Greece's new Prime Minister Antonis Samaras will miss this week's EU summit while he recovers from eye surgery, according to a government spokesman.

He underwent routine surgery on Saturday for a damaged retina, with the operation said to have been a success.

(Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday proposed scrapping rent subsidies for Britons under 25, in a newspaper interview likely to strain his Conservative Party's coalition with the Liberal Democrats for the second time in a week.

Requiring almost 400,000 low-paid and unemployed young Britons to live with their parents if they cannot afford market rents could save just under 2 billion pounds ($3.1 billion) a year, Cameron said in an interview with the Mail on Sunday.

Asked about the proposal in a BBC interview, Lib Dem Deputy Finance Minister Danny Alexander said the coalition had already implemented major welfare reforms - including cuts to housing benefit - and that these should be allowed to bed down first.

Separately, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, leader of more than 80 million Anglicans worldwide and a long-standing critic, accused Cameron of "aspirational waffle designed to conceal a deeply damaging withdrawal of the state from its responsibilities to the most vulnerable".

Scottish MEP Alyn Smith has accused the EU of "bribing" farmers to quit the industry.

The SNP member was speaking after a parliamentary committee this week approved a report on reform of the EU's agricultural policy.

The report contains a proposal to pay up to €35,000 for farmers who are willing to leave the sector and "permanently transfer their holding to another farmer".

The measure is part of a wide ranging package of proposals aimed at boosting the competitiveness of the farming sector.

The report was approved by parliament's agricultural and rural development committee.

...for all the pre-implementation hype, the new democracy instrument has gotten off to a poor start.

Of the first six officially registered initiatives, not one has begun to collect signatures.

This poor state of affairs is due to the fact that the online signature collection system offered by the Commission is not yet up and running. This costs the ECI organisers valuable time.

In addition, officials at the EU's central information services are still unable to answer the simplest questions about the ECI process. There is not enough staff. And training on the ins and outs of the ECI - which must have at least one million signatures in a minimum of seven member states - is inadequate.

BRUSSELS - Turkey says future visa-free travel will work out well because Turks no longer want to live in the EU.

Its European affairs minister Egemen Bagis told EUobserver on Friday (22 June) that Turks these days travel to EU capitals "to spend [money]" in shops and hotels.

"In the past, when Turks were asked do you want to live in Europe, 80 percent would say Yes. Now, 85 percent say No. Turkish citizens feel there is more hope in Turkey, better job opportunities," he said.

He noted that in 2010, 27,000 Turks went to live in Germany, but 35,000 German citizens moved to Turkey.

As the queues of jobless Greeks grow, more and more young people are moving abroad. It's an exodus that's particularly painful for Greek journalist Giorgos Christides.

Hanging out with friends is becoming increasingly difficult for me.

It seems my friends are fleeing Greece one by one, and the next time we see each other for a beer, our meeting place will probably be London's Trafalgar rather than Thessaloniki's Aristotle Square.

These past couple of weeks, I saw two of my best friends become residents of London, leaving their spouses and children behind, to work in the British capital and escape the employment no-man's-land that Greece has turned into because of the crisis.

Recently I also had to bid farewell to my brother, who returned to Saudi Arabia where he works as an engineer. The trend is not limited to 30 and 40-something professionals, but is spreading to younger age groups as well.

According to the latest national polls, more than seven out of 10 young Greeks aged 18 to 24 believe that emigration is the ideal - indeed the only - way out from the crisis. Two out of 10 have already applied for jobs and university places abroad.

(Reuters) - European leaders will discuss specific steps towards a cross-border banking union, closer fiscal integration and the possibility of a debt redemption fund at a summit on June 28-29, according to a document prepared for the meeting.

Two officials familiar with the 10-15 page document, drawn up over the past month and which is still being revised ahead of the summit, said it sets out in detail the four "pillars" required for a strong economic and monetary union which leaders believe is necessary to secure the currency project's future.

As well as progress towards a banking union, the paper discusses the need for a more integrated budget policy, steps required for deeper economic integration, and how to retain "democratic legitimacy" if countries give up some sovereignty.

The document has been drafted by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi, and Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the Eurogroup countries using the euro.

In order to overcome the resistance of the federal states against the fiscal pact in Bundesrat, the second chamber, the coalition of Angela Merkel agreed to introduce bonds issued jointly by the federal and the state governments, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. The common issuance's goal is to reduce interest rates and thus the refinancing costs of the states.

Different notions of what federalism entails, apparently.

Come to think of it, I did cross paths with an impressive convoy of police vehicles on two occasions. Wondered what it was about.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Reuters has details of the first draft of a paper to be discussed by the European Council on Thursday and Friday; no formal decisions are likely to be taken; paper targets four areas: banking union, fiscal union, economic union and political union; banking union is prioritised, and could be implemented within a year; paper says no treaty change would be necessary for any of the proposals; the article says it is unlikely that this set of proposals would calm tensions in the markets; a leaked paper from the German finance ministry said a euro breakdown would have catastrophic implications for Germany - exceeding the cost of even the most expensive rescue package; Wolfgang Schäuble says there may be a referendum in Germany on political union within five years; Jens Weidmann rejects Mario Monti's ESM bond purchase proposal as a hidden monetary financing; Greece's new coalition will ask for an extra two years to implement austerity, no more firing of civil servants and an extension of unemployment benefit to two years; health problems prevent Antonis Samaras and Greek finance minister  Vassilis Rapanos to attend the summit; a poll says that 39% of Germans now want to leave the euro; 78% want Greece out; Angela Merkel has bribed the federal states into accepting the fiscal pact with the promise of a jointly issued federal-state debt instrument to cut the financing costs for the Länder; federal government also agreed to pay any fines for the Länder until 2019; Spain's new toll road schemes face catastrophic losses as the economy goes  from boom to bust; the poll ratings of Francois Holland and his prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault is already falling; Simon Johnson says JP Morgan may not survive the collapse of the euro; George Soros says Germany is endangering financial stability in Europe, and has drawn up an action plan to set up and link a banking union and a fiscal union; Wolfgang Münchau, meanwhile, argues that Mario Monti should stand up to Angela Merkel and say that Italy cannot remain in the euro without joint debt instruments.

Greece's newly designated finance minister, Vassilis Rapanos, has quit less than a week after being appointed.

His resignation was confirmed by the office of new Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

No reason was given for the move. However, Mr Rapanos has been in hospital since last week receiving treatment for stomach pains.

A broad swath of official economic data shows that America and its people are in much worse shape than when we paid higher taxes, higher interest rates and made more of the manufactured goods we use.

The numbers since the turn of the millennium point to even worse times ahead if we stay the course. Let's look at the official numbers in today's dollars and then what can be done to change course.

First, incomes and jobs since 2000 measured per American:

Internal Revenue Service data show that average adjusted gross income fell $2,699 through 2010 or 9 percent, compared to 2000. That's the equivalent of making it through Thanksgiving weekend and then having no income for the rest of the year.

Had average incomes just stayed at the level in 2000, Americans through 2009 would have earned $3.5 trillion more income, the equivalent of $26,000 per taxpayer over a decade. Preliminary 2010 data show a partial rebound, reducing the shortfall by a fifth to $2.8 trillion or $21,000 per taxpayer.

Wages per capita in 2010 were 4.3 percent less than in 2000, effectively reducing to 50 weeks the pay for 52 weeks of work. The median wage in 2010 fell back to the level of 1999, with half of workers grossing less than $507 a week, half more, Social Security tax data show. The bottom third, 50 million workers, averaged just $116 a week in 2010.

Developed countries are now about as rich as Keynes thought they would be, but most of us work much longer than 15 hours a week, though we do take longer holidays, and work has become less physically demanding, so we also live longer. But, in broad terms, the prophecy of vastly increased leisure for all has not been fulfilled. Automation has been proceeding apace, but most of us who work still put in an average of 40 hours a week. In fact, working hours have not fallen since the early 1980's.

At the same time, "technological unemployment" has been on the rise. Since the 1980's, we have never regained the full employment levels of the 1950's and 1960's. If most people still work a 40-hour week, a substantial and growing minority have had unwanted leisure thrust upon them in the form of unemployment, under-employment, and forced withdrawal from the labor market. And, as we recover from the current recession, most experts expect this group to grow even larger.

What this means is that we have largely failed to convert growing technological unemployment into increased voluntary leisure. The main reason for this is that the lion's share of the productivity gains achieved over the last 30 years has been seized by the well-off.

Particularly in the United States and Britain since the 1980's, we have witnessed a return to the capitalism "red in tooth and claw" depicted by Karl Marx. The rich and very rich have gotten very much richer, while everyone else's incomes have stagnated. So most people are not, in fact, four or five times better off than they were in 1930. It is not surprising that they are working longer than Keynes thought they would.

Central banks in developed nations are confronting the limits of their ability to aid economic recovery as government efforts to strengthen their finances fall short, the Bank for International Settlements said.

"Central banks are being cornered into prolonging monetary stimulus as governments drag their feet and adjustment is delayed," the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS said in its annual report, published today. "Both conventionally and unconventionally accommodative monetary policies are palliatives and have their limits."

While central banks' actions were key to limiting damage from the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., interest rates are now "as low as they can go" and debt purchases have swollen central bank balance sheets, the BIS said. European Central Bank President Mario Draghi has indicated that the ECB is close to exhausting its tools after cutting its benchmark rate to a record low and flooding the banking system with cash.

"In the middle of all this we find the overburdened central banks, pushed to use what power they have to contain the damage," Stephen Cecchetti, BIS economic adviser, said on a conference call. "There are very clear limits to what central banks can do. It's critical for the health of the global economy to break the vicious cycles and reduce the pressure on central banks."

Some Chinese economic indicators are being inflated by roughly 1 or 2 percentage points as local officials falsify statistics to mask the extent of the nation's slowdown, the New York Times reported, citing company executives in China and Western economists.

Government officials in some cities and provinces are overstating economic output, tax receipts, corporate revenue and profits, the paper said, citing executives and economists who requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing their relationships with Chinese authorities. They are urging companies to keep separate sets of books, showing improving business results and tax payments that do not exist, the newspaper said.

Power plant managers have been told not to report the full extent of the slowdown in electricity demand, according to the report.

The Beijing-based National Bureau of Statistics, which compiles most of the country's economic statistics, denied that economic data was overstated, the paper said. "This is not rooted in evidence," it quoted an unnamed spokeswoman as saying.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi has officially won Egypt's presidential election and will be the country's next president, the electoral commission has announced.

Morsi picked up 13.2 million votes out of just over 26 million, giving him about 51 per cent of the vote. His competitor, Ahmed Shafiq, the final prime minister under Hosni Mubarak, received 12.3 million. More than 800,000 ballots were invalidated.

Farouq Sultan, the head of the election commission, delivered a long speech before announcing the results in which he defended the body's "independence and integrity" amidst what he called meddling by unnamed political factions.

The two candidates filed 456 complaints about the electoral process, Sultan said, most of them allegations of either forgery or Christian voters being blocked from polling stations in Upper Egypt. The vast majority of those complaints were dismissed.

Turkey has said that Syria shot down its military aircraft in international airspace and declared it would formally consult with NATO allies on a reaction.

Turkey's assertion came as reports said search teams had located the wreckage in Syrian waters at a depth of 1,300 metres. Turkish news channels reported this on Sunday without citing a source, after the foreign minister earlier had said search and rescue teams were still searching for the two missing pilots.

He said the search operations were in co-ordination with the Syrians, but could not be described as a "joint" operation.

The foreign minister said that the plane had been clearly marked as Turkish and said he did not agree with Syria's earlier statement it had not known the plane belonged to Ankara.

Speaking on state-run TRT television, Ahmet Davutoglu said the F4 fighter plane "was hit when it was a distance of 13 miles from the Syrian coast".

The plane entered Syrian airspace on Friday, but quickly left when warned, Davutoglu said.

Chinese astronauts have carried out the nation's first manual space docking, a highly complex manoeuvre that will bring it a step closer to building a space station.

The manual "kiss in space" was the main goal of China's current manned mission, which began over a week ago when the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft lifted off carrying three crew members, including the nation's first female astronaut.

The manual docking took place around noon (0400GMT) on Sunday, state media said.

On June 18, the spacecraft came together in an automatic docking with the Tiangong-1 module in orbit around Earth, which the three astronauts entered several hours later - a first for China - and have been living in since.

In preparation for the manual docking, the Shenzhou-9 separated from the space module shortly after 11am (0300GMT) after all the astronauts returned to the cabin of the spacecraft.

The Tiangong-1 is an experimental module that will only stay in orbit until 2013 and will later be replaced, but is designed to test the docking technique essential to building a space station - which China aims to do by 2020.

The US embassy in Kenya has warned of an imminent threat of an attack on the Kenyan port city of Mombasa and asked all its government workers to leave the coastal town, which has been hit by a series of attacks in the past.

Underscoring the threat, police said they recovered suspected bomb-making material in the capital Nairobi on Saturday, the second such discovery this week in the country.

The US embassy said in a statement dated June 22 on its website that it had also suspended travel for its government officials to Mombasa, a tourist destination popular with foreigners, until July 1.

Mombasa, the capital Nairobi and other parts of Kenya have suffered a series of grenade attacks since Kenya sent troops into Somalia last year to pursue al-Qaeda-allied al-Shabab fighters it blames for a surge in violence and kidnappings threatening tourism in east Africa's biggest economy.

China and the remote Himalayan nation of Bhutan have agreed to establish diplomatic relations and resolve a long-standing border dispute, China's foreign ministry said.

Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao held talks with his Bhutanese counterpart Jigmi Y. Thinley on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio De Janeiro on Thursday, the ministry said in a statement.

"China is willing... to establish formal relations with Bhutan, resolve the border issue between the two nations at an early date, strengthen exchanges in all areas and advance Sino-Bhutanese relations to a new stage," Wen said.

China appreciated Bhutan's support for the "one China policy" which maintains that Taiwan and Tibet fall under China's sovereignty, Wen said.

Most U.S., European, and Israeli commentators and policymakers warn that a nuclear-armed Iran would be the worst possible outcome of the current standoff. In fact, it would probably be the best possible result: the one most likely to restore stability to the Middle East.

(Reuters) - Bouncing down a county back road, squinting as a blazing sun intensifies one of the hottest, driest Midwest springs ever, farmer Dale Tuholski steers his pick-up truck between fortune and failure.

To his left, new irrigation machinery sprays a fine mist across his corn field in northern Indiana, where emerald green plants sway in the breeze. To his right is a neighbor's land: the soil dry and dusty, the corn leaves curled.

Amid the warmest first five months of the year since 1894 in the U.S. heartland, a rapidly expanding minority of farmers like the Tuholskis and Kyle Clute - who manages 25,000 acres 100 miles southwest of Tuholski's farm - are taking out an expensive hedge against increasingly volatile weather: buying new irrigation equipment for their corn or soybean fields.

"We don't want Mother Nature to control our destiny anymore," said Clute, who farms corn and soybean fields in Warren County, Indiana.

The potent mix of ever-warmer weather and expectations of near-record farm income of $92 billion for 2012 is fueling all-time-high sales of such equipment, with revenues up a third or more at leading firms. Center-pivot irrigators are particularly popular with farmers in water-strapped areas because the machinery can extend the reach of limited natural resources.

"We try to stay ahead of the game," he said. "We want to anticipate what genes are involved, so we can proactively develop strategies to sustain the efficacy of Bt crops and reduce reliance on insecticide sprays. The implicit assumption is what we learn from lab-selected resistance will apply in the field."

That assumption, according to Tabashnik, had never been tested before for resistance to Bt crops.

Now for the first time, the international team gathered genetic evidence from pests in the field, enabling them to directly compare the genes involved in the resistance of wild and lab-reared populations.

They found some resistance-conferring mutations in the field were the same as in lab-reared pests, but some others were strikingly different.

"We found exactly the same mutation in the field that was detected in the lab," Tabashnik said. "But we also found lots of other mutations, most of them in the same gene and one in a completely different gene."

A major surprise came when the team identified two unrelated, dominant mutations in the field populations. "Dominant" means that one copy of the genetic variant is enough to confer resistance to Bt toxin.

Intense warm climate intervals - warmer than scientists thought possible - have occurred in the Arctic over the past 2.8 million years. That result comes from the first analyses of the longest sediment cores ever retrieved on land. They were obtained from beneath remote, ice-covered Lake El'gygytgyn (pronounced El'gee-git-gin) ("Lake E") in the northeastern Russian Arctic.

The journal Science published the findings this week.

They show that the extreme warm periods in the Arctic correspond closely with times when parts of Antarctica were also ice-free and warm, suggesting a strong connection between Northern and Southern Hemisphere climate.

A team of NOAA-supported scientists is predicting that this year's Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone could range from a low of approximately 1,197 square miles to as much as 6,213 square miles. The wide range is the result of using two different forecast models. The forecast is based on Mississippi River nutrient inputs compiled annually by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The smaller dead zone forecast, covering an area slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island, comes from researchers from the University of Michigan. Their predicted size is based solely on the current year's spring nutrient inputs from the Mississippi River which are significantly lower than average due to drought conditions throughout much of the watershed.

The larger dead zone forecast, the equivalent of an area the size of the state of Connecticut, is from Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University scientists.

The Louisiana forecast model includes prior year's nutrient inputs which can remain in bottom sediments and be recycled the following year. Last year's flood, followed by this year's low flows, increased the influence of this "carryover effect" on the second model's prediction.

Hypoxia is caused by excessive nutrient pollution from human activities coupled with other factors that deplete the oxygen required to support most marine life in bottom and near-bottom water.

I'd left the courtroom and was watching his testimony on a large video screen in the courthouse press centre, just along the corridor. Breivik described what he admitted were "gruesome, barbaric acts".

He recalled how his victims had frozen in panic, unable to run, and how he'd calmly reloaded his gun and shot them, and how he'd tricked other young people out of their hiding places, then gunned them down too.

At that moment, I looked around the press centre. There were rows and rows of reporters, their heads buried in their laptops as they hurried to reproduce Breivik's words - and many of them were in tears at what they were having to type.

Words. The power of words. That's what I'll remember most about this trial.

(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Friday ruled that Apple Inc cannot pursue an injunction against Google's Motorola Mobility unit, effectively ending a key case for the iPhone maker in the smartphone patent wars.

The ruling came from Judge Richard Posner in Chicago federal court. He dismissed the litigation between Apple and Motorola Mobility with prejudice, meaning it can't be refiled.

The ruling is a blow for Apple, which had hoped a decisive ruling against Motorola would help it gain an upper hand in the smartphone market against Android.

"Apple is complaining that Motorola's phones as a whole ripped off the iPhone as a whole," Posner wrote. "But Motorola's desire to sell products that compete with the iPhone is a separate harm --- and a perfectly legal one --- from any harm caused by patent infringement."

Selenium is an inexpensive element that naturally belongs in the body. It is also known to combat bacteria. Still, it had not been tried as an antibiotic coating on a medical device material. In a new study, Brown University engineers report that when they used selenium nanoparticles to coat polycarbonate, the material of catheters and endotracheal tubes, the results were significant reductions in cultured populations of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, sometimes by as much as 90 percent.

"We want to keep the bacteria from generating a biofilm," said Thomas Webster, professor of engineering and orthopaedics, who studies how nanotechnology can improve medical implants. He is the senior author of the paper, published online this week in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research A.

Biofilms are notoriously tough colonies of bacteria to treat because they are often able to resist antibiotic drugs.

Data from NASA's AIM spacecraft show that noctilucent clouds (NLCs) are like a great "geophysical light bulb". They turn on every year in late spring, reaching almost full intensity over a period of no more than 5 to 10 days--and the bulb is glowing.

"They were visible to the north for about 3 hours as we flew between Ottawa and Newfoundland at 35,000 feet" said Brian Whittaker.

These electric-blue ice clouds hang 53 miles (85 km) above Earth's surface, at the edge of space itself, circling the north and south pole regions.

A stolen bust of Auguste Rodin, sculpted by his lover, Camille Claudel, has been recovered 13 years after it was stolen from a museum in central France.

The 17.6lb, 23 inch treasure was stolen from the Guéret art and archaeology museum in 1999.

Looking grizzled with a furrowed brow and full beard, the rare, signed bronze portrait of the French sculptor - a precious remnant of his passionate romance with Claudel - is reportedly worth up to one million euros (£800,000).

French detectives were surprised to find it inside the truck of an antique seller who had been under surveillance for weeks.

Silvio Berlusconi ready to run for Italy prime minister again - Telegraph

Silvio Berlusconi has said he is once again ready to "take charge" of the Italian government as October elections in the struggling country look increasingly likely.

Mario Monti, a technocrat who took over in November, has seen the country's public faith in him rapidly erode following the implementation of an austerity package.

Mr Berlusconi, 75, told a rally for his People of Freedom party on the outskirts of Rome: "This is no longer a situation of liberty. We are being governed by people who were not elected."

Seizing on the tax hikes and a hated new property tax introduced by Mr Monti he said: "We can no longer spend freely or privately our money our rights as home owners are abused."