President Bashar Assad's regime faced fresh European Union sanctions targeting its oil exports Friday as ministers from the 27-nation bloc gathered in Poland to discuss the turmoil in Syria.

The sanctions "will go straight to the heart of the regime", said Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard dismissed mounting speculation Friday about her future, vowing to stay in the job despite a crushing court blow to the government's asylum-seeker policy.

The nation's highest court on Wednesday scuttled Canberra's proposal to send 800 boat people to Malaysia, in a huge embarrassment for Gillard and her fragile Labor government, sparking fevered talk that her days are numbered.

Lebanon took over the rotating presidency of the U.N. Security Council for this month, the second time since its council membership in January 2010.

Ambassador Nawwaf Salam told An Nahar daily published Friday that he was seeking to introduce “preventive diplomacy” to the agenda of the council. “This concept includes means and diplomatic measures taken in advance to prevent the eruption of conflicts or stop them from spreading.”

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas said Thursday that a U.N.-mandated inquiry into a deadly Israeli raid on an aid flotilla bound for Gaza was "unjust" and lacked balance.

The inquiry into the Turkish-led aid flotilla said Israel's commando raid in 2010 was "excessive," according to extracts published by the New York Times newspaper.

The attorney general of the central Syrian province of Hama said he has resigned to protest hundreds of killings and thousands of arrests by President Bashar Assad's regime, after the state agency said the official was kidnapped.

"I, the attorney general of the province of Hama, Mohammed Adnan al-Bakkour, announce my resignation from the regime of Assad and his band," he said in a video posted on YouTube late Wednesday.

Russia on Thursday officially recognized Libya's rebels as the governing authority in the country, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

"The Russian Federation recognizes Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) as the ruling authority and notes its reform program that includes the development of a new constitution, holding general elections and forming the government," it said.

Global death rates among newborns under one month old are dropping, a study by the World Health Organization showed Tuesday.

"Newborn deaths decreased from 4.6 million in 1990 to 3.3 million in 2009," the U.N. health agency said in a statement.

Libya's rebels said Wednesday Moammar Gadhafi is almost certainly in Libya and that they have a "right to kill" him, while giving the fugitive strongman's remaining troops until Saturday to surrender.

"The information I have is this: it is 80 percent certain that Gadhafi is still in Libya," Omar Hariri, head of military affairs, told Agence France Presse in Tripoli.

United Nations leader Ban Ki-moon will visit Australia next month in the first trip to the country by a U.N. Secretary-General in more than a decade, officials said Wednesday.

The visit -- which will also take in New Zealand, the Solomon Islands and Kiribati and is expected to focus on climate change -- will be the first since then United Nations leader Kofi Annan toured in 2000.

A hand-made olive-wood chair, fashioned to look like the blue seats at the United Nations, is set to tour Europe to raise support for a Palestinian bid to join the world body.

The chair was commissioned by a Palestinian NGO which is hoping to rally support for the campaign to secure full U.N. membership for a Palestinian state when the General Assembly meets in New York next month.