World

ALMOLOYA, Mexico — Mexico's most prized prisoner paced his cell, first to the latrine, then the shower, then the bed. At every turn around the tiny room, drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman checked the shower floor hidden by a half wall, because even jailed criminals get their privacy.

In his final sweep, Guzman sat on his bed and took off his shoes. Then he walked back to the shower, stooped behind the wall and disappeared. It was the beginning of an escape odyssey straight out of the pages of fiction and the media were given a peek on Tuesday of the deep and sophisticated tunnel that led the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, whose illicit drug trafficking reach includes Europe and Asia, swiftly to freedom late Saturday night.

Government video of Guzman's final moments in his cell and a reporter's climb into the tunnel put real dimensions to a high-tech engineering feat three stories underground, where planners and builders managed to burrow through dirt and rock right to the one spot in Guzman's cell that surveillance cameras couldn't see.

Mexico's security commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said Tuesday that up to the moment Guzman disappeared, his pacing was considered normal for someone who lives in about 5 sqm with only an hour a day outside for exercise. But there was nothing usual after he lifted a slab of concrete shower floor and descended into a warm and humid man-made underworld, where a motorcycle rigged to two carts on rails waited to whisk him away.

Guzman either rode on the bike or in one of the carts for 1.5km in the dirt tunnel built just high enough for a man called "Shorty" to stand without hitting his head. When he reached the other end, he climbed a wooden ladder through a large, wood-framed shaft with a winch overhead that had been used to drop construction supplies into the tunnel. After pulling himself up 17 rungs, he reached a small basement, where a blue power generator the size of a compact car provided the electricity to illuminate and pump oxygen into the underground escape route.

From there, Guzman walked to a shorter ladder and climbed one, two, three steps as the air thinned and the temperature dropped 10 degrees. As Guzman's head poked above the dirt floor, he climbed three more rungs to stand inside the unfinished bodega built to hide the elaborate scheme.

Digging crews had discarded 4-by 10cm wooden beams, 2.4m tall coils of steel mesh, gallons of hydraulic fluid, 3m lengths of PVC pipe and an electric disc saw. A battered wheel barrow full of fine gray soil sat just above the opening in the floor. A couple of improvised wooden tables and a wooden bench rounded out the bodega's furniture, along with shelves of assorted drill bits, a circular wood saw blade, a jar of liquid cement for pipe joining and a bottle of motor oil.

Seven more strides and the man who Mexico's government said could not possibly repeat his 2001 prison escape stepped through a sliding steel door into the chilly night on a high plain west of the capital.

For the first time since his latest capture on February 22, 2014, Guzman was free.

The ingenuity and audacity of the caper was breathtaking.

It was no slapdash project. It appeared no expense was spared, though working quickly was the priority.

A tunnel of such sophistication would normally take 18 months to two years to complete, said Jim Dinkins, former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations. But Guzman was behind bars barely 16 months.

"When it's for the boss, you probably put that on high speed," Dinkins said.

WASHINGTON — Climate change is a big worry in Latin America, Asia and Africa, but the Daesh terror group spells more anxiety among Europeans and North Americans, a global opinion poll released Tuesday suggests.

The Pew Research Centre in Washington said it interviewed 45,435 respondents in 40 countries to see what issues were most likely to keep them awake at night.

Sixty-one per cent in Latin America identified climate change as their biggest worry, the highest proportion of any region, said Pew in a summary of its findings.

Concern was greatest in Peru and Brazil, running at 75 per cent in both nations, it said.

Climate change was similarly the top concern for 59 per cent of Africans surveyed in nine countries, with fear expressed most frequently in Burkina Faso (79 per cent), Uganda (74 per cent) and Ghana (71 per cent).

In the Asia-Pacific region, a majority in half of the 10 countries surveyed identified climate change as the top issue, with the proportion running as high as 73 per cent in India and 72 per cent in the Philippines.

Meanwhile, Daesh was the leading worry in Europe, where 70 per cent expressed serious concern about the threat that it represents, Pew said.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans and 58 per cent of Canadians felt likewise, and Daesh was also the top concern for a majority of respondents in South Korea, Japan, Australia and Indonesia.

Fear of Daesh was shared by respondents in the Middle East, where 84 per cent of Lebanese — including 90 per cent of its Sunnis and 87 per cent of its Shiites — said they were very concerned by the group's proliferation.

Sixty-two per cent of respondents in Jordan and 54 per cent in the Palestinian territories agreed with that concern, Pew said.

The full survey, which was conducted from March 25 to March 27, appears at www.pewglobal.org.

ATHENS — Greece's government on Tuesday submitted tough bailout terms demanded by eurozone creditors to parliament, as Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras battled for support for the draconian reforms from his ruling anti-austerity Syriza Party.

With around 30 hardline Syriza Party lawmakers threatening to oppose the latest reforms demanded by Greece's international creditors, Tsipras faced the unenviable task of turning to pro-European opposition parties to push the deal through parliament by Wednesday.

In the agreement struck Monday with the eurozone to prevent Greece crashing out of the euro, the parliament in Athens must pass sweeping changes to labour laws, pensions, VAT and taxes.

Only then will the 18 other eurozone leaders start negotiations over what Greece is to get in return: a three-year bailout worth up to 86 billion euros ($95 billion), its third rescue programme in five years.

Europe's main stock markets marked time on doubts whether the bailout would win Greek lawmakers' approval.

"Mr Tsipras's Syriza government may see significant rebellion and approval of the deal in the Greek parliament will probably only be possible with the help of opposition parties — and even then, it is not completely certain it will pass," said strategist Kit Juckes at French bank Societe Generale.

With much of his party up in arms, Tsipras loyalists were hard at work to convince sceptics that the cuts could be softened through alternative measures.

But a number of prominent leftists, whose party was voted in January on an anti-austerity ticket, refused to budge.

"The great majority of Syriza organisations oppose this agreement... in terms of labour and pension issues this is worse than the last two bailouts," lawmaker and parliament vice-president Despoina Haralambidou told Vima FM radio.

Syriza's junior coalition partner, the nationalist Independent Greeks Party (ANEL), said it would not approve the measures but would stay in the government.

Tsipras has predicted "the great majority of Greek people" will support the deal, which he said includes help to ease Greece's huge debt burden and to revive its crippled banking system.

The last-ditch deal is aimed at keeping Greece's economy afloat amid fears its banks were about to run dry and trigger its exit from the single currency.

French President Francois Hollande insisted there was no humiliation for Greece in the deal struck in Brussels.

'Humiliation and slavery' 

Many ordinary Greeks are sceptical the deal can bring any improvement to their lives. Some expressed their anger on social media, with the Twitter hashtag #ThisIsACoup trending.

Greece's public servants are also to stage a 24-hour strike on Wednesday, the first big stoppage since Tsipras took power. 

Haralambos Rouliskos, a 60-year-old economist, described the deal as "misery, humiliation and slavery".

The eurozone creditors "are trying to blackmail us," said Katerina Katsaba, a 52-year-old working for a pharmaceutical company.

Faced with a eurozone deeply distrustful of Athens after five months of tense meetings, 40-year-old Tsipras had to agree to demands that critics say rob Greece of financial independence.

"This agreement may pass with [opposition party] votes, but it will never pass the people," said the head of a hardline Syriza faction, Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis.

If Greece does pass it, Europe's next step would be to push the deal through several national parliaments, many in countries that are loath to afford Athens more help.

Germany's Bundestag is likely to vote on Friday, provided the Greek parliament rushes through the four new market-oriented laws by Wednesday. 

A new poll said 55 percent of Germans supported their chancellor, Angela Merkel, on the bailout deal, while a third said they would have preferred a so-called Grexit.

Despite strong opposition, Tsipras yielded to a plan to park assets for privatisation worth up to 50 billion euros in a special fund.

Some 25 billion euros of the money in that fund will then be used to recapitalise Greece's banks.

Payments due 

The deal contains little specific mention of relieving a Greek debt mountain worth 180 per cent of Gross Domestic Product — a step recommended by the International Monetary Fund.

The eurozone must now unite to tackle the immediate problem of finding funds to keep Greece afloat as Athens faces several huge debt payments to the European Central Bank (ECB) and other creditors, while the bailout could take weeks if not months to finalise. It is to pay a 4.2-billion-euro instalment to the ECB next Monday.

Eurozone finance ministers were meeting Tuesday to consider bridge funding for Greece, but officials said there was no easy solution.

The ECB meanwhile has kept Greek banks afloat — barely — with emergency liquidity, but has refused to provide extra funds needed to reopen lenders, which have been closed for over a week.

Banks will stay closed in Greece until Wednesday, the finance ministry said.

BRUSSELS — Eurozone leaders made Greece surrender much of its sovereignty to outside supervision on Monday in return for agreeing to talks on an 86 billion euros bailout to keep the near-bankrupt country in the single currency.

The terms imposed by international lenders led by Germany in all-night talks at an emergency summit obliged leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to abandon promises of ending austerity and could fracture his government and cause an outcry in Greece.

“Clearly the Europe of austerity has won,” Greece’s Reform Minister George Katrougalos said.

“Either we are going to accept these draconian measures or it is the sudden death of our economy through the continuation of the closure of the banks. So it is an agreement that is practically forced upon us,” he told BBC radio.

Greece, however, aims to reopen its banks on Thursday, bankers said. Facing a wave of withdrawals, the banks closed two weeks ago.

If the summit on Greece’s third bailout had failed, Athens would have been staring into an economic abyss with its banks on the brink of collapse and the prospect of having to print a parallel currency and exit the euro.

“The agreement was laborious, but it has been concluded. There is no Grexit,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told a news conference after 17 hours of bargaining.

He dismissed suggestions that Tsipras had been humiliated even though the summit statement insisted repeatedly that Greece must now subject much of its public policy to prior agreement by bailout monitors.

“In this compromise, there are no winners and no losers,” Juncker said. “I don’t think the Greek people have been humiliated, nor that the other Europeans have lost face. It is a typical European arrangement.”

Tsipras himself, elected five months ago to end five years of suffocating austerity, said he had “fought a tough battle” and “averted the plan for financial strangulation”.

Conditional agreement

Greece won conditional agreement to receive a possible 86 billion euros ($95 billion) over three years. As part of the deal, eurozone finance ministers will discuss this week how to keep Greece financed during the time it will need to agree a bailout, but none of the options appear easy, officials said.

Athens must meet a tight timetable for enacting unpopular reforms of value added tax, pensions, budget cuts,  bankruptcy rules and a European Union (EU) banking law that could be used to make big depositors take losses.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she could recommend “with full confidence” that the Bundestag authorise the opening of loan negotiations once the Greek parliament has approved the entire programme and passed the first laws.

The Bundestag is due to vote on Greece on Friday.

Tsipras returned to Athens on Monday and was expected to  meet aides and coalition partners. Facing a Wednesday deadline, he can put all the required measures in one parliamentary bill.

Merkel’s allies meanwhile defended the deal, with her chief of staff, Peter Altmaier, saying Europe had won and Germany “was part of the solution — from the beginning until the end!”

But in Greece, relief was mixed with anger at Germany. 

“Listen, it is some sort of victory but it is a pyrrhic victory because the measures are very strict,” Marianna, 73, told Reuters.

Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said Greece had been “humiliated”, mostly as a result of its refusal to take an offer made to it two weeks ago.

Asked whether the tough conditions imposed on Greece were not similar to the 1919 Versailles treaty that forced crushing reparations on a defeated Germany after World War One, Merkel said: “I won’t take part in historical comparisons, especially when I didn’t make them myself.”

The deterioration of the Greek economy since Tsipras won office in January, and particularly in the last two weeks, had led to a much higher financing need, she said.

One senior EU official put the cost to Greece of the last two weeks of turmoil at 25 to 30 billion euros. A eurozone diplomat said it might be closer to 50 billion euros.

State assets

Tsipras accepted a compromise on German-led demands for the sequestration of Greek state assets worth 50 billion euros, including recapitalised banks, in a trust fund beyond government reach, to be sold off primarily to pay down debt. 

In a gesture to Greece, some 12.5 billion euros of the proceeds would go to investment in Greece, Merkel indicated.

The Greek leader had to drop his opposition to a full role for the International Monetary Fund in the next bailout, which Merkel had insisted on to win parliamentary backing in Berlin.

In a sign of how hard it may be for Tsipras to convince his own Syriza Party to accept the deal, Labour Minister Panos Skourletis said the terms were unviable and would lead to new elections this year.

Six sweeping measures including spending cuts, tax hikes and pension reforms must be enacted by Wednesday night and the entire package endorsed by parliament before talks can start, the leaders decided.

In almost the only concession after imposing its tough terms on Tsipras, Germany dropped a proposal to make Greece take a “time-out” from the eurozone that many said resembled a forced ejection if it failed to meet the conditions.

Tsipras was subjected to a 17-hour browbeating by leaders furious that he had spurned their previous bailout offer on more favourable terms in June and held a referendum last week to reject it. Only France and Italy worked to try to soften the terms being imposed on Greece.

Some diplomats questioned whether it was feasible to rush the package through the Greek parliament in three days. Tsipras is set to sack ministers who did not support him and make dissident Syriza lawmakers resign their seats, people close to the government said.

Even if this week’s rescue succeeds, EU diplomats question whether Greece will stay the course on a three-year programme.

Eurozone finance ministers were tasked with finding sources of immediate bridge funding for Greece to prevent it defaulting on a key payment to the European Central Bank (ECB) next Monday.

Greece needs 7 billion euros of funding by July 20, when it must make a bond redemption to the ECB, and 12 billion euros by mid-August when another ECB payment falls due.

The ECB on Monday maintained emergency funding for Greek banks to keep them just afloat this week, a banking source said.

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — Pit, only two and with just one eye, needed only 11 minutes before he detected a deadly mine buried in a Cambodian field, work that humans with metal detectors could have taken up to five days to investigate.

But Pit is not human. He is part of a team of elite rats, imported from Africa, that Cambodia is training to sniff out landmines that still dot the countryside after decades of conflict.

"Under a clear sky, he would have been quicker," said Hul Sokheng, a veteran Cambodian deminer, who oversees training of 12 handlers on how to work with 15 large rats to clear Cambodia's farmland and rural villages of bombs.

"These are life-saving rats," he said under rainy skies.

Their work could prove vital in a country where unexploded devices, including mines and unexploded shells, have killed nearly 20,000 Cambodians and wounded about 44,000 since 1979, according to the Cambodian government.

Pit is able to smell highly explosive TNT inside landmines, watched over by two handlers who tie him up to a rope as the one-eyed rat searches through the grass.

Pit and his rat friends — all Gambian pouched rats — were deployed to Cambodia from Tanzania in April by a Belgian non-profit organisation, APOPO, to help clear mines. They've been trained since they were 4 weeks old.

At the training field, Pit sniffed TNT scented objects, stopped, dug a little, and was rewarded by his handler with banana.

"He knows his duty: search," said Hul Sokheng.

Landmines and explosive remnants of war have taken a severe toll on Cambodians. The Cambodian Mine Victim Information Service has recorded 19,684 people killed since 1979.

Cambodia is still littered with landmines after emerging from decades of war, including the 1970s Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" genocide, leaving it with one of the world's highest disability rates.

APOPO has used the rodents for mine-clearing projects in several countries, including Angola, Mozambique, Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.

One of the biggest advantages of using rats is that landmines pose no danger to them because the rats are not heavy enough to trigger an explosion.

For their handlers, the rats are more than bomb detectors.

"They are not just rats, they are like my brothers," said 41-year-old handler Meas Chamroeun.

ABUJA — President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday sacked his entire military top brass, as Boko Haram militants mounted deadly attacks against civilians in Nigeria's remote northeast and their first suicide bombing in Cameroon. 

A strike by a lone bomber in the restive city of Maiduguri and two women in the border town of Fotokol in northern Cameroon, killing 11 people, again underlined the regional threat posed by the Islamists.

Both came after a male suicide bomber, dressed as a woman and wearing a full-face veil, blew himself up at a crowded market in Chad's capital N'Djamena on Saturday, killing 15. 

Buhari's purge of senior military commanders inherited from his predecessor Goodluck Jonathan was widely expected but is the clearest demonstration yet of his quest for a fresh start.

"President Buhari thanks the outgoing service chiefs and national security advisor for their services to the nation and wishes them well in their future endeavours," his office said in a statement. 

The former military ruler has made ending the insurgency his top priority but Boko Haram has intensified its campaign since he came to power on May 29, killing some 570 people in Nigeria alone.

At least 15,000 have been killed since 2009.

First senior appointments 

The new appointments are Buhari's first to senior roles in his administration, as he looks to overhaul a military that struggled to take on Boko Haram throughout all of last year. 

The outgoing chief of defence staff Alex Badeh and heads of the army, navy and air force were appointed in January 2014 after a daring raid by the Islamists against military installations in Maiduguri. 

Badeh promised at his investiture in January last year that the insurgency "must be brought to a complete stop before April 2014" — but if anything, the violence has worsened. 

In April last year, militant fighters kidnapped more than 200 schoolgirls from the remote northeastern town of Chibok in Borno state, provoking global outrage. 

Jonathan's administration and the military were criticised for their response and Badeh promised the 219 girls' swift return yet nothing has been seen or heard from them since May last year. 

His time in the post also saw Boko Haram overrun vast tracts of northeastern Nigeria, capturing towns and villages and even proclaiming a self-styled caliphate. 

Demoralised frontline troops were seemingly unable to prevent the take-over and protested over a lack of arms and ammunition to take on the better-armed rebels. 

Procurement since the end of last year, the arrival of foreign mercenaries and assistance from Cameroon, Chad and Niger have apparently reversed the unprecedented land grab.

But the rebels have since allied themselves to the Daesh terror group, handing a potentially more troubling portfolio to Badeh's successor, Major-General Abayomi Gabriel Olonishakin. 

There will also be questions over who heads the new, regional force due to deploy at the end of the month, with the appointment of Major-General Tukur Yusuf Buratai as chief of army staff. 

Buratai had been acting as commander of the Multi-National Joint Task Force, which has its headquarters in N'Djamena. 

Hearts and minds 

Former national security advisor Sambo Dasuki last year unveiled a well-received "soft power" counter-insurgency plan that recognised poverty and alienation in the northeast was fuelling the crisis. 

His successor, retired Major-General Babagana Monguno, and the new chief of defence intelligence, Air Vice Marshal Monday Riku Morgan, will also have to try to win hearts and minds of civilians wary of the military following a catalogue of abuses and excesses. 

The attack in Maiduguri again demonstrated the difficulty of combating Boko Haram's guerrilla-style tactics, as bomber detonated his explosives in a crowd of passengers undergoing identity and screening checks, civilian vigilantes said.

Two female bombers blew themselves up near an army camp at Fotokol on Sunday, according to a local security source in the town, the first suicide attack on Cameroonian soil although the area has come under repeated attack by Boko Haram.

Just before his sacking, former army chief Lieutenant-General Kenneth Minimah said Boko Haram's ability to fight troops had been "seriously degraded".

"Consequently, the terrorists have cowardly resorted to attacking innocent and vulnerable citizens in markets, places of worship and similar places," he added.

ALMOLOYA DE JUÁREZ, Mexico — Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped through a lengthy tunnel under his prison cell's shower, authorities said Sunday, marking his second jailbreak and an embarrassing blow to the government.

A massive manhunt was launched after Guzman vanished late Saturday from the Altiplano maximum-security prison, some 90 kilometres west of Mexico City.

The Sinaloa cartel kingpin, whose empire stretches around the globe, had been in prison for 17 months after spending 13-years on the lam.

After security cameras lost sight of Guzman, guards went into the cell and found a hole 10 metres deep with a ladder, National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said.

The gap led to the 1.5-kilometre tunnel with a ventilation and light system, Rubido said, adding that its exit was in a building that was under construction in central Mexico State.

A motorcycle on a rail system was found in the tunnel and is believed to have been used to transport tools and remove earth from the space, which was 1.7 metres high and around 80 centimetres wide.

Rubido said 18 prison guards will be interrogated by prosecutors in Mexico City.

Until Guzman escaped, Rubido said, "the day had gone on normally and at around 8:00pm he was given his daily dose of medicine".

Some 250 police and troops guarded the outskirts of the vast prison, surrounded by corn fields, while a helicopter hovered overheads. 

Soldiers manned checkpoints on the nearby highway, using flashlights to look at the faces of car passengers and searching car trunks and the backs of trucks.

Flights were suspended at the nearby Toluca Airport.

The Altiplano prison in central Mexico State houses the country's most notorious drug lords, murderers and kidnappers. 

Guzman's first break from prison was in 2001, when he slipped past authorities by hiding in a laundry cart. He had been arrested in Guatemala in 1993.

Marines had recaptured him in February 2014 in a pre-dawn raid in a condo in Mazatlan, a Pacific resort in Sinaloa state, with the help of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Authorities had already investigated a strange prison visit to Guzman in March, when a woman managed to see him by using a fake ID to get in.

Wanted in US 

His second escape is sure to embarrass the administration of President Enrique Pena Nieto, who was flying to France for a state visit when Guzman fled.

Pena Nieto's government had won praise for capturing the powerful kingpin, a diminutive but feared man whose nickname means “Shorty”.

After his last capture, the government had paraded Guzman in front of television cameras, showing the mustachioed mafia boss being frogmarched by two marines before taking him to prison on a helicopter.

The US government had hailed his capture as "landmark achievement" while some US prosecutors wanted to ask for his extradition, but Mexican officials insisted on trying him first.

'Public Enemy Number One' 

Guzman's Sinaloa cartel empire stretches along Mexico's Pacific coast and deals drugs to the United States and as far as Europe and Asia.

His legend grew in the years that followed his first escape.

The United States had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest, while the city of Chicago — a popular destination for Sinaloa narcotics — declared him "Public Enemy Number One", joining American gangster Al Capone as the only criminal to ever get the moniker.

Folk ballads known as "narcocorridos", tributes to drug capos, sang his praises.

He used to be on Forbes magazine's list of billionaires until the US publication said in 2013 that it could not verify his wealth and that it believed he was increasingly spending his fortune on protection.

He married an 18-year-old beauty queen, Emma Coronel, in 2007 and is believed to have 10 children with various women.

Coronel was with him when he was arrested last year. His capture sparked small protests by supporters in Culiacan, Sinaloa's capital, where Guzman nurtured a Robin Hood image.

In Culiacan, authorities found a home with a bathtub that rose up electronically to open a secret tunnel that he used to escape the authorities before being caught in Mazatlan.

His cartel became entangled in brutal turf wars against the paramilitary-like Zetas cartel and other gangs for years.

More than 80,000 people have been killed in drug violence in Mexico since 2006.

The drug war began to escalate after former president Felipe Calderon sent the army and navy to rein in the cartels in 2006, a deployment that analysts say exacerbated the violence.

More than 10,000 were killed in Ciudad Juarez alone in violence attributed to battles between Sinaloa and Juarez cartel members for supremacy in the key drug corridor at the border with the US state of Texas.

BRUSSELS — Eurozone leaders told near-bankrupt Greece at an emergency summit on Sunday that it must enact key reforms this week to restore trust before they will open talks on any new financial rescue to keep it in the European currency area.

Leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will be required to push legislation through parliament to convince his 18 partners in the eurozone to release immediate funds to avert a state bankruptcy and start negotiations on a third bailout programme.

Six sweeping measures including tax and pension reforms will have to be enacted by Wednesday night and the entire package endorsed by parliament before talks can start, a draft decision sent by Eurogroup finance ministers to the leaders showed.

The document also included a German proposal to make Greece take a "time-out" from the eurozone if it failed to meet the conditions for a loan. But not all ministers endorsed the idea, which was reserved in brackets in the text seen by Reuters.

A senior EU source said such a temporary exit from the euro was illegal and would not survive in the summit statement.

Tsipras said on arrival in Brussels he wanted "another honest compromise" to keep Europe united.

"We can reach an agreement tonight if all parties want it," he said.

But German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is the biggest contributor to eurozone bailouts, said the conditions were not yet right to start negotiations, sounding cautious in deference to mounting opposition at home to more aid for Greece.

"The most important currency has been lost and that is trust," she told reporters. "That means that we will have tough discussions and there will be no agreement at any price."

If Greece meets the conditions, the German parliament would meet on Thursday to mandate Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble to open the talks on a new loan. Then Eurogroup finance ministers would meet again on Friday or at the weekend to formally launch the negotiations.

A Greek government official, in a first reaction to the draft, said: "How can they demand all these measures at the last minute without securing a lifeline to see us through till next week?"

A European official said a Eurogroup meeting on Monday could discuss ways to provide emergency finance to keep Athens afloat.

A finance ministers' meeting was suspended at midnight after angry exchanges during nine hours of acrimonious debate without a firm recommendation on Greece's application for a three-year loan on the basis of reform proposals submitted by Tsipras.

Eurogroup Chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem said that while ministers had made good progress, a couple of big issues were left for the leaders to resolve.

"The Eurogroup ... came to the conclusion that there is not yet the basis to start the negotiations on a new programme," the document sent to national leaders said.

"Only subsequent to legal implementation of the above mentioned measures can negotiations on the memorandum of understanding commence, subject to national procedures having been completed," it said, in a reference to authorisation by national parliaments in countries such as Germany.

The draft said Greece needed 7 billion euros by July 20, when it must make a crucial bond redemption to the European Central Bank, and a total of 12 billion euros by mid-August when another ECB payment falls due.

It did not say how those needs would be met, and EU officials said finance ministers had been unable to agree on emergency finance.

Temporary Grexit?

Several hardline countries voiced support for the German proposal that Greece take a five-year "time-out" from the euro unless it accepted and implemented swiftly much tougher conditions, notably by locking state assets to be privatised in an independent trust to pay down debt.

But French President Francois Hollande, Greece's strongest ally in the eurozone, dismissed the notion, saying it would start a dangerous unravelling of EU integration.

"There is no such thing as temporary Grexit, there is only a Grexit or no Grexit. There is Greece in the eurozone or Greece not in the eurozone. But in that case it's Europe that retreats and no longer progresses and I don't want that," he said.

European Council President Donald Tusk cancelled a planned summit of all 28 EU leaders that would have been needed in case of a Greek exit from the single currency, and said eurozone leaders would keep talking "until we conclude talks on Greece".

The finance ministers agreed in principle to seek ways to make Greece's debt burden manageable by extending loan maturities and other steps stopping short of a "haircut" or writedown, provided Athens first implements reforms.

They also insisted that the International Monetary Fund must remain fully involved in any third bailout for Athens.

At one stage in the debate on Greece's debt sustainability, Germany's hardline Schaeuble snapped at ECB President Mario Draghi: "I'm not stupid," a person familiar with the exchange said. Schaeuble also clashed with the head of the eurozone bailout fund, Klaus Regling, on whether the EU treaty conditions for an emergency loan were fulfilled, another source said.

The rules say there must be "a risk to the financial stability of the euro area as a whole or of its Member States".

Greeks see humiliation

Greece's new finance minister, Euclid Tsakalotos, was silent in public but the reaction among some lawmakers in Tsipras' radical leftist Syriza Party, still smarting from having to swallow austerity measures they had opposed, was furious.

"What is at play here is an attempt to humiliate Greece and Greeks, or to overthrow the Tsipras government," Dimitrios Papadimoulis, a Syriza member of the European Parliament, told Mega TV.

With banks shuttered for two weeks, cash withdrawals rationed and the economy on the edge of an abyss, some Greeks vented their anger on Merkel and Schaeuble.

"The only thing that I care about is not being humiliated by Schaeuble and the rest of theme," said Panagiotis Trikokglou, a 44-year-old private sector worker in Athens.

POTOCARI, Bosnia and Herzegovina — Serbia's prime minister was forced to flee a ceremony held to mark 20 years since the Srebrenica massacre on Saturday, when mourners hurled stones and bottles at him in what his government later described as an attempted assassination.

Bodyguards surrounded Aleksandar Vucic and rushed him away through a crowd that turned on him moments after he entered the cemetery and laid flowers to 8,000 Muslim men and boys executed after the UN safe haven fell to Bosnian Serb forces towards the end of the 1992-95 war.

Stones and bottles were thrown from the crowd, some of whom were heard to cry "Allahu Akbar" (God is greatest), in an attack underscoring the depth of anger over Belgrade's denial of the massacre as genocide.

Serbia, which backed the Bosnian Serbs during the war with men and money, condemned the attack as an "assassination attempt".

Vucic, without his glasses that he said were smashed, told reporters in Belgrade: "It was not an incident. It was an organised attack."

The attendance of Vucic, a hardline nationalist during the Yugoslav wars but who now wants to take Serbia into the European Union, was intended to be symbolic of how far the region has come since the bloody collapse of Yugoslavia.

But it came just days after his government enlisted ally Russia to veto a resolution at the United Nations that would have condemned the denial of Srebrenica as genocide, as a UN court has ruled it was.

Many Serbs dispute the term, the death toll and the official account of events, reflecting conflicting narratives of Yugoslavia's collapse that still feed divisions and have stifled progress in Bosnia towards integration with western Europe.

As Vucic fled and calm was restored, the remains of 136 recently identified Muslim Bosniak victims were interred under bright blue skies, their coffins draped in green cloth and carried aloft by mourners. The bones of more than 1,000 are yet to be found.

Different future

Vucic had been welcomed by Munira Subasic, head of the Association of Srebrenica Mothers, who pinned to his lapel a green and white crochet flower, a symbol of Srebrenica.

In a book of condolences he wrote: "Here in Srebrenica, it is the obligation of each of us to bow our heads, to not forget and to begin to create a different future."

But in the cemetery, a banner quoted from a wartime address by Vucic to the Serbian parliament. "For every Serb killed, we will kill 100 Muslims," it read.

"I'm sorry some did not recognise my sincere desire to build friendship between Serbs and Bosniaks," Vucic said. "My hand remains outstretched to the Bosniak people."

Subasic said she was "terribly disappointed" by the scenes.

The EU and the United States condemned the attack, and Bosnia's tripartite presidency issued a statement expressing its "deepest regret", saying Vucic had come "in the spirit of reconciliation and with the intention of paying respects".

Serbia sent a protest note to Bosnia. "This was a murder attempt on Aleksandar Vucic," said Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic.

Some 100,000 people died in the Bosnian war, before a US-brokered peace deal created a complex and unwieldy system of ethnic power-sharing that remains today and is frequently held hostage to nationalist politicking.

The accused architects of the massacre — Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and military commander Ratko Mladic — are standing trial at the UN court in The Hague, after years spent in hiding in Serbia.

Vucic lionised both men before rebranding himself in 2008 as a pro-Western reformer.

"Look at him and look at those thousands of tombstones," said Hamida Dzanovic, who had come to bury two bones identified by DNA as those of her missing husband. "Is he not ashamed to say that this was not genocide?" 

WASHINGTON — The divisive Confederate flag came down Friday at South Carolina's legislature, drawing a line under a furor rekindled last month by the murder of nine black church goers by an alleged white supremacist.

Thousands gathered at the State House in Columbia to cheer the removal of the red, white and blue Civil War-era battle flag, regarded by many as a bitter symbol of racism and slavery that has no place in modern America.

Many chanted "U-S-A! U-S-A!" as a state police honour guard in white gloves ceremoniously lowered the flag and then neatly folded it under brilliant sunshine.

"A signal of good will and healing and a meaningful step towards a better future," President Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, said on Twitter.

The flag has been a focal point of controversy in South Carolina — birthplace of the Confederacy — since it was raised in the early 1960s atop the State House dome in defiance of the civil rights movement then sweeping the United States.

It was relocated in 2000 to a 10-metre flag pole alongside a memorial to Confederate war dead on the State House lawn.

But it became a lightning rod for outrage after the June 17 killings of nine black worshippers by a young white gunman during a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, in South Carolina. 

The dead included Emanuel's chief pastor Clementa Pinckney, a Democratic state senator.

Dylann Roof, 21, who was indicted on nine counts of murder, had been photographed before the attack brandishing firearms and the Confederate flag.

He reportedly sought to ignite a race war, after a year in which the deaths of black men in confrontations with white police officers has dominated American news headlines.

In Washington, FBI director James Comey said Roof should not have been able to purchase the .45 caliber handgun he allegedly used, news media reported.

Roof was arrested on a drugs rap earlier this year and that would have been sufficient to block a gun sale during an FBI-administered background check.

But confusion over where the arrest took place meant the FBI could not get a record of it within three days, after which the gun sale could proceed, The New York Times reported.

"We are all sick this happened," Comey was quoted as telling journalists at a briefing at FBI headquarters. "We wish we could turn back time."

By law, the Confederate flag outside the State House could only be removed with the approval of two-thirds of South Carolina's Senate and House of Representatives.

That came last week, with both houses — dominated by Republicans — voting overwhelmingly in favor of taking it down, after hours of impassioned debate.

Governor Nikki Haley signed the order into law on Thursday, flanked by relatives of the Charleston dead.

"The State House is an area that belongs to everyone and no one should ever drive by the State House and feel pain," Haley told NBC television.

"I think this is a hopeful day for South Carolina. I think it is a day that we can all say that we have come together as a state."

On its final night on the pole, the Confederate flag was surrounded by a barricade and guarded by nearly two dozen state troopers, as police imposed a ban on carrying firearms in the State House vicinity.

Among the crowd overnight was an unidentified middle-aged white man in the uniform of a Confederate infantry soldier.

"I'm disheartened that this flag has been stolen and used for hatred and something divisive, which it is not," said Terry Hughey, commander of the Columbia branch of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

"I always thought of it as love and honour for my ancestors," he said, quoted in the city's State newspaper.

But the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, a major civil rights organisation, hailed the flag's removal. 

"By removing the flag, South Carolina not only denounces an odious emblem of a bygone era but also honours the lives of nine students of scripture who were gunned down in a church," its national president Cornell Brooks said.

Such has been the backlash at the Confederate flag, major retailers no longer stock it, country music acts stopped flaunting and the NASCAR stock car organisation — wildly popular in the rural South — appealed to racing fans to stop displaying it.