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Last year’s deal on an €86bn bailout to prevent Greece from leaving the eurozone may need to be completely renegotiated with more realistic fiscal targets for the International Monetary Fund to take part in the rescue, its chief has warned.

Christine Lagarde said that forcing Athens to achieve the demanding budget surplus targets written into the bailout would require “heroic” efforts by the Greek people, given the deep austerity measures required. She added that maintaining such surpluses well into the future is “highly unrealistic”.

Her statements are a clear sign that Ms Lagarde is now confronting the possibility of pulling the IMF out of the Greek rescue after nearly six years during which the fund’s reputation has taken a battering. Although Athens and its eurozone partners agreed to a third bailout in July, the IMF has not yet signed up. Germany has repeatedly warned it may no longer be able to support the deal if the IMF quits.

However, although she refused to say how the IMF would stay involved, Ms Lagarde on Thursday said “we will not walk away” from Greece.

The IMF and the Greek government are in the middle of an increasingly hostile war of words over the future of the programme, which must be decided before €3.5bn in debt payments fall due in July.

Writing in the Financial Times, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras accused the IMF of “changing the design of the reforms” proposed by Athens and backed by Brussels, arguing the IMF is attempting shift the tax burden “on to the relatively poor”.

“Our government was elected with a mandate to meet the twin objectives of fiscal discipline and credibility, on the one hand, and inclusion and social fairness, on the other,” Mr Tsipras wrote.

Mr Tsipras agreed to pass tax increases, spending cuts, and economic reforms to enable Athens to reach a primary surplus — the balance before debt interest payments — of 3.5 per cent of economic output by 2018. With such a surplus Athens could in theory begin paying down its mountain of debt, which is projected to top 185 per cent of gross domestic product this year.

Athens believes the target is achievable with a series of higher income taxes, pension reforms and better collection of value-added and other taxes, a view shared by the European Commission.

But the IMF remains highly sceptical, and has instead urged fewer tax hikes and deeper pension cuts to reach a more modest 1.5 per cent target by 2018. Rather than deeper austerity, the IMF wants eurozone governments to grant Athens sweeping debt relief.

“[The] 3.5 per cent [target] in the short term might be achievable by some heroic — and I really mean heroic — effort on the part of Greece and the Greek people. We are sceptical about it, but we are open to seeing what additional measures the authorities are proposing,” Ms Lagarde told reporters ahead of today’s start of the IMF spring meetings in Washington.

“What we find highly unrealistic on the other hand is this assumption that this primary surplus of 3.5 per cent can be maintained over decades,” Ms Lagarde added. “That just will not happen.”

Although Brussels and the IMF have historically presented a unified front to Athens, the differences have become so severe that last week they resorted to presenting the Greek government with two separate plans for how to break the bailout impasse.

The war of words between Mr Tsipras and the Fund comes just two weeks after the leak of a transcript of a confidential IMF conference call in which the Greek programme was discussed.

Mr Tsipras said the call showed the IMF was attempting to push Athens into bankruptcy. In a subsequent letter to Mr Tsipras, Ms Lagarde called the allegation “nonsense” and hinted she believed the Greek government was responsible for recording and leaking the call, which included IMF staff who were working in an Athens hotel.

Mr Tsipras has been attempting to rally his European allies in recent days, flying to Paris on Wednesday and Brussels on Thursday night.

Athens also announced this week it would pass new tax-reform measures without consulting bailout monitors, a move that the EU and IMF have previously deemed a provocation.

IMF officials have been bemused by the vehemence of Mr Tsipras’ criticism. They insist they are proposing less austerity and more debt relief — things Mr Tsipras has in the past demanded. But the IMF remains highly unpopular in Greece, and Mr Tsipras’ Syriza party has fallen far behind the opposition New Democracy in recent opinion polls.

Rousseff challenges impeachment in court

The government of Dilma Rousseff launched a last-ditch bid to avert an important vote on the president’s impeachment on Sunday by challenging the measure in the Supreme Court.

The attorney-general José Eduardo Cardozo, who is leading Ms Rousseff’s defence, said there were procedural flaws in the impeachment process that rendered it illegal.

“The attorney-general’s office has entered with an injunction in the Supreme Court to annul the process of impeachment,” Mr Cardozo’s office said in a Twitter message.

Deeply unpopular and facing Brazil’s worst economic recession in more than a century, Ms Rousseff is in eleventh hour talks to persuade her remaining allies in congress to vote against Sunday’s impeachment motion.

The challenge in the Supreme Court, which was expected, is a tactical move designed to try to delay the impeachment process and steal some of the momentum from the opposition, analysts said.

“According to the petition from the AGU [attorney-general’s office], the process [of impeachment] contains errors that impede its continuation,” the attorney-general’s office said in a statement.

It said a special committee that prepared a report for congress on the impeachment considered matters that were not relevant to the process.

This included subjects that did not relate to Ms Rousseff`s current mandate and testimony from a scandal dogging Petrobras, the state-run oil company, that had nothing to do with her handling of the budget.

This had turned the impeachment process into a “true Kafkaesque trial in which the defendant can never ascertain exactly of what he is being accused,” it said.

Some people close to the pro-impeachment camp, which is led by the centrist PMDB, until recently Ms Rousseff’s main coalition partner, and the PSDB, the main opposition party, say they already have the votes needed for victory.

A two-thirds majority of the 513-seat lower house of congress, or 342 lawmakers, must approve the motion, which would then go to the senate.

If accepted in the senate by a simple majority, the formal impeachment process — essentially a political trial — would begin during which Ms Rousseff would be suspended and her vice-president Michel Temer become acting president. If she was impeached, Mr Temer would take office until the next elections in 2018.

The pro-impeachment camp is basing the impeachment action on allegations that Ms Rousseff fiddled the national accounts to hide the true state of the budget deficit.

She contests the charges and argues that they are insufficient to justify her removal, calling the impeachment process a coup being orchestrated by the opposition, conservative media and partisan police, prosecutors and judges.

But impeachment is supported by a large part of the population who are angry at the president over her handling of the economy and the vast corruption scandal at Petrobras, of which she was once chairman.

GoPro on Thursday very quietly took the wraps off its new developer program, by which it hopes to get its action cameras hooked into as many third-party devices, vehicles, and service as possible. The program was announced at a private event in San Francisco, where it showed off the fruits of various partnerships.

The Periscope integration announced earlier this year is an example of what the company is hoping to achieve. There was also a snap-on timecode system that you can use to sync your footage (announced last week, but still new), a mount for kids’ toys from Fisher-Price, add-ons for tracking your route and vital statistics when parasailing, skiing, and other extreme activities — you get the general idea. Partnerships with BMW and Toyota also suggest more automotive applications in the future.

Perhaps the coolest item, shown off at the end of this highlight video, was a gesture-based camera control system for when your motorcycle gloves or [insert extreme garment here] prevent you from operating the app.

The hope, presumably, is that this will extend GoPro’s reach and restore the company’s luster (and sales) after a disappointing earning report. Turns out people don’t buy a new action camera every year or so, unlike iPhones. But dozens of cool new applications and accessories could bring in new users, put more miles on existing cameras — or leverage features only available in the latest model.

There’s also a “Works with GoPro” badge now — it’s sort of a rite of passage in consumer electronics to get big enough to require curation of accessories, and then name that curation process the exact same thing as everyone else’s.

Amazon has been focusing attention on areas like media streaming, its faster delivery and pickup services, hardware and enterprise via AWS. But it’s also making an effort to reboot one of the more legacy parts of its business: fashion.

TechCrunch has learned from multiple sources that the e-commerce giant has eyed up several startups in the fashion sphere as potential acquisitions to update and expand its presence in the category. Everlane, Le Tote, Rent The Runway, Third Love and PreeLine are among the names we’ve heard in connection with the effort.

“They are losing big time in apparel and are anxious to acquire brands,” one founder approached by the company told TechCrunch. Amazon did not respond to requests for comment, and all the companies mentioned here declined to comment about any talks.

The range of these companies speaks to how Amazon is looking to address several parts of the equation when it comes to selling fashion online.

Apparel and accessory site Everlane and lingerie startup Third Love are both vertically integrated businesses, selling items that they have designed and manufactured themselves. Le Tote and Rent the Runway are in the business of Netflix-style clothing rentals, sometimes called recommerce, where you wear and then send back items. And Preeline is a social platform where people can connect with like-minded consumers to share opinions and discover new items.

Amazon has been looking to build up its own in-house muscle in at least one of these areas already. Following in the footsteps of major physical retailers like Nordstrom, Macy’s and Target, Amazon has been working on a number of its own private-label brands, with smart/quirky names like Franklin & Freeman, Lark & Ro, and North Eleven, designed and manufactured under Amazon’s direction and (of course) sold and distributed by Amazon. Of the 399 job openings in fashion that Amazon is currently advertising (399!), 25 specifically mention Amazon’s private label business.

Part of the reason that Amazon is interested in acquiring third-party brands and building its own private-label business is because the company has typically had a hard time shaking its no-nonsense and decidedly unsexy image as a purveyor of cut-price books, electronics and just about anything under the sun — an image that has kept some fashion brands away from selling through the site, and keen fashionably-minded shoppers from visiting and buying there.

“Right now, there is no way that some of the top brands would want to be seen for sale on Amazon,” one source said.

But in a kind of e-commerce, corporate version of Pygmalion, Amazon has been trying to change this. The company has built photo studios in hipster neighborhoods in New York and London to put together shoots and editorial to better sell items online. It has sponsored Fashion Weeks both in New York and India (also helping to raise its game in the latter country). And in addition to the company’s own private label advances, it’s finally been wooing some bigger brands, too.

“Dozens of brands now sell directly to Amazon,” the WSJ wrote earlier this month, “including department store stalwarts such as Nicole Miller, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade, Lacoste and Levi Strauss.” It’s also apparently taking a very un-Amazon approach with this new stock: it’s selling full price.

And on top of all this, the company has been looking at ways of leveraging some of its other assets to differentiate what it presents in terms of fashion commerce. One of the more recent and notable developments there has been the debut of Style Code Live, a daily video program that lets viewers shop for highlighted items on Amazon (and chat about them) while the show is streaming.

The other thing that is notable about these startups that Amazon has looked at for acquisition is that they are the essence of customer loyalty and recurring sales, with sites like Le Tote directly built around subscriptions, but the others donning strong brands that encourage repeat visits and purchases, too.

“They are trying to break the mould and the one-off relationship,” one source said of Amazon’s interest in smaller online brands with loyal followings. “With fashion it needs to be more of a brand play and longer-lasting relationships, not just ‘come to my site to buy a pair of boxers or a regular white t-shirt.'”

Loyalty is something that Amazon has been very bullish about as a way of growing its business, specifically around its Prime service, which gives shoppers free, fast shipping and exclusive access to certain digital content and other goods in exchange for a monthly fee. It’s a guessing game how many Prime members Amazon has. One estimate from this past January put the number at 54 million in the U.S. alone.

On the other side of the equation, building e-commerce businesses of any size is notoriously hard, with even large operations often failing to make decent (or any) returns, never mind the challenges for smaller outfits that lack scale. (Indeed, consignment marketplace Threadflip suddenly folded in January and sent its business over to Le Tote, which appears to still be going strong.) That pressure (or more positively, the scaling opportunity) could lead some smaller businesses to consider offers from Amazon.

Amazon itself is no stranger to considering startups for acquisition when it starts to eye up a new business area, be it delivery, food ordering, or video.

But while Amazon’s push into fashion is on the one hand somewhat recent, it also goes back years, as a reference point in a more general mantra about how the company needs to focus on the essential, recurring items of modern consumerist life. “In order to be a $200 billion company, we’ve got to learn how to sell clothes and food,” CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has reportedly said, according to Brad Stone’s 2013 book about the company, The Everything Store.