In this video, the representatives of the workers of Viomihaniki Metalleftiki (Greece) talk about their attempt to take over the factory and run it as a cooperative of workers. Viomihaniki Metalleftiki (BIO.ME.) is a company producing building material. Last year, the management decided to abandon the company. In a unique (for Greece) move, the workers launched a project of taking over the factory and runni ...

Unions question the wisdom of austerity as unemployment grows and a contracting economy means less tax revenue. Greece’s austerity policies could create a crisis of insolvency within the country, undermining the very reason they were implemented – to repay the country’s debt - says the country’s biggest labour confederation. “I am afraid that we may see a phenomenon that could cause a social explosion,” say ...

For many people flying to Greece means sunshine and leisure. Indeed the sun is shining today and the sea is blue and tempting. But for others, the same sea is dark and dangerous. After arriving in Lesvos, an island right next to Turkey, the first thing we saw on the way from the airport were backpacks and clothes dispersed over a nearby beach. ‘’Irregular migrants landed here this morning,’’ said the taxi d ...

New internationalist magazine From direct deals with farmers to guerrilla parks and suicide prevention, Alexandra Saliba documents grassroots solutions to the financial crisis. Even after securing billions in loans from the so-called ‘Troika’, the Greek economy continues to shrink at an alarming rate. Jobs are vanishing. Unemployment is double the euro-zone average and 55 per cent of people aged between 15 ...

Why is the Netherlands a tax haven? What kind of consequences does this have for our country, and others? Who gains, and who loses? Real World Economics presents an evening, together with the Center for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), where we will discuss the answers to these questions. More importantly, alternatives will be presented that can tackle the issue of tax injustice. Unitary taxat ...

No subsidy for empty buildings Friday February the 1st the SNS bank was nationalised. When we are continuously told that there is no money and that cuts to public services are necessary it turns out that there is still 3.7 billion euro left to save a bank and its extensive real estate portfolio. For years trees grew to the sky and no building project was too much for SNS. Now tax payers have to pay the bill ...

Athens LIKE many Greeks caught in the maelstrom of the economic crisis, my wife and I live a day-to-day existence. Since the newspaper where I worked for 23 years (my wife for 17) went out of circulation in December of 2011, we have both been unemployed. Neither of us have received a paycheck in 18 months, as our newspaper stopped paying us five months before it closed. With unemployment for journalists at ...

'Teenager killed' in Bahrain protest Witnesses say 16-year-old boy shot during protests to mark second anniversary of pro-democracy uprising, activists say. Bahrain has seen several days of protests in the run-up to Thursday's anniversary [Reuters]   A teenager has been killed during a protest in Bahrain marking the second anniversary of the country's pro-democracy uprising, activists have said. Hussai ...

The reportage of Envoyé Spécial, broadcast on French TV provides evidence to a scandalous story that took place in Northern Greece. This story concerns the beautiful forest land “Skouries” that was sold by the Greek state to the Canadian mining company "Eldorado Gold" in order to exploit its precious subsoil and therefore be enormously profited from it. The forest though has been assigned for the symbolic p ...

The essence of the story is simple. Raytheon is reported to have developed software “capable of tracking people’s movements and predicting future behaviour by mining data from social networking websites”. Whether the details of the story are correct, and whether Raytheon’s software is particularly good at doing what it is supposed to do isn’t really the main point: the emergence of software like this was al ...