Headlines

Maria Katri sent her son to live at a charitable home for poor boys after Greece's economy crashed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Now, as Greece slides deeper into depression, the widowed mother is so poor that her teenage daughter, who stills lives at home, is "jealous that her brother is having a better time than her in the institution," Ms. Katri says. The spread of economic hardship is fraying Greece's social fabric and straining its political cohesion as the country enters the harshest winter of its three-year-old debt crisis.

The lower house of India's Parliament approved a government proposal to strengthen the central bank's regulatory powers, paving the way for overhauls of the banking sector that could draw investments from more foreign banks as well as local industrial companies, The Wall Street Journal reported. The bill proposes to give the Reserve Bank of India the power to take temporary control of private banks in the event of operational irregularities. It would also increase the limit on the voting rights of any one shareholder in a private bank to 26% from 10%.

Britain will get the go-ahead to force banks to shield their routine retail operations from riskier investment banking activities when MPs announce the conclusions of an inquiry into banking reform on Friday, Reuters reported. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards will also recommend that the government can resort to a "nuclear option" of breaking up banks if they try to find ways around the new rules, commission sources said.

Photon Europe, the German publisher of several solar energy magazines and websites, has filed for insolvency, Recharge reported. A district court in the Western German city of Aachen has opened preliminary insolvency proceedings and appointed lawyer André Seckler as administrator, Photon says in a statement. Under German insolvency rules, he has three months to bring new investors on board to save the publisher, which has 140 employees. Seckler plans to keep it going in the meantime.

Cyprus could default on loan payments due this month unless it can reach an agreement on a bailout with international lenders within days, a government official said on Monday, The Telegraph reported. "If in the coming days the state is unable to secure €250m to €300m [£244m), then the state will proceed to default on payments," finance ministry official Christos Patsalides told a parliamentary committee. Patsalides said the government had no "plan B" if it fails to reach an agreement on a bailout, AFP reported.

Greece is failing to collect the tax it is owed and is in danger of missing key targets that need to be met to reduce the government's staggering debt pile, the European Union warned on Monday, the Associated Press reported. An EU task force helping Greece overcome the financial crisis that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy said Athens still has trouble dealing with old, outstanding tax claims. With 2 months to go in 2012, it was still about a billion euros behind the EU target of recovering (EURO)2 billion ($2.6 billion).

If European leaders expect Enda Kenny to set aside his awkward disputes with the international creditors funding Dublin’s €67.5bn bailout during his six months at the helm of the EU’s rotating presidency, the Irish prime minister has a message: he is not going to go quiet, the Financial Times reported. Ireland next year could become the first of the eurozone’s five bailout countries to emerge from a rescue programme if all goes according to schedule.

European Central Bank President Mario Draghi urged governments to build on "painful progress" they have made on narrowing budget deficits and overhauling their economies, despite the near-term damage these policies have inflicted on business activity and unemployment, The Wall Street Journal reported. Mr.

A German maker of yachts and naval vessels agreed to buy insolvent shipyard Peene in a rare deal as the shipbuilding sector in Europe's biggest economy crumbles, Reuters reported. Bremen, Germany-based Luerssen Group is paying less than 20 million euros ($26.3 million) to buy former Communist East Germany's biggest naval shipbuilder, Peene's insolvency administrator Berthold Brinkmann said on Monday. The deal to buy Peene - which makes patrol boats for the coast guard and oil spill response vessels, among other - will make Luerssen Germany's biggest maker of naval surface vessels.

British electrical retailer Comet will close its remaining stores for the final time on Tuesday as part of a deal that will cost the British government more than 23 million pounds ($37 million), its administrators said, Reuters reported. Deloitte said in a report about the group's collapse that the cost of making almost 7,000 people redundant would reach 23.2 million pounds, a fee that will have to be met at least initially by the government. The country's tax authority also looks set to miss out on 26.2 million pounds from the closure.