By Allan Little BBC News Having to pay for its reunification after the fall of the Berlin wall, Germany broke the budget deficit rules in 2003 - did this set a bad example for the eurozone?   Who is to blame for starting the current crisis in the eurozone? Greece? Italy? The real answer may lie further north. It was not the behaviour of the eurozone's southern members that first plunged the single curr ...

Development Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis, who has declared he intends to challenge for the PASOK leadership, said on Tuesday that when he was part of the Cabinet in 2010 he did not read the terms of Greece's loan agreement with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Speaking to Skai TV, Chrysochoidis said that he was too busy at the time with his duties as Citizens' Protection Minister t ...

Zal Europa Iraanse olie gaan weren? Die vraag ligt maandag op het bordje van de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken van de 27 landen van de Europese Unie. Europa wil graag de sancties tegen Iran verder uitbreiden wegens de omstreden nucleaire activiteiten van het land, maar Griekenland kan niet zomaar zonder de Iraanse olie en ligt dus dwars. Hoewel ook Griekenland zich schaart achter een olieboycot, kan het l ...

[Author's Note: SAY NO TO WAR ON IRAN, Spread the word, forward this article, post it on Facebook. Our objective at Global Research is to curb the flow of media disinformation, reverse the tide of war and restore World peace.] Introduction While the possibility of a war with Iran is acknowledged in US news reports, its regional and global implications are barely analyzed. Very few people in America are awar ...

Some of the most inspiring social struggles of 2011 have placed democracy at the top of the agenda. Although they emerge from very different conditions, these movements – from the insurrections of the Arab Spring to the union battles in Wisconsin, from the student protests in Chile to those in the US and Europe, from the UK riots to the occupations of the Spanish indignados and the Greeks in Syntagma Square ...

On the last day of 2011, a headline in The Wall Street Journal read: “Spain Misses Deficit Target, Sets Cuts.” The cruel forces of poor economic logic were at work to welcome in the new year. The European Union has become a vicious circle of burgeoning debt leading to radical austerity measures, which in turn further weaken economic conditions and result in calls for still more damaging cuts in government s ...

US ambassador threatened Spain with 'retaliation actions' if the country did not pass tough new Sopa-style internet piracy laws. The US ambassador in Madrid threatened Spain with "retaliation actions" if the country did not pass tough new internet piracy laws, according to leaked documents. The latest revelation comes amid a fierce debate over America's own plans to pass online piracy legislation that criti ...

January 11, 2012 is a profoundly depressing anniversary — marking ten years since the Bush administration established its “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and decided that those who ended up in US custody would not be screened to ascertain whether or not they were combatants, and would be sent to Guantánamo to be held without rights. To mark this bleak occasion, Andy Worthington, investigativ ...

Georges Prévélakis Historically positioning themselves between an unruly, oriental population and the western powers, since 1981 Greek elites have siphoned off EU funds into a bloated public sector favouring corruption, patronage and social climbing. The threat posed to Europe by the breakdown is less contagion to the centre than a wave of anti-western feeling that could exacerbate geopolitical instabilitie ...

In October, the leader of PVV, Geert Wilders, heavily criticized the moral of Greeks with respect to paying taxes. He pointed  to the huge deposits of rich Greeks in Switzerland. What Wilders failed to report is that the Netherlands is helping the Greeks with tax evasion. From a research that De Pers carried out, it seems that many Greek companies use the Netherlands as a way to avoid the tax authorities. I ...