Gunmen snatched two senior government officials after overpowering their subordinates in Pakistan's restive southwest on Thursday, officials said.

The incident happened in Tump town, Kechh district, some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) southwest of Quetta, the capital of the oil and gas rich Baluchistan province bordering Iran and Afghanistan.

French police have detained an Egyptian national on suspicion of carrying explosives on board a Paris-Venice night train, Besancon prosecutor Alain Saffar told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

The man, who is 33 and lives in Italy, was taken off the train late Wednesday and placed in custody after customs officials who had boarded the train at the French city of Dijon confiscated a plastic bottle wrapped in aluminium foil.

Kenya on Thursday accused the U.S. development agency USAID of trying to "destabilize" the country by financing anti-government demonstrations.

The chairman of National Security Advisory Committee (NSAC), Francis Kimemia, accused USAID of financing "clandestinely planned" demonstrations held to "pour vitriol" on the nation's parliament.

Turkey's president said on Thursday he was trying to iron out problems in his country's new Internet laws that have sparked outrage both at home and abroad.

"There are one or two problematic areas," Abdullah Gul told reporters, in his first remarks since parliament cleared the Internet restrictions that some see as an attempt to silence dissent.

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta announced his resignation on Thursday after his own party voted for a change of government, with 39-year-old leftist Matteo Renzi now expected to replace him.

Letta said he will submit his resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday after less than a year at the head of an uneasy left-right coalition and just as Italy is beginning to emerge from a painful recession.

A civilian employee at the National Security Agency has been disciplined after admitting he gave intelligence leaker Edward Snowden his personal encryption details, NBC News reported Thursday.

The employee was among three workers at the NSA who have been sanctioned after being "implicated" in the unprecedented security breach that allowed Snowden to leak a trove of classified documents, according to a memo to lawmakers cited by NBC.

Boko Haram gunmen killed nine Nigerian soldiers after launching an ambush on a military convoy in the troubled northeast, a local official and a hospital source told Agence France Prese Thursday.

The troops were responding to a distress call late Wednesday in the Madagali area of Adamawa state when they were bombarded by Islamist rebels armed with anti-aircraft weapons mounted on the backs of 4X4 trucks, said Maina Ularamu, a local government official in the area.

The race is on to find hundreds of troops for the EU's military mission in the troubled Central African Republic, the French head of the operation said Thursday.

"We are working with a sense of urgency," said General Philippe Ponties who took up his post as the mission chief for the force earlier this week.

More than 70 men and women have been summarily executed in the restive eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the U.N. mission in the country (MONUSCO) said Thursday.

"The reports received by MONUSCO suggest that the summary executions were allegedly committed mainly by armed groups to spread terror among the population. The majority of the victims were killed with machete," MONUSCO said in a statement.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Thursday said Washington should respect his country's judicial authority after the release of 65 alleged Taliban fighters triggered U.S. condemnation.

"Afghanistan is a sovereign country. If the Afghan judicial authorities decide to release the prisoners, it is of no concern to the U.S. and should be of no concern to the U.S.," Karzai told reporters in Ankara.