16:07

Over to Greece now. With another vote looming over painful pension cuts and tax increases – the price of emergency bailout loans to avoid default – the Greek prime minister has been busily trying to sweeten the pills today telling his own leftist MPS that the end of austerity is in sight.Helena Smith reports from Athens:

It has been four days since Greece cut a preliminary agreement with creditors that paves the way to disbursement of loans in return for more painful reforms and which should open the door to debt relief. In theory all 153 MPs in prime minister Alexis Tsipras’ two-party coalition will also support the measures when put to parliament for vote on May 16. But disaffection is mounting in the ranks of Tsipras’ own Syriza party with many leftists openly questioning the wisdom of applying measures that will not only deepen Greece’s debt deflationary cycle – and in so doing aggravate a depression now longer and deeper than that suffered in the US in the 1930s – but further impoverish those already hit hardest by the crisis. With his own legacy now at stake, Tsipras has launched a concerted effort to bring lawmakers on board, telling a gathering of his parliamentary group today that any surplus money will be used to ease the pain of the most vulnerable. After tough negotiations, he said, international lenders had finally agreed to the government’s demands that counter measures be instituted if fiscal targets and budget savings are better than expected.

Tsipras addresses the leftist Syriza party’s lawmakers in parliament. Photograph: Simela Pantzartzi/EPA