Kurdish fighters' success in recapturing the key Syrian town of Kobane from Islamic State jihadists was a "big deal," U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Saturday.

Kerry, speaking during a trilateral meeting with his Mexican and Canadian counterparts in Boston, noted that the IS group has been "forced to acknowledge its own defeat."

A drone strike killed four suspected al-Qaida militants in Yemen Saturday, tribal sources said, the second attack in a week since Washington vowed to pursue its campaign against the jihadists.

Tribal sources said the unmanned aircraft, which only the United States operates in the region, targeted a car carrying four militants in the southern province of Shabwa, a stronghold of the jihadist network.

The CIA and Israel's spy agency Mossad were behind an elaborate plot to kill Hizbullah commander Jihad Mughniyeh in a 2008 car bomb attack in Syria, the Washington Post reported Friday.

Citing former intelligence officials, the newspaper reported that U.S. and Israeli spy agencies worked together to target Mughniyeh on February 12, 2008 as he left a restaurant in the Syrian capital Damascus.

Lebanese officials received warnings from foreign countries over attempts to drag Lebanon into a new confrontation with Israel despite Prime Minister Tammam Salam's moderate stance from the latest developments along the border.

According to An Nahar newspaper published on Saturday, U.S. and French officials contacted several ministers to stand on the cabinet's stance from Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah's speech.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un said Pyongyang would not sit idly by "with rabid dogs barking" about toppling its socialist system, in apparent reaction to comments by U.S. President Barack Obama that the regime was doomed, state media reported Saturday.

Kim made the remarks while overseeing a joint naval and air force drill simulating an attack on a U.S. carrier strike group off South Korea, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

Hungary's maverick Prime Minister Viktor Orban has spent the past year straddling the divide between Russia and his European Union counterparts on the crisis in Ukraine.

But he may soon be forced to pick sides.

After having used the Internet profusely for propaganda and recruitment, jihadist organisations have realized that investigators are gleaning crucial information online and are increasingly concealing their web presence, experts say.

Apart from recent orders given to fighters to limit their exposure, erase the footprint of their online activity and avoid revealing too many place names or faces, the Islamic State and Al-Nusra Front groups are increasingly using the "Dark Web" -- the hidden part of the Internet protected by powerful encryption softwares.

A Florida man cleared two years ago of murdering unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in a case that fueled debate about racism in the U.S. won't face charges over recent allegations of assault, local media reported.

A woman described as his ex-girlfriend told police George Zimmerman had thrown a wine bottle at her in a domestic dispute. However, she is no longer cooperating with authorities, prompting police to drop the charges, the Orlando Sentinel reported Friday.

Israel's ambassador to Washington denied responsibility Friday for a protocol incident over an invitation for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address the U.S. Congress, saying that Republican leaders made the decision.

The White House had expressed frustration last week when House Speaker John Boehner, a main political adversary of President Barack Obama, announced Netanyahu had been invited to address a joint meeting of Congress just weeks before Israel's snap elections.

U.S. prosecutors charged a third man Friday for conspiring to overthrow the Gambian government last month in a failed coup ostensibly aimed at restoring democracy to the small west African nation.

Dual U.S.-Gambian citizen Alagie Barrow, 41, was charged for seeking to overthrow Gambian President Yahya Jammeh on December 30 with fellow dual national Papa Faal and U.S. resident Cherno Njie, whom they planned to then have serve as interim leader.