Reuters has disclosed the outcome of the Greek debt buyback, citing a Eurozone official, which while completed at €32 billion, has missed it hard goal by €450 million, and as a result the completely unbelievable Greek 2020 debt/GDP target will be 126.6% instead of 124%. Reuters also reports that the average price on the buyback was 33.5 cents on the euro. As a result of the higher price paid for the buyback ...

112 dead after preventable fire at Bangladesh garment factory   Update Dec 6, 2012: Sometimes, you read something, and it makes your blood boil. Like this quote from today's New York Times, about Walmart's connection to the fire in a Bangladesh factory that killed 112 people two weeks ago: "[T]wo officials who attended a meeting held in Bangladesh in 2011 to discuss factory safety in the garment indust ...

Doctors are left "playing God," having to choose which patient will get the costly treatment.   By Benoît Vitkine LE MONDE/Worldcrunch THESSALONIKI - It was in 2009 – what feels like ages ago now - that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reported that the Greek healthcare system was "rather efficient." Around that very same time, doctors in Thessaloniki successfully cured ...

[ Scroll down for Dutch.] Source: http://www.openeurope.org.uk/Content/Documents/PDFs/greece2ndbailout.pdf   A new restructuring of the Greek debt is in sight. After 2 loan agreements with the IMF and the EU and one debt restructure in February 2012, politicians and analysts consider a new restructuring inevitable. The new element that is politically-speaking extremely sensitive in central and northern Euro ...

PARIS — Its membership in the euro currency union hanging in the balance, Greece continues to receive billions of euros in emergency assistance from a so-called troika of lenders overseeing its bailout. But almost none of the money is going to the Greek government to pay for vital public services. Instead, it is flowing directly back into the troika’s pockets. The European bailout of 130 billion euros ($163 ...

A worldwide research effort in collaboration with BBC Panorama and the ICIJ reveals the people behind these anonymous companies       The existence of an extraordinary global network of sham company directors, most of them British, can be revealed. The UK government claims such abuses were stamped out long ago, but a worldwide joint investigation by the Guardian, the BBC's Panorama and the Wa ...

Greece’s Parliament did what it had to do on Thursday. Despite some defections from the ruling centrist coalition, lawmakers narrowly approved a $23 billion package of new austerity measures, including further spending cuts to social services, pensions and public salaries, as well as tax increases demanded by Greece’s European lenders. ...

In the heart of Europe, a democracy now teeters on the edge Editorial   The Guardian, In spring 2010, as Athens wrangled with the IMF and the rest of Europe for what would turn out to be a €110bn emergency loan, a revealing, chilling phrase slipped out. When Greece's then-premier, George Papandreou, begged for easier borrowing terms, he was told by Angela Merkel that the deal had to hurt. According to a wel ...

Large Bank Mergers Since 1990 This is how the U.S. banking monopoly was created after more than two decades of unbridled bank mergers endorsed, and in some cases, encouraged the by the OCC, the FDIC, the FTC and the elimination of Glass-Steagall.   ...

In BBC Paul Mason’s report published a few days ago, the notorious Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros declares ‘We are at war with domestic and international bankers’ (3:08 Mason’s report http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-19976841) Sure, Panagiotaros likes to imagine himself as a righteous warrior, but truth falls closer to the fact that he is a mercenary, and after looking between the lines one can understand ...