The Syrian rebels anonunced on Monday that they could no longer be committed to Kofi Annan's ceasefire amid on-going attacks by the Syrian military on civilian targets.

The rebels' spokesperson, Sami al-Kurdi, told Reuters news agency:

"We have decided to end our commitment to this [plan] and starting from that date [Friday] we began defending our people,"

The deputy foreign minister of Russia, Gennady Gatilov said on Monday that Syrian president Assad, did not "necessarily" need to remain in power "at the end of the political process".

See here for article by The Times.

Gatilov said,

“We have never said or insisted that Assad necessarily had to remain in power at the end of the political process,”

The Syrian government barred 17 Western diplomats from the country, reports Reuters. 

The ban includes ambassadors from the US, Canada, Turkey and several European countries, and has been seen as a response to Syrian diplomats being expelled last week.

Thousands of protesters returned to Cairo's Tahrir Square on Sunday, angry at the sentence of Muburak.

Warning of a renewed revolution, many demanded that Mubarak must face the death penalty for his treatment of the protesters during the January 2011 uprising, and pledged to protest until those who died received justice.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, defended the country’s human rights record and claimed that Russia has no political prisoners, the Associated Press reported from St. Petersburg on Monday.

Chinese authorities deleted numerous blog posts, closed down individual blog accounts, and blocked a whole cohort of words and phrases, such as "that year", "massacre", "recall", "candle", "suppress", "mourn" "square" and "today", from the Chinese equivalent of Twitter - Sina Weibo, as many commemorated the 23rd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.

See here.

The newly elected president of Serbia, Tomislav Nikolic, has sparked controversy after claiming that "there was no genocide in Srebrenica."

See here and here.

Speaking on Montenegrin television, Nikolic said,

The UN High Commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay, said that amnesty could not be granted for "serious crimes" in Syria.

Rejecting the possibility of President Assad being granted amnesty in a safe haven, in exchange for relinquishing power, Pillay said that whilst international leaders may be drawn into "politically expedient solutions which may involve amnesty or undertakings not to prosecute," it would be wrong under international law.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Pillay said,