The flu epidemic death toll in Ukraine has reached 273, the Ukrainian Health Ministry said in a report on Friday.

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Thursday that the developments on the Turkish-Syrian border suggested Turkey’s intensive preparations for military intrusion into Syria. According to Reuters, it is caused by Syrian army source's statement that Aleppo would soon be encircled by government forces that are advancing with Russian air support.

Russia understands Finland’s concerns with the migrant crisis and is ready to discuss the existing problems constructively on the basis of mutual respect, the Russian Foreign Ministry said commenting remarks by Finnish officials that asylum seekers from third countries were entering Finland from the territory of Russia, TASS reports.

Russia has offered “specific proposals” on Syrian ceasefire andis waiting forreaction to them from the International Syria Support Group, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at the start of talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry. According to RT, Lavrov made the statement before meeting his US counterpart John Kerry on the eve of the start of the Munich Security Conference.

US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter on Tuesday previewed a 2017 budget that he said better positions the Pentagon to counter a rising China, Russia's assertiveness and fight Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria

Greece is under concerted pressure from European Union interior ministers to do more to control the influx of refugees and migrants from Turkey, as the EU scrambles again to put together a coherent answer to the biggest challenge the union has ever faced.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has warned against against supporting former US Secretary of State and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the upcoming presidential, calling her a “war hawk with bad judgment” who gets an “emotional rush out of killing people.”

The World Health Organisation has recently declared that the Zika virus outbreak is a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), due to the undoubted link of the Zika virus to a wave in serious birth defects in South America. Experts now are anxious about devastating consequences of Zika virus, which can spread too far and fast.

The World Health Organisation informs the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which has been linked to brain deformities in babies, is likely to spread to all countries in the Americas except Canada and Chile.

UN and Turkish officials declare that about 20.000 Syrian refugees fleeing fighting in northern Aleppo province have gathered at a border crossing with Turkey. The deputy spokesman for the U.N. secretary-general, Farhan Haq told reporters the thousands of people are mainly from the Aleppo sub-districts of Tel Rifaat, Hariyatan and Azaz.

U.S. officials consider North Korea to be preparing a rocket launch, citing increased activity around the Sohae Satellite Launching Station

St Elijah’s monastery in Mosul, which was a place of worship for 1,400 years, is thought to have been demolished between August and September 2014. "New satellite photos confirm what church leaders and Middle East preservationists had feared: the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq has been reduced to rubble, yet another victim of Islamic State’s relentless destruction of heritage sites it considers heretical", The Guardian reports.