U.S. President Donald Trump told law enforcement chiefs Friday to investigate links between Jeffrey Epstein and ex-president Bill Clinton, seeking to deflect growing questions about his own ties to the late alleged sex trafficker.

U.S. President Donald Trump said Friday he has "sort of" made up his mind about Venezuela, as his escalating military deployment in Latin America has ignited concerns about a wider regional conflict.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling coalition is headed to win a key state election in a vote seen as a crucial test of Modi's popularity in one of the country's poorest yet most politically influential states.

Partial results Friday from the Election Commission of India, the country's election watchdog, showed the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance, or NDA, expected to take 208 seats of the 243-member legislature in the eastern state of Bihar.

Iran seized a Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker as it traveled through the narrow Strait of Hormuz on Friday, a U.S. official said, turning the ship into Iranian territorial waters in the first-such interdiction in months in the strategic waterway.

Iran did not immediately acknowledge the seizure, though it comes as Tehran has been increasingly warning it can strike back after facing a 12-day war in June with Israel that saw the U.S. strike Iranian nuclear sites.

The U.N.'s top human rights body was holding a one-day special session Friday to highlight hundreds of killings at a hospital in Sudan's Darfur region and other atrocities committed last month by paramilitary forces fighting the army.

The Human Rights Council was also debating a draft resolution calling on an existing team of independent experts to carry out an urgent inquiry into the killings and other rights violations in the city of el-Fasher by the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary.

A U.S. proposal to provide a United Nations mandate for an international stabilization force in Gaza is facing opposition from Russia, China and some Arab countries, which have expressed unease about a yet-to-be established board that would temporarily govern the territory and the lack of any transitional role for the Palestinian Authority.

The Chinese and the Russians — two veto-wielding members of the U.N. Security Council — have called for the "Board of Peace" under President Donald Trump's ceasefire plan to be removed from the resolution entirely, according to four U.N. diplomats briefed on the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations.

Russia unleashed a major missile and drone barrage on Kyiv early Friday, killing four people, starting fires and scattering debris as the sound of explosions boomed across the city, Ukrainian authorities said. A pregnant woman was among at least 34 people injured.

Emergency crews responded to multiple strikes during the night, said Tymur Tkachenko, head of Kyiv's military administration. Russia used at least 430 drones and 18 missiles in the attack, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Pakistan's interior minister said Thursday that Afghan nationals carried out two fatal suicide attacks this week — one targeting a cadet college near the Afghan border and the other outside a court in the capital, Islamabad.

"In both of the suicide bombings, Afghan citizens were involved, and they carried out the attacks," Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said.

Ukraine's top military commander said Thursday he visited troops holding the front line in a key eastern city besieged by Russian forces, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky grappled with the fallout from a corruption scandal that has engulfed his administration.

After Zelensky's justice and energy ministers quit Wednesday amid the investigation into alleged energy sector graft, the government fired the vice president of Energoatom, the state-owned nuclear power company believed by investigators to be at the center of the kickback scheme.

Coordinated terrorist attacks turned Paris into a theater of blood and calamity 10 years ago Thursday, with gunfire on café terraces, explosions by a stadium and a nighttime massacre at the Bataclan concert hall leaving 132 people dead and hundreds injured.

Many families measure time as "before" and "after" the attacks. The night reshaped France's sense of safety and purpose, hardening security while deepening a civic reflex for solidarity that endures a decade on.