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ment. The crackdown aims to crush a new attempt to launch a protest movement calling for the ouster of al-Bashir, inspired by the Middle East's uprisings that toppled the leaders of Sudan's neighbors Egypt and Libya as well as Tunisia and Yemen.
• Anti-government activists see al-Bashir's 23-year-old regime as the ripest in the region to fall. He has been weakened by the loss of oil-rich South Sudan, which became independent last year after two decades of Africa's bloodiest civil war. His regime has had to impose painful economic austerity measures to make up for the loss of revenues from the south's oil, sending inflation up to nearly 40 percent this month. The years-old rebellion in the western Darfur region continues to bleed the country. Al-Bashir is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes in that region.
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• He was the victim whose horrific assault in the football team showers wound up costing Joe Paterno his job, severely tarnished Penn State's image, and brought accusations of a cover-up by high-level university officials.
• Law enforcement officials dubbed him Victim 2.
• Until Thursday, the boy was a phantom, absent from last month's trial of retired defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky and thought to be unknown to prosecutors. His identity was one of the biggest mysteries of the child sex abuse scandal.

• Now, for the first time, a man has stepped forward to claim he was the boy in the shower, and his attorneys have promised to sue the university.
• "Our client has to live the rest of his life not only dealing with the effects of Sandusky's childhood sexual abuse, but also with the knowledge that many powerful adults, including those at the highest levels of Penn State, put their own interests and the interests of a child predator above their legal obligations to protect him," the lawyers said in a news release.
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• LONDON (AP) -- Around the 2012 Olympics and its host city with journalists from The Associated Press bringing the flavor and details of the games to you:

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