Nearly one out of every five NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan this year were killed by Afghan police or army forces. Nine of the 16 victims were U.S. soldiers.

This pattern of attacks raises a fundamental problem for the plans of the United States and other NATO countries to draw down their forces over the next two years. That plan is, in part, predicated on the idea that as Afghan forces take the lead in security operations, they will be supported by small numbers of U.S./NATO advisers embedded in Afghan army and police units. Those advisers will be quite vulnerable to attack.

This problem was underlined earlier this week when an Afghan Local Police (ALP) officer on Monday shot and killed a U.S. soldier in the eastern province of Paktika, and the same day an Afghan soldier murdered two British soldiers at a NATO base in Lashkar Gah, the capital city of Helmand Province.

Monday’s shootings were the latest in a wave of attacks on international troops by Afghan security forces, prompting concerns over the stepped up frequency of what NATO terms “green-on-blue” incidents.

Incidents of green-on-blue violence were rare in the first few years of the Afghan War, averaging no more than one a year through 2008.

With the “surge” of 33,000 U.S. troops in 2009, though, the number of attacks jumped to 4, likely due to the increased exposure of Afghan forces to international troops.

Instead of tapering off, this upward trend continued to a peak of 12 incidents in 2011. And there have already been nine such attacks this year.

In January, an Afghan soldier fired on a group of French troops during a training exercise, killing four and wounding 16. The deadly attack prompted French President Nicolas Sarkozy to temporarily suspend French training programs in Afghanistan and threaten the early withdrawal of French troops.

NATO officials usually characterize these incidents as “isolated,” and not indicative of the overall relationship between coalition forces and their Afghan partners.

But the trust that might have once existed between international forces and their Afghan counterparts has been seriously undermined by three recent incidents.

– In January a video surfaced on YouTube showing U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of suspected Taliban insurgents.

– This month U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was accused of going on a murderous rampage a mile from his base in Kandahar, killing 16 Afghan civilians.

– The accidental burning of Qurans by U.S. soldiers at Bagram Airfield on February 21 sparked massive protests across Afghanistan. During one such protest outside a military base in Nangarhar Province, a man wearing an Afghan army uniform turned his gun on NATO troops, killing two U.S. servicemen. Two days later, Afghans wearing police uniforms shot and killed two U.S. officers in one of the most secure areas of the Interior Ministry.

The Taliban quickly claimed responsibility for the murders inside the Interior Ministry, saying they were in retaliation for the Quran burnings. However, the insurgent group’s involvement in planning most of the green-on-blue attacks is doubtful.

A few perpetrators have found safe-haven with the Taliban following their attacks, such as the Afghan army soldier, Mohammed Roozi, who appeared in a Taliban video in February boasting about his attack on Australian troops, but rarely have the Taliban declared that the Afghan soldiers and police who have turned their guns on U.S. and NATO troops were working for them.

With American forces making up almost 70% of the NATO troops on the ground in Afghanistan, it is not surprising that almost half of the attacks involved the death or injury of U.S. troops, but as the bar chart on the left shows, many other NATO countries have also been the target of insider attacks by Afghan security forces. Sixteen British soldiers, for instance, have been killed in such attacks.

NATO’s withdrawal strategy requires a high degree of trust between small numbers of military advisors embedded with much larger units of Afghan troops in order to succeed.

This trust has now been eroded to a dangerous degree. Does NATO have a Plan B?

Amid the olive groves of Turkey just a stone’s throw away from the Syrian border, he has hidden away several Styrofoam boxes.

Their contents are deadly: a dozen unexploded antipersonnel mines.

He took one out and brushed dirt off its green molded plastic case. It was about the size of a soup bowl and stamped with Cyrillic letters.

Hajisa pointed at a raised black cross on the top of the device.

“If you put pressure on this trigger,” he said, “It will explode.”

Hajisa’s deadly stash of booby-traps are just a fraction of more than 300 similar devices he claimed he and several other Syrian volunteers dug up from the border between Syria and Turkey over the last two months.

Turkish authorities said the Syrian army began planting mine fields along stretches of the border earlier this winter.

The landmines appear to be part of an effort to close the widely-traveled smugglers’ trails that criss-cross this long Middle Eastern frontier.

The new measure has added another potentially lethal obstacle to the already perilous journey that has been made by thousands of Syrian refugees fleeing to Turkey. More than 17,000 Syrians are currently living in Turkish refugee camps, with hundreds of new arrivals coming every day.

Rami Bakour knows the new landmine threat all too well.

The 25-year old Syrian refugee lay mutilated in a hospital bed in the Turkish city of Antakya. All that was left of his right foot was a stump covered by a bandage.

“I didn’t know there were land mines,” he said, while recalling the fateful afternoon earlier this month, when he tried to flee with his family across the border to Turkey.

“I didn’t feel anything under my foot. I didn’t feel that I stepped on something. Then I heard a very big explosion,” Bakour said. “I didn’t know I had been hit until I saw my shoe with my foot inside it laying close to me.”

Turkish doctors were scheduled to operate on Bakour’s stump once again on Thursday, to clean fragments from his maimed limb.

Turkish officials say at least 10 Syrian landmine victims have been treated in Turkish hospitals in recent weeks.

“Any use of antipersonnel landmines is unconscionable,” wrote the New York-based Human Rights Watch, in a report published earlier this month on new Syrian minefields buried along the borders of both Turkey and Lebanon.

An international convention banning the use of antipersonnel mines has been signed by 159 countries. Syria, the United States and Russia are not signatories.

Human Rights Watch researchers who examined the landmines retrieved by Hajisa identified them as Russian- or Soviet-made PMN-2 antipersonnel mines. Though the Syrian minefields were new, at least some of the landmines appeared to have been manufactured decades ago during the Cold War.

“The PMN-2 antipersonnel landmine was produced in state factories of the Soviet Union,” wrote Mark Hiznay, a senior researcher in Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division. “The examples we photographed had stamps on them that indicated the explosives were loaded into the mines in 1982.”

According to Human Rights Watch, it was impossible to ascertain when the mines were sold to Syria.

But possibly as long as three decades after production, the Soviet landmines were claiming new victims.

“That is the insidious nature of the weapons,” Hiznay wrote in an e-mail to CNN. “They wait for their victim. It’s why 159 countries have banned them.”

Typically, de-mining operations in conflict zones are carried out by experts wearing armor and using specialized equipment.

But the Syrian activist Hajisa and his colleagues had none of these resources and virtually no training when they began the dangerous work of clearing smugglers’ trails.

“Activists informed me that the regime planted mines that exploded under pressure,” said Hajisa, who had some prior experience working with other models of landmines while doing his mandatory military service in the Syrian army five years ago. “So I conducted an experiment. I dug in a big stick next to a mine, tied a rope to it, and went 20 meters away from the mine to pull it out. When I saw the mine didn’t explode, I discovered that you have to step on it to detonate it.”

From that moment, Hajisa said he and several other volunteers started opening up paths through the minefields.

His de-mining tool of choice? A foot-long metal kebab skewer.

“The mines are typically buried 5 to 6 centimeters underground,” he explained, while demonstrating how he probed the dirt with the skewer. “You can find them because the earth around them is a different color, after the Syrian soldiers buried the mines there.”

Asked why he was risking his life digging up hidden explosives, Hajisa had a simple answer.

“It’s my duty,” he said. “If I don’t do this, how will the refugees escape from the regime? They face two choices, either be killed by snipers and tanks, or be killed by landmines. The refugees must have a safe place to escape to.”

A crackdown on protesters by the Syrian regime has been going on for more than a year. The United Nations estimates as many as 9,000 people have been killed, while activists put the toll at more than 10,000. The violence has forced thousands from their homes, many of them seeking refuge in Turkey.

After showing CNN his boxes full of landmines, Hajisa gingerly carried them back into the underbrush where he had stored them.

The volunteer de-miner did not know how to defuse the deadly little devices. He said he didn’t know of any official to whom he could turn over the mines, seeming not to trust the Turks.

“I hide them here because I don’t know where else to put them,” he said.

Greeted by throngs of Catholic worshipers from across the region, Pope Benedict XVI ended his two-country tour in Havana’s Revolution Plaza with a reference to what he described as a need for “authentic freedom.”

Changes between Cuba and the world can come only if “each one is prepared to ask for the truth and if they decide to take the path of love, sowing reconciliation and brotherhood,” the pope said Wednesday.

He also met with the Communist country’s former leader, Fidel Castro, before heading to the airport for a Rome-bound flight Wednesday evening.

In a farewell speech just before boarding the plane, he criticized the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, saying “restrictive economic measures, imposed from outside the country, unfairly burden its people.”

Benedict, whose office has routinely cast the trip in the context of a spiritual pilgrimage, at times addressed political issues — often subtly, and on occasion more overtly.

At the start of his visit, aboard a flight from Rome, he denounced violence caused by the drug war in Mexico and blasted Cuba’s Marxist political system by saying it “no longer corresponds to reality.”

Later, he prayed for “those deprived of freedom” while in Cuba’s southeastern city of Santiago de Cuba. And he made several references to freedom in his final sermon in Havana, addressing a nation that human rights groups have routinely denounced for its abuses.

Many in Cuba and around the world listened closely to the pope’s homily at the enormous open-air Mass Wednesday to see whether he would expand on — or be more forceful in — his apparent criticisms. But his comments often seemed couched in a broader discussion of religious openness.

“It is with joy that in Cuba there have been steps so that the church can carry out its mission,” but the country must continue to strengthen this path, he said.

Tens of thousands of faithful packed Revolution Plaza to hear Wednesday’s Mass.

The pope arrived in the so-called popemobile, his bulletproof vehicle, which slowly made its way to the altar. At some points, he appeared just a few feet from the crowd, which shifted as onlookers tried to get a closer look.

Rescue workers carried away at least three people who fainted in what was a comparably mild Caribbean heat, after waiting for hours for the pope to arrive.

“Every time the pontiff comes comes here, there’s always some sort of transformative period for us afterward,” said Jorge Luis Rodriguez, a Havana resident who joined the thousands that filled the square on Wednesday.

But Cuban dissidents complained that police prohibited some activists from leaving their homes to attend the Mass and that others were detained.

Amnesty International said in a statement that activists were “facing a surge in harassment in a bid to silence them during the pope’s visit.”

Government opponents were detained, threatened or stopped from traveling freely leading up to pontiff’s arrival, according to the human rights group.

“The clampdown has seen an increase in arrests, activists’ phones have been disconnected, and some have had their houses surrounded to prevent them (from) denouncing abuses during Pope Benedict’s tour,” the group said.

CNN could not independently confirm those reports.

The pope’s visit comes 14 years after Pope John Paul II addressed massive crowds near the towering sculpture of Che Guevara in the historic first papal visit to the island nation.

Elsida Martinez, a Havana resident who said she watched from the square when John Paul spoke in 1998, said there was a noticeable difference between the two pontiffs. Cuba itself was also different, she said.

“When we saw John Paul, Cubans didn’t really know anything about religion,” Martinez said. “Now we’re open more. We practice (religion) more. We believe more.”

When John Paul came “it was a different period in our history,” said Camilo Ortiz, a 50-year-old Havana resident, but the former pontiff’s visit still “had more power” than Benedict’s.

“During that time, there were many difficulties here,” Ortiz added. “Now, there are some changes, and things are a little better.”

After the island’s so-called “special period,” which began in the early 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba — which had long enjoyed Soviet subsidies — was confronted with a prolonged period of economic hardship.

When John Paul visited years later, the country was still reeling from its effects.

Cuba is Benedict’s second stop on a tour that has also taken him to Mexico, where he denounced the violence-plagued drug war before traveling to the island nation.

“In Cuba, there will not be political reform,” said Marino Murillo, vice president of the island’s council of ministers, responding to the pope’s remarks about its Marxist political system.

But some Havana residents at Wednesday’s Mass said they were optimistic.

“For me, there’s a hope” that comes with Benedict’s visit, Ortiz said. “There’s a hope that something’s going to change.”

A new satellite image has captured increased activity on North Korea’s launch pad as the country prepares for its controversial missile launch in mid-April.

The DigitalGlobe image taken on March 28 shows trucks on the Tongch’ang-ni launch pad. Atop the umbilical tower, which sits beside where the assembled rocket will stand, a crane arm that will be used to lift the rocket stages has been swung wide.

While South Korean media are reporting the first stage of the rocket – known as the booster – has been moved to the launch facility, DigitalGlobe Senior Analyst Joseph Bermudez said that is not visible in this image.

“It does confirm a higher level of activity within the overall facility and significant activity at the launch pad specifically,” according to Bermudez. “This activity appears consistent with preparations for a satellite launch.”

The booster would be placed on top of the mobile launch platform (in the satellite image, the black square on the launch pad) that shows nothing on it when the DigitalGlobe image was taken. There is evidence of some sort of spill near the trucks sitting on the launch pad, Bermudez told CNN. Additional support equipment is visible near the mobile launch pad.

Bermudez said the North Koreans are assembling the long-range missile inside a horizontal assembly facility not far from the launch pad after it was shipped by rail from a factory outside Pyongyang.

Once the missile is assembled and tested, the stages will be moved by specialized vehicles to the launch pad and assembled, lifted by the crane and assembled on the umbilical tower, Bermudez explained.

The buildings visible to the right of the launch pad in the satellite image are storage for fuel and oxidizer, according to Bermudez. A pipeline leading to the umbilical tower is visible in the image.

The launch, expected between April 12 and April 16, is meant to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Song, the founder of communist North Korea and the grandfather of the current North Korean leader.

The launch is in violation of numerous United Nations resolutions and the most recent agreement with the U.S.

Spanish unions were making final preparations for a general strike Thursday to protest the new conservative government’s labor reforms and austerity cuts.

It will be the first general strike against the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, which was elected in November and took office in December, in the midst of Spain’s deep economic crisis.

Leaders of the two main unions — the Socialist-leaning General Workers Union (UGT) and the Communist-leaning Workers Commissions (CCOO) — were due in Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol plaza late Wednesday to meet with union picketers who will then spread out across the capital, while other picketers fan out across the nation.

The unions are expected to try to disrupt public transportation and major industry in the early hours of the strike, either through workers staying off the job or through informational picketers who will noisily greet people trying to go to work and ask them to join the strike.

The last general strike, in September 2010, was against the then-Socialist government, which also had initiated austerity measures. That strike slowed industry and transport, but much of the country went to work and many analysts saw it as a kind of a draw between the government and unions.

Since then, the economic crisis has deepened. Spain’s jobless rate is nearly 23% overall, and nearly 50% for youth. Nearly 5.3 million Spaniards are out of work.

Union protests across the nation this month and last drew large crowds, which analysts say emboldened the unions to move ahead with a general strike.

The government says the latest labor reforms are needed to bring flexibility to the workplace and to simplify the rules for employers. But unions say the effect will be to make it easier and cheaper to fire workers.

The unions’ strike theme is: “They want to end labor and social rights and finish off everything.”

At the MercaMadrid wholesale fish market, one of the largest in Europe, seafood wholesaler Alfonso Mozos, who employs 120 people, said he doesn’t think striking is good.

“It would be better if unions, the government and employers would negotiate and find a solution,” he said.

Union picketers are expected at the entrance to the sprawling market on Madrid’s south side, but some employees say they plan to work despite the strike.

“If the boss buys fish and we need to come, we’ll come,” said Pedro Marin, a worker at the wholesale market. “But if the union pickets outside won’t let us in, we’ll just have to wait, or maybe go home.”

Many other Spaniards, who have already seen their salaries cut or frozen in the economic crisis, were debating whether to strike. If they walk out, they will lose a day’s wage, which for government workers could amount to several hundred dollars.

Unions and government officials in many, but not all, of Spain’s 17 regions have agreed on minimum services, which generally call for about 30% of public transportation to run, while public hospitals and other essential services would have reduced staff, similar to holiday levels.

The unions also plan 80 demonstrations across the country on Thursday, mostly in the late afternoon or eary evening.

The strike comes one day before the government unveils its 2012 budget on Friday, with the aim of reducing Spain’s deficit to 5.3% of gross domestic product this year, and to 3% next year, to meet European Union requirements.

The government already approved a $20 billion (15 billion euro) package of austerity cuts and tax hikes to reduce the deficit, and on Friday it is expected to announce a second package of the same size or larger. Government critics say it will be the first time the government really shows its hand on where to make deep cuts in specific programs and agencies.

Rajoy, at a recent European Union summit, was reported by Spanish media to be overheard on an open microphone telling another EU leader that the labor reforms would cost him a general strike.

The reforms were approved first as a decree law, with immediate effect, and the unions called on the government to make amendments as the bill moved through parliament. But the conservatives have a commanding majority in parliament and later approved the reforms unchanged.

The government says the labor reforms make up only a portion of the elements needed to spur an economic recovery. It predicts a 1.7% decline in the economy this year.

The government also has demanded reforms in the banking sector, with the aim of getting credit flowing again and to clean up the books of lenders stuck with huge uncollectible debts left over from Spain’s real estate and construction boom that went bust, precipitating the economic crisis.

Energy giant Total was trying Wednesday to contain a gas leak that forced the evacuation of a platform off the coast of Scotland.

A union representing workers on the rig warned there was an “urgent need” to stop the leak, which began Sunday.

“If the gas cloud somehow finds an ignition source, we could be looking at complete destruction,” said Jake Molloy, an official with the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers.

“This is an unprecedented situation and we really are in the realms of the unknown,” Molloy said of the leak from the Elgin platform in the North Sea, about 150 miles (240 km) east of the Scottish city of Aberdeen.

But oceanographer Simon Boxall said the risk of explosion may not be as high as initially feared.

“Initially the risk of explosion was seen as being very high. There were reports coming through of a large gas cloud enveloping the whole rig,” he told CNN.

But the fact that there has been no blast when the flare on the gas rig is still burning “obviously contradicts the idea that there was a very high risk of explosion,” he said.

“Perhaps the quantity of gas is not that great as first thought,” he said.

For the moment, the wind seems to be blowing the gas cloud away from the flare on the Elgin rig.

Nearly 240 workers were taken off the rig as the problem developed Sunday, Total said in a statement.

“Investigations are ongoing to analyze the causes and to determine the remediation of the gas leak,” the company said.

Total confirmed there was a “sheen on the water in the vicinity of the platform,” but said there was no indication of environmental damage. There have been no injuries, the company said.

Steve Todd, national shipping secretary for the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, said that while the workers were safely evacuated, they are being kept in the dark about what happened.

More information is needed on what measures are being taken to prevent such a leak occurring again, he told CNN, speaking from Brussels, Belgium.

“We really need reassurances before anyone is put back out there that the danger has been cleared up altogether,” he said.

Shell partially evacuated two of its nearby platforms, Shearwater and Hans Deul, as a “purely precautionary” measure, it said.

The Shearwater crew was reduced from 90 to 38, and the Hans Deul crew is in the process of being reduced from 106 to 38. Drilling was suspended on the Hans Deul rig, Shell UK said.

The Elgin leak has echoes of the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but there are significant differences. The Elgin is in significantly shallower water, which could make problems easier to fix, but it is leaking gas, rather than oil. Gas catches fire much more easily.

“This is nothing on the scale of the Gulf spill two years ago,” Boxall said. “This is a relatively light spill. The gas itself is dispersing quite rapidly.”

But there is one parallel, he pointed out.

“Ironically, it sounds as if, just like with the Deepwater Horizon, they were closing off a well and somewhere along the line something went wrong,” he said.

“The hope is that there is so little gas pressure in there that it will just blow itself out,” he said of the Elgin spill. Failing that, Total may have to dig a bypass well to close off the leak from another angle, as BP did with the Gulf spill, he said.

Any effect on the environment is likely to be strictly local, he predicted.

Total’s share price fell 7% Tuesday on news of the leak, but market analyst firm Jeffries International said Wednesday that it thought the market had overreacted.

The company’s value continued to fall on Wednesday, but not as sharply. It was down about 1% from the day before as of Wednesday afternoon in France, where it is traded.

The North Sea was the scene of the world’s worst offshore rig disaster, the Piper Alpha explosion, which killed 167 people in 1988.

Sudan and South Sudan may be sliding back toward war, the United States and other international powers are warning, amid reports that Sudan is bombing its newly independent neighbor.

The White House is “alarmed” by recent fighting in the region of Southern Kordofan, Sudan, it said in a statement Tuesday, urging both sides to “exert the greatest restraint.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laid most of the blame for the recent fighting on Sudan.

On Tuesday, she called bombing runs and the use of heavy weaponry by the North “evidence of disproportionate force on the part of the government in Khartoum.”

The United States has also urged South Sudan to stop arming rebel groups in its northern neighbor. South Sudan denies it is doing so.

“We are urging both parties to cease all military activity along the border, because it is a flashpoint that could become even more dangerous and escalate out of control,” U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Tuesday.

On Wednesday, the top European Union foreign policy official echoed the American concerns.

Catherine Ashton called the clashes “a dangerous escalation of an already tense situation,” and warned: “Further cross-border military activity could result in a wider military confrontation.”

The ground clashes that erupted this week are the first between the two sides since South Sudan became independent last year.

They have thrown into doubt plans for Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir to visit South Sudan next month for talks with South Sudan President Salva Kiir.

South Sudan military spokesman Philip Aguer Tuesday accused Sudan of bombing an oil field in the south, a claim Sudan army spokesman Al-Suwarmi Khalid denied.

Actor George Clooney, an outspoken activist on Sudan, was arrested Friday protesting outside the country’s embassy in Washington.

Clooney met with U.S. President Barack Obama Thursday to discuss his concerns about Sudan after testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about violence in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan.

On Monday, the United Nations Security Council “demand(ed) that all parties cease military operations in the border areas and put an end to the cycle of violence,” said Security Council President Mark Lyall Grant of the United Kingdom.

“The members of the Security Council are deeply alarmed by the military clashes in the region bordering Sudan and South Sudan, which threaten to precipitate a resumption of conflict,” Lyall Grant said.

South Sudan became independent from Sudan last year after years of civil war over oil-rich territory.

Recent talks between the two sides failed to resolve the long-running dispute over oil revenues.

South Sudan shut down oil production in late January after accusing its northern neighbor of stealing $815 million worth of its oil. Sudan said it confiscated the crude to make up for unpaid fees to use the pipeline and processing facilities in its territory.

Clashes this month included “ground fighting on both sides of the border and aerial bombardment,” the African Union said Tuesday.

“Military means will never provide a long-term to answer to the bilateral issues affecting the relations between the two countries,” AU Chairperson Jean Ping said Tuesday.

Sudan’s ambassador to the U.N. denied his country was bombing South Sudan and insisted that it had a right to defend itself.

“When our security is threatened inside our territories by rebel movements, we have every right to use all possible means to repel and put an end to those attacks which threaten our security,” Daffa-Alla Elhag Ali Osman said.

It is not clear how many have been killed in the recent clashes, but the U.N. refugee agency says thousands have fled the violence.

The two sides signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Non-Aggression and Cooperation just last month, and are due to hold a presidential summit starting April 3.

Re-election to the Elysée Palace was looking like mission impossible for President Nicolas Sarkozy: Trailing far behind the socialist candidate François Hollande in the polls for months, Sarkozy had only just recently narrowed his rival’s lead, but only at the price of a pugnacious and robust few weeks of campaigning, exploiting the extreme right’s favorite themes, immigration and halal meat.

Then tragedy struck in the streets of southwestern France, in the otherwise picturesque towns of Montauban and Toulouse.

The killing spree of a homegrown terrorist, radicalized in French prisons and trained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, acted like a jolt: Here was a Frenchman executing his compatriots at point blank range — among them, little children aged three to eight — in the name of Allah.

The election campaign stopped in its tracks, time seemed suspended. For three days, candidate Sarkozy became President again. French police reacted swiftly once the means were put into the investigation. The killer was identified, found and shot down after a 32-hour siege during which terrorist Mohammed Merah first said he would surrender and then swore to kill as many policemen as possible.

During those three days, French media kept quiet, didn’t ask difficult questions, they were mainly processing the shock felt by the whole country. Never had France’s children been harmed in a school before. In France, a school is a sacrosanct place at the heart of the French republic, the place where children become citizens.

Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t waste much time. A few hours after Mohammed Merah was gunned down, he had traded his official clothes for that of the candidate’s. At a political rally, he uttered the strongest words yet. He said it was immoral to ask questions surrounding Mohamed Merah’s radicalization in France. The man was a monster and that was it.

The questions now are: Have the events in Toulouse changed the course and direction of the presidential elections?

The latest polls, carried out two days after the end of the siege, show that the events in Toulouse have not radically changed the situation.

Nicolas Sarkozy has only gained half a point, at 28% of expected votes on the first round of the elections, with François Hollande down by half a point at 27.5%. The socialist candidate would still win with ease at the second round, his lead only slightly narrowed, from 56% to 54%. Marine Le Pen loses half a point, at 16.5%, while hard left Jean-Luc Mélenchon overtakes Centrist François Bayrou for the first time, with 13% of expected votes at the first round, leaving Bayrou behind on 11.5%.

Those polls seem to show that the French make a distinction between Sarkozy the president and Sarkozy the candidate. While 55% approve of his actions and tone during the events in Toulouse, they still reject him as a candidate.

The polls also show that security isn’t really people’s top priority, with only 8% of them listing it as their main concern.

Education and unemployment remain the top priorities of French people, both before and after the shootings in Montauban and Toulouse.

Strangely, very few candidates have elaborated on the economy. There have been a few announcements, such as François Hollande’s promise to tax 75% of incomes above the 1 million euro mark, which 61% of the French approve of, and to create 60,000 jobs in the education sector, but apart from vague wording on how to try and cut the budget deficit, the campaign has mainly focused on the robust exchanges between camps and a controversy about halal meat.

This has so far been a disappointment to the French who were expecting more substance on topics which matter to them.

A recent poll has showed that the electoral turnout risks being one of the lowest since 1958 and the beginning of the Fifth Republic. In 2007, turnout was one of the highest, with 87% of voters turning out to cast their ballot at the second round of the elections.

The 10 candidates to the French presidency have four weeks left to finally answer the people’s questions. And to stop bickering over non-issues such as halal meat.

Even though Syria has signed off on a U.N.-backed peace initiative, there’s no evidence yet that the regime is carrying out the plan Wednesday, activists and the U.S. State Department said.

At least 26 people, including two military defectors, were killed in Syria Wednesday as security forces fired shells and rockets, staged raids, and clashed with resistance fighters, the opposition Local Coordination Committees of Syria said.

Diplomats reacted hopefully but skeptically to Syria’s initial acceptance of the peace plan because al-Assad has made other commitments calling for an end to violence during the year of carnage. The United Nations estimates that the Syrian conflict has killed more than 9,000 people since a government crackdown on protesters began last March; opposition activists have put the toll at more than 10,000.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland noted the arrests and violence across Syria Wednesday.

“It is clear that the Assad regime has not yet taken the necessary steps to implement the commitment it has made to Kofi Annan. So, as the secretary said yesterday, he (Assad) knows what he needs to do. We will judge him by his actions, not by his promises,” Nuland said, referring to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

LCC spokeswoman Rafif Jouejati cited shelling in Idlib and growing military deployment in parts of Aleppo.

“So far we haven’t seen anything concrete to indicate the regime is implementing anything of the sort,” she said, referring to the Annan plan.

Dima Moussa, spokeswoman for the Revolutionary Council of Homs, described shelling and snipers in Homs.

“As far as we know, the Syrian regime has taken none of the steps laid out in the six-point peace plan mapped out by Kofi Annan,” she said. “It is hard to believe that the Assad regime is serious about observing the points of the proposal, despite allegedly agreeing to it, when the regime and its tools continue their practices of randomly killing and bombing Syrian cities.”

The United Nations said President Bashar al-Assad’s government accepted the plan Tuesday. Annan, the joint special envoy of the United Nations and the Arab League, urged the government to immediately implement the proposal.

The plan calls for a U.N.-supervised halt of violence by the government and opposition; timely humanitarian aid; speeding up the release of “arbitrarily detained” people; ensuring “freedom of movement” for journalists; and respecting peaceful demonstrations and “freedom of association.”

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called Syria’s acceptance an “important initial step” and urged al-Assad “to put those commitments into immediate effect. There is no time to waste.”

“Mr. Annan is working urgently with all parties to secure implementation of the plan at all levels. I sincerely appreciate his tireless efforts and the evident support he is receiving from the international community,” Ban said Wednesday in Kuwait City. Annan plans to brief the U.N. Security Council in a closed meeting from Geneva, Switzerland, Monday.

The LCC, in a statement, said “it appears” that the Annan plan “will meet a fate no better than that” of the “infamous” Arab League initiative and observer mission that began late last year and continued for several weeks until it was suspended. The Arab League urged an end to the crackdown and a withdrawal of troops from cities, but the violence continued to rage.

“The regime declared restrictions on several provisions of the plan, rendering it devoid of any meaning and making it a sterile technical formality to be ‘negotiated’ indefinitely, citing ‘internal affairs’ as the justification,” the LCC said of the Arab League initiative.

The LCC said Annan’s plan “buys the regime more time to assassinate more activists.” The international community must come up with a “practical mechanism” that protects Syrians, political free expression, and a better future, the LCC said.

“Such an initiative must establish a timetable, methods, and safeguards for the transfer of power, and must enable activists to create a framework for the present and future of their country. Anything short of these demands would be pointless,” the LCC said.

World powers have been unable to stop the violence. The United States has been focused on sanctions and political pressure.

This week, U.S. President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan talked about enhancing ways to provide “nonlethal” aid such as medical supplies and communications equipment to the opposition.

Arab and other voices have called for supplying arms to the Free Syrian Army, the fledgling anti-regime rebel force made up mostly of defectors from Syria’s army.

Some Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq, such as Sheik Abu Ahmed, say they feel obligated to send arms and fighters to help Syrian rebels as they watch the Syrian regime hammer their fellow Sunni tribesmen. Ahmed said he has sent more than $300,000 in cash, machine guns, AK-47s and about 30 fighters into the Syrian province of Deir Ezzor.

Syria is expected to be a hot topic at this week’s Arab League summit in Baghdad.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has said “an updated and distinct resolution” will be presented to Arab leaders.

Syria, which has been suspended from the group over the clampdown, will not deal with any initiative issued by the Arab League during its absence from the group, state media reported, citing Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Maqdasi.

U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Arizona, Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, and Joe Lieberman, a Connecticut independent, this month called for “foreign airpower” to stop the government “slaughter” and save innocent lives. They also called for establishing safe havens that could serve as bases for military aid.

McCain and other senators unveiled a resolution Wednesday condemning Syria’s “crimes against humanity.” It called on senators to recognize Syrians’ “inherent right to defend themselves,” support calls by Arab leaders to help Syrians defend themselves, and urge Obama to work with allies on how and where to create safe havens for citizens.

The Syrian government routinely blames the vaguely defined “armed terrorist groups” for violence in the country, while most reports from inside Syria suggest the government is slaughtering civilians in an attempt to wipe out dissidents.

CNN cannot independently confirm reports from inside Syria because the government severely restricts access by international journalists.

Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was charged in France on Monday with “aggravated pimping” for his alleged participation in a prostitution ring, prosecutors said.

He is not allowed to have contact with other people involved in the investigation, nor is he permitted to talk to the media about the case. Strauss-Kahn was released under a 100,000-euro bail, according to prosecutors.

Earlier in the day, he was questioned by a judge about his alleged involvement in the ring. The meeting was initially scheduled for Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the judge told CNN it was the judge’s decision to change the date, but did not say why the decision was made.

The charge alleges involvement in the habitual operation of a prostitution racket. Specifically, “aggravated’ means on a regular and involved basis, and “pimping” means actually facilitating a prostitution operation, not just being a customer.

Last month, Strauss-Kahn was held for more than 24 hours by police in Lille and questioned about his alleged involvement in the prostitution ring.

His attorneys released a statement in November calling the allegations against their client “unhealthy, sensationalist and not without a political agenda.”

The prostitution probe, nicknamed the “Carlton Affair” by the French press, kicked off in October.

It centers around the city of Lille, where investigators began looking into claims that luxury hotels, including the Carlton, served as a base for a high-profile prostitution network.

In December, Strauss-Kahn’s attorney, Henri Leclerc, acknowledged in an interview with radio station Europe1 that his client attended sex parties, but said Strauss-Kahn was unaware the women in attendance were prostitutes.

While prostitution is not illegal in France, profiting from the prostitution of another person is against the law, according to the French Penal Code. Authorities are also investigating whether corporate funds were used to pay for the prostitutes. In the December Europe1 interview, Leclerc said there is no evidence that such funds were misappropriated.

A hotel manager and four other men were arrested late last year in connection with the investigation.

The Carlton Affair continues a string of sexual allegations against Strauss-Kahn.

The former IMF chief has been linked with a number of sex scandals in the past year — one of which torpedoed his expected plan to run for the French presidency this year. He has not been convicted of any crime.

He stepped down from the top job at the IMF after a New York hotel maid accused him of sexual assault and attempted rape in May.

The case ultimately fell apart after the alleged victim posed significant credibility issues for prosecutors, despite forensic evidence that showed a sexual encounter had occurred.

Strauss-Kahn also faced allegations of attempted rape from a young French writer. Tristane Banon filed a complaint, alleging a 2003 attack, though it could not be pursued because of a statute of limitations.

Strauss-Kahn denied the allegations and has since filed a countersuit in France, alleging slander.