World News

New French President Francois Hollande has had a busy week: After being sworn into office Tuesday, he hopped on a plane to Germany to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel. That plane, however, was struck by lightning on the way to Berlin, and he had to turn around and board a new flight. But the Socialist leader has jumped into the real storm: the Eurozone crisis. Tomorrow Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, French President Francois Hollande, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Merkel will chat via videoconference before heading to the G-8 summit on Friday, with the NATO summit beginning in Chicago on Saturday.

A preview of that first meeting of the four European leaders by The Independent:

David Cameron will claim today that austerity is working despite Britain's slide back into recession as he urges eurozone countries to either "make up or break up".

The Prime Minister will warn that Britons are "living in perilous economic times," having heard the Bank of England Governor, Sir Mervyn King, say yesterday that the eurozone is "tearing itself apart". But Mr Cameron will rule out any departure from his Government's tough deficit-reduction strategy. He will also reject the "something for nothing" economics of the Labour opposition, which will be seen as a criticism of François Hollande, the new Socialist President France elected on a "pro-growth" ticket.

Mr Cameron is expected to hold his first face-to-face meeting with Mr Hollande tomorrow, when both men will be in the United States for a summit of leaders from the G8 major economies. The Prime Minister is likely to side with Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, in a debate over the right balance between austerity and growth. There could also be tension between Britain and France over Mr Hollande's plans to bring back French troops from Afghanistan from next year. The withdrawal strategy will be discussed at a Nato summit to be attended by Mr Cameron in Chicago on Sunday.

Restating his economic case today Mr Cameron will insist: "Now is the time to stand firm. We are moving in the right direction - not rushing the task, but judging it carefully. And that is why we must resist voices calling on us to retreat."

(Photo by Antoine Antoniol/Getty Images)

A day after Sudan declared a state of emergency along its border with recently independent South Sudan, the south said that Khartoum bombed an oil region in another disturbing sign of the escalation of hostilities. From Reuters:

Weeks of border fighting have raised fears Sudan and South Sudan could return to all-out war, after failing to resolve a string of disputes over oil revenues and border demarcation.

Philip Aguer, spokesman for South Sudan's army, the SPLA, said Sudanese forces had bombed Panakuach in Unity State.

"There was bombing in Panakuach yesterday. Not less than four bombs were dropped," Aguer said, adding there had been no reports of casualties.

There was no immediate comment from the Sudanese army.

South Sudan has accused Sudan of using its warplanes to bomb its territories. Khartoum has denied it, though it has said it reserves the right to use air strikes in self-defense.

Unity State has come under repeated bombardment over the past week, and an air strike in its capital Bentiu last Monday killed two people.

The UN is debating what to do about the tensions, but to me whatever they do the writing is on the wall: Sudan didn't want South Sudan to gain its independence, and will stoke whatever discord it needs to over still-disputed regions and oil revenues in response.

(Photo by Kazuhiro Ibuki - Pool/Getty Images)

After shooting to Internet superstardom and greater global recognition, the hunt for Lord's Resistance Army rebel leader Joseph Kony continues as before, but at a more publicized pace. International forces, including a hundred U.S. special ops troops, are aiding in the Central African hunt for Kony, wanted for kidnapping children to use as soldiers and other war crimes, and his band of some 300 fighters. An interesting story in The New York Times about being on the trail of one of the world's most wanted men:

Their biggest challenge, they say, is Mr. Kony's turf, a vast expanse the size of California in the middle of Africa that is so rugged it renders much of the American gadgetry useless. Picture towering trees that blot out the sun, endless miles of elephant grass, and swirling brown rivers that coil like intestines and are infested with crocodiles; one of them recently ate a Ugandan member of the force.

"This is not going to be an easy slog," said Ken Wright, a Navy SEAL captain and the commander of the joint American detachment assisting in the Kony hunt.

Still, in the past several months since they arrived, the Americans say Mr. Kony's army of around 300 fighters is showing cracks. No longer is Mr. Kony able to direct the massacres he directed just a few years ago when his fighters waylaid entire towns and hacked hundreds of people to death. His armed acolytes are breaking up into small, desperate groups, American officials say, and for the first time they are abandoning many of the women and children they had abducted who cannot keep up as they flee deeper into the bush.

...The Central African Republic would be an excellent place to disappear. Its national army is one of the region's smallest and weakest. Its terrain is primordially thick. And its infrastructure is shambolic.

Because there are so few roads and telephones, it often takes weeks for news of an attack to reach the fusion center. By the time the Green Berets sift the information and help dispatch the Ugandan hunting squads, Mr. Kony is gone. The Americans say they never go on patrols themselves.

MORE: Behind the headlines in Africa

Encrypted al-Qaeda documents embedded inside a porn flick have revealed that the terror organization planned to attack cruise ships and carrying out Mumbai-style attacks in Europe. German newspaper Die Zeit first reported on the trove found on a suspected al-Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last year. Here, details are shared with CNN.

On May 16 last year, a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin was being questioned by police in Berlin. He had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then traveled overland to Germany. His interrogators were surprised to find that hidden in his underpants were a digital storage device and memory cards.

Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass" -- and a file marked "Sexy Tanja."

Several weeks later, after laborious efforts to crack a password and software to make the file almost invisible, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence -- more than 100 al Qaeda documents that included an inside track on some of the terror group's most audacious plots and a road map for future operations.

Future plots include the idea of seizing cruise ships and carrying out attacks in Europe similar to the gun attacks by Pakistani militants that paralyzed the Indian city of Mumbai in November 2008. Ten gunmen killed 164 people in that three-day rampage.

Terrorist training manuals in PDF format in German, English and Arabic were among the documents, too, according to intelligence sources.

Porn doesn't exactly fit the moral superiority claimed in al-Qaeda's famous 1998 fatwa on the West. The plan for the cruise ship reportedly would include dressing passengers in orange jump suits, as if they were al Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and then videotaping their execution. Investigators believe that Lodin and a partner were sent to Europe to recruit more al-Qaeda members after training in the tribal regions of Pakistan.

MORE: Behind al-Qaeda

A quick update on the Syrian Revolution: The peace plan that Bashar al-Assad promised Kofi Annan he'd adhered to isn't coming to fruition. There's still a body count every day. Activists are frustrated beyond words at the seemingly glacial pace at which the global community is responding to stop the bloodshed. And United Nations monitors have moved in. What could possibly go wrong?

The response of activists to the fresh presence of monitors is interesting. It's helped somewhat, some told CNN, but it's also helping guide the Syria forces to the right spots to strike at the opposition. More:

The growing presence of U.N. monitors already has helped the situation in Syria, opposition activists said, though it hasn't completely stopped the bloodshed that has been a fact of life in the Middle Eastern nation for more than 13 months.

"Shelling has calmed, but this does not mean that the (Kofi Annan-brokered) peace plan has been implemented," said an activist in Homs identified as Saleem, who reported at least three killed Monday in that central Syrian city. "Gunfire, rocket shelling, mortar shelling and arbitrary arrests still occur."

Saleem credited U.N. monitors in Homs, a hot spot of the opposition movement and frequent target of government forces, with helping retrieve bodies left in the streets, in some cases for as long as 50 days. And in Hama, a Local Coordination Committees of Syria (LCC) member named Mousab said the situation in his city is "more quiet," while adding that civilians are not able to talk to U.N. observers because they are always flanked by government forces.

But Ahmad, another opposition activist in Idlib province in northwestern Syria, offered a sour assessment of the U.N. effort. Observers presence may stifle violence in the short-term, he said, but things can change quickly after they depart.

"Unfortunately, the monitors are like a guide for the Syrian regime: Wherever they go, usually people are killed after they leave," Ahmad said Monday night.

Despite Security Council hurdles from veto-wielding members Russia and China, the UN General Assembly passed in February a resolution condemning the violence and calling for an end to human-rights violations.

The Local Coordination Committees report 17 dead so far today across Syria.

Tensions are getting higher between Sudan and the newly independent South Sudan, which declared its independence after an overwhelming majority approved it in a referendum and will celebrate its first birthday on July 9. From Al-Jazeera:

Sudan has declared a state of emergency along its border with South Sudan, in a move that imposes a trade embargo on the South and suspends the constitution, official news agency SUNA said.

President Omar al-Bashir issued a resolution on Sunday declaring the emergency in border districts of South Kordofan state, White Nile and Sennar states, it said.

...Trade across the border has unofficially been banned since South Sudan's independence but the emergency formalises that prohibition.

Bashir's resolution "gives the right to the president and anyone with his mandate" to establish special courts, in consultation with the chief justice, SUNA said.

The state news agency als reported that the governor of White Nile state on the border has set a one-week deadline for 12,000 ethnic South Sudanese gathered south of Khartoum to leave the country.

"The wali (governor) of White Nile state, Yusuf al-Shambali, confirmed that he has set May 5 as the deadline for the Southerners waiting in Kosti," a way station south of Khartoum, it said.

The last thing the region needs is more civil war: About two million people were killed in civil warfare between 1983 and 2005. An emergency has already been in effect for a decade in Darfur -- the region in which Bashir is accused of committing war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

South Sudan President Salva Kiir already said last week that Sudan had declared war on his country.

(Photo by LIU JIN - Pool/Getty Images)

London has already been targeted by terrorists, in the 2005 tube and bus bombings. No wonder the city is on edge as it prepares to host the Summer Olympics -- and as new al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is eager to show a display of power to the affiliates who are doubting his leadership. Preparing for any threats, though, could make the London Games feel a bit more like the Battle of Britain, as this story can attest:

Surface-to-air missiles could be stationed on the rooftops of an apartment block in east London as part of Britain's air defenses for the Olympics, the country's military confirmed Sunday.

Around 700 people living at the building in Bow -- about 2 miles (3.2km) from London's Olympic Stadium -- have been contacted and warned that the weapons and about 10 troops are likely to be based at the site for around two months.

In a leaflet sent to residents, the ministry said the venue offered an uncluttered "view of the surrounding areas and the entire sky above the Olympic park."

Troops plan to conduct tests next week at the building, an upmarket gated apartment complex, to determine if the high velocity surface-to-air missiles will be stationed on a water tower attached to the site's roof.

As many as 13,500 troops are being deployed to help protect the Olympics. When not watching the defense display, here's your guide to the Olympic events from July 25 through August 12.

(Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

The trial of Anders Behring Breivik has been going on for a week in Norway, and it's essentially a forum for the right-wing extremist to rant as the court tries to determine whether he was criminally insane when he murdered 77 people last summer at a youth camp and in an Oslo bombing. He has said he committed the shocking rampage but is technically not guilty because he was battling against multiculturalism in the Scandinavian nation. In his fifth day of testimony, he offered an apology for killing "non-legitimate" bystanders -- but in his twisted mind, the teens at the Utoya summer camp were fair game.

More:

During his fifth day of testimony in this highly emotional trial, Mr. Breivik detailed his "deepest apologies and regrets" to the family of Kai Hauge, a bystander who died from the Oslo bombing, as well as others innocent civilians with no connection to the Labor party that were killed or hurt in the attack.

Breivik placed a car bomb outside the prime minister's main offices that claimed eight lives, seriously injured nine, and injured at least 200 more people, according to the indictment.

When asked by Svein Holden, Oslo public prosecutor, if he had similar regrets about killing the young people at Utøya, he replied with no hesitation, "No, I do not." "Utøya was the best political target in Norway at the time," he said.

Mr. Holden pressed Breivik on whether it weighed on his conscience that he had most likely traumatized a 10-year-old boy whose father, an unarmed security guard, was the first victim on the island. Breivik said he intentionally spared the boy because of his young age.

He replied that the attack was part of "a little barbarism, to avoid a larger barbarism," referring to his belief that Muslim immigration poses a threat to Norway and the rest of Europe.

Giving Breivik such a highly publicized platform to rant about his manifesto has been controversial, to say the least. Read more about what people are saying of the crimes of Anders Behring Breivik.

(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is returning to Cuba for yet another round of cancer treatment, the BBC reported today. More:

Mr Chavez, 57, is having radiotherapy after surgery to remove a second tumour from his pelvic area in February.

The Venezuelan leader said he was determined to overcome cancer and win re-election in October.

The exact nature of his cancer has not been disclosed, fuelling rumours that his health may be worse than officially stated.

Mr Chavez had made clear that he would be "coming and going" between Venezuela and Cuba during his treatment.

Last year, the Venezuelan leader had surgery and four rounds of chemotherapy in Cuba, after a baseball-sized growth was detected in his pelvic region.

After the treatment he had said he was free from cancer, only to suffer a recurrence that required surgery in February.

A poll released Thursday said that Chavez led opposition candidate Henrique Capriles, governor of the state of Miranda, by 14 percent, but 25 percent polled still indicated that they were undecided.

MORE: The rule of Hugo Chavez

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The crisis in post-coup Mali continues to deepen, reports Al-Jazeera, as rebel fighters made gains by attacking the northern strategic city of Gao just a day after seizing the provincial capital of Kidal. More:

The two towns are major prizes for the Tuareg rebels, who launched an insurgency in January that was fuelled by the flow of arms from the fall of neighbouring Libya, where many of the rebels had been on the payroll of ex-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Gao is around 1,200km from the capital of Bamako, where junior officers overthrew the elected government and claimed power 10 days ago.

If Gao falls, the only other major city in Mali's north in government hands is Timbuktu. On Saturday, Baba Bore, a radio programmer at the local Radio Alfarouk station in the ancient city, said gunshots were heard earlier in the day.

The families of military members stationed at the city's two camps had evacuated, expecting to be attacked. Shops had closed and checkpoints had been erected on all sides of nearby Timbuktu.

In Gao, a journalist at Radio Aadar said the attack began early Saturday.

"There has been heavy fighting all morning and it's still going on now," Ibrahima Ly said at midday. "We can hear heavy arms fire and machine guns."

"Most of the fighting is just outside town. There is some fighting near the military camp to the east of town. There has been some fighting in the town itself too but that has been quite light. Everyone is scared and locked up at home."

The junta, whose spokesman was holed up in Burkina Faso with authoritarian leader Blaise Compaore claimed today that "we do not want to confiscate power" and "we agree there must be a regular, normal constitutional state of affairs."

But the military members who staged the coup face widespread international condemnation and surely looming sanctions, as well as a northern part of the country that won't acquiesce so easily.