German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reportedly the target of U.S. snooping on her mobile phone, said Thursday that such conduct between friends was unacceptable.

"Spying between friends, that's just not done," Merkel said as she arrived for a two-day European Union summit where the growing spy scandal has hijacked the agenda.

The mayor of the Italian island of Lampedusa warned European leaders gathered Thursday in a summit that they need an urgent rethink on immigration -- with Mediterranean and Balkan states demanding urgent EU action.

The little Mediterranean island has been swamped by an exodus from neighboring north Africa and hit the headlines this month when hundreds of African refugees and migrants drowned off its shores.

Roma communities around Europe are being stereotyped and scapegoated in the wake of recent child abduction allegations in Ireland and Greece, the head of a Roma rights organization said Thursday.

"We urge the media and authorities not to assign collective responsibility to Roma communities on the basis of individual cases," Dezideriu Gergely, director of the European Roma Rights Center, (ERRC) told Agence France Presse.

French, U.N. and Malian forces were engaged in a major operation aimed at preventing a resurgence of Islamist rebels in Mali, the French military said Thursday.

"We have engaged, with the Malian army and (U.N. mission) MINUSMA, in a large-scale operation" in the so-called Niger Loop, an area hugging a curve of the Niger River between Timbuktu and Gao, French general staff spokesman Colonel Gilles Jaron said.

The head of the U.N. mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Martin Kobler, on Thursday urged armed groups to free their child soldiers, calling their recruitment "an atrocity".

"Almost 1,000 children have been... recruited by armed groups between January 1, 2012 and August 31, 2013. The children were aged from six to 17 years old," Kobler told a weekly conference of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the country, MONUSCO.

Greenpeace on Thursday urged Russia to release its crew members after investigators reduced the charge against them from piracy to hooliganism over their protest on an Arctic oil platform.

"Our general position has not changed: the investigation must wind up this laughable case, apologize and set them all free," Greenpeace lawyer Anton Beneslavsky told Agence France Presse.

Malawi has demanded an official explanation from South Africa after comments by President Jacob Zuma labeling his near neighbor as backward, an official said Thursday.

Malawi has already summoned South Africa's top diplomat, High Commissioner Cassandra Makone, over the gaffe.

Britain and the United States spied on Italy too, including on the government but with the consent of secret services, the Italian weekly L'Espresso reported in its edition due out on Friday.

The weekly said the espionage concentrated on three underwater fiber optic cables with terminals in Italy: the SeaMeWe3 and the SeaMeWe4 in Sicily and the Flag Europe Asia crossing the country.

European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said Thursday that Europeans viewed privacy as "a fundamental right" and warned against the risk of "totalitarianism" after fresh reports of covert U.S. surveillance.

Commenting on the anger boiling up in Europe over reports of U.S. snooping on EU leaders and citizens, Barroso said "we in Europe consider the right to privacy as a fundamental right".

Iran on Thursday angrily rejected as "unfair" and politically-motivated a U.N. report which said the Islamic republic's human rights record showed no sign of improvement.

The report "describes the human rights situation in Iran in a completely unfair light and with political motivations," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham said in a statement carried by the state broadcaster.