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MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's borrowing costs shot up at a bond auction on Thursday, after economic data confirmed the country is back in recession and reports of an outflow of deposits from nationalized Bankia hammered its share price. The Spanish Treasury had to pay around 5 percent to attract buyers of three- and four-year bonds. The longer-dated paper sold with a yield of 5.106 percent, way above the 3.374 percent the last time it was auctioned. "This ... ...

ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's surging leftist leader predicted on Thursday his party would sweep next month's election and refused to stop demanding an end to "barbaric" austerity policies he said were bankrupting the nation. Increasingly worried about Greece's future in the euro zone, foreign lenders and mainstream parties have stepped up warnings that the country risks being cut off from aid if it fails to stick to spending cuts included in its latest bailout package. SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras, the 37-year-old rising star of Greek politics, promised he would listen to neither group. ...

PARIS (Reuters) - France's new left-wing government started work on Thursday with pledges to combat excessive austerity but better manage public finances, marking the debut with a 30 percent cut in pay for President Francois Hollande and all ministers. The sizeable wage reduction was endorsed at a first meeting of the 34-minister team, a day after Germany's government awarded rises to its ministers and Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose pay will overtake Hollande's. ...

LONDON, May 17 (IFR) - The euro zone crisis was in full swing when Jean-Claude Trichet took the podium in Berlin last October 6 for his final press conference as president of the European Central Bank. Having helped create one of the longest periods of price stability in the history of central banking, Trichet was closing out his eight-year reign under siege. Soaring oil prices had made a mockery of the bank's superlative record on inflation, while the worst recession on the continent since World War II had morphed into a full-scale sovereign debt crisis. ...

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Prosecutors in the genocide trial of Serb general Ratko Mladic on Thursday described five days of terror in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, when troops under his command massacred more than 7,000 unarmed Muslim boys and men. Mladic, 70, sat listening with his back to the public after being warned at the start of his trial on Wednesday for making a throat-slitting gesture to a relative of Srebrenica victims. ...

PORT HARCOURT (Reuters) - A suspected armed robber was killed when explosives his gang was transporting accidentally went off in the centre of Nigeria's main oil city of Port Harcourt on Thursday, police said. The blast ripped through a minibus carrying at least three suspected robbers, four AK-47 rifles and a large amount of ammunition, Rivers State Police Commissioner Mohammed Abdulkadir Indabawa told Reuters. Two people in the bus and a woman who was nearby were injured in the explosion, he added. ...

AMMAN (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said on Wednesday that countries trying to "sow chaos" in Syria could be infected with it themselves, an apparent warning to Arab Gulf nations that back the insurgency aimed at forcing him from power. Assad's remarks, to a Russian TV channel, came after U.N. staff monitoring an increasingly shaky ceasefire were caught up in an attack that killed at least 21 people, and had to spend a night with rebel forces. ...