By occupiedlondon.org UPDATE, 11.45 am. If the numbers of detentions are confirmed (101 in Villa Amalias and 40 at the Democratic Left) this would mean today’s police operation will have seen the biggest number of anarchists detained at least since the 1998 Polytechnic riots. At approximately 07:30 on January 9, dozens of people re-squatted Villa Amalias this morning, hanging a banner writing: “Squat for Ev ...

By JUDY DEMPSEY BERLIN — The euro crisis has not been good for NATO’s secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Mr. Rasmussen has used every occasion to cajole alliance members into investing and collaborating more in defense. He said recently that allied defense expenditures had declined by more than $56 billion compared with 2009. Practically all of those cuts happened in Europe, reducing defense spending ...

Why not make slaves out of unemployed people? Unpaid work by unemployed people is the suggestion of the ex finance deputy minister, Petros Doukas. Mr Doukas outlined on his personal webpage a number of suggestions in order for Greece to exit the crisis. One of his brilliant suggestions is that unemployed people should offer unpaid work wherever the State needs them to. Also enterprises could be asked whethe ...

Consider it a mea culpa submerged in a deep pool of calculus and regression analysis: The International Monetary Fund’s top economist today acknowledged that the fund blew its forecasts for Greece and other European economies because it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth. The new and highly technical paper looks again at the issue of fiscal multipliers ...

THE first culprit of Greece’s biggest tax-evasion scandal in recent memory may not be a high-rolling tycoon but the former finance minister. In 2010 George Papaconstantinou, the chief negotiator of Greece’s first bail-out by the European Union and the IMF, took delivery from the French government of a computer disk with the names of some 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. Mr Papaconstantinou should imme ...

Growers and shrinkers   The fastest growing and shrinking economies in 2013 MACAU will be the fastest growing economy this year, according to the latest estimates from our sister company, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Growth is expected to return to a faster pace as new casino projects are resumed and Chinese visitors (with rising wages) continue to raise gambling revenues. Mongolia, in second ...

By Stephanie Bodoni, Elisa Martinuzzi & Gabi Thesing The European Central Bank will be allowed to keep private files showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its debt after defeating the first court challenge using the bloc’s freedom of information rules. “Disclosure of those documents would have undermined the protection of the public interest so far as concerns the economic policy of the European U ...

Country faces year of destiny, with doubts about survival of government and of its eurozone membership as austerity bites In the three years that Greece has been engulfed by the drama of its debt, crises have come and gone. But the next 12 months are likely to be more critical yet with politicians and pundits predicting that 2013 will ultimately define whether Athens remains in the eurozone. For once, Greek ...

 The New York times LONDON — Last month, the European Commission’s top economic official in Brussels, Olli Rehn, received an intriguing e-mail. Greece, under pressure from its European creditors, wanted to retire some of its debt by buying back its bonds at a deep discount to their face value. A senior executive at Deutsche Bank proposed that Europe take a tough negotiating stance toward private hedge funds ...

By Naomi Kresge   It was 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday when Greek Coast Guard Ensign Chrisafis Theofilos’s boat got a report of a migrant drowning off the coast of the island of Lesbos. [nggallery id=4] As dawn began to break, Theofilos sped south toward the man’s coordinates. His scheduled departure had already been delayed five hours by a broken radar system that headquarters in Athens hadn’t yet fixed. Th ...