Greece's unemployment rate rose to a record 23.1% in May, complicating Athens' efforts to complete deep cuts demanded by international creditors that may involve laying off thousands of public employees, The Wall Street Journal reported. The youngest workers were hardest hit, with more than one in two Greeks, or 54.9%, between 15 and 24 years old looking for work, national statistics agency Elstat said. The jobless rate climbed from 22.6% overall and 51.5% for youths in April. A year earlier, the national average stood at 16.8% overall and 41.7% for 15-24 year olds.

Greece may have to place thousands of public workers in a special labor pool at reduced pay to help achieve as much as €4 billion ($4.95 billion) in spending cuts demanded by international creditors, a politically risky move for the fragile coalition government, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The International Monetary Fund, facing discontent among its members about the huge sums it has lent to the euro zone, is pushing the currency bloc's governments to take steps to lighten the burden of the bailout loans they made to Athens, officials familiar with ongoing discussions said. The IMF pressure, which has been evident in private discussions with euro-zone officials, comes in response to mounting evidence that the country's deep recession has thrown the Greek bailout program woefully off track from targets set earlier this year, Dow Jones reported.

A political row has erupted in Athens after the former head of a big Greek state bank admitted to transferring €8m of personal savings abroad to buy a London property months before his Agricultural Bank headed towards insolvency, the Financial Times reported. Theodoros Pantalakis, former chief executive of Greece’s Agricultural Bank (ATEbank), strongly denied any wrongdoing, telling Realnews, a Greek website, that he had declared the transaction to authorities in 2011 and had paid tax on the amount transferred.

Greece's latest fiscal and reform pledges may be enough to convince international lenders weary after years of broken promises to keep Athens hooked to a 130 billion euro lifeline, but the battle to implement it will be epic, Reuters reported. Few question the new coalition government's resolve but many doubt whether the cantankerous public sector can or will implement the measures or the Greek public, reeling from years of austerity, can take much more without putting up a fight.

Greece's international creditors have called on Athens to provide more details on its €11.5 billion ($14.14 billion) austerity plan that is crucial to keeping the country's funding lines open, as Athens faced dwindling cash reserves, The Wall Street Journal reported. A visiting delegation of international representatives met Thursday with Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras and agreed to see him again on Sunday in an effort to reach a deal on the cuts needed to pay the next tranche from the country's second €173 billion bailout.

Greece’s three-party coalition has reached agreement on €11.5bn of spending cuts over the next two years after the socialist party leader dropped objections to further planned reductions in pensions and public sector wages, the Financial Times reported. Evangelos Venizelos, a former finance minister facing dissent in his PanHellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), had distanced himself from both coalition partners and Greece’s international lenders by demanding the cuts be postponed until 2015-16.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's allies are pushing for two more years to implement unpopular austerity cuts before they sign off on them, sources close to the parties said on Monday, potentially delaying a deal on the savings demanded by lenders, Reuters reported. The three parties in Samaras's coalition have agreed on the bulk of the nearly 12 billion euros in cuts that Greece must produce to satisfy inspectors from the European Union and International Monetary Fund bailing out the nation.

European policymakers are working on "last chance" options to bring Greece's debts down and keep it in the euro zone, with the ECB and national central banks looking at taking significant losses on the value of their bond holdings, officials said. Private creditors have already suffered big writedowns on their Greek bonds under a second bailout for Athens sealed in February, but this was not enough to put the country back on the path to solvency and a further restructuring is on the cards.

Political leaders in Greece have agreed on most of the austerity measures demanded by its creditors and are now eyeing pension and wage cuts to find the final 1.5 billion euros of savings still needed, a source close to the talks said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Greece must find savings worth 11.5 billion euros for 2013 and 2014 to satisfy its increasingly impatient lenders, who are currently visiting Athens to evaluate the country's progress in complying with the terms of its latest bailout.