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.

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".