By Peter Stanford As Roma families are accused of abducting children in Greece and Ireland, we should beware of persecuting an ancient people A Roma girl at a migrants’ encampment near Paris. The Third Reich regarded Roma as racially impure; an estimated one million died in concentration camps Photo: Reuters It is a measure of the sensitivity of a topic that any nomenclature you use risks causing offence. S ...

“The consciousness of a worker is not a curve that rises and falls with wages and prices; it is the accumulation of a lifetime of experience and socialization, inherited traditions, struggles successful and defeated . . . It is this weighty baggage that goes into the making of a worker’s consciousness and provides the basis for his behavior when conditions ripen . . . and the moment comes.” – E. P. Thompson ...

Rescuers have ended their search for the bodies of the migrants who died in the October 3 Lampedusa boat sinking. Only 155 of the 545 people, including Eritrean, Somalis, and Syrians aboard the vessel which sank in the Mediterranean survived the tragedy. Just 359 bodies have been recovered. ...

After her re-election, Angela Merkel will again propose to the EU that the German economic model — thrift, probity, austerity and a formal partnership between employers and workers — should be the norm for all Europe. But that partnership, once  admired for its fairness, is failing. Now employers revel in local and global inequality. ...

Carlos Humberto de Carvalho, the mayor of Barreiro, is a straightforward and frank 62-year-old who has just won the Portuguese city’s municipal elections for the third time in a row — and with an absolute majority. Dressed without a tie, he has been a communist since he came of age in 1968, since the tough, tricky and far-off days of the underground era. He belongs to the hardcore — to the Central Committee ...

Just 8.4% of all the 5bn adults in the world own 83.4% of all household wealth (that’s property and financial assets, like stocks, shares and cash in the bank).  About 393 million people have net worth (that’s wealth after all debt is accounted for) of over $100,000, that’s 10% own 86% of all household wealth!  But $100,000 may not seem that much, if you own a house in any G7 country without any mortgage.  ...

The only way to stop the fascists profiting from the breakdown of the Greek state is to offer a socialist alternative to capitalism. Greece – and the rise of Golden Dawn – is an extreme parable of what has happened to many developed countries since the global crisis broke out in 2007. The policies of the Greek "rescue" – where the Greek people had no inkling what was afoot until the agreement was signed in ...

A fortnight ago, Golden Dawn was feeling smug. Greece's neo-Nazi party was riding high in the opinion polls at about 15%, double what it got in last year's election. ...

De crisis in Griekenland wordt de laatste jaren steeds als excuus door de regeringen gebruikt om grotere bezuinigingen in Nederland en de rest van Europa te realiseren. De regeringen gebruiken Griekenland of als afschrikwekkend voorbeeld (we moeten onze zaken op orde hebben anders worden we zoals Griekenland) of als noodzakelijk kwaad (de Nederlandse burger moet belastinggeld betalen voor het redden van Gri ...

It could take up to 25 years to regain living standards prior to the economic crisis  If left unchecked, austerity policies could put between 15 and 25 million more Europeans at risk of poverty by 2025 – nearing the population of the Netherlands and Austria combined. This would bring the number of people at risk of poverty in Europe up to 146 million, over a quarter of the population, warns international ag ...