German Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's Francois Hollande will likely meet next week to finalize plans for a more integrated eurozone as the threat of a British exit from the EU looms, European sources said.

The Berlin meeting, which will also include European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker, was "almost certain", the sources said, in a move that will cause tremors in a euroskeptic London suspicious of a two-speed Europe dividing euro and non-euro nations.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Friday he was "confident" of striking an EU reform deal to put before British voters by 2017 but warned of "ups and downs" in the process.

On his first overseas trip since winning a general election two weeks ago, Cameron kicked off months of negotiations to persuade other European leaders of the need for reforms which he says will require treaty change.

A London taxi driver who made bombs targeting coalition troops in the Iraq war was on Thursday convicted in a British court of murdering a U.S. soldier eight years ago.

Anis Sardar, 38, built an improvised explosive device (IED) which killed Sergeant First Class Randy Johnson of 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment when it exploded under his armored vehicle outside Baghdad on September 27, 2007.

Prime Minister David Cameron said Thursday that restricting welfare payments to EU workers was an "absolute requirement" of his efforts to renegotiate Britain's relationship with the bloc, as he unveiled a new crackdown on immigration.

The Conservative leader's comments came as new figures dealt a further blow to his long-held promise to reduce net migration to below 100,000, showing it rose from 209,000 in 2013 to 318,000 last year.

British lawmakers appointed a speaker on Monday as they convened in the House of Commons for the first time since a general election that handed Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives a surprise majority.

The former speaker, John Bercow, was re-elected and ceremonially dragged to the speaker's chair in a tradition dating back to centuries past, when previous holders of the office could be executed by thin-skinned monarchs.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is to visit the site of Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen during her state visit to Germany next month, Buckingham Palace said Sunday.

The 89-year-old queen and her husband Prince Philip will visit what remains of the camp and see a memorial to Anne Frank, the teenage Jewish diarist who died of typhus there in 1945.

With more female, gay and ethnic minority background lawmakers than ever before, the new House of Commons following May 7's general election has never looked more diverse.

Nearly one in three MPs (29 percent) are women, making up 191 out of the 650 lawmakers who will return for the formal restart of business from Monday.

Irish police on Thursday quizzed six men including a top dissident republican after finding two bombs ahead of a visit by Britain's Prince Charles, the police and news reports said on Thursday.

The devices were found as police searched 20 homes and also stopped a car near an area that Charles will be visiting, finding a pistol and bomb components.

David Cameron could bring forward a referendum on Britain's EU membership to next year instead of 2017 to cut short an impending battle on two fronts -- in Brussels and against Euroskeptics in his own camp.

"It is highly likely they want to have a short re-negotiation that would be ended by the end of 2015 and they want to have a referendum in 2016," John Springford, an expert at the Center for European Reform in London, told AFP.

Nigel Farage will remain head of Britain's anti-EU UK Independence Party despite tendering his resignation after failing to become an MP in last week's general election, the party said Monday.

The party's National Executive Committee (NEC) refused Farage's resignation, saying that he had led UKIP's election campaign with "great success", despite the party winning only one seat in the House of Commons.