AWARDS

French warplanes pounded Islamic State positions in Syria on Sunday as police in Europe widened their investigations into coordinated attacks in Paris that killed more than 130 people.

Islamic State has claimed responsibility for Friday's suicide bombings and shootings, which have re-ignited a row over Europe's refugee crisis and drawn calls to block the arrival of more Muslim asylum-seekers.

French police have launched an international hunt for a Belgian-born man they believe helped organize the assaults with two of his brothers. One of the brothers died in the attacks, while the second is under arrest in Belgium, a judicial source said.

A further two French suicide attackers have been identified, police said, while the identity of four other assailants, who were all killed, was still under review.

France has been bombing Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria for months as part of a U.S.-led operation. Following Friday's mayhem, Paris vowed to destroy the group. Underlining its resolve, French jets on Sunday launched their biggest raids in Syria to date, hitting its stronghold in Raqqa.

"The raid ... including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped," the Defense Ministry said. Among the targets were a munitions depot and training camp, it said.

The Paris attacks were seen causing a short-term sell-off in global stock markets and Asian shares fell on Monday, but few strategists expected a prolonged economic impact or change in prevailing market directions.

The investigation into Friday's attacks, the worst atrocity in France since World War Two, led swiftly to Belgium after police discovered two of the cars used by the Islamist militants had been rented in the Brussels region.

By Sunday, Belgian officials said they had arrested seven people in Brussels. But one of the people who had hired the cars slipped through the fingers of the police. He was pulled over on the French-Belgian border on Saturday, but later released.

Police named the man they were seeking as Salah Abdeslam, saying the 26-year-old was "dangerous". Although he was born in Brussels, French authorities said he was a French national.

"The abject attacks that hit us on Friday were prepared abroad and mobilized a team in Belgium that benefited ... from help in France," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told reporters after meeting his Belgian counterpart in Paris.

Stunned by the carnage, thousands of people thronged to makeshift memorials at four of the sites where the attacks took place, laying flowers and lighting candles to remember the dead.

The death toll rose to 132, with three more people dying on Sunday from their wounds. Some 103 have been identified, including many young people and many foreigners, out relaxing on a Friday night in one of the world's most visited cities.

In a sign that at least one gunman might have escaped, a source close to the investigation said a Seat car believed to have been used by the attackers had been found in the eastern Paris suburb of Montreuil with three Kalashnikov rifles inside.

Police have formally named just one of the attackers: Ismael Omar Mostefai, 29, from Chartres, southwest of Paris. He was identified by the print from one of his fingers that was severed when his suicide vest exploded.

French media named the two other French assailants as Bilal Hadfi and Ibrahim Abdeslam.

Police said they had found a Syrian passport near one of the other dead gunmen. Greece said the passport holder had crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands last month and then registered for asylum in Serbia before heading north, following a route taken by hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers this year.

The news revived a furious a row within the European Union on how to handle the flood of refugees. Top Polish and Slovak officials poured cold water on an EU plan to relocate asylum seekers across the bloc, saying the violence underlined their concerns about taking in Muslim refugees.

Bavarian allies of German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for a reversal of her "open-door" refugee policy, saying the attacks underlined the need for tougher controls.

France has declared three days of national mourning and President Francois Hollande will make a rare address to the joint upper and lower houses of parliament on Monday at the Palace of Versailles, just outside Paris.

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A Google self-driving car has been pulled over by police in Mountain View, California, for driving too slow.

"An accident report recently filed by the California Department of Motor Vehicles described a Google automated car as "over-cautious". Mountain View police department said an officer "noticed traffic backing up behind a slow-moving car in the eastbound lane".

Google responded with humor: "Bet humans don't get pulled over for that too often."

The car was travelling at 24mph in a 35mph zone. "The officer stopped the car... to learn more about how it was choosing speeds along certain roadways and to educate the operators about impeding traffic," it added.

In its own post about the incident, Google said: "We've capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25mph for safety reasons. We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets."

But it added that, in 1.2 million miles of autonomous driving tests, "we're proud to say we've never been ticketed". In September, Google said it was working to make its cars drive "more humanistically" following complaints that they were too polite.

Google's fleet of autonomous cars are programmed to follow the rules of the road to the letter but this can cause problems when the vehicles are sharing the road with human drivers who do not.

Researchers in the field have acknowledged that getting autonomous cars to work well in the world of human drivers is one of their biggest challenges.

This problem is illustrated in a recent accident report published by the California DMV which described how a Google AV (autonomous vehicle) and its test driver exhibited "an abundance of caution" at a pedestrian crossing. The car braked and another vehicle went into the back of it.

The cars sustained damage and the Google test driver was taken to hospital suffering from "minor back pain". Statistics suggest that 90% of all car accidents are caused by human error and most experts acknowledge that self-drive cars will drastically reduce the number of road traffic accidents.

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U.S. forces targeted "Jihadi John," the man who has emerged as the masked face of ISIS, in an airstrike in Raqqa, Syria (known as the Capital city of ISIS), the Pentagon announced Thursday night.

"Jihadi John," whom Western officials have identified as Mohammed Emwazi, has appeared in a series of brutal execution videos, taunting Western leaders in a British accent.

It was not immediately clear whether the strike was successful. But a senior U.S. official said authorities are pretty confident that the strike killed Emwazi, adding that the U.S. announced the strike because of Emwazi's notoriety.

This was a mission of "persistent surveillance," the official said, adding that authorities knew it was Emwazi when they took the shot. Another U.S. official told CNN that Emwazi was in a vehicle at the time of the strike, which was launched from a drone.

Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook announced the strike in a statement. "We are assessing the results of tonight's operation and will provide additional information as and where appropriate," Cook said.

Emwazi, a British citizen, participated in the videos showing the murders of U.S. journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, U.S. aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, and a number of other hostages, the Pentagon said.

Emwazi, who speaks English and is believed to be born in Kuwait, is frequently seen in hooded hostage videos carrying out violent beheadings. The U.K. government was notified of the operation and notified families whose kin was executed by Emwazi.

For periods at a time this year, Emwazi was not seen in hostage videos, though U.S. officials told CNN in July that they had learned that he was alive and hiding near Raqqa.

Analysts describe him as grotesque and fond of sadistic torture techniques, with one former hostage recounting last month how his captor made him dance the tango with him.

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Clashes broke out between riot police and youths in central Athens during the first general strike since the country's left-led government initially came to power in January.

Youths broke away from a protest march by thousands as it passed outside parliament and threw Molotov cocktails at police who responded with tear gas and stun grenades.

Nearly 25,000 people had been participating in three separate demonstrations in central Athens, according to police figures, protesting a new round of bailout-related tax hikes and spending cuts.

The 24-hour general strike has caused widespread disruption across Greece, with numerous public services shutting down.

Public transport was severely disrupted. The Athens metro and suburban railway shut down while bus and trolley routes were reduced and ferries remained tied up in port, severing connections between islands and the mainland. More than a dozen domestic flights were also cancelled.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' has shown sympathy for the strike. The party's department that deals with labor policy called for mass participation in the walk-out to protest "the neoliberal policies and the blackmail from financial and political centers within and outside Greece."

The strike closed museums, state schools and pharmacies, while state hospitals were functioning with emergency staff. Journalists also walked off the job, pulling news bulletins off the air except to report on the strike. News websites were not being updated, while no Friday newspapers were to be printed. Lawyers, too, were scaling back their work.

Tsipras, who won re-election in September, signed up to the bailout in a dramatic policy change despite initially campaigning vigorously against bailouts and their accompanying austerity conditions. He has said he had no choice but to agree to the deal to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debts and being forced out of Europe's joint currency.

"I believe strikes can turn into a boomerang for the worker, but there are times when people need to react," said 61-year-old Yannis Nikolaidis as he marched in the protest near parliament. "This is the time when people need to react. Enough already with the taxes, enough with the double talk. They need to let us breathe."

The government is currently locked in negotiations to reach an agreement on the disbursement of a 2 billion-euro installment ($2.2 billion), as well as 10 billion euros set aside for the recapitalization of its banks. While Greece has met many of the requirements, it remains at odds with creditors over how to deal with non-performing loans and the repossession of homes whose owners have fallen into arrears on mortgage payments.

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