the "heinous murder" of three American Muslims of Palestinian origin who were shot dead this week in what it described as an act of "terrorism."

The murder of sisters Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19, and Yusor Mohammad, 21, along with Yusor's husband Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, in North Carolina was a "dangerous sign of racism and religious extremism," Palestinian official Wafa news agency quoted the foreign ministry as saying. 

Iran's supreme leader has sent a secret but noncommittal letter to U.S. President Barack Obama in response to American overtures, amid talks to strike a nuclear accord, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The newspaper cited an Iranian diplomat as saying Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had written to Obama in response to the president's letter sent in October.

That's when a warplane drops every bomb on board. And air crews for the B-1 bomber told Agence France Presse it was not uncommon in the battle for the Syrian town of Kobane, recaptured by Kurdish forces last month.

The airmen, recently returned from a six-month stint flying combat missions over Syria and Iraq, recounted how American aircraft relentlessly pounded Islamic State jihadists fighting the Kurds in Kobane.

Colombian authorities detained 16 Pakistani nationals who illegally entered the country and were trying to reach the United States, immigration officials said Friday.

Initial investigations found the Pakistanis had come from Brazil and planned to travel more than 3,200 kilometers (2,000 miles) to the U.S. via Panama and then through Central America, immigration spokesman Juan Caicedo told Agence France Presse.

A large fire destroyed a building belonging to an Islamic center in the Texas city of Houston early Friday and U.S. police suspect arson, members of the institute said.

It comes just days after three Muslim students were shot dead in a North Carolina university town in what the victims' families say was a hate crime.

Americans believe the Islamic State group poses the most serious threat to the United States in the next decade, according to a poll released Friday.

Eighty-four percent of those quizzed by Gallup said IS jihadists, who have grabbed large areas of Iraq and Syria in a brutal onslaught, and terrorism in general presented a "critical threat."