Russia's ambassador to the UN used the word "strange" to describe a speech given by the Ukrainian prime minister at the General Assembly.

Most of Arseny Yatsenyuk's speech, which came last at the first day of UNGA debates, was devoted to criticizing Russia.

Yatsenyuk has urged the General Assembly participants not to lift sanctions imposed on Russia until Kiev regains control over the whole of the Ukrainian territory.

Russia's Foreign Ministry has denounced Romanian PM Victor Ponta's plan to unify Moldova with Romania by 2018 as "inadmissible and irresponsible," and called for all European countries to counter modern expansionism.

Prime Minister Ponta, announced last week that he was entering the race for the Romanian presidency, and said that if elected he would make the unification of Romania and Moldova his main objective.

"We consider it irresponsible and inadmissible to multiply such statements when an election campaign is under way in Moldova. We expect the Chisinau authorities to give an adequate appraisal of these words. We also hold that a reaction must follow from Brussels and other European capitals," the Russian Foreign ministry said in a statement.

Russian diplomats added that authorities in Moscow were concerned how certain Bucharest circles have annexation plans concerning the sovereignty and neutrality of Moldova.

Romanian nationalists have had plans to annex Moldova ever since it emerged as an independent nation in the early 1990s. Bucharest officials introduced a simplified citizenship procedure for Moldovans and thousands of people have already used it, especially after Romanians received the right of visa free travel in the EU.

This year Romania sponsored a national census in Moldova, and the Romanian ambassador told reporters that his country was interested in the number of Moldovans who spoke Romanian and considered themselves Romanians.

Moldova signed an Association Agreement with the EU in June this year and ratified it in July. After this move Moscow warned Chisinau that it would cause a review of trade links between Russia and Moldova. In addition, Russian Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin said that the agreement violated the basic rights of residents of the Russian-speaking breakaway Republic of Transdniester. Rogozin also promised Russia's fully-fledged support to the region.

In the same speech Rogozin attacked Moldova's pro-EU position, saying that this course was countering "life's natural logic," as about 700,000 Moldovan citizens are now working in Russia as labor migrants, and their earnings are supporting the state budget of their homeland.

At least 14 Islamic State militants and five civilians have been killed in airstrikes carried out by the US-led forces overnight in northeast Syria, according to a monitoring group.

A third night of attacks targeted IS-controlled oil refineries in the east of the country, the location being the major source of income for the radical group, Rami Abdulrahman, the head of the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The facilities around al Mayadin, al Hasakah, and Abu Kamal were hit, according to the US military, as quoted by Reuters.

Attorney General Eric Holder, the first African-American U.S. Attorney General is expected to announce his resignation on Thursday.

NPR reported Thursday morning that Holder intends to leave the Justice Department as soon as his successor is confirmed.

Holder is the fourth longest-serving Attorney General in U.S. history and one of the President Barack Obama's most enduring cabinet appointees. He is apparently eager to leave office, concerned that "he otherwise could be locked in to stay for much of the rest of President Obama's second term," wrote NPR's Carrie Johnson.

Holder's tenure has been marked by controversy as Republicans placed political obstacles in the path of virtually every Obama administration initiative and appointee. However, it was his recent intervention in Ferguson, Missouri and appearance before protesters that is believed to have calmed tensions in the St. Louis suburb.

Deliveries of Russian relief aid for Ukrainian war-torn eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, which currently face a humanitarian catastrophe, were transparent, a senior executive at the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) said on Thursday.

President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly Ilkka Kanerva, who is currently on a visit to Moscow, said the European organization had always supported humanitarian aid and Russia's assistance delivered by three convoys of trucks was open and understandable.

The OSCE official also said he was surprised with attempts of some countries to politicize the issue of Russian humanitarian aid deliveries to Ukraine.

The day before the Iranian president's address to the UN General Assembly, Israel issued a statement, again accusing the Islamic Republic of allegedly testing technology that could only be used for nuclear bombs.

Based on "highly reliable information," according to the statement from Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, Tel Aviv has accused Tehran of using internal neutron sources such as uranium in nuclear implosion tests at the Parchin military complex.


The statement claimed that the tests occurred back in 2000-2001, during the construction of what it called a "nuclear weaponization test site in Parchin."

The rise of violent extremism around the world is the fault of "certain states" and "intelligence agencies" that have helped to create it and are failing to withstand it, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in an address to the UN General Assembly.

Speaking at the 69th session of the UN General Assembly on Thursday, Rouhani stressed that extremism is not a regional but a global issue, and called on states worldwide to unite against the extremists.

"Certain states have helped to create it, and are now failing to withstand it. Currently our peoples are paying the price," he said. "Certain intelligence agencies have put blades in the hand of the madmen, who now spare no one."

Rouhani also said the current anti-Western sentiment in certain parts of the world was "the offspring of yesterday's colonialism. Today's anti-Westernism is a reaction to yesterday's racism."

The Iranian president urged "all those who have played a role in founding and supporting these terror groups" to acknowledge their mistake.

It was a small victory in a grim and runaway catastrophe. In July, Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, both American medical workers in Liberia, became stricken with Ebola hemorrhagic fever after treating dozens suffering from the disease, which has a mortality rate of 50 percent to 90 percent. They were rushed doses of an experimental cocktail of Ebola antibodies called ZMapp, flown home via a Gulfstream III on separate flights on Aug. 2 and 5, and each isolated inside a special tent called an "aeromedical biological containment system." The U.S. Department of State and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) coordinated the flights, operated by Phoenix Air, a private transport company based in Georgia. Cared for in a special ward at Emory University in Atlanta, they recovered within the month and later met with President Obama. It appeared to be a win for the White House.

Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the San Diego company that developed ZMapp, is also in a way a White House project. It's supported exclusively through federal grants and contracts that go back to 2005. The antibody mixture hadn't yet passed its first phase of human clinical trials, but after the two Americans were infected with Ebola, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency access to ZMapp.

It's too early to say whether ZMapp was vital to the Americans' survival. There were a limited number of doses available. Mapp ran out after having given doses to the two Americans, a Spanish priest, and doctors in two West African countries, although it declined to say how many. And that raised fair questions: Why hadn't the promising treatment gone through human clinical trials sooner, and why were there so few doses on hand?

Ever since the post-World War II grafting of the national-security apparatus onto America's governmental structure, the assumption of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA has been that Americans who oppose national-security state policies and practices are "subversives" or even traitors.

We experienced this phenomenon throughout the Cold War. U.S. officials were spying on Americans who believed in communism or socialism, tapping their telephones, keeping secret files on them, infiltrating their organizations, and doing whatever they could to destroy, humiliate, or ruin them.

Why were they doing such things? Because they believed that Americans who believed in communism or socialism were subversives and even traitors.

It was the same mindset during the Vietnam War, when U.S. officials secretly monitored the activities of American citizens who were protesting the war. Anyone who wasn't "supporting the troops" was considered a subversive, a bad guy, a traitor. Anyone who refused a conscription order to go fight in Vietnam was criminally prosecuted as a draft resister.

German drones may soon be flying over Ukraine as part of the OSCE mission to monitor the truce between Kiev forces and militia fighters. The German Defense Ministry has sent a team to southeastern Ukraine. France is also considering sending drones.

The ministry announced its readiness to fulfill the OSCE's request in an official statement published on Bundeswehr's (Germany's armed forces) website.