According to the USDA, Symptoms of CCD include few or no adult honeybees present, honey and immature bees (broods) remain present in the hive suggesting a sudden abandonment of the hive – a possible response to stress. However, the bees are never found elsewhere, they simply disappear and die. Usually, the queen bee is left behind but dies without establishing a new population.

The disorder has significantly affected bee populations since the 1970s with a sharp increase in losses since 2006. Now, as beekeepers return to their hives to prepare for spring pollination, they are finding that at least half of their bees are gone. The 2013 year now marks the highest loss on record with at least 50 percent of all European honeybees in the US reported lost to CCD. The attrition rate for honeybee hives is normally around 5 to 10 percent per year. After 2006, that rate increased to about one third. This year, it is one half. That one-half figure is a critical point beyond which many beekeepers think prices will be affected.

Premier Antonis Samaras held a special meeting with the foreign minister Dimitris Avramopoulos and other key officials this morning to limit the diplomatic damage from the 80-page report.

The document – stamped “Aporito”, or secret – was drafted by a panel of experts appointed by the Greek finance ministry and delivered to officials last month. The alleged claim against Germany reaches a grand total of €162 billion, including €108 billion for rebuilding the country’s infrastructure after the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944. This is 80 percent of Greek GDP.

The probe was chaired by Panagiotis Karakousis, director-general of the General Accounting Office at the Finance Ministry, and relied on 190,000 pages of documents scattered through the country’s ministries and archives. Mr Karakousis told The Daily Telegraph that the report was commissioned by the current leadership, not the previous Pasok government.

The challenge for the grouping created in 2003 and named after the celebrated American poet Ezra Pound who sided with Mussolini during the war, is to rewrite history for pure political ends. “We cannot be responsible for what was happening some 70 years ago. I can’t judge events of the past, since I wasn’t alive back then; so I cannot be judged for things that happened that far back,” the movement’s vice president Simone Di Stefano told RT.

According to Di Stefano, CasaPound has been expanding across Italy gaining public support. They claim to have up to 5,000 members and say fascism has never been so popular since World War 2.

PETMAN is a bipedal robot that has been displayed during previous tests as having the ability to climb stairs and even do pushups. In the latest video, though, the experimental project is showcased as being more lifelike than ever before.

Scientists at Boston Dynamics have released a video that shows PETMAN, clothed head-to-toe in full-on camouflage, jogging in place on a laboratory platform. But unlike earlier videos in which PETMAN appeared to be nothing more than a pile of wires enclosed in metal, the newest footage shows the science project at its all-time most humanness. The robot, adds the scientists, can balance itself, move freely, walk and do a variety of suit-stressing calisthenics — all while being exposed to chemical warfare agents.

"Natural, agile movement is essential for PETMAN to simulate how a soldier stresses protective clothing under realistic conditions,” adds Boston Dynamics. “The robot will have the shape and size of a standard human, making it the first anthropomorphic robot that moves dynamically like a real person."

It is hard to exaggerate the pitiful state of Britain in the Seventies. The reckless economic policy of Mrs Thatcher’s predecessor as Tory leader, Ted Heath, who between 1970 and 1974 printed money as though it were going out of fashion, had left a legacy of high inflation, peaking at 27 per cent in 1975. But the Labour administrations of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan between 1974 and 1979 made things even worse. Wilson began by buying off trade unions with budget-busting pay rises and implemented a programme of food and housing subsidies that owed more to the Soviet bloc than to a supposedly western economy.

Jim Callaghan succeeded him in April 1976 and continued to spend money the country did not have. A refusal to accept that Britain could not spend its way out of trouble led to the International Monetary Fund having to rescue the country from bankruptcy in the autumn of 1976. The severe spending cuts the IMF ordered in return for its financial assistance aggravated relations between the Labour government and its notional supporters in the trade union movement.

Things were grim for the private sector. The top rate of tax on earned income was 83 per cent, which drove thousands of the best and brightest abroad. It was an astonishing 98 per cent on unearned income, such as dividends, which prevented many people from investing in industry. Starved of investment, industry became ever more sclerotic.

The private sector was also held hostage by the unions. From 1976 a dispute had been running for two years at Grunwick, a London photo-processing laboratory, over the management’s refusal to recognise unions. It came to symbolise the struggle between management and unions in pre-Thatcherite Britain. When Mrs Thatcher won office she delivered on her promises. Unions were forced to be democratic — no longer could they call strikes without a ballot of their members. Flying pickets were made illegal.

Having emasculated the unions by bringing them within the law, Mrs Thatcher was able to proceed with the strategy of restructuring the economy and dragging Britain into the late 20th century. By 1983, when she faced re-election — after the small matter of the Falklands War — she had won her richly deserved accolade as a transformative prime minister.

Unelected union leaders no longer dictated the terms of the political debate in Britain. For the first time since the Thirties, managers truly did have the right to manage. Our money was sound again, thanks to her refusal to fund a client state in the way her Labour — and Conservative — predecessors had. As a result of all this, not only was our country transformed in four short years, but also our standing in the world and our ability to believe in ourselves.

“Law” was for her an almost sacred word. In private political conversation, I think she used the phrase “the rule of law” more often than any other. Her biblically based, though surprisingly tolerant, Protestantism saw obedience to God’s law as a much stronger imperative than personal fulfilment. It was partly her respect for law as a religious idea that made her so sympathetic to Judaism.

Her love of system attracted Baroness Thatcher to scientific knowledge, the laws of nature. Her love of order and clarity of rules attracted her to the laws of England. “Not just liberty”, she would shout as she expounded her idea of the British genius, “but law-based liberty”.

She did not see freedom as a floaty, private, self-indulgent thing, but more like the breath that animates the human body. The frame of that body — the anatomy of human society — came from properly constructed laws.

Banners were held stating ‘Rejoice Thatcher is dead’ by drunken crowds, many of whom were too young to remember her as prime minister. Similar disgraceful scenes were witnessed in Glasgow and further ‘parties’ were planned in Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle and Manchester. Sickening messages also began flooding the internet minutes after the official announcement.

And at a National Union of Students conference in Sheffield some delegates cheered and applauded when informed of the former prime minister’s death. Eighties Trotskyist firebrand Derek Hatton, a sworn political enemy of Mrs Thatcher from his days as deputy leader of Liverpool City Council, sent one particularly vile message. He tweeted: ‘The issue isn’t about whether she is now dead, I regret for the sake of millions of people that she was ever born.’

Former London Mayor and Labour MP Ken Livingstone claimed that ‘almost everything that’s wrong with Britain today is her legacy’. He added: ‘She created today’s housing crisis, she produced the banking crisis, she created the benefits crisis.’ Chris Kitchen, general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, said: ‘We’ve been waiting for a long time to hear the news of Baroness Thatcher’s demise and I can’t say I’m sorry. I will not be shedding a tear for her.’

Comedians were also quick to add to the insensitive tirade against the former PM. Comedian Frankie Boyle, referring to IRA hunger strikers, tweeted: ‘Booby [sic] Sands ghost just appeared to me, trying to start a conga’, and added: ‘Thatcher being dead is a lot less tragic than Cameron being alive.’

Dozens of students tweeted their distaste after delegates at the National Union of Students’ conference cheered and applauded when Baroness Thatcher’s death was announced at Sheffield City Hall. NUS President Liam Burns made a statement a few minutes later, urging the 1,000 delegates to show ‘sensitivity’.

In joint interviews with five European newspapers, Mr Cameron today argued the EU has “overreached itself with directives and interventions and interferences”. Asked whether there will be treaty change, Mr Cameron said he is “absolutely convinced that there will be the need to reopen at some stage these treaties, not least to solve the problem of the eurozone”.

He said, “I don't want to give you a shopping list. I think this should be a discussion across Europe about how we make the EU more flexible, and how we make clear that powers can flow back to nation states as well as flow forward to the EU.” He added, “We need to recognise that consent for Britain's membership of the EU and all the ways that it's changed has become wafer-thin in Britain. Politicians, if they do their job properly have to recognise this fact rather than try and brush it under the carpet.”

Lucke added that while some areas like competition policy and banking regulation should remain at the EU level, most other decisions should be returned to national governments. Looking ahead to September’s federal elections, he argued that “many of Angela Merkel’s supporters will vote for us.”

In a feature on the party in Die Welt, Thorsten Jungholt argues that if the election will be tight, even a modest electoral result for the party could be enough to deprive the CDU/CSU and FDP coalition of an outright victory. An Infratest Dimap poll for the paper shows that the party can potentially count on support from across the political spectrum with 29% of Die Linke’s voters, 21% of SPD voters, 19% of CDU/CSU voters and 14% of Green voters saying they could see themselves voting for the party “in principle”.

These economists, including Tsinghua University professor Li Daokui and ANZ Bank's Liu Ligang, see Japan's plan to double its monetary base within two years as "blackmail" and have criticised the Japanese central bank's decision to open the liquidity floodgates to bump up the economy.

Liu said Japan's unprecedented easing programme, aimed at ending more than two decades of deflation, was "a monetary blackmail" targeted at other export-driven Asian countries such as China and that the central bank should sell more yuan and buy the US dollar to push down the yuan.

He also called on authorities to guard against a fresh wave of hot money into China's fragile financial markets, warning that Japan's move would reignite the so-called carry trade, under which investors borrow in low-interest yen and invest in high-interest markets. "The massive monetary stimulus by the Japanese central bank could spell doom for other nations in the region," said Tsinghua's Li, a former adviser to the People's Bank of China.

First, we will not build Europe without, and even more so against its people. We cannot succeed if the citizens do not feel part of the project. As the Mayor of Thessaloniki rightly recalled: “Only if the people see the benefits of the European Union in their daily lives will they continue to believe in it”.

Second, in order to enable citizens to continue to believe in Europe, the latter must find the means, among its leaders and within its institutions, to show that the project remains beneficial, or, at least, that Europe is not per se responsible for all that is happening.

Third, in the light of the current situation, it is essential that Europe – and above all the Commission – starts tackling the rise of populism throughout the continent. More and more of these movements are questioning the very essence of the European project, and the risk is real that they might succeed.

Finally, We need to engage in an open debate with the people of Europe, put all cards on the table, listen and rebuild together.

A span of unfinished apartment blocks in the Siska complex on the outskirts of Ljubljana is emblematic of the former Yugoslav republic's woes, just as many such ghost neighborhoods in Europe's debt-choked south stand testament to the depth of the broader continent's economic problems.

The rows of buildings, housing 833 flats in all, stand mostly empty, casualties of a property boom turned bust and a subsequent recession. Alongside, Vegrad, a company once led by a well-placed politician, also planned to build a hotel, but got no further than digging an enormous hole. An apt symbol, as Slovenia comes under growing pressure to seek a bailout to fill a financial hole, just as Cyprus did last month.

The countries are different in many ways, but they have at least two things in common: like Cyprus, Slovenia needs to recapitalize its biggest banks, and it does not have the money to do so.

In 2001 Goldman Sachs executive Jim O’Neill invented the BRIC’s. Russia and China, as two powerful neighbors obviously have long standing and important bilateral relations. But equally obviously, have little in common with Brazil and South Africa. However, in 2009 they organized a first summit. Just a week ago we all of a sudden hear the BRIC’s are planning to open up a competitor to the IMF. India is also involved. They’re still working out the details and it’s not a done deal yet, but the move looks very serious.

And there is of course the euro, which, make no mistake, is in great shape. True, Eurocrat legitimacy is suffering because of the euro crisis, even in Germany the currency is losing support. But the euro crisis is purely for internal consumption, to sucker the nations into surrendering budget responsibility to Brussels. This is the final frontier for a full blown EU federalist Super State. While the euro is deeply hated, this is not really a problem for the Money Power: it isn’t in this business to make friends and it does not mind a big fight. It only fears real alternatives and these are nowhere to be seen.

There is nobody proposing anything real, people are just letting off steam. Once they get their fiscal union, the crisis will quickly end. People have a short memory. The euro was designed to be eventually backed by gold and the ECB has enough of the stuff to be ready for the coming transition.