Another conference over. Charlie Skelton talks to some of the 800 activists outside the gates to find out what they learned

What a Bilderberg it's been. Big names, big money, big decisions, big crowds. Somewhere around 800 activists outside the gates (up from about a dozen in 2009), and inside? Well, here's what we learned.

A Mitt Romney attendance?

Four eyewitnesses on the hotel staff told me Willard Mitt Romney was here at Bilderberg 2012. My four eyewitnesses place him inside. That's one more than Woodward and Bernstein used. Romney's office initially refused to confirm or deny his attendance as Bilderberg is "not public". They later said it was not him.

So, was he being crowned, or singing for his supper? Will Mitt Romney follow in the august footsteps of Clinton, Cameron and Blair to have attended Bilderberg and then shortly become leader? Four years ago, Senator Obama shook off his press detail and nipped (many think) into Bilderberg. This exact same hotel.

As eurosceptics, who have devoted many years of our lives to opposing this new EU regime that has descended over Europe, our first loyalty, our whole sympathy, must be with the victims of the EU ambition: we are all Greeks now.

The Greek people are the victims of an experiment. And let us not confuse Greeks, the people like us, and the institutions of government that are in Greece but are tiers in the EU governmental hierarchy.

Not all people are opponents of the EU nor of the way the EU governs Europe. Such people will say that the Greeks are to blame for all their woes. For some people it simply would not do if blame was seen to lay with the EU, the institutions of the Euro and the foreign banks who made speculative loans. These people say that they all conducted themselves with perfect virtue and should suffer no loss - and that the people must pay. And so television screens all over Europe have shows vilifying the swarthy, lazy, greedy Greek.

Alright, the average Greek may have borrowed too much, retired too early and defended himself too enthusiastically against the taxation of a kleptocratic state. But all his sin was not to have the power to doubt every word he was told by his politicians, his newspapers and his television. What people of what nation could have done that? Not even the British. If a man, even if he is a fool, believes a lie, is he as guilty as the liar? All Greeks did was to live the way they were told was the way to live.

A dusty marketplace in southern Afghanistan was turned into a gruesome scene of blood and bodies on Wednesday after at least two suicide attacks, which left 22 civilians dead and at least 50 others injured, officials said.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi said the militant group was behind the attacks in Kandahar, the capital of Kandahar province and the spiritual birthplace of the insurgency, The Associated Press reported.

In the east, two American pilots were killed in a helicopter crash amid enemy activity, an un-named senior U.S. defense official at the Pentagon told The Associated Press. NATO confirmed that two service members had been killed in the crash but not their nationality or any other information.

Also in the east, Afghan officials and residents said a pre-dawn NATO air-strike targeting militants killed civilians celebrating a wedding in Logar province, including women and children, although a NATO forces spokesman said they had no reports of civilians being killed in the overnight raid to capture a Taliban leader.

NATO said a number of insurgents had been killed as a result of the operation, and that two Afghan women had received medical care after being wounded. The women had not received life-threatening injuries, NATO said.

China said Tuesday foreign embassies were acting illegally in issuing their own air quality readings and that only the government could release data on the nation's heavy pollution.

China's cities are among the world's most polluted, but until recently, official air quality measurements regularly rated their air quality as good - even as data from the US embassy in Beijingshowed off-the-chart pollution.

The US embassy air quality Twitter feed gained a major following in Beijing, and later in Shanghai when it was introduced at the US consulate there.

Beijing announced earlier this year it would change the way it measured air quality to include the smaller particles experts say make up much of the pollution in Chinese cities, after a vocal campaign.

"The monitoring and publishing of China's air quality are related to the public interests and as such are powers reserved for the government," Wu Xiaoqing, vice minister of environment protection, said at a news conference.

Top senators are calling for a hearing on the "continuing leaks of classified information" allegedly from the White House after a recent media report detailed a U.S. cyber warfare targeting Iran's nuclear facilities.

A report in The New York Times on Friday provided classified details of the U.S cyber attack.

Since the beginning of his term, President Barack Obama secretly ordered cyber attacks targeting computers that run Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities, the Times reported, attributing the information to the program's participants.

Senators John McCain and Dianne Feinstein, a Republican and a Democrat respectively, discussed the possibility of holding hearings to address the leak of information.

"I am pleased to report that chairman Carl Levin has agreed to hold a hearing on these leaks in the Senate Armed Services Committee," McCain said in a statement Tuesday.

After the Phantom Eye landed, it was slightly damaged when the landing gear hit the lakebed and broke

Boeing sent its Phantom Eye unmanned airborne system (UAS) on its first autonomous flight last week.

Boeing's Phantom Eye is a hydrogen-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is propeller-driven. The aircraft uses two 2.3 liter, four-cylinder engines capable of pushing 300 horsepower total and can loiter above a target for up to 10 days. Its main purpose is to gather information or conduct attack missions.

The Phantom Eye took off at 6:22 a.m. PST for a 28-minute flight. It reached an altitude of 4,080 feet and a speed of 62 knots. The flight took place June 1 at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

"This day ushers in a new era of persistent Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaisance (ISR) where an unmanned aircraft will remain on station for days at a time providing critical information and services," said Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works. "This flight puts Boeing on a path to accomplish another aerospace first -- the capability of four days of unrefueled, autonomous flight."

After the Phantom Eye landed, it was slightly damaged when the landing gear hit the lakebed and broke. But overall, the flight was a success.

Previous to the June 1 flight, the Phantom Eye took part in a series of tests throughout April, such as navigation and control, pilot interface, and mission planning.

The Phantom Eye used for demonstration purposes has a 150-foot wingspan and can carry a 450-pound payload. It can fly up to 96 hours without needing to land, but Boeing is looking to make a new model in 2014 that can fly up to 240 hours without landing.

}No debt repayments, higher salaries and freedom from EU-IMF tutelage: Greece under the radical leftists, who are poised to win a June 17 election, seems a world removed from its current recession nightmare.

The Syriza party has pledged to tear up Greece's loan agreement with the EU and the IMF, which is currently keeping the country on its feet but at the cost of an unprecedented wave of austerity cuts and structural reforms.

If implemented, such a program, which would also mean the nationalization of banks and a halt to privatization, could well mean Greece's ejection from the eurozone, potentially sending shock-waves through the global economy.

Fed up with two years of salary and pension cuts, Greek voters on May 6 punished larger parties associated with the bailout and catapulted Syriza to second place, within striking distance of the top.

In February, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that after the U.S. kills people with drones in Pakistan, it then targets for death those who show up at the scene to rescue the survivors and retrieve the bodies, as well as those who gather to mourn the dead at funerals: "the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals." As The New York Times summarized those findings: "at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile" while "the bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals."

This repellent practice continues. Over the last three days, the U.S. has launched three separate drone strikes in Pakistan: one on each day. As The Guardian reports, the U.S. has killed between 20 and 30 people in these strikes, the last of which, early this morning, killed between 8 and 15. It was the second strike, on Sunday, that targeted mourners gathered to grieve those killed in the first strike:

At the time of the attack, suspected militants had gathered to offer condolences to the brother of a militant commander killed during another US unmanned drone attack on Saturday. The brother was one of those who died in the Sunday morning attack. The Pakistani officials said two of the dead were foreigners and the rest were Pakistani.

I gave a talk last week at Canada's Wilfrid Laurier University to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Many in the audience had pinned small red squares of felt to their clothing. The carre rouge, or red square, has become the Canadian symbol of revolt. It comes from the French phrase carrement dans le rouge, or "squarely in the red," referring to those crushed by debt.

The streets of Montreal are clogged nightly with as many as 100,000 protesters banging pots and pans and demanding that the old systems of power be replaced. The mass student strike in Quebec, the longest and largest student protest in Canadian history, began over the announcement of tuition hikes and has metamorphosed into what must swiftly build in the United States - a broad popular uprising. The debt obligation of Canadian university students, even with Quebec's proposed 82 percent tuition hike over several years, is dwarfed by the huge university fees and the $1 trillion of debt faced by U.S. college students. The Canadian students have gathered widespread support because they linked their tuition protests to Quebec's call for higher fees for health care, the firing of public sector employees, the closure of factories, the corporate exploitation of natural resources, new restrictions on union organizing, and an announced increase in the retirement age. Crowds in Montreal, now counting 110 days of protests, chant "On ne lâche pas" - "We're not backing down."