The Crisis Coalition, an alliance of Zimbabwean pro-democracy and rights groups in the Mozambique capital, said a summit communique was being prepared that would urge Mugabe to ask his nation's highest court to rescind a ruling ordering him to hold elections by July 31.

Mugabe will be asked to seek at least a two-week extension of the ruling and hold polls not before Aug. 14, the group said.

The official communique has not yet been formally released. No confirmation was immediately available from the secretariat of southern Africa's political and economic bloc, known as Southern Africa Development Community, or SADC.

No comment was given by Mugabe or his delegation.

MacDonald Lewanika, the Crisis Coalition director, said in a Twitter feed from the Maputo convention center that regional leaders agreed the election "is not time-driven but process driven" and more time was needed finalize preparations and voting reforms.

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said on Friday that Mugabe's unilateral proclamation of the July 31 election date breached terms of the power sharing agreement forged by regional leaders after the last violent and disputed elections in 2008. That agreement required the coalition partners to agree on policy decisions and the holding of elections, he said.

Tsvangirai, in a shaky coalition with Mugabe, said democratic reforms also demanded in a new constitution and by mediators ensuring free and fair polls cannot be completed by July.

Polls after Aug. 14 would clash with one of the world's largest tourism gatherings, the United Nations World Travel Organization summit, that Zimbabwe is set to host on Aug. 24.

South Africa President Jacob Zuma, the chief regional mediator on Zimbabwe, started closed-door talks with Mugabe, Tsvangirai and other regional leaders earlier Saturday, officials said.

Zuma said in a statement the leaders were to consider "a roadmap" to elections in Zimbabwe. But a top Mugabe party official told South African state radio Saturday the summit will only seek financial help from the region to fund polls in July.

The Crisis Coalition said at the beginning of the talks that early elections risked not being recognized regionally or by Zimbabweans themselves unless reforms are in place and political violence and intimidation are brought to an end.

"Conditions are not ripe for free and fair elections. The security situation is not good ...we want SADC to ensure that violence is stopped and the media is free to report without intimidation," Lewanika told reporters.

A new constitution, overwhelmingly accepted in a referendum in March, has demanded reforms to sweeping media and security laws along with reforms within Mugabe's loyalist police and military blamed for state orchestrated violence in previous polls.

None of those reforms have been completed, Tsvangirai's party says.

Mugabe's party insists he was abiding by a ruling of the Constitutional Court, the nation's highest court, ordering him to hold presidential and parliamentary elections by the end of July, linked to the automatic dissolution of the Harare parliament on June 29, the end of its current five year term.

Independent lawyers' groups say that ruling does not follow provisions in the new constitution and can only be rescinded by the same court on an application from Mugabe.

Continuing amendments to electoral laws called for in the constitution and by regional leaders were effectively blocked by Mugabe's announcement of the poll date on Thursday, said Veritas, a legal research group.

Mozambique President Armando Guebuza, current chair of the regional grouping, said earlier Saturday that Zuma was scheduled to have presented a report to the one-day summit on Zimbabwe's readiness for elections.

PARIS (Reuters) - While French President Francois Hollande is at pains to repair his fraught relations with business, his industry minister has other ideas - or so many entrepreneurs and even some government colleagues believe.

Proudly protectionist Arnaud Montebourg, who is also Minister for Industrial Renewal, is showing a heavy-handed hostility to foreign and domestic firms just when France needs investment, his critics say.

In his defense, the tousle-haired opponent of globalization says he is saving jobs, rewarding the many and targeting only a few - that happen to include the boss of the world's biggest steelmaker and a French car giant.

"I pinned medals on hundreds of companies and I criticized two. Why Mittal and Peugeot? Because they did daft things," Montebourg told Reuters after presiding at a recent prize giving for entrepreneurs, noting that Peugeot's loans are guaranteed by French taxpayers.

Hollande's problem is that while his popularity is near rock bottom, poll ratings are somewhat higher for 50-year-old Montebourg, a man who seems to have his sights set on the top job one day.

This, along with Montebourg's strong support on the left of the ruling Socialist Party, is complicating Hollande's efforts to impose cabinet discipline and ensure his government shows a consistent face to business leaders.

Hollande recently invited 300 of them to the Elysee Palace and told them he was easing capital gains taxes for entrepreneurs. The president, who vilified high finance during his 2012 election campaign, said he now understood that encouraging entrepreneurship was the way to restore growth to the recession-bound French economy.

The next day, though, news broke that Montebourg had aborted a deal for Yahoo to take a majority stake in video-sharing website Dailymotion, which the French firm was counting on to spur its overseas growth.

Mid-meeting, Montebourg barked at the finance chief of France Telecom, Dailymotion's owner and itself 27 percent state-owned, that he would not let him hand over the "French nugget", according to a senior corporate source involved in the takeover.

The message entrepreneurs heard was: if you're lucky enough that your years of toil create a successful business, don't count on being allowed to use a foreign partner to go global.

"The deal was all but done. We'd worked on it for months. Then Montebourg blew a fuse," said the source, who believes the episode will scare start-up firms away from forming partnerships with groups in which the state holds a stake.

"The same week the government tried to help entrepreneurs it shot itself in the foot by showing it is interventionist and anti-business. It was a red flag for start-ups."

Government sources say Montebourg, a loquacious former lawyer and grandson of an Algerian butcher, is proving problematic in his role as the public face of Hollande's industrial policy.

Yet Hollande believes that Montebourg would be more dangerous outside the government where he could attract left-wingers to an opposition movement, they say. The government insiders describe him as a necessary nuisance who may help to keep left-wing voters behind Hollande as the president pushes for economic reforms that were not in his election manifesto.

"Of course it bothers us. It's irritating for people who work here. But what matters is that we can get things done," said a source at the finance ministry, where friction is rife between Montebourg and other ministers in the building.

Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who has a sixth-floor office overlooking the River Seine, was not consulted before Montebourg, who works on the third floor, stamped on the Dailymotion deal. On the fourth floor, digital economy minister Fleur Pellerin, a darling of the dotcom industry, was irate.

Yet few people think Montebourg will be ditched soon. The ministry source said the election defeat earlier this year of Italian prime minister Mario Monti, who had been popular with investors for his painful economic reforms, showed that ordinary voters had to be kept happy.

"If we keep Montebourg, it's purely political. Investors adored Monti yet he polled 10 percent. As long as we explain all this to foreign investors - and we do - we're OK," he said. "Where I think Montebourg does have a cost is with the message he sends to entrepreneurs, and that is a worry."

Officials figures present a mixed picture. While broad foreign direct investment, including reinvested earnings and intercompany loans, climbed 52 percent in 2012, an Ernst & Young study on European attractiveness found the number of foreign projects that set up sites fell 13 percent from 2011.

The rate of creation of French start-ups over the past 12 months is down 2.2 percent from the previous 12 months.

"KILL MITTAL"

Montebourg mesmerized many with attacks on cheap Chinese imports as one of six candidates in the Socialist Party's 2011 presidential primary. Defending those "crushed by the economy" and promising to part-nationalize banks, he came in third with 17 percent of the first-round party vote.

He had already written books demonizing free trade and co-founded a movement seeking a greater say for citizens in public affairs and a more powerful parliament under a new constitution.

Today, charged with delivering Hollande's promise to pull French industry out of the doldrums, he has played more to his fans than foreign investors.

His least controversial project is "Say Oui to France" - a campaign to persuade businesses to bring home production they have moved overseas. So far this year, five firms have done so, on top of 13 last year.

Otherwise, he is most visible racing from one troubled factory to another battling closures, lending him the unwitting air of a Grim Reaper and sometimes leading to outbursts that appeared to embarrass his bosses.

Moscovici and Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault had to smoothe things over when Montebourg insulted Lakshmi Mittal, chief of steel giant ArcelorMittal, over plans to shut two French furnaces and sparred with a U.S. tire tycoon.

His portrayal of Mittal as a villain spawned a video game called "Kill Mittal" where players can battle the Indian businessman, portrayed as a giant robot, to keep the plant open.

Montebourg also rounded on the British-based Economist magazine after it described France as being in a state of denial, calling it the comic of London's financial center.

Mocking the friction within the government, TV host and Tweeter Bernard Pivot invented the verb "to montebourg", meaning to contradict one's boss.

Montebourg brushes this off and says what's important is that he has saved 65,031 out of 76,809 threatened jobs in cases when he has intervened.

Talking to Reuters in late May, Montebourg scoffed at the idea he is anti-business. Mittal and Peugeot - which he has criticized for paying out dividends while benefitting from state support - had deserved "public reprimands", he said.

PRESIDENTIAL AMBITIONS

People who know Montebourg say his habit of turning up the rhetoric near TV cameras is all about his designs on the presidency. "Arnaud is unable to put that ambition to rest," said Thierry Mandon, a Socialist lawmaker close to him for 20 years.

Rene Beaumont, a conservative senator who once lost a lower house seat to Montebourg, said he was all about publicity.

"As he's said himself when he's come out with an insulting remark or stoked up a crowd with untruthful statements: 'the key thing is to speak, whether it's right or wrong, I don't care'."

After the Dailymotion affair, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist premier and finance minister, called for heads to roll, saying the finance ministry needed one boss.

Yet people who know Hollande say that for all of his reform efforts, deep down he shares many of Montebourg's convictions and is loath to lose him.

This is perhaps as much for practical as ideological reasons. A recent BVA opinion poll rated Montebourg as the second most-popular government minister, with 32 percent support, after crime-busting Interior Minister Manuel Valls.

By contrast, Hollande's own ratings have fallen faster than those of any other modern French president in his first year, standing at around 25 percent in recent surveys.

"Hollande's biggest concern is to keep the left united and so he'll keep Montebourg inside as long as he can," said a top communications executive who has advised government ministers.

"The problem is that Montebourg's impact on France's image abroad has a real cost in terms of foreign investment. Hollande is looking at domestic opinion polls when he should also be looking at opinion in the rest of the world."

(Editing by Mark John and David Stamp)

Francis signed off on naming Monsignor Battista Ricca as interim prelate of the Institute for Religious Works.

It's a key job that has been left vacant since 2011: The prelate oversees the bank's activities, attends its board meetings and, critically, has access to all its documentation. The prelate reports to the commission of cardinals who run the bank and is currently headed by the Vatican No. 2. That gives Ricca a near-direct line to the pope, serving as a bridge between the bank's lay managers and board members and its cardinal leadership.

Ricca is currently director of the Vatican hotel where Francis lives and other Vatican-owned residential institutes for clergy.

Technically the appointment was made by the bank's five-member commission of cardinals, headed by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican secretary of state. But the Vatican statement announcing the appointment made clear Francis had approved it, an indication that it was something Francis either initiated himself or strongly supported.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the interim nature of the appointment was a sign that Francis is still mulling how to reform the Vatican bureaucracy as a whole one of the major priorities set out by the cardinals who elected him pope in March.

Right before resigning, Benedict XVI named German aristocrat and financier Ernst von Freyberg as IOR president, filling a vacancy that had been left open for nine months following the remarkable ouster of Italian banker Ettore Gotti Tedeschi for alleged incompetence. Von Freyberg has said the bank's main problem is its reputation, not any operational shortcomings.

The Council of Europe's Moneyval committee, however, says otherwise. The committee, which helps member countries comply with international norms to fight money laundering and terrorist financing, gave the Vatican bank several poor or failing grades in its inaugural evaluation last year.

While praising the Vatican as a whole for making progress quickly, Moneyval said the bank's rules for customer due diligence, wire transfers and suspicious transaction reporting were insufficient. It said the bank needed an independent supervisor and must conduct a thorough risk assessment to ensure that it knew its clients and the risks it faces.

Vatican officials have recently revealed that six such transactions were flagged last year and another seven so far in 2013.

But the customer checks are only now getting underway, even though the Vatican pledged to Moneyval that they would be completed by December 2012. Von Freyberg has said they would be completed by the end of July.

The Vatican must submit a progress report to Moneyval in November.

The Vatican opened itself to the Moneyval evaluation process after signing a new European Union monetary agreement in 2009. Its aim is to shed the bank's image as a secretive tax haven and improve its reputation in global financial circles following a series of scandals, including a money-laundering investigation launched by Rome prosecutors in 2010.

In an interview this week, von Freyberg said his aim was to make the bank's activities more transparent, by publishing its annual report online on Oct. 1. He has hired a leading firm in the fight against money laundering, Promontory Group, to go over the bank's client base, a top-notch international law firm to review the bank's legal framework, and a fancy German public relations agency to help revamp the bank's image.

"I cannot comment on the past," von Freyberg said. "I am here now to take things in hand and we are doing this with great effort."

He said he had some of his own ideas about bank reform, but that the cardinals were the top decision-makers and that the mission of the IOR remained the same.

The Vatican bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII to manage assets destined for religious or charitable works. Located in a tower just inside the gates of Vatican City, it also manages the pension system for the Vatican's thousands of employees.

The bank is not open to the public; its 19,000 clients include Holy See personnel, religious orders, prelates and diplomats accredited to the Holy See.

The Vatican bank's finances have long been shrouded in secrecy. Most famously, it was implicated in a scandal over the collapse of Italy's Banco Ambrosiano in the 1980s in one of Italy's largest fraud cases. Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 in circumstances that remain mysterious.

Banco Ambrosiano collapsed following the disappearance of $1.3 billion in loans the bank had made to several dummy companies in Latin America. The Vatican had provided letters of credit for the loans.

While denying any wrongdoing, the Vatican bank agreed to pay $250 million to Ambrosiano's creditors.

In the 2010 money laundering case, Italian financial police seized euro23 million and Rome prosecutors placed the IOR's then-president, Gotti Tedeschi, and general director Paolo Cipriani under investigation for alleged violations of Italy's anti-money laundering norms in conducting a routine transaction from an IOR account at an Italian bank. The money was eventually unfrozen. The men technically remain under investigation but nearly three years on, haven't been charged.

But that isn't the only problem facing the IOR. Last year, under pressure from the Bank of Italy, JPMorgan closed its IOR accounts. And in December, again under pressure from the Bank of Italy, Deutsche Bank Italia halted its 15-year term providing electronic payment services to the Vatican, leaving the tiny city state cash-only. E-commerce operations only resumed at the end of May and still aren't fully operational, even though the Vatican announced in Februrary the problem had been resolved, The Associated Press reported earlier this week.

_____

Follow Nicole Winfield at www.twitter.com/nwinfield

ARDMORE, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - Nineteen-year-old amateur Michael Kim looked at the scoreboard at Merion's 15th green on Saturday and smiled at the sight of his name listed two strokes from the lead in the third round of the U.S. Open.

South Korea-born Kim, a University of California, Berkeley student and winner of the Jack Nicklaus award as top U.S. college golfer, said it was the company he was keeping on the big scoreboard that made for the special moment.

"I kept looking at the leaderboard, not because I wanted to know how I was doing in the tournament, but it was so cool to see my name next to those names like (Phil) Mickelson, (Luke) Donald, (Charl) Schwartzel. It was just an incredible feeling."

Kim birdied four of six holes from the 10th to be level par and within two strokes of the lead after 15 holes but finished by sandwiching a double-bogey with two bogeys to slip to 10th, five shots behind third-round leader Mickelson.

That left Kim five strokes clear of the next best amateur in the field - 21-year-old Pan Cheng-Tsung of Taiwan - and did not diminish the teenager's enthusiasm.

"It was a great day and it's been a great week and just looking forward to tomorrow," said Kim, who played his round with 2006 U.S. Open winner Geoff Ogilvy of Australia and American Bo Van Pelt.

"I didn't really know what to expect coming in, honestly, just wanted to make the cut. I thought that would be a pretty good week."

Kim conceded that after gazing at the scoreboard, he could not help but fantasize about what it might be like to carry on and win the title.

"I kind of went through that 'what if' situation in my head," said Kim. "What if I won or what if I did this.

"But it was cool, and I tried to snap back out of it, but I hit an awful tee shot on the next hole."

Despite the tough end to his round, Kim, who grew up in California, stood five shots better than his golf hero, Tiger Woods, who was nine-over par after a 76.

"Tiger's been an idol of mine since I basically started golf, and if I do finish in front of him, great," said Kim.

"If I finish behind him, that's fine.

"Hopefully Tiger can win the British or something."

(Editing by Ian Ransom)

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Healthcare has improved in many countries in the last five years, but patients in South Korea, Argentina and Japan are the most satisfied with their medical care, according to an Ipsos poll released on Tuesday.

In a survey of 15 countries, people in those countries gave top grades for improvements in their national healthcare system since 2008, along with residents of Belgium and Australia, which rounded out the top five nations.

At the other end of the spectrum, patients in Sweden, France, Italy, Hungary and Spain were the least satisfied with their health services and experiences among the 15 countries studied.

"On average things are moving forward in terms of healthcare access and experience around the world based on what we saw. This is very clear," said John Wright, senior vice president and managing director of Global Advisor Ipsos Public Affairs, which conducted the survey.

"But the elements within the healthcare system in certain countries are very specific in terms of what they are concerned about," he added in an interview.

The United States, which came in sixth overall, was followed by Poland, Germany, Canada and Britain.

It's worth noting the survey only included the 15 countries and was based on perceptions of users. So one country's system could be superior to another's, but if its users didn't rate it as highly, it would rank lower on the list.

"Everybody is getting a report card by their individual patient populations," Wright explained, likening it to "a customer satisfaction survey."

Ipsos polled a total of 12,001 adults online in 15 countries in Europe, Asia and North America about whether healthcare in their countries was better now than in recent years.

It also asked residents to rate access to doctors, specialists, a hospital, diagnostic tests, drugs and their experiences in treatment options, quality, coordination, speed and level of care.

MEETING EXPECTATIONS?

The poll could help healthcare officials see where they are failing to meet patient expectations, Wright added.

While the results show how patients rate their country's healthcare system, he added, they do not reflect how one nation's system compares against another.

South Korea scored the highest marks in all categories.

Residents of Spain, which ranked at the bottom of the list, gave poor scores on access to diagnostic tests, hospitals, drugs and specialists and patient experiences in all categories.

Those in France also gave low grades for most healthcare services, except for diagnostic tests and for the speed with which they could access medical care.

Poland's scores suggested worsening healthcare in the areas of hospital and specialist access, while Hungarian patients were most dissatisfied with availability of specialists and a hospital, and speed of services.

Sweden, which has universal healthcare coverage and among the world's longest life expectancies, was No. 11 overall and received low marks for access to specialists, diagnostic tests and hospital, and coordinated services.

Ipsos surveyed about 1,000 adults in each country, except for Argentina, Belgium, Hungary, Poland and South Korea which each had a sample of 500-plus participants. The online survey conducted January 4-18 had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for a poll of 1,000, and plus or minus 5.0 percentage points for a poll of 500 people.

(Reporting by Patricia Reaney; Editing by Chris Michaud and Cynthia Osterman)

Everyone needs a little personal space in the office.

At least, workers at a warehouse leased by the Environmental Protection Agency, in Landover, Md., seem to think so. EPA's inspectors found secret rooms at the facility filled with exercise equipment, televisions, refrigerators, microwaves and couches. The "man caves" also boasted photos, pin ups, calendars, clothing, books, magazines and videos, according to adated May 31.

To hide the rooms from security cameras, the employees-who worked for Apex Logistics, LLC, and not directly for the EPA-piled up screens, partitions and boxes in front of them.

According to the report, first made public in , the 70,000 square foot warehouse, which is owned by theand leased to the EPA for about $750,000 per year, is filled with everything from computers and other electronic equipment to letterhead paper and office furniture.

There was also "corrosion, vermin feces, mold and other problems" along with "unsecured racks (shelves) and poorly balanced inventory items that hung over the upper edges of the racks."

Additionally, there were potential fire hazards from propane stored in trucks and other vehicles, parked inside the building.

EPA spokesperson Alisha Johnson told ABC News that as soon as the organization discovered the areas, they "took immediate action to secure the warehouse and its contents, and issued a stop work order to the contractor." The EPA also investigated other warehouses and storage spaces, but did not find other problems.

EPA is also in the process of developing a security plan and new operating procedures for management of the warehouse, she said.

Apex did not return calls for comment.

The 36-year-old welterweight - considered the best defensive boxer of his generation - topped the magazine's Fortunate 50 list, issued on Wednesday. Mayweather also took the top spot last year, earning an estimated $85 million, again from just two fights, the magazine reported.

Miami Heat basketball star LeBron James, 28, a four-time National Basketball Association Most Valuable Player, came in this year in the number two slot, earning a total of $56.5 million.

The list is calculated by combining estimated salary, winnings and endorsements. Mayweather's total earnings are even more impressive considering he received no endorsement money either this year or last.

James' $56.5 million income combines a $17.5 million salary with an additional $39 million in endorsements.

Golfer Tiger Woods, the highest paid U.S. athlete from 2004, when the list was first published, through 2011, dropped to the No. 5 slot on this year's list, earning $40.8 million.

Chicago Cubs outfielder Alfonso Soriano came in as the 50th highest-paid U.S. athlete with an estimated $18.2 million.

Candidates for the list must be U.S. citizens and compete in a U.S.-based league.

Internationally, soccer great David Beckham is estimated to earn more than $48 million, landing him the top spot on the magazine's annual list of highest-paid athletes worldwide, The International 20.

(Reporting by Chris Francescani; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Tim Dobbyn)

The primate appears to be the most primitive known relative of the group that contains , small primates found only in Southeast Asia. The finding suggests this group diverged from anthropoids, the group that contains monkeys, apes and humans, during the Eocene epoch (55.8 million to 33.9 million years ago), a time of widespread warming.

It's not the oldest primate fossil, researchers say, but it is one of the oldest most-complete skeletons of the group known as tarsiiformes. []

"This discovery is really exciting," vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch of the University of Florida's museum of natural history told LiveScience, "because it shows us the first really [well-articulated] skeleton of one branch of the ," (the group including all primates alive today and their common ancestor). Bloch was not involved in the study.

The fossil confirms speculation that the earliest primates probably lived in trees, ate insects and were active during the daytime.

The primate, now named Archicebus achilles (roughly translated as "ancient monkey"), would have weighed about 1 ounce (20-30 grams), suggesting the earliest primates were very small. The skeleton shares some features of tarsiers and some of anthropoids. For instance, the specimen's heel bone strongly resembles those of anthropoids, hence the species name, "achilles."

According to the researchers, this fossil and other evidence suggest the first steps of , rather than Africa. But Bloch and others disagree with this interpretation.

"Crown primates appeared simultaneously in North America, Europe and Asia 56 million years ago," Bloch said. "I don't think this specimen tells us much about where primates themselves evolved," he added.

The fossil was dug up from an old lake bed in central China's Hubei Province, close to where the Yangtze River now flows.

The fossil was scanned with X-rays at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, to produce a 3D digital reconstruction without damaging the specimen.

The Archicebus skeleton is roughly 7 million years older than the previously known oldest fossil primate skeletons, which includefrom Messel, Germany, and Notharctus from the Bridger Basin, Wyoming.

Archicebus is not the oldest primate, anthropologist Mary Silcox of the University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada, told LiveScience. Nevertheless, "this new species will significantly impact our understanding of what is primitive for the common ancestor of living primates," Wilcox said.

The findings were reported online today (June 5) in the journal Nature.

Follow Tanya Lewis on and .Follow us , & . Original article on.

* Stanley Cup champions trail 2-1 in best-of-seven series

* Voynov involved in first two Los Angeles goals

By Jahmal Corner

LOS ANGELES, June 4 (Reuters) - The Los Angeles Kings enjoyed a return to familiar surroundings as they breathed new life into the Western Conference Finals with a 3-1 home victory over the Chicago Blackhawks on Tuesday.

Withdrawn from Game Two after allowing four goals in 29 minutes, goaltender Jonathan Quick was back to his best, making 19 saves as Los Angeles stretched their unbeaten run at the Staples Center in the playoffs.

The defending Stanley Cup champion Kings have now won 15 consecutive home games dating back to March 23, with their latest triumph reducing Chicago's best-of-seven series lead to 2-1.

"Honestly, we don't talk about (the home streak) in here at all," Kings defenseman Matt Greene told reporters.

"For whatever reason, we do a heck of a job at home. I wish we could bottle that up and take it on the road."

Game Four is also in Los Angeles, where the Kings appear to have restored their confidence following back-to-back losses in Chicago.

The top-seeded Blackhawks had looked in imperious form early in the series and if the Kings are to overcome a 2-0 deficit as they did in their first round match-up against St Louis, they will need to raise their game to a higher level.

EARLY FOUNDATION

"Last year, we were playing at a level that probably few teams have ever played at. This year, we're finding it more difficult and that's the nature of playoff hockey," winger Dustin Brown said of their latest challenge.

Slava Voynov helped lead the offensive charge by setting up Justin Williams for the opening goal just 3:21 into the game as the Kings laid an early foundation for the victory.

Voynov registered the team's second goal at 6:37 in the second to open a 2-0 advantage.

The Blackhawks battled back in the final minute of the second, when the visitors won a faceoff and Bryan Bickell skated around the back of the net to find a way past Quick.

The Kings held Chicago to just 20 shots on the night but survived some close calls in the third period, including a Blackhawks power-play, before Dwight King notched an empty-netter in the final seconds to seal the win.

Chicago goaltender Corey Crawford finished with 25 saves. (Editing by John O'Brien)

BERLIN (Reuters) - A new novel about a neo-Nazi plot to assassinate Germany's first Jewish candidate for Chancellor has shed a timely light on the right-wing extremist violence that has plagued the country since 1990 and was swept under the carpet for years.

Political thriller "The Jewish Candidate" by British journalist David Crossland has been published just as Germany's September election campaign is heating up and at the start of a trial of a neo-Nazi cell blamed for a spate of racist murders that went undetected for more than a decade.

Built upon the intriguing notion of a Jewish politician named Rudolf Gutman running for Chancellor as the candidate for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the fast-paced thriller is told through the eyes of a reporter for a fictional London newspaper who stumbles upon a neo-Nazi plot to kill Gutman.

Set in modern Germany, "The Jewish Candidate" focuses on the surge in far-right violence since reunification in 1990 and on the country's failure to contain it.

Some estimates say almost 200 people have been killed in acts of far-right violence since 1990 that have often been directed at dark-skinned foreigners. Those killings were often downplayed by authorities and German society as isolated acts of random violence mainly in formerly communist eastern Germany.

That complacency was shattered in late 2011 when police accidentally stumbled upon a neo-Nazi cell, the National Socialist Underground (NSU), whose members killed eight Turks, a Greek and a German policewoman execution-style between 2000-2007 and carried out two bombings in immigrant quarters in Cologne.

"I started writing it back in 2007 before anyone had heard about the NSU," said Crossland, a freelance writer and former Reuters correspondent.

"I was reporting about neo-Nazi violence and was surprised at how lightly the authorities and the general public were taking it despite warnings that parts of the east were 'no-go' areas for anyone who doesn't look German."

The trial of a surviving member of the NSU, Beate Zschaepe, began in Munich on May 6 after two men who founded the NSU in the late 1990s committed suicide following a botched bank robbery in November 2011.

Germans have been closely following the trial and parliament is conducting its own investigation into the failure of police and security services, who neglected the far-right threat and suspected other immigrants were responsible for the killings.

The parallels between the real-life NSU and the fictional neo-Nazi assassins in "The Jewish Candidate" are striking but coincidental. The novel, set in the run-up to an election, includes descriptions of clandestine torchlit neo-Nazi meetings and of their links with the security services.

The novel also raises the interesting question of whether Germany might one day have a Jewish chancellor. It had a Jewish population of 670,000 before the Nazi regime and Holocaust. There was a vestigial community of 29,000 in 1990. Germany prides itself on its growing Jewish population of over 200,000.

Crossland, 46, who has lived in Germany since 1992, said Germany may be ready to elect a Jewish leader.

"But it's an unlikely prospect for now due to a lack of Jewish politicians," he said. "It's clear, though, that neo-Nazis are better armed and better organised than the authorities believed until the NSU came to light."

(Reporting by Erik Kirschbaum, editing by Paul Casciato)