Saudi officials are to pay the Free Syria Army wages in a bid to encourage mass defections, reports The Guardian on Friday.

Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has addressed both Houses of Parliament during her visit to Great Britain.

Ms Suu Kyi met Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall ahead of a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron at No 10.

At a joint press conference the prime minister paid tribute to Ms Suu Kyi.

More than one million people around the world took part in marking World Refugee Day  on 20th June, remembering the 42 million people who are currently displaced from their homes.

In his keynote speech, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said that many more millions had been displaced in the past 18 months from Cote d’lvoire, Libya, Mali, Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

A Syrian air force pilot, Colonel Hassan Hamada, defected to Jordan on Thursday, flying his MiG-21 fighter plane over the border to the King Hussein military air base in Jordan.

According to Jordanian officials the defecting pilot was seeking aslyum.

Jordan's Minister of State for Information, Samih al-Maaytah, said to the Reuters news agency:

The head of the observer mission to Syria, General Robert Mood, has told the Security Council that the UN team was targeted by gun fire and hostile crowds, ahead of his decision to suspend the mission.

Diplomats say Gen Mood described how his 300 unarmed monitors were targeted at least 10 times by direct fire and nine UN vehicles were struck in the past week alone.

France has warned Iran of tougher sanctions if it doesn’t negotiate seriously over its nuclear program.

Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said the EU should implement an agreed oil embargo from July 1.

The MV Alaed, currently off the coast of Scotland, is believed to be carrying Mi-25 attack helicopters and anti-ship missiles for Syria, a move that drew the ire of the United States.
 

The Sudanese government's security wing, the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) ordered three independent newspapers not to distribute their Sunday edition this weekend, despite having printed them.

The daily newspapers, Al-Ahdath, Al-Watan and Al-Jarida, were also ordered not to publish Monday's editions until further approval by the NISS agent.

British Prime Minister David Cameron and Argentine President Cristina Kirchner were involved in a confrontation on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

Cameron approached Ms Kirchner before the first session of the summit, and told her she should ‘respect the views’ of Falkland Islanders.

US President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have urged an immediate end to violence in Syria in a joint statement released on Monday, on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Los Cabos Mexico.

The statement read:

Early election results for Egypt's first democratically elected President, appeared to indicate that Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood defeated Ahmed Shafik, Hosni Mubarak’s former Prime Minister, by a margin of about 4 percentage points, or approximately one million votes.

Election results will only be confirmed later this week. However, a spokesperson for Shafik declared him the true winner and asserted that the Brotherhood had “terrorised voters” but offered no evidence for it.

Meanwhile, ruling generals have imposed martial law, as Brotherhood parliamentarians, refuting the authority of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) or the Supreme Court to dissolve the parliament on the eve of the election, vow to turn up to the chambers as scheduled on Tuesday.

Martial law grants the military power to detain and try civilians in military courts, and the ruling generals have suggested that this could be applied in the case that someone should try to enter the parliamentary building, which is currently guarded by soldiers and police to keep the lawmakers out.

In an interview with a Mexican newspaper, Reforma, the Chinese President Hu Jintao, urged G20 members to approach the European debt crisis in a "constructive and cooperative way, encourage and support efforts made by Europe to resolve it and send a signal of confidence to the market"

Hu said,

"In the current world economic environment, the G20 members should stick together in difficult times and pursue win-win cooperation."