U.N. leader Ban Ki-moon said Thursday he believes al-Qaida committed a major bomb attack in Damascus that left dozens dead, and that up to 10,000 people have now been killed in Syria.

Ban said President Bashar Assad has still not implemented a peace plan agreed with U.N.-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan.

Three Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are refusing food, despite the signing this week of a deal to end a mass prisoner hunger strike, Israeli and Palestinian officials said on Thursday.

An official from the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, which tracks the well-being of the 4,700 Palestinians in Israeli jails, told Agence France Presse that "prisoners Mahmoud Sarsak, Akram Rikhawi and Mohammed Abdel Aziz are still on hunger strike."

The head of Syria's main opposition bloc, Burhan Ghalioun, announced on Thursday that he is resigning, pending the naming of his successor, just two days after his controversial re-election.

"I will not allow myself to be the candidate of division, I am not attached to a position, so I announce that I will step down after a new candidate has been chosen, either by consensus or through new elections," the Paris-based academic said in a statement.

Ethnic rebels in the far north of Myanmar have urged the United Nations to send observers to monitor fighting with government troops, a Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) official said Thursday.

In a letter to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, emailed to AFP, the KIO "implored" observers to visit the conflict zone where fighting has raged since a ceasefire collapsed last year.

An explosion rocked an area of the Nigerian oil hub city of Port Harcourt on Thursday, a military spokesman said, but the cause and extent of damage remained unclear.

"There was actually an explosion around Rumuokoro area of Port Harcourt," Lieutenant Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu said of the city in southern Nigeria that is home to a number of oil firm offices.

Russia has commissioned new school textbooks that condemn "falsifications of history" and paint the Soviet Union in a more positive light in a bid to boost patriotism among the young.

The education and science ministry this month posted a call for new teaching materials for senior classes "on the problem of the falsification of history," according to the Zakupki official tender website.

Two Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are refusing food, despite the signing this week of a deal to end a mass prisoner hunger strike, Israeli and Palestinian officials said on Thursday.

An official from the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, which tracks the well-being of the 4,700 Palestinians in Israeli jails, told Agence France Presse that "prisoners Mahmud Sarsak and Akram Rikhawi are still on hunger strike."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday he hopes to attend this summer's Olympic Games in London but that the British authorities were reluctant to allow him, state media reported.

"I would like to be beside the Iranian athletes at the Olympic Games in London to support them, but (the British) have issues with my presence," Ahmadinejad said, without offering further explanation.

French leader Francois Hollande's new Socialist government got down to work on Thursday with the first order of business a symbolic 30 percent pay cut for the president and ministers.

With the cabinet set to hold its first meeting, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the top item on the agenda would be the salary cut, a Hollande campaign promise that the premier said was about "setting an example".

Russia cautioned Western powers on Thursday against launching "hasty" wars that could lead to the rise of radical Islamist factions and even result in regional nuclear wars.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev told a legal forum ahead of his visit to the G8 summit as Russia's official representative at Camp David that Moscow noted numerous examples of powers infringing on the sovereignty of other states.