Globe Trot 05.07

Claiming, "Austerity can no longer be the only option," French socialist candidate Francois Hollande beat French President Nicolas Sarkozy with just a little more than 51 percent of the vote in a runoff election on Sunday. Sarkozy will be remembered for a successful fight to advance France's retirement age from 60 to 62, but he was hardly an austerity president-raising both sales and capital gains taxes while enacting few real anti-spending measures. Hollande now must face his next opponent in heading off the eurozone debt crisis: Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The latest poll ahead of presidential elections in Egypt shows former Arab League head Amr Moussa leading a slate of 13 presidential candidates ahead of the May 23-24 elections with 35 percent. No candidate yet has a full majority, making a June runoff all but certain. In second: "former" Muslim Brotherhood candidate Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fotouh at 24 percent, followed by former Air Force chief and Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq, who during Arab Spring rioting was seen as a possible successor to ousted President Hosni Mubarak. Moussa led the Arab League for 10 years and took the lead in calling on NATO to take military action against Libya's Moammar Qaddafi. His nephew Nour was an early investor in what became known as the Ground Zero mosque in New York. This is only the second election with multi-party candidates in Egypt's history, following the February 2011 ouster of Mubarak, a longtime U.S. ally.

President Obama announced last month an increase in Special Forces deployments to Uganda to boost the search for fugitive Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony. African leaders have second-guessed that show of force, as Kony's strength and whereabouts continue to be questioned.

The real deployment to watch: Marines training Ugandan soldiers and other members of an African Union force battling growing threats from Somalia's al-Shabaab militants. If you like to sing top of the morning then here's a training video that could make anyone want to go to war with the Africans.

But the al-Shabaab threat is serious-and migrating, as the group has attacked two sites of Christian worshipers in Kenya.

Read the latest on Chen Guangcheng's case at CHINAaid.org.

Quote of the day: "They left off the 'h' in 'whining,'" wrote Will McCants of Jihadica after al-Qaeda-linked magazine Inspire carried the headline, "Wining on the ground," on its cover (above).