FRANCE24 - A former Burkina Faso soldier may have participated in Friday's simultaneous attacks by al Qaeda-linked extremists on the army headquarters and heavily-guarded French Embassy in the capital, Ouagadougou.

AFP - Thousands of websites around the world, including many operated by governments, have been infected by hackers using the sites' computing power to "mine" cryptocurrencies, security researchers said.

REUTERS - Syrian government warplanes conducted air strikes against rebel-held eastern Ghouta on Thursday, killing 21 people and injuring 125 more, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitoring group, reported.

AFP - The US-led coalition killed at least 100 regime and allied fighters in retaliation for an attack in eastern Syria, a US official said, in one of the deadliest incidents of its kind.

The flare-up lasted into the small hours of Thursday and was sparked by an attack on positions held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Deir Ezzor province.

AFP - Afghanistan has handed "undeniable" evidence to Pakistan that it claims shows a recent spate of deadly attacks were planned on Pakistani soil, Afghan officials said Thursday, amid growing public anger over their impotence to protect civilians.

FRANCE24 - Insurgents conducted a coordinated attack on the Save the Children office in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad Wednesday, killing at least one person and wounding several others, according to local officials.

AFP - Drones that attacked Russian bases in Syria last week were sent from Idlib, a "de-escalation" zone controlled by anti-Damascus fighters, the Russian defence ministry's official newspaper said Wednesday.

AFP - Israeli forces set up roadblocks and deployed around a major Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday in a manhunt for attackers who shot dead an Israeli settler.

Raziel Shevah, a 35-year-old rabbi, was killed late Tuesday while driving near the wildcat settlement where he lived, Havat Gilad near the northern West Bank city of Nablus.