Speaking at an event hosted by Deutsche Bank in Berlin alongside Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, Merkel also defended her approach to the crisis against critics who argue she has put too much emphasis on austerity, saying Europe must find a way to deliver both growth and solid finances.

The comments came two months before European leaders are due to gather in Brussels to discuss moving towards a so-called "fiscal union". Expectations are low, in part because an easing of the crisis has reduced pressure on leaders to produce a big leap forward in integration, but also due to differences between Germany and its partners, notably France, over the next steps.

"We seem to find common solutions when we are staring over the abyss," Merkel said. "But as soon as the pressure eases, people say they want to go their own way. "We need to be ready to accept that Europe has the last word in certain areas. Otherwise we won't be able to continue to build Europe," she added.

Though the cumulative level of government deficits fell last year, mainly because of Germany swinging into a budget surplus, many countries have continued to reel from the costs associated with recession. Spending cuts and tax increases have helped to reduce deficits across the 17 EU countries that use the euro, but the region's debt burden rose after economic growth flatlined and fewer companies and households paid taxes.

David Whipple kept the fast food meal for a month to show friends how the preservative-packed hamburger would keep its composure. But he forgot about it, finding it two years later in his coat pocket and then he decided to continue the bizarre experiment. However, even he was shocked to see that the hamburger still looks the same a whopping 14 years later.

'It wasn't on purpose,' Whipple told TV show 'The Doctors,' of his decision to keep the burger for such a long time. I was showing some people how enzymes work and I thought a hamburger would be a good idea. And I used it for a month and then I forgot about it. It ended up in a paper sack in the original sack with the receipt in my coat pocket tossed in the back of my truck and it sat there for, I don't know, two or three months.'

He said his coat ended up in the coat closet of his Logan, Utah, home. The burger had no signs of mold, fungus or even a strange odor, the show's hosts said. The only thing that had changed over the years was that the pickle had disintegrated. Whipple, who still has the original receipt for the burger, said he now shows the sandwich to his grandchildren to encourage them to eat healthily. 'It's great for my grand-kids to see. To see what happens with fast food,' he said.

Bernd Lucke, the spokesman of the newly established Alternative for Germany party, is no ordinary economics professor. Giving the most complicated answers to the most straightforward questions is normally one of the trademarks of his profession. But the Hamburg economist takes precisely the opposite approach. He has a simple solution for even the trickiest problem of the day.

And what is Lucke's miracle cure for a crash without side effects? He proposes that the Southern European countries introduce parallel currencies - that is, bring back the drachma, the peseta, the escudo and the lira alongside the euro. The countries' national central banks would then tie these currencies to the euro at fixed rates. The professor essentially wants to combine the best of both worlds, allowing Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy to remain connected to the euro zone and yet receive their own currencies.

This would allow them to devalue their currencies and still have a calculable form of payment at their disposal. At the same time, argues Lucke, this will reduce the cost of their goods in world markets without assets losing their value overnight. Even Lucke probably senses that his proposal doesn't really solve the current problems. When it comes to the side effects of his recipe, he issues a typical caveat: "It goes without saying," he writes, "that the transition to a second national currency entails a number of technical problems."

According to the report, Jordanian King Abdullah made the decision in March during US President Barack Obama’s visit to Jordan, which came immediately after his first trip as president to Israel. Le Figaro quoted the military source as saying that the Israeli drones fly at night to avoid detection.

The source added that “the Syrians have Russian air defense assets, but Israeli aircraft are difficult to detect and therefore virtually immune to anti-aircraft measures.” According to the source, the unmanned aerial vehicles are carrying out surveillance, but “they are also armed and therefore can hit targets anywhere in Syria.”

Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun. However, Curry warns that without federal funding of basic research, America will lose the race to develop new plasma energy technologies. The basic research program was originally funded by the Office of Naval Research, but continued research has been funded by MU.

Curry’s device launches a ring of plasma as far as two feet. The plasma doesn’t emit radiation, and it is completely safe for humans to be in the same room with it, although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun. The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make the plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together while it travels through the air.

“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering in the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering. “Creating plasma in a vacuum tube surrounded by powerful electromagnets is no big deal; dozens of labs can do that. Our innovation allows the plasma to hold itself together while it travels through regular air without any need for containment.”

The youngest known patient being treated in the UK is a four-year-old girl from the South East. Her parents enrolled her for compulsive behaviour therapy after she became increasingly “distressed and inconsolable” when the iPad was taken away from her. Her use of the device had escalated over the course of a year and she had become addicted to using it for up to four hours a day.

Dr Richard Graham, who launched the UK’s first technology addiction programme three years ago, said he believed there were many more addicts of her age. He warned that the condition prevented young people from forming normal social relationships, leaving them drained by the constant interaction.

Parents who have found themselves unable to wean their children off computer games and mobile phones are paying up to £16,000 for a 28-day “digital detox” programme designed by Dr Graham at the Capio Nightingale clinic in London. Psychiatrists estimate that the number of people who have become digitally dependent has risen by 30 per cent over the past three years.

Angela Merkel does not look like a conqueror. She is no great speaker, has little physical presence and hardly exudes charisma. Indeed, to the casual observer, this short, unprepossessing woman might be a suburban German housewife. Yet according to one of Germany's most distinguished intellectuals, Mrs Merkel is 'the uncrowned Queen of Europe'. In the European power stakes, no one comes close to competing with the German Chancellor.

Most recently, faraway Cyprus has fallen under her sway, with Mrs Merkel ordering a stunning raid on savers' bank accounts in return for an £8.5 billion bailout of the island's ailing economy. In countries such as Cyprus and Greece, which have felt the lash of German-imposed austerity, the German Chancellor has become a public hate figure, with protesters regularly likening her to the war criminals of the Third Reich. But in a sense, the hatred is a tribute to her success. For in just a few years, using the European Union as her vehicle, she has succeeded where Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Hitler failed - turning an entire continent into a greater German empire.

Mrs Merkel is not for turning. So the great machine of German-imposed austerity rumbles on, crushing the hopes and livelihoods of millions of European youngsters beneath its wheels. Of course it is all too easy to overlook the stolid, uncharismatic woman who sits in judgment on her neighbours. Even now many foreign observers struggle to take her seriously.

But the stark reality is that Angela Merkel has succeeded where so many of her predecessors, with their strutting militarism, peaked helmets and soaring rhetoric, failed. She has made Germany the undisputed master of Europe.

Conservative MPs are demanding that Britain stays out of measures that, it is argued, weaken democratic oversight and sovereignty over policing, costing British taxpayers an extra £62 million in contributions to the EU. "Europol wants open access to every police file in Britain. That would allow European authorities to pry into the private matters of ordinary innocent citizens - and they want to charge us for the privilege," said Dominic Raab, Tory MP for Esher and Walton in Surrey.

"This plan lays bare the federalist ambition of moving towards a single European criminal justice system, shorn of proper national democratic control." Under new European Commission proposals, law enforcers will be obliged to "supply Europol with the information necessary for it to fulfil its objectives", removing previous safeguards that allow British police to decide what records are handed over.

The plan is for Europol "to truly become the EU hub for information exchange and analysis on serious crime" with a new regulation that "strengthens and clarifies the obligation for member states to supply data".

This is despite the fact that there was a treasure trove of photos showing several suspicious looking people around the finish line right before the bombs went off. There were military types roaming around the finish line and a number of odd looking individuals carrying backpacks similar to what may have been used to carry the bombs. Thus far there has been no official explanation as to why there were military types roaming around the area of the finish line.

There has also been no official explanation as to why there were strange drills and exercises being run in the general area of the Boston Marathon that have been reported by eyewitness accounts. As stated in my previous article pointing the finger at government involvement in these events, these types of drills are typically used as cover for a larger government sponsored terror operation as seen with events like the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 bombings in London.

If the government was more open and honest with what was actually taking place, people wouldn’t be asking all of these questions. They are the ones that are fueling speculation and distrust by engaging the public in this manner.

Consider the following trends: Suicide has surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of injury death for Americans. Even more disturbing, in the world’s greatest military, more US soldiers died last year by suicide than in combat;

Fully one-third of the nation’s employees suffer chronic debilitating stress, and more than half of all “millennials” (18 to 33 year olds) experience a level of stress that keeps them awake at night, including large numbers diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder. Shocking new research from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that one in five of all high-school-aged children in the United States has been diagnosed with ADHD, and likewise a large new study of New York City residents shows, sadly, that one in five preteens – children aged six to 12 – have been medically diagnosed with either ADHD, anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder;

New research concludes that stress renders people susceptible to serious illness, and a growing number of studies now confirm that chronic stress plays a major role in the progression of cancer, the nation’s second-biggest killer. The biggest killer of all, heart disease, which causes one in four deaths in the US, is also known to have a huge stress component;

Incredibly, 11 percent of all Americans aged 12 and older are currently taking SSRI antidepressants – those highly controversial, mood-altering psychiatric drugs with the FDA’s “suicidality” warning label and alarming correlation with school shooters. Women are especially prone to depression, with a stunning 23 percent of all American women in their 40s and 50s – almost one in four – now taking antidepressants, according to a major study by the CDC;

Add to that the tens of millions of users of all other types of psychiatric drugs, including (just to pick one) the 6.4 million American children between 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin or similar psycho-stimulants. Throw in the 28 percent of American adults with a drinking problem, that’s more than 60 million, plus the 22 million using illegal drugs like marijuana, cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens and inhalants, and pretty soon a picture emerges of a nation of drug-takers, with hundreds of millions dependent on one toxic substance or another – legal or illegal – to “help” them deal with the stresses and problems of life.