Israeli Special Forces detained two Palestinians early on Thursday morning near the southern Gaza city of Rafah, a security official told Agence France Presse.

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Israeli forces "crept into the Rafah area and took two citizens to an unknown destination and there is no information on what happened to them."

Aid group Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres - MSF) said Thursday it had halved its operations in Somalia's war-torn capital after two employees were shot dead last month.

MSF also said it closed down operations in Mogadishu's Hodan district, where it was helping some 200,000 people who fled other Somali regions hit by drought and famine.

Ethiopian security forces were Thursday searching for gunmen who killed five European tourists and kidnapped at least two others and two guides in an attack it blamed on arch-rival Eritrea.

"We are working on how to respond to the attack... there are security operators there," said foreign ministry spokesman Dina Mufti.

Syrian security forces on Thursday killed at least 24 people across the country, including four leading pro-democracy activists, as dissident soldiers killed a general in the flashpoint central city of Hama, activists and a rights group said.

“The number of martyrs has risen to 24,” the Local Coordination Committees, the main activist network spurring protests on the ground, said on its Facebook page.

Financial markets were subdued Thursday as investors awaited developments in Greece's debt-reduction talks with private creditors, a day after the International Monetary Fund revealed it was looking to get its hands on another half a trillion dollars to help it shore up a fragile global economy.

Another successful bond auction from Spain and relief that Germany's second-largest bank, Commerzbank AG, won't need to help from shareholders or the government to boost its capital base helped ease concerns over Europe's debt crisis in the run-up to a raft of U.S. corporate earnings.

Japan said Thursday it was ready to answer an International Monetary Fund call for extra cash to help Europe steer a course through its sovereign debt crisis, a report said.

"Japan is prepared to support European efforts to stabilize the market, including through lending to the IMF, based on strong efforts by European countries," Dow Jones Newswires quoted an unnamed senior government official as saying.

France and Spain gingerly return to the bond markets Thursday, testing appetite for their debt after a raft of Eurozone credit downgrades, as world powers debated boosting the IMF bail-out fund.

The key test for two of the single currency bloc's biggest economies came as its weakest, Greece, was trying to negotiate a deal with private creditors to slash 100 billion euros ($128 billion) from its debt.

Social media giant Facebook released dozens of new applications to let users catalogue every aspect of their lives, from movies to books to food to fashion, and share them with friends.

"Whatever you love, whatever story it is you want to tell, you can add that to your timeline," said Carl Sjogreen, director of platform products for Facebook.

Chinese ratings agency Dagong has warned that Europe's debt problems would cause a collapse of confidence in the euro, and predicted a worsening of the global financial crisis this year.

The agency said the world's economic woes would grow more severe in 2012, with the sovereign debt crisis developing into a "currency crisis" as investor confidence in the euro continued to suffer.

Rare and expensive fragments of a Mars meteorite fell from the sky in July over Morocco, a team of international scientists confirmed.

A fireball in the sky was observed in a remote region of southern Morocco by nomads who tracked down fragments of the seven kilogram (15 pound) meteorite, marking only the fifth time in history that a Mars rock has been seen falling to Earth.