The head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce made an urgent plea Thursday to relaunch relations between Cuba and the United States.

Thomas Donohue spoke at the end of the highest-profile visit of an American official to the communist-ruled island in years.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Friday it had lost contact with a second four-member international team in restive eastern Ukraine.

The Vienna-based security body said it had not heard from its team in the industrial region of Lugansk since Thursday evening when it was stopped "by armed men" at a roadblock in the town of Severodonetsk.

Eight women died in the Philippine capital on Friday as a fire engulfed a building in which they had been locked in by their employer, police said.

Eight other women survived the blaze by climbing to the roof of the two-storey building and jumping off, said police officer Cris Gabutin, an investigator in the case.

Pakistani police investigating the murder of a pregnant woman bludgeoned to death outside a court have arrested four men including her uncle and two cousins, a senior officer said Friday.

Farzana Parveen was killed on Tuesday outside the High Court in the eastern city of Lahore by more than two dozen attackers armed with bricks, including numerous relatives, for marrying against her family's wishes.

At least 11 people have been killed and several others wounded in fighting between rival clans in Wajir in Kenya's remote northeast, police said Friday.

The fighting broke out on Thursday when the attackers raided a settlement of the local Degodia clan. Kenyan media reports said the attack was believed to have been carried out by a militia from the rival Garre clan.

A South Korean diver died Friday during efforts to cut a new access hole into a submerged ferry that sank last month with the loss of around 300 lives, the coastguard said.

The 46-year-old diver, identified only as Kim, was pulled from the water unconscious and bleeding from his face, a coastguard official said.

Ukraine claimed it had regained control of swathes of the separatist east on Friday even as Washington expressed concern over the appearance of fighters from Russia's war-ravaged region of Chechnya among the insurgents.

The rebels for their part dismissed speculation of a rift in their ranks after a dozen local militants were evicted from their seat of power in Donetsk by a military brigade comprised largely of Chechens and other Russians from the volatile North Caucasus.

The center-left government of Bulgarian Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski survived a no-confidence vote in parliament on Friday, the fourth such motion submitted by the conservative opposition.

The motion failed in a vote of 116 to 93 with the backing of the Socialist BSP party, their liberal partner Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and independent lawmakers.

Spanish security forces launched pre-dawn raids Friday to break up a jihadist cell in Spain's north African territory of Melilla, arresting six suspects, the government said.

In a 4am (02:00 GMT) operation, officers dismantled an international network that was recruiting and sending out jihadists to join "terrorist organizations" based in Mali and Libya, the Spanish interior ministry said in a statement.

Two people were killed during anti-government protests in the Central African Republic on Friday following a wave of violent clashes across the capital Bangui. 

Troops and police fired warning shots in a bid to stop thousands of protesters who had gathered in different parts of Bangui on Friday calling for the interim government to resign, witnesses and military sources told Agence France Presse.