North Korea said Friday it had test-fired strategic cruise missiles to demonstrate its nuclear counter-attack capability, days after it vowed to respond to what it called escalating U.S.-led hostilities since the start of the Trump administration.

The official Korean Central News Agency said leader Kim Jong Un oversaw the missile tests off the country's west coast Wednesday. They were the North's fourth missile launch event this year and the second of President Donald Trump's second term.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer wore a broad smile aboard the plane home from Washington. He landed back in Britain on Friday with the satisfaction of a tricky mission not quite accomplished, but off to a flying start.

Starmer's goals for his trip were to persuade President Donald Trump to provide Ukraine with security guarantees in any peace deal and head off duties on British goods while pursuing a rapport with an unpredictable U.S. leader who is the center-left prime minister's opposite in temperament and political outlook.

Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday met Russia's security chief Sergei Shoigu in Beijing, state news agency Xinhua said.

Shoigu's trip comes days after Xi spoke with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, with the Chinese leader hailing Moscow's "positive efforts to defuse" the Ukraine crisis.

A suicide attack at an Islamic religious school in Pakistan where key Taliban leaders have studied killed four people, including the head of the school, police said.

"Hamid ul Haq has been martyred, and it appears he was the target of the suicide bomber," Abdul Rasheed, the district police chief, told AFP, adding that four people were killed and 13 wounded in the blast.

Moscow's troops are using infantry to storm the Ukrainian border from the Russian region of Kursk, which is partially controlled by Ukrainian forces, Kyiv said Friday.

"The Russians are currently attempting to assault the border not with convoys of vehicles, but with infantry groups. The Defence Forces are destroying the enemy. At the moment, there has been no breakthrough and the fighting continues," a Ukrainian state agency that tackles disinformation wrote on social media.

Russia said on Friday it had suggested to the United States resuming direct flights between the two countries during talks in Istanbul this week that addressed "many annoyances" in bilateral ties.

"It was suggested to the American side to examine the possibility of resuming direct air links," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement.

Imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan called on his militant group Thursday to lay down its arms and dissolve as part of a new bid to end a four-decade long conflict with Turkey's government that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

In a message from his prison on an island off Istanbul, Ocalan said that the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, should hold a congress and decide to disband.

Russian and U.S. diplomats held talks in Istanbul on Thursday to discuss normalizing the operation of their respective embassies after years expelling each others' diplomats.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the talks in Istanbul followed an understanding reached during President Donald Trump's call with Russian President Vladimir Putin and talks between top Russian and U.S. diplomats and other senior officials in Saudi Arabia.

Over the last five years, European Union countries have been forced to adapt to unprecedented circumstances. They pulled together to purchase tens of millions of vaccines and devised an innovative debt financing scheme to resuscitate their COVID-19-ravaged economies.

After President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine three years ago, Russia restricted the flow of natural gas to weaken Western support for Kyiv. In response, the 27 EU nations weaned themselves off a dependency on Russian energy in record time.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will visit the White House on Thursday to try to convince President Donald Trump that a lasting peace in Ukraine will endure only if Kyiv and European leaders are at the table as negotiations move forward with Moscow.

Starmer's trip, coming a few days after French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron's own visit, reflects the mounting concern felt by much of Europe that Trump's aggressive push to find an end to Russia's war in Ukraine signals his willingness to concede too much to Russian President Vladimir Putin.