Tamerlan Tsarnaev arrived in Russia in January 2012 and left six months later to return to his home in Boston.

Family members report him visiting his father and other relatives in the Caucasus region of Dagestan and he is thought to have traveled to neighboring Chechnya, the family's ancestral homeland.

Beyond that, reports of his movements are murky.

The surviving accused bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has reportedly told investigators he and his brother acted alone in planning the attack and planting the devices that killed three people and injured over 200 close the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Tamerlan is believed to be the plot’s instigator.

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Now there's hope of new riches beneath the area's sandy heathland.

The Campine is one of dozens of regions across Europe believed to be sitting on significant reserves of shale gas — the underground fuel that has revolutionized energy supply in the United States over the past decade.

"The potential in Europe could be huge," says Professor Richard Davies, a specialist at Britain's Durham University and advisor to the industry. "We've got all the right sort of rocks."

Shale gas now accounts for more than 20 percent of US natural gas production, up from barely 1 percent in 2000. By the 2030s, it's share is expected to be over 50 percent.

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BRUSSELS, Belgium — Armed robbers have pulled off a spectacular heist at Brussels airport, stealing millions of dollars worth of uncut diamonds from a plane.

The gang of eight hit a Brinks security truck as its contents were being loaded onto a Swiss aircraft bound for Zurich, Belgian public television reported Tuesday.

The Flemish radio station VRT initially reported the haul as being worth 350 million euros ($465 million), but later revised the figure to 50 million euros ($67 million), according to Agence France-Presse.

"What we are talking about is obviously a gigantic sum," Caroline De Wolf of the Antwerp World Diamond Center told VRT.

AFP cited a spokeswoman at the same Antwerp center calling the robbery "one of the biggest" ever. She said the diamonds were "rough stones" being transported from Antwerp to Zurich.

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ROME, Italy — Rome is awash in political posters.

They're plastered on buses, billboards, even the Segways that bear footsore tourists through ancient cobbled streets, with messages from a seemingly baffling array of 25 parties and coalitions — from the Workers' Communist Party to the neo-Fascist Tricolor Flame — competing in parliamentary elections on Sunday and Monday.

Although actually a relatively simple contest, the elections could have a profound impact on the future of Italy and the entire euro zone.

The results will determine whether Italy maintains its policies of fiscal restraint and economic liberalization that have restored its credibility on financial markets over the past year, or if voter anger with austerity will usher in a government that would spend its way out of recession at the risk of clashing with Italy's euro zone partners, especially Germany.

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There's a little restaurant in Innsbruck, Austria, that does a peppery foal goulash. Horse burgers are a popular street food in Slovenia and in the hills south of Rome, they snack on dried horsemeat flavored with chili and fennel. A weakness for juicy equine steaks earned inhabitants of the Belgian city of Vilvoorde their nickname pjeirefretters — horse gluttons.

"Horsemeat is part of our culinary heritage, like snails and frogs legs and we're very proud of it," says Eric Vigoureux, president of the FrenchAssociation of Hippophagist Butchers.

These days however, Europeans risk becoming hippophagists (horse eaters) by accident, thanks to the widening spiral of revelations that’s uncovered horsemeat in pre-packaged products labeled as beef — from Irish burgers to frozen lasagne in Germany and British bolognese sauce.

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Pull into a gas station in rural Umbria and the black-shirted dictator glares down from the labels of special-edition wine bottles; browse souvenir shops in Basilicata and there's a phalanx of fake-marble busts of the bald-headed Duce; hunt through Roman antique stores and its easy to uncover hoards of Mussolini memorabilia.

Adolf Hitler's Italian henchman is enjoying a revival, 68 years after he was shot by resistance fighters and strung up in a Milan piazza.

Mussolini has always had a loyal following among the far-right fringe in post-War War II Italy. But now, even many ordinary Italians are defending the father of Fascism as a good leader with sound social policies and a knack for making trains run on time. Later, they say, he was led astray by Hitler and pressured to imposing the anti-Jewish 1938 Laws for the Defense of the Race.

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The threat of attacks against French and international interests by the multifarious jihadist groups lurking across North and West Africa is just one of the risks President Francois Hollande took on when he ordered the French land and air offensive against the insurgents in Mali last week.

The Islamists have threatened terrorist outrages in France itself and French military officers acknowledge they face a tough fight against the well-armed desert fighters who have held much of northern Mali for almost a year. The fighting could also spread to the country’s neighbors.

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Bitter party rivals buried their grievances to give a non-elected, technocratic government time to convince financial markets that the world's 8th-largest economy isn’t headed for a Greek-style meltdown.

But all that changed over the Christmas break, when the country was suddenly plunged into an election campaign that's seen as crucial not only for Italy’s future, but for the entire euro zone.

The head of Germany’s central bank warned the country would be flirting with disaster if it allowed the elections to derail efforts to reform its economy and reduce the euro zone' second-highest government debt.

"It would be disastrous if they [the reforms] were called into question by the outcome of the elections," Jens Weidmann told the business magazine Wirtschaftswoche on Thursday. "If the reform process comes to a halt, Italy would again lose investors’ confidence."

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Mercury contamination in big fish such as sharks, swordfish and certain types of tuna is on the rise, and smaller traces of the toxic metal may be enough to cause restricted brain development or other health problems for humans who eat them, according to data released Tuesday.

"Levels of exposure that are defined as safe by the official limits, are actually having adverse effects," said Dr. Edward Groth, author of one of two new reports published ahead of a United Nations conference on mercury pollution.

"These are not trivial effects, these are significant effects," Groth, an adviser to the World Health Organization, told journalists in a Web conference. "There does appear to be evidence now, fairly persuasive evidence, that adverse effects occur from normal amounts of seafood consumption."

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"It's part of our history, our gastronomy, our culture in the widest sense of the word," says Hugues Henry, a leading expert on the topic, at the launch of a month-long celebration of the humble fry.

The author of a lavishly illustrated book about Belgian fry culture, Henry is director of a Brussels fries museum. "It's about much more than just eating,” he explains. “Fries are deeply rooted in the Belgian mentality. Everybody grew up with a fries-stand on the corner of the street or in the town square.”

The Belgian capital is honoring its traditional fritkots — street stands whose paper cones of hot fries topped with mayo are to Brussels what pizzas are to Naples — at the climax of a year-long gastronomic festival named Brusselicious.

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French police arrested 150 demonstrators who gathered outside the US embassy in Paris on Saturday, and 250 protesters were detained in Belgium over the weekend after confrontations in the country's second city, Antwerp. Around 300 people chanted anti-US slogans outside the American Embassy in London on Sunday.

Muslim leaders in France and Belgium were quick to condemn the violence despite their outrage over the video, which mocks the Prophet Muhammad.

"Don't associate French Muslims with these marginalized events," said Mohamed Moussaoui, president of the French Council of the Muslim Religion. "Muslims should use legal and just means to defend their religion."

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Home prices in Ireland took a vertical plunge and languish at around half the levels they reached during the mid-2000s boom. They've tumbled almost 20 percent in Spain and Greece during the past five years, while Serbia, Austria and Norway have seen prices rise.

Amid the chaos, there are opportunities aplenty for canny buyers on the lookout for bargain basement investments or knockdown vacation homes. Here are some of them.

Castles in Italy

Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is speeding up the sale of state properties as part of his struggle to slash the national debt. Venetian palazzos, hilltop castles and historic army barracks are due to come under the hammer.

Plumb locations already put up for offer include a Napoleonic fortress in Liguria and an abandoned mining village on the Mediterranean island of Elba.

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Spain and Germany issued assurances on Tuesday that Madrid will not need a full bailout. But the country is facing record borrowing costs as government coffers run low, pushing the euro crisis to a new level of intensity many believe can be resolved only by a comprehensive solution opposing camps in the European Union show no signs of reaching.

Spain isn’t the only major concern.

At the other end of the Mediterranean, new fears are growing that Greece will be forced out of the euro.

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Twenty-three-year-old Andrea Gonzales, newly qualified in specialized teaching, works stacking shelves in a supermarket.

And Diego, who declined to give his full name, is a freelance photographer. He’s spent most of his time volunteering with a protest group that tries to protect families from eviction since his commissions dried up.

Meet Spain's lost generation.

More than half of people under 25 here are out of work. That's Europe’s highest rate, ahead of even Greece, which has come close. Spaniards are worried the strain it’s exerting on society is putting stability at risk as the government prepares to cut unemployment benefits, among other tough measures aimed at meeting the obligations of a eurozone bailout.

The country’s largest labor union, Comisiones Obreras, or CCOO, says 1.73 million people under 30 are unemployed.

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Back in the early 2000s, France’s president liked to taunt the US with his vision of a "multi-polar" world where a cluster of emerging powers would team up with a strong, united Europe to challenge American hegemony.

What a difference a decade can make.

This week’s G-20 summit underscored that Chirac should have been careful what he had wished for.

Those powerful new global players have indeed risen. But it's Europe, debilitated by its seemingly unending debt crisis, that's seen its standing eroded, with China, Brazil, India and the rest emerging on the world stage.

"We are witnessing the political weakening of the EU on the international scene," Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, a senior member of the European Parliament, told GlobalPost.

"The impact of the crisis is not only about pure economy," added the veteran Polish politician. "It is about the collateral damage being done to the union itself, its future, unity and security."

At the summit in Mexico, emerging powers berated European leaders for not solving the debt crisis.

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Unfortunately, Angela Merkel’s still playing Dr. No.

At a euro zone summit on Wednesday, the new French leader plans to revive proposals for bonds that would be jointly issued by euro zone countries to spread national debt burdens across the whole currency bloc.

Hollande knows however that there is little chance the German chancellor will warm to the idea, even faced with the mounting concern that, without drastic action, the euro zone is headed toward a disastrous breakup.

“We spoke about it and both sides confirmed their well-known positions,” said France’s Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, after meeting with his German counterpart on Monday to prepare the summit.

“Francois Hollande plans to put everything on the table … even those proposals that cannot be agreed immediately,” Moscovici added.

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In the last few days, however, the risk that Greece could be forced out of the currency bloc has become too real to be ignored. The once-taboo subject has become an unavoidable topic of conversation among Europe’s financial leadership.

“The price would be very high if they decided to leave the euro,” warned German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble, before talks Monday with his eurozone partners.

Governors of three central banks have openly raised the option of a Greek exit.

“Technically it could be managed,” said Patrick Honohan, the Irish governor. “It is not necessarily fatal, but it is not attractive.”

Even Jose Manuel Barroso, the usually cautious president of the European Commission, had a stark warning for the Greeks: “If a member of a club does not respect the rules of the club, it’s better not to remain in the club,” he told Italy’s Tg24 TV last week.

In the corridors of the European Union’s headquarters the fear now is not only that Greece could be forced out, but that the resultant chaos would spread quickly to Portugal, Ireland, Spain and beyond, causing a collapse of the euro currency and a generalized economic meltdown.

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There’s a new buzz in Brussels about pumping hundreds of billions into a Marshall Plan-inspired fund to get Europeans back to work, devaluing the euro to boost exports or sharing out the euro-zone debt burden.

“This generalized austerity is prolonging the crisis. I can’t accept that. We need growth in Europe,” says Francois Hollande, the Socialist leader tipped to win Sunday’s French presidential election.

“With every day that goes by, I have the feeling that my initiative is more and more understood in Europe,” Hollande said in comments posted on his website Monday.

Hollande is enjoying an eight-point lead over incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s vote. His expected victory is the main catalyst behind the emerging pro-growth emphasis in Europe, but there are other factors.

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Spanish flu spread around the world in the early 1900s. The pandemic didn't begin in Spain, but it was there that the world realized how serious — and unstoppable — the outbreak had become.

Now, as Spain takes up a central position in Europe's economic crisis, the analogy is clear.

Sickly economies in Greece, Portugal and Ireland may yet respond to the European Union’s limited array of economic remedies.

But if Spain’s attempt to heal itself with a shock-treatment of austerity fails, the EU may not be strong enough to prevent the infection from spreading to Italy, France and beyond.

“The big question is, can Europe ring-fence Spain, can they draw a line to stop this contagion happening? This is their biggest challenge,” says Carsten Brzeski, senior Brussels economist at the Dutch bank ING.

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