Hagel indicated he had been caught off guard by claims from an Israeli general this week that Syria had fired chemical agents against rebels in recent months, the AFP news agency reported. "When I was in Israel they did not give me that assessment. I guess it wasn't complete," Hagel told reporters in Cairo on a tour of the Middle East that included a three-day visit to Israel.

The United States has warned any use or transfer of chemical weapons would cross a "red line" and possibly trigger military action. Britain and France also suspect Syria has used chemical weapons but Hagel said American intelligence agencies were still evaluating information and were not yet convinced. "Suspicions are one thing, evidence is another," he said. The Pentagon chief added that "this is serious business and you want to be as sure as you can be on these kind of things".

As I have written about previously, the unemployment rate in Greece has now risen to 27 percent, which is much higher than the peak unemployment rate that the US economy experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930's. And as you will read about below, child hunger is absolutely exploding in Greece right now. Some families are literally trying to survive on pasta and ketchup.

But don't think for a moment that it can't happen here. Sadly, the truth is that child hunger is already rising very rapidly in our poverty-stricken cities. Never before have we had so many Americans unable to take care of themselves. Food stamp enrollment and child homelessness have soared to brand new all-time records, and there are actually thousands of Americans that are so poor that they live in tunnels underneath our cities.

But for millions of other Americans, the suffering is not quite so dramatic. Instead, they just watch their hopes and their dreams slowly slip away as they struggle to find a way to make it from month to month. There are millions of parents that lead lives that are filled with constant stress and anxiety as they try to figure out how to provide the basics for their children. How do you tell a child that you can't give them any dinner even though you have been trying as hard as you can?

What many families go through on a regular basis is absolutely heartbreaking. Unfortunately, more poor families slip through the cracks with each passing day, and these are supposedly times in which we are experiencing an "economic recovery". So what are things going to look like when the next major economic downturn strikes?

The secret legal authorization from the Justice Department originally applied to a cybersecurity pilot project in which the military monitored defense contractors' internet links. Since then, however, the program has been expanded by President Obama to cover all critical infrastructure sectors including energy, healthcare, and finance starting June 12.

"The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which obtained over 1,000 pages of internal government documents and provided them to CNET this week. "Alarm bells should be going off."

Germans will never foot the bill and other Europeans will not accept the loss of sovereignty that a supranational state would entail, Védrine told EurActiv.fr on the margins of the Organisation for Econonic Co-operation and Development’s New World Forum in Paris. Védrine suggested that a 'grand bargain' where Germany bailed out struggling European economies in exchange for more solidarity would never gain traction.

“For the Germans, it would mean that the entire euro zone is under German control - of the Bundestag and the Court of Karlsruhe. For others, it would mean that Germany must pay for countries in difficulty. I do not believe for a second in a supranational vision, where the nation-states transfer their competencies to a higher level and where the states will be reduced to regions.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has mooted in interviews the idea of a “political union” where countries ceded more sovereignty as a solution to save the euro currency. “We need more Europe, we need not only a monetary union, but we also need a so-called fiscal union, in other words more joint budget policy,” Merkel was quoted as saying June last year.

France so far has been reluctant to take a leap towards federalism but may advocate ceding some fiscal control to Germany in exchange for Eurobonds and debt-pooling under a “grand bargain”. For Germany that would be the end point of a fiscal union.

Volatile price moves ricocheted through markets for stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities around 1 pm EDT on Tuesday after a tweet purporting to be from the Associated Press said there had been two explosions at the White House and that President Barack Obama had been injured.

The move in stocks, described by one futures trader as "pure chaos," briefly wiped out about $140 billion in US market value. When it became clear that the tweet was fake, equities rebounded and more than recovered the losses - the S&P 500 index ended up 1.04 percent. The episode led some investors and traders to ask whether the increasing domination of high frequency trading means that there is an increasing danger that even highly questionable information can have a more dramatic impact than it ever could in the past.

What jolted investors and traders was the source: The Associated Press, which describes itself as "one of the largest and most trusted sources of independent newsgathering." The tweet was sent from its "verified" Twitter account.

The impact quickly started to wear off as traders began to question the veracity of the tweet. Within a few minutes, the AP had told Reuters and other news organizations that the report was "bogus" and the White House confirmed that there had been no explosions and Obama was fine. But the damage had been done, and it appears to have stirred some soul-searching among traders for whom Twitter has become an important source of information.

An inconclusive general election in February left the country in political limbo. Mr Letta said he would aim to change the course in Europe on austerity. "European policies are too focused on austerity which is no longer enough" he said, following the closed-door meeting with the president in Rome.

Striking statements were made by one of Europe's most powerful men on Monday night, when European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the strict austerity measures thus far imposed on the EU's beleaguered economies may have reached their political limits.

Although this policy is "fundamentally right," it has nevertheless "reached its limits," he told a conference in Brussels. "A policy, to be successful, not only has to be properly designed, it has to have the minimum of political and social support," he added. Barroso's comments came just ahead of the release of the EU's latest budget deficit numbers by the body's statistics agency Eurostat on Monday. They showed that for 2012, though Europe's combined deficit level dropped, the overall debt for the 17 members of the EU currency union jumped from €8.2 trillion ($10.7 trillion) to €8.6 trillion.

The drastic belt-tightening policies imposed on a number of ailing member states have apparently had little effect. On the contrary, many theorize that the spending cuts intensify budgetary problems because they stifle growth, which has prompted fierce protest in the Southern European countries in recession.

Father Georg Ratzinger, himself a priest, told the Daily Telegraph his younger brother was "very happy" to be living at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer retreat south of Rome he moved to after stepping down in February, becoming the first pope to resign in 600 years. Father Ratzinger, 88, who travelled from Germany to celebrate Benedict's 86th birthday with him on April 16, said his brother "still suffers the problems of the Church, but is really relieved to no longer have the weight of the Church on his shoulders."

His comment about Benedict continuing to "suffer" the problems of the Church appeared to be a reference to the alleged infighting and power seeking plaguing the Vatican's bureaucracy, details of which emerged when the pope's butler leaked Benedict's private correspondence.

In 1942-43, the Nazis murdered within the framework of "Operation Reinhard" around two million west and east European prisoners in the Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Bełżec, and Sobibór extermination camps. In Sobibór, alone, by July 1943, the Nazi terror regime had murdered more than 34,000 Dutch Jews, including German emigrants.

By early January, Berlin had still refused to contribute to the costs of this year's scheduled Sobibór memorial services of the Netherlands, Slovakia, Israel, and Poland. Berlin also does not intend to contribute to covering the costs of the other "Reinhard" memorial sites.