The Egyptian government is having difficulty exerting full control over the Sinai Peninsula, allowing terror groups to flourish there, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday.

Netanyahu, who was addressing the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, also said that changes in the region had seen the Hamas movement begin to shift its activities from its headquarters in Syria to Egypt.

Caretaker Health Minister Mohammed Jawad Khalife denied to the Central News Agency on Monday some media reports that Palestinian refugees near al-Shabriha camp in Tyre had pelted his convoy with stones.

He asserted that he never headed to the South on Monday, adding that he was in Beirut all morning as he was carrying out surgeries at the American University of Beirut Medical Center.

Prime Minister-designate Najib Miqati condemned on Monday the attack against a U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon on Friday, stressing the important role the Italian contingent plays in the international force.

He said after holding talks with Italian Ambassador to Lebanon Giuseppe Morabito: “The attack was primarily aimed at destabilizing Lebanon.”

U.N. rights Chief Navi Pillay on Monday slammed the brutality of crackdowns on protestors by government forces in Libya and Syria, saying the actions were shocking in their disregard for human rights.

"The brutality and magnitude of measures taken by the governments in Libya and now Syria have been particularly shocking in their outright disregard for basic human rights," Pillay told the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Germany on Monday became the first major industrialized power to agree an end to nuclear power in the wake of the disaster in Japan, with a phase-out due to be completed by 2022.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said the decision, hammered out by her center-right coalition overnight, and marked the start of a "fundamental" rethink of energy policy in the world's number four economy.

The United States will ask the U.N. atomic watchdog to report Syria to the U.N. Security Council over its alleged illicit nuclear activity, according to a draft resolution obtained by Agence France Presse on Monday.

At a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors next week, Washington will urge member states to report Syria to the Security Council, despite an apparent pledge by Damascus to break a three-and-a-half-year silence over its alleged nuclear ambitions.

Maronite Patriarch Beshara al-Rahi stated on Monday that he does not oppose amending the Taif Accord “as experience has revealed several of its flaws.”

He said after holding talks with Change and Reform bloc MP Nematallah Abi Nasr: “We don’t mind change and if we needed a new agreement, then why not.”

North Korea said Monday it would no longer deal with South Korea and threatened to retaliate against any moves by Seoul to wage "psychological warfare".

The North's powerful National Defense Commission (NDC) said in a statement it would also cut a military communications line on the east coast and shut a liaison office at the jointly-run Mount Kumgang resort.

Seven land rights and religious freedom activists went on trial in Vietnam on Monday on subversion charges which U.S. lawmakers decried as a "stain" on the country's rights record.

Three of the accused, who are being tried by a court in southern Ben Tre province, are members of U.S.-based opposition group Viet Tan, said the organization, also known as the Vietnam Reform Party.

Twin Taliban attacks killed four people and wounded 24 others, including children, in the Afghan city of Herat and at an Italian-led NATO reconstruction team on Monday, officials said.

The blasts came just weeks before the usually peaceful historic city is to become one of the first places in the war-torn country to transition from NATO to Afghan security control nearly 10 years after the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.