Germany, the world's second largest exporter behind China, also imported a record 69.5 billion pounds of goods as its economy ploughed on while many other EU member states struggled. 'Germany is on the verge of a golden decade,' said Christian Schulz, an economist at Berenberg Bank, the country's oldest private bank.

The German government expects economic growth of 2.6% this year, following a 3.6% expansion in 2010. In Britain, the Coalition predicts the economy will grow by 1.7% in 2011, although some commentators think such a forecast is optimistic.

The software mess at the Geneva-based office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, has already involved "years of delays," according to the internal UN audit of the situation, and the scramble to fix it may not be over until next year.

In the meantime, the audit report by the UN's Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) states, information "critical to the decision-making process" could not be recorded, and "users could not compare expenditures against budget, and actual performance against targets" in a sophisticated system that was supposed to provide managers with information on how well the organization is spending its money at myriad locations around the world.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in UNHCR spending have been affected by the lack of information, according to the report.

The memo reads: "Regarding the use of base facilities for same-sex marriages, legal counsel has concluded that generally speaking, base facility use is sexuality orientation neutral. If the base is located in a state where same-sex is legal, then base facilities may normally be used to celebrate the marriage." Navy marriages on Navy bases typically involve Navy Chaplains, but the memo goes on to say the chaplains involvement is not mandatory and he or she could decline to participate if gay marriage is not "consistent with the tenets of his or her religious organization."

On Monday Representative Todd Akin, Republican for Missouri, released a statement saying the Navy's new policy violates the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines marriage as between one man and one woman. "While a state may legalize same-sex marriage, federal property and federal employees, like Navy chaplains, should not be used to perform marriages that are not recognized by federal law," Akin says.

The Navy is hoping to have all its chaplains trained on the new guidelines by the end of June, and the Pentagon is expected to remove the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy sometime this summer.

Last month was the warmest April on record in Britain. It was also the 11th driest month, with on average just half the usual rainfall. And in parts of south-east England, there was less than 10% of normal precipitation. Smos is an experimental mission of the European Space Agency (Esa), and is providing some novel information to meteorologists, hydrologists and other scientists interested in how water moves around the globe.

The 760km-high satellite carries an 8m-wide interferometric radiometer that senses the natural emission of microwaves coming up off the planet's surface. Variations in the water content of soils will modify this signal. Understanding how much water is held in the earth under our feet is a key variable if you want to make weather forecasts. If soils are wet then much of the energy coming from the Sun will be used to evaporate water from the ground, keeping temperatures cooler than they would otherwise be.

Generally speaking, more precipitation would be initiated as well. But if soils are dry, then the water available for evaporation is limited. As a result, the incoming solar energy will warm the surface, raising the temperatures above it. Over a sustained period, this can lead to drought conditions.

Meanwhile, the EU has announced an arms embargo on Syria. In a statement, the bloc said it was banning the shipment to Syria of "arms and equipment that could be used for internal repression". Thirteen "officials and associates of the Syrian regime" are banned from travelling anywhere in the 27-nation union and have had their assets in EU countries frozen.

The UN announced last week that President Bashar al-Assad had agreed to a request from the global body's Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, for a humanitarian mission to be sent to Deraa, where scores of protesters are reported to have been killed in recent weeks. But UN humanitarian chief Valerie Amos told reporters on Monday: "We were expecting to go in with a mission to Deraa yesterday. That was postponed by the government."

At the same time, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, said that it too had been unable to get emergency medical supplies to the 30,000 or so refugees in the Deraa area. The unrest poses the most serious challenge to President Assad since he succeeded his father, Hafez, in 2000.

During fighting in November 1911 between Italy and forces loyal to the Turkish, Ottoman Empire, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father: "Today I have decided to try to throw bombs from the aeroplane. It is the first time that we will try this and if I succeed, I will be really pleased to be the first person to do it."

And soon afterwards Lieutenant Gavotti did indeed hang out of his flimsy aircraft and fling a bomb at troops in a desert oasis below. In that instant he introduced the world to the idea of war from the air. He had begun the age of the bomber, and opened the door to all the horrors it would bring.

With his small bomb, Lieutenant Gavotti may have caused very few if any casualties in his lone raid on that dusty, Libyan oasis. But he had shown for the first time that it was possible to carry out attacks from an aircraft. And the many bombers who would come after him - those who would strike at places like Guernica, Dresden and Hiroshima - would do more damage and take more lives than the young Italian pilot could ever have imagined.

The flooding has been caused by melting snow and heavy rains. Army engineers say it is unlikely that the levee system in Memphis will give way, but have admitted that the water has been rising faster than expected. The authorities have also warned residents to look out for snakes and rats which could seek shelter on higher ground.

Officials downstream in Louisiana have begun evacuating prisoners from one of the state's toughest prisons - the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola - and opened floodgates to relieve pressure on levees outside New Orleans. On Monday evening, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam said even though the river was approaching its crest, the water would not recede in some neighbourhoods for at least two weeks. "It's not going to get a lot better for a while," Mr Haslam said.

In downtown Memphis, the river had swollen to three miles (4.8km) wide from its typical width of half a mile, the Memphis Commercial Appeal newspaper reported.

Born amidst deceit and lies that dwarf those told by the most famous 20th century titans of mendacity, the Eurofascists not only kept their totalitarian political aims under wraps, but outright denied that they had any intention of infringing national sovereignties. For more than 40 years, they swore up and down that their only objectives were economic, until the moment that their vast bureaucratic infrastructure appeared to be sufficiently emplaced to permit a naked grab for overt political rule.

But fittingly, since economics was the sword they used to conquer an unwitting Europe, economics is also the sword by which their dark visions of a Fourth Reich will die. The prosperity which the European Union brought to the lesser nations of the continent, the Irelands, the Portugals, the Greeces and the Spains was always a mirage. There was no genuine wealth generation. What looked like a new paradigm of free trade and single-currency-based growth was nothing more than the short-term consequences of debt-based spending on a continental scale.

It was all a lie. Just as the bureaucrats of Brussels were aiming at unquestioned, unelected political rule over a single, sovereign super-state all along, the explosion of new European wealth was never anything more than the parents of today robbing their children, their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. But now the lies are being unearthed, one after another, even as the great administrative infrastructure trembles before the barely surfaced anger of the voiceless, voteless, European citizenries who realize that they have been financially raped, plundered and left for dead without ever realizing that their nations were under attack in the first place.

Even as the bankers and politicians rush from Greece to Ireland and from Spain to Iceland in increasingly desperate attempts to shore up their collapsing charade, they are being rocked by new economic and political cataclysms after another. In just the last month, four major events have taken place that spell the eventual end to the most recent attempt to conquer Europe.

1) The rise of the True Finns in Finland. Being a more pragmatic nation than most, the Finnish people are the first to openly reject the idea that sending millions of Euros to other European countries and importing large quantities of foreigners is beneficial to the nation of Finland. Unlike Americans, the Finns recognize that a foreigner who comes to Finland is not a Finn. He is merely a foreigner in Finland, and his interests have little in common with those of the Finnish people.

2) The revelation that Portugal, which is seeking a bailout from the other European states, is presently in possession of GOLD RESERVES WORTH $17.5 BILLION. This was not readily known by the voting populations, especially in Finland, which is now poised to kill the third "rescue package" being prepared by the EU and the IMF, following the bailouts provided to the bankers who had loaned money to Greece and Ireland. Even German politicians, normally among the most staunch advocates of EU expansionism, have begun to openly question why other Europeans should pay off Portuguese debts while Portugal sits on its gold.

3) The referendum in Iceland which killed the Icelandic government's plan to tax Icelandic taxpayers billions of dollars for the debt incurred by a single Icelandic bank.

4) The failure of the original Greek bailout. The Greek budget deficit is actually getting worse and is falling far short of its targets; total debt has now reached 150 percent of its already-exaggerated GDP, and there is no sign that the southern European country will ever be able to even service its debts, let alone repay them. This sparked a report in Der Spiegel that Greece would be the first to withdraw from the Euro, an act that would be the first solid indicator that the EU had reached terminal status and was beginning to contract. Greek officials denied that they were considering leaving the single currency, but it should be kept in mind that they also denied their creditors were in need of a bailout in the first place.

On Friday, Spiegel Online reported on a secret meeting taking place in Luxembourg at which finance ministers from leading euro-zone countries and Athens discussed options for dealing with Greece's ongoing crisis, which even a multibillion euro bailout has failed to resolve. Spiegel Online reported that Athens is mulling, among other scenarios, a possible departure from the common currency area. On Saturday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou denied the report, calling it "rumor mongering."

It emerged Sunday, however, that finance ministers from Europe's largest economies, including Germany, France, Italy and Spain, have already attended secret meetings several times in order to be able to discretely discuss the euro crisis, the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported on Monday. The fact that politicians initially denied there was any secret meeting on Friday and then later trying to play down what had been discussed, has led to speculation on the editorial pages of major newspapers in Germany that a second bailout for Greece is likely to come soon.

Several editorialists also believe that a debt restructuring, or "haircut," will also be necessary for Athens. That would involve debt forgiveness that will hit taxpayers in Germany and other countries straight in the pocketbook. They warn, however, that a haircut, if done incorrectly, could also have an incalculable impact on the European banking sector that might echo the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

And the percentage of homeowners in negative-equity positions - with a home worth less than its mortgage - has rocketed to 28%, a new crisis high. Zillow now predicts prices will fall about 8% this year and says it no longer expects the market to bottom before 2012. "There's no way we can get to flat, from these depreciation levels, in the last nine months of the year," says Zillow economist Stan Humphries. "Demand is a lot more anemic than we had previously thought."

When in 2012 does Zillow see the market bottoming out? Humphries won't say. What a foolish boondoggle those tax breaks for home buyers have turned out to be. The government spent an estimated $22 billion between 2008 and 2010 on tax breaks to prop up the housing market. All it achieved was a brief suckers' rally that ended last summer.

"As we said at the time, it was a giant waste of money," says Mark Calabria, economist at the conservative Cato Institute. "None of these things really turned the housing market around. They just put off the adjustment for awhile." It's hard to overestimate the scale of the carnage in the housing market. Zillow found prices fell in all but four US metro areas. Falling real-estate prices mean spiraling hidden losses throughout the economy, from banks to homeowners.

Riders traveling through downtown stations reportedly expressed alarm after a man asked them for help carrying a duffel bag and a large box. Bomb technicians with the Dallas Police Department determined the packages were not a threat about two hours after the evacuation, said DART spokesman Morgan Lyons. "He was actually trying to pay people to help him get packages on and off the train," Lyons said. The man with the packages remained with DPD through the afternoon, though he was not arrested.

Nationwide, transit systems have been on high alert because of fears al Quaeda could retaliate for the death of Osama Bin Laden. Here in North Texas, the NBA playoffs have had heightened security at the American Airlines Center. The FBI is also investigating suspicious letters with a Dallas postmark found at Washington DC area schools. They are similar to other letters sent to DC schools this week containing a white powder. One of them referenced al Qaeda.

"The customers are aware of what's going on in the world. We're aware of what's going on in the world," said Lyons. Like the powder laced letters, the package at Mockingbird station was found to be harmless. Still, no one at all seemed to mind the dose of extra caution.

We met a young Syrian man on the Lebanese side of the border. He preferred not to give us his real name asking instead that we call him 'Ahmed'.

He told Sky News that he had crossed over last week along with two of his eight brothers. The other six remain in Syria and are participating in the anti government demonstrations.

After security forces opened fire on villagers their father insisted that at least three of the young men leave for Lebanon in case there was a massacre and the whole family was killed. Ahmad told us that foreigners were involved in the killing. 'People we don't know, wearing black, and with beards came and started shooting men, women, anybody. They used hand grenades and let tanks enter. The women couldn't handle it anymore and to protect our honour we sent them here to this region.'

We can't verify his account nor the claim that his whole village and all of Syria is against the regime. He didn't appear sophisticated enough to understand the ramifications of his claim that foreigners were involved in the killings. If that was true, suspicion would fall on the Iranians, who are close to the Assad regime, or the Hizbollah militia from Lebanon, which is partially bankrolled by Damascus. It is an inflammatory accusation. We cannot test it because of the lack of visas. That in turn suggests the government has something to hide.

Oil just doesn't fall by 10 percent in the course of a normal day, though. In commodities markets, oil is king, and its daily contract turnover, typically around $200 billion (122 billion pounds), is usually able to absorb even large inflows or outflows of investment. The rare moves of $10 a barrel usually are set off by dramatic events - the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1991, or the collapse in 2008 of Lehman Bros bank, which both led to recessions.

In interviews with more than two dozen fund managers, bankers and traders, no clear cause emerged for the plunge in price. Market players were unable to identify any single bank or fund orchestrating a massive sale to liquidate positions, not even an errant trade that triggered panic selling, as seen in the equities flash crash last May.

Rather, the picture pieced together from interviews on Thursday and Friday is one of a richly priced commodities market - raw goods have been on a five-month winning tear over all other major investment classes - hit by a flurry of negative factors that individually could be absorbed but cumulatively triggered a maelstrom. Computerized trading kicked in when key price levels were reached, accelerating the fall. "It was a domino effect," said Dominic Cagliotti, a New York-based oil options broker.

In many cases, computer algorithms sold for technical reasons, as oil dropped through levels that, once breached, could trigger ever larger waves of selling yet to come. "Computers don't care. Momentum just increases until nobody wants to stand in front of it," said Peter Donovan, a floor trader for Vantage on the New York Mercantile Exchange. High frequency trading and algorithmic trading accounts for about half of all the volume in oil markets.

A string of religious disputes in recent years, often involving minority complaints of discrimination, has triggered persistent feelings of insecurity among both Malaysian Muslims and minorities about their religious rights in a country that prides itself on multiethnic peace. The allegation by two anonymous political bloggers about a plot by Christian leaders received little attention until the country's leading Malay-language newspaper reported it on its front page Saturday under the headline "Malaysia a Christian nation?"

The Utusan Malaysia newspaper is owned by Prime Minister Najib Razak's Malay-dominated ruling party. It said dozens of pastors were believed to have pledged at a recent meeting to make Christianity the official religion of Malaysia and have a prime minister elected from the Christian community, which comprises about 10 percent of Malaysia's 28 million people.

The countries - Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Greece - were said to be discussing EU issues, including the financial situation of Portugal, Ireland and Greece. Greece denounced the Spiegel report about the possible exit of Greece from the Eurozone as "not only completely untrue but also written with incomprehensible flippancy despite repeated denials by the Greek Government as well as other EU Member States".

"Such articles are not only provocative but also highly irresponsible as they undermine Greece's efforts and those of the Eurozone and serve only the interests of speculators. Despite the denials, at 2230 GMT the euro was worth $1.44. After the talks the Eurogroup Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker issued a categorical denial that Greece's euro status was up for debate. "We have not been discussing the exit of Greece from the euro area, this is a stupid idea, it is in no way... an avenue we would never take," Reuters reported him as saying. "We don't want to have the euro area exploding without reason."

"We have ruled out any restructuring of Greek debt," Juncker underlined, saying the talks were about "discussing European problems in relation to G20 and Eurogroup meetings over the coming weeks." Despite dismissals from officials, the story "does seem to be having a market effect," said Ron Leven, a currency strategist at Morgan Stanley in New York. But he played down the significance of the report. "For [Greece] to leave the euro is very complicated. It's not like they can just wake up tomorrow and say we're not in the euro anymore."