"The military ended up getting everything and we got nothing," - Lobna Darwish, an Egyptian activist and longtime critic of the military, after judges appointed by Hosni Mubarak dissolved the Islamist-dominated parliament and ruled his former prime minister is eligible for the presidential runoff election this weekend.

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"A strong stench of dead bodies was in the air." - Sausan Ghosheh, a spokeswoman for the U.N. observers who entered the nearly deserted Syrian town of Haffa a day after President Bashar Assad's forces overran it as part of a major offensive to recover rebel-controlled territories.

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"The European banking system is paralyzed. So many banks hold massive amounts of Spanish and Italian government bonds that are losing value. We no longer have a functioning interbank (lending) market in the eurozone." - Nicolas Veron, a senior fellow at the Bruegel think tank in Brussels.