More than 7,000 staff of the U.N. Palestinian refugee agency in Jordan observed a one-day strike on Monday to demand better pay and conditions.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency employees, including teachers and medical staff, "demand a $140 salary raise and they do not want their annual bonus cut," UNRWA spokesperson Anwar Abu Sakinah told Agence France Presse.

Baghdad violence left six people dead on Monday, including a mother and her three children who were stabbed to death in their home, officials said.

A mother, her 13-year-old boy, and two girls aged five and seven were stabbed to death in the east Baghdad neighborhood of Kamaliyah on Monday morning, security and medical officials said.

More than 20 people were killed on Monday in blasts targeting security buildings in the city of Idlib, northwest Syria, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The majority of those killed were members of the security forces, the Britain-based group said.

Bahrain's highest appeals court on Monday ordered the retrial of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a jailed opposition activist who has been on hunger strike since February 8, and other dissidents, their lawyer said.

"The court accepted the appeal (against the verdict of a special tribunal) and ordered a trial in the court of appeal," a civil court, Mohammed al-Jishy told Agence France Presse after a brief hearing.

Islamist militants have offered to free a British-South African hostage if London allows radical cleric Abu Qatada to choose a country for his extradition, U.S. monitoring service SITE said.

Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) also threatened that Britain would "open the door of evil" unto its country and people should it send the imam back to his native Jordan where he faces jail, the report said.

The Syrian Central Bank came under rocket propelled grenade attack overnight, state television reported on Monday, blaming an "armed terrorist group."

"An armed terrorist group staged an RPG attack on the Central Bank of Syria on Sabaa Bahrat Square in Damascus," the television reported. "Only material damage was caused."

The body of Libya's former oil minister Shukri Ghanem, who had defected from Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, was found Sunday in the Danube, Austrian police said in a statement.

No trace of violence was found on the body, police spokesman Roman Hahslinger said, adding that "it is possible that he felt unwell and fell into the water."

Algerian youths working on fixed-term contracts for the government took to the streets Sunday threatening to boycott the May 10 legislative polls if they were not awarded permanent jobs.

Some 200 protesters claiming to represent 600,000 youths on pre-employment civil service contracts nationwide staged a demonstration in Algiers waving banners and placards.

An Islamist group calling itself Al-Nusra Front has claimed responsibility on the Internet for a deadly suicide bombing in Damascus this week, the SITE Monitoring Service said on Sunday.

Al-Nusra Front named the bomber as Abu Omar al-Shami, and said he detonated his payload when members of the Syrian security forces who had assembled for Friday prayers in the Midan neighborhood had peaked to 150.

The head of Egypt's ruling military has told parliament speaker Saad al-Katatni he will reshuffle the government on Sunday ahead of next month's presidential election, the Muslim Brotherhood website said.

"Field Marshal (Hussein) Tantawi tells Katatni he will reshuffle the government in the coming hours," the site said.