A Jordanian air force plane on a training flight crashed on Thursday due to a technical failure, killing the pilot and a trainee, an official in the armed forces' general command said in a statement.

"At 6:55 am (0355 GMT) on Thursday morning one of the training planes, a Firefly, at the King Hussein air force college (in Mafraq, in northern Jordan), crashed in a training area to the west of the college after a technical failure during a routine training flight," the statement said.

Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi on Thursday summoned his defense and interior ministers over the kidnapping hours earlier of policemen and soldiers in the Sinai peninsula, the official MENA agency reported.

The crisis talks at the presidential palace come after unidentified gunmen kidnapped three Egyptian policemen and four soldiers in the lawless Sinai peninsula, security officials said.

Kidnappers in Yemen have freed three International Red Cross employees, including a Swiss and a Kenyan, along with two Egyptian hostages, following tribal mediation, a local official said Thursday.

"We have managed to obtain the release of the five hostages kidnapped by the Al-Marakisha tribe," who released them overnight Wednesday, said Abdellatif Sayed, a local commander with the military-linked Popular Resistance Committees.

Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said Wednesday that "urgent" pressure must be put on the rival Syrian sides to propose names for a transitional government.

Cameron said after talks with U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon that he "fully supports" plans for a new international peace conference that could be held in Geneva next month.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will take part in a meeting of the so-called "Friends of Syria" group in Jordan next week, a U.S. official confirmed Wednesday.

"The secretary looks forward to attending," State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell told journalists about the talks to be hosted in Amman, adding that "a substantial amount of our diplomatic energy is focused on this."

An al-Qaida-linked cell broken up in Egypt at the weekend planned to bomb the U.S. and French embassies in Cairo, state news agency MENA quoted investigators as saying on Wednesday.

"The accused planned suicide car bombings outside the embassies of France and the United States in Egypt," MENA said

The U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday condemned the Syrian government's "escalation" of the country's war and backed the role of the opposition coalition in transition talks.

But Russia, Syria's key diplomatic ally, fiercely opposed the resolution, branding it a potential obstacle to peace negotiations expected to be held in Geneva next month.

Car bombs mainly targeting Shiite-majority areas of Baghdad killed at least 10 people on Wednesday, security and medical officials said.

The bombs in Kadhimiyah and Sadr City in north Baghdad, Saidiyah in the south and Mashtal and Baghdad Jadida in the east also wounded at least 45 people, the officials said.

The Tunisian government has decided to ban the congress of hardline Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia due to take place at the end of this week, the ruling Islamist party's leader said Wednesday.

"The government has decided to prohibit this congress whose organizers have not obtained prior permission from the authorities as required by law," Ennahda party chief Rached Ghannouchi told a news conference.

Protesters and Israel forces clashed in the West Bank on Wednesday as thousands of Palestinians commemorated the Nakba (catastrophe) of the Jewish state's creation in 1948, during which 760,000 Palestinians fled their homes.

Soldiers fired rubber bullets at protesters gathered in front of Ofer military prison near Ramallah, wounding 15 of them, Palestinian medical officials said.