North Korea has mobilized a variety of missiles in preparation for a massive military parade later this month to mark the 60th anniversary since the end of the Korean War, a report said Friday.

Satellite imagery has revealed more than 10,000 North Korean soldiers practicing for the parade at Mirim Airport near Pyongyang, Seoul-based Yonhap news agency said.

A Saudi princess was to be released from U.S. jail on bail Thursday after being charged with enslaving a Kenyan woman, forcing her to work in abusive conditions and withholding her passport.

Meshael Alayban, 42, one of six wives of a grandson of the Saudi King Abdullah, paid a $5 million bond and surrendered her passport, the Orange County, California district attorney's office said in a statement.

President Robert Mugabe kick-started his election campaign Thursday exuding confidence that Zimbabweans will vote to extend his 33-year rule when they go to the ballot box in three weeks' time.

"On the 31st of this month the whole country will vote ZANU-PF back into government," 89-year-old Mugabe said in an hour-long speech to some 6,000 supporters in Chiweshe, 120 km (75 miles) north of the capital Harare.

Israel is ready to "immediately" build 10,000 homes in the West Bank and east Jerusalem to lower housing costs, Housing Minister Uri Ariel was quoted as saying on Thursday.

"To immediately alleviate the housing crisis we must massively build in (east) Jerusalem and the settlement blocs in Judaea and Samaria," the Yediot Aharonot newspaper quoted Ariel as telling a parliamentary committee.

A court in Morocco on Thursday sentenced to jail the former head of the country's Airport Authority (ODA) and eight others on charges of corruption, their lawyer told Agence France Presse.

"Abdelhanine Benallou, the former head of the ODA, and two of his close assistants were sentenced to five years in prison each, while the others received terms ranging from one to three years in jail," lawyer Salah Foudda said.

The United States and Israel on Thursday slammed a bid by Iran and Syria to get seats on the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Acting U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Rosemary DiCarlo, called the campaigns "highly inappropriate" because of their records on human rights.

Israel's military is set to change to increase its "technological advantage" over other regional armies, Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said on Thursday, while cutting away at costly traditional field forces.

"We are facing a revolutionary multi-year plan, at the end of which, in a few years, we'll see a different IDF (Israel defense forces)," he wrote on his Facebook page.

U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon on Thursday raised concerns about the detention of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and other Muslim Brotherhood leaders with the country's foreign minister, a spokesman said.

Ban reaffirmed that there must be no "retribution" against any party after the military coup against Morsi, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters after the telephone talks between the U.N. secretary general and Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamal Amr.

A majority of Lebanese believe the influx of Syrian refugees in their country threatens national security, Norway's Fafo research foundation said in a report obtained on Thursday by Agence France Presse.

In the survey carried out by Fafo in late May, 900 people were interviewed across Lebanon, a country of more than four million people which now hosts around 600,000 Syrian refugees.

Russia on Thursday accused Western nations of using "naive" allegations of chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government to block a U.N. investigation into the use of the arms.

Russia's U.N. ambassador Vitaly Churkin angrily attacked Western members of the U.N. Security Council after it emerged that Moscow had blocked a draft resolution backing an investigation.