Greek, German ministers clash

Greece's new leftist finance minister clashed openly with his powerful German counterpart on Thursday as Athens' borrowing costs leapt and bank shares plunged following the European Central Bank's decision to stop funding the country's lenders. After blunt talks in Berlin, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he had told Greece's Yanis Varoufakis it was not realistic to make electoral promises that burdened other countries, and they had "agreed to disagree". A defiant Varoufakis, whose hard left-led government was elected on a platform of scrapping austerity measures and negotiating a debt write-off, contradicted him at a joint news conference, saying: "We didn't even agree to disagree."