U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit Ukraine next week amid growing global concern over the intensifying nine-month war in the country's east that has killed more than 5,000 people.

The trip will come as the EU and the U.S. are mulling fresh sanctions against Russia, accused of arming and aiding the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Gunmen fired at two U.S. citizens Friday on a road in oil-rich Eastern Province, leaving one wounded, in the fourth anti-Western attack in Saudi Arabia in as many months, police said.

"At 2:00 pm today... a car carrying two American nationals... came under fire from an unknown source, resulting in one of them being wounded and hospitalized," said a police spokesman, quoted by the official SPA news agency.

When Bulgarian police on January 1 arrested Frenchman Fritz-Joly Joachin, a self-confessed "old friend" of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, he was not the first suspected Islamist trying to cross the EU's south-eastern border into Turkey.

Indeed, Bulgarian Interior Minister Veselin Vuchkov says, "hundreds" of Europeans have travelled to Bulgaria to traverse the 275-kilometre (170-mile) border into Turkey, some then crossing into Syria to join Islamic State (IS) militants.

The state of Texas on Thursday executed a convicted rapist-killer whose lawyers argued was severely mentally impaired, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court refused last-minute appeals to spare him.

Robert Ladd, who had an IQ of 67, was executed by lethal injection at 7:02 pm (0102 GMT Friday) in the state's death chamber in Huntsville, justice department spokesman Jason Clark said.

China has asked the United Nations to withhold the names of countries that criticize non-governmental organizations, diplomats said Thursday, in a move that raised transparency concerns.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power tweeted that the request from China at the U.N.'s NGO committee was "very concerning."

A Guinean opposition leader Thursday urged the international community to help monitor presidential elections due in the west African nation this year, voicing fears of possible fraud and violence.

Former prime minister Cellou Dalein Diallo accused Guinea's President Alpha Conde of using the country's ongoing fight against Ebola as a "pretext" for not setting a date for the presidential polls.

Three American contractors were killed in an apparent "insider attack" at Kabul airport on Thursday, a U.S. defense official told AFP.

Details of the shooting remained unclear, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The victims, who were employed under a U.S. Defense Department contract to help train the Afghan air force, died from gunshot wounds.

U.S. President Barack Obama will on Thursday unveil plans to forestall automatic budget cuts, increasing spending $74 billion above a cap for 2016.

Rolling out budget proposals for the coming year, White House officials said that Obama will seek to freeze the so-called sequester, which would automatically trim spending by about $1 trillion by 2021.

Governments increasingly view human rights as "a luxury" they can ill afford, Human Rights Watch said Thursday, warning that abuses fuel crises in world trouble spots like Syria and Ukraine.

Western powers, including the United States, are far from blameless and in some cases their wrongdoing has fed the very climate in which serial rights abusers like Islamic State jihadists thrive.

The last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on Friday accused the United States of drawing Russia into a new Cold War and said he feared hostilities could escalate into armed conflict.

The United States "has already drawn us into a new Cold War, trying openly to achieve its main idea of triumphalism," Gorbachev said in an interview with the Interfax news agency.