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Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Israel: Iran behind bus bomb attack that killed seven tourists in Bulgaria

Bomb placed in trunk of bus with at least 40 people on board was detonated near Burgas airport

Israel has accused Iran of ordering a fatal bomb attack on an Israeli tour group in Bulgaria, in which seven tourists were killed and 30 injured, five critically.

A group of about 200, mostly young, Israelis travelling with the Kavei Chufsha company tour company had just flown into the country and were being driven to their hotels in a convoy of three coaches when the explosion hit the bus in the Black Sea city of Burgas, 250 miles (400 kilometres) east of the capital, Sofia.

The bomb, placed in the trunk, was detonated not far from Burgas airport, said Dimitar Nikolov, the city's mayor. At least 40 people were on board when it exploded.

Little more than an hour after the attack, the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a veiled threat to Tehran in a brief statement holding the Islamic state responsible for the attack.

"Iran is responsible for the terror attack in Bulgaria, we will have a strong response against Iranian terror," he said.

The fatal attack comes just days after a 24-year-old Lebanese man affiliated with Hezbollah was arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack targeting Israeli tourists, based on evidence provided to local police by Israeli intelligence.

The man was found with information on tour buses carrying Israeli passengers, a list of Cypriot tourist spots favoured by Israel tourists and details of Israeli airlines that fly into Cyprus, Greek newspaper Phileleftheros reported.

"Based on the modus operandi of Hezbollah and Iranian agencies, including the Revolutionary Guard, I think a clear trademark connects today's attack with those elements," said Boaz Ganor, executive director at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya.

This month's consecutive attempts – one thwarted and one successful - on Israeli targets abroad follows attacks on Israeli diplomatic targets in India, Georgia and Kenya in February this year. Iran has spoken of its "open war" on Israel.

"In February, the same groups were identifiable by their trademarks – magnetic bombs stuck to the bottom of diplomatic cars. This same method has not necessarily been used in today's attack, but we are seeing the same technique of simultaneously planned attacks," Ganor added.

"I would definitely not underestimate the threat of further attacks. There may well be terror units in different countries with similar contingency plans to attack Israeli tourists in the near future."

Initial reports claimed the explosion was caused by a suicide bomber, after eyewitnesses reported seeing a person board the bus before it blew up.

Michel Parhan, whose daughter Ron was injured in the blast, said she had called her in panic saying that a man had boarded the bus and blown himself up. "She sustained cuts and was bleeding, they removed her through the window of the bus. She was hysterical, and is there without a cell phone, so she could not say much," Parhan told Haaretz.

The Israeli foreign ministry has since denied that the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber. Bulgarian media reports said an 11-year-old child and two pregnant women were among the injured.

The Bulgarian interior minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, was quoted on national radio BNR as saying the police were investigating two possible causes of the blast: that an explosive device was put in the bus before the tourists boarded or that the explosives were in the tourists' luggage.

Within minutes of the attack, Burgas airport was shut down and passengers newly arrived on planes from Israel to Bulgaria were not allowed to disembark. Eleven flights from Tel Aviv bound for eastern Europe were halted.

The Israeli foreign office said Israeli medics had been sent to Bulgaria to assist the injured. As the emergency teams were rallied, Israeli officials focused on those responsible and how the Jewish state should respond.

Following a briefing from Nikolay Mladenov, his Bulgarian counterpart, foreign minster Avigdor Lieberman called for a situation assessment.


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Greece Eyes New Round Of Government Cuts


Greece Eyes New Round Of Government Cuts
NPR
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The heads of three parties supporting Greece's month-old coalition government are meeting to try and finalize a new round of austerity measures worth €11.5 billion ($14.1 billion) demanded by international rescue creditors.


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3 Dead As Explosion Hits Bus Carrying Young Israeli Tourists

SOFIA, Bulgaria — A bus carrying Israeli youth exploded Wednesday in a Bulgarian resort, killing at least four people and wounded more than two dozen,...

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Greece's Coalition Agrees on Basics of Austerity Plan


Greece's Coalition Agrees on Basics of Austerity Plan
NASDAQ
NASDAQ News: Greece's Coalition Agrees on Basics of Austerity Plan.


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Greek Coalition Sets Austerity Plan

Greece's coalition partners agreed on a basic outline of a plan for $14.1 billion of spending cuts over the next two years but pushed back final decisions pending discussions with international creditors.

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Greeks promised no more austerity in 2012, but future cuts loom


Globe and Mail

Greeks promised no more austerity in 2012, but future cuts loom
Washington Post
ATHENS, Greece — Greeks will be spared new austerity measures this year, parties backing the coalition government promised on Wednesday, though they refused to rule out more painful cuts starting in 2013.
Greek leaders push back decision on austerity cutsReuters
Greek Coalition Agrees Basics of Austerity PlanWall Street Journal

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Greece's Coalition Agrees on Basics of Austerity Plan -Fin Min


Telegraph.co.uk

Greece's Coalition Agrees on Basics of Austerity Plan -Fin Min
Wall Street Journal
ATHENS--Greece's three coalition partners Wednesday agreed on a basic outline of a plan regarding 11.5 billion euros ($14.1 billion) of spending cuts to be implemented over the next two years but have pushed back final decisions on the belt-tightening ...
Greece Is Still Working on Budget After Leaders' Athens MeetingBloomberg
Greece in hard spot as debt payment looms and European doubts growWashington Post
Greece eyes new round of government cutsBoston.com

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Greeks promised no more austerity in 2012

Protesters chant slogans in support of striking steel workers outside the Labor Ministry building in Athens, on Tuesday, July 17, 2012. Several hundred people took part in the protest, organized by a Communist labor union, which came as the Greek government is seeking to end a nine-month standoff between strikers and management at a steel plant outside Athens. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)Greeks will be spared new austerity measures this year, parties backing the coalition government promised on Wednesday, though they refused to rule out more painful cuts starting in 2013.



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Mastiff mix dog bites Greece cop


Mastiff mix dog bites Greece cop
Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
A dog bit an officer Tuesday when police responded to Greece home for a domestic dispute.
Dog attacks Greece Police officerBrighton-Pittsford Post

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Greek leaders push back decision on austerity cuts


San Francisco Chronicle

Greek leaders push back decision on austerity cuts
Reuters
ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek coalition leaders agreed to meet next week to hammer out almost 12 billion euros worth of austerity cuts demanded by the near-bankrupt country's lenders after a deal proved elusive.
New Greek cuts “almost impossible” says party backing coalition governmentWashington Post

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Greece Fin Min: Coalition Partners Agree on Basics of Austerity Plan


San Francisco Chronicle

Greece Fin Min: Coalition Partners Agree on Basics of Austerity Plan
Wall Street Journal
ATHENS--Greece's three coalition partners have agreed on the basic outline of a plan for 11.5 billion euros ($14.1 billion) of spending cuts that have been demanded by the country's international creditors, the Greek finance minister said Wednesday.
Greece in hard spot as debt payment looms and European doubts growWashington Post
Greece eyes new round of government cutsSan Francisco Chronicle

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Greek leaders push back final decision on austerity cuts


Business Recorder

Greek leaders push back final decision on austerity cuts
Reuters
ATHENS, July 18 (Reuters) - Leaders of the three parties inGreece's new government will meet next week to hammer out 11.7billion euros worth of spending cuts demanded by foreignlenders, Socialist party.
New Greek cuts “almost impossible” says party backing coalition governmentWashington Post

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READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT in.reuters.com

Greece eyes new round of government cuts


San Francisco Chronicle

Greece eyes new round of government cuts
Boston.com
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — The heads of three parties supporting Greece's month-old coalition government are meeting to try and finalize a new round of austerity measures worth €11.5 billion ($14.1 billion) demanded by international rescue creditors.
Greece Seeks Bridge LoanWall Street Journal
Greece in hard spot as debt payment looms and European doubts growWashington Post

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Gaza Christians protest what they call forced conversion to Islam


The Daily Star

Gaza Christians protest what they call forced conversion to Islam
Los Angeles Times
GAZA CITY -- Scores of Christians in the Gaza Strip organized a sit-in Tuesday at the Greek Church of Gaza to protest what they call the "kidnapping” of five Christians by an unknown Islamist group seeking to forcibly convert them to Islam.
With UN summer camps closed, Hamas now main source of entertainment for Gaza's ...Washington Post
Gazans visit relatives jailed in Israel after five yearsReuters
Hamas Now Has Monopoly on Summer Fun for Gaza KidsABC News
CBS News -The Guardian
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Eurozone crisis live: Greece's leaders meet to discuss further cuts

Prime minister Antonis Samaras will hold talks with senior ministers in an attempt to agree billions of euros of fresh austerity measures



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Greek life is more than just a party


Greek life is more than just a party
Virginia Tech Collegiate Times
When the topic of Greek life gets brought up, almost 100 percent of first thoughts go straight to harlequinade antics seen in “Animal House,” but there is more to it than that.


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Greece in hard spot as debt payment looms and European doubts grow

BERLIN —Greece’s new leaders have had only a month to confront their country’s dismal tangle of economic problems, but some in Europe think the troubled Mediterranean country is up against a hopeless task.


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G4S should make it easier to beat the privatisation racket | Seumas Milne

Scandals are multiplying as the outsourcing drive intensifies. Where is the political voice to reflect a growing public revulsion?

If nothing else, the spectacular failure of G4S, the world's largest security firm, to get even close to meeting its Olympics contract should at least bury the fantasy that private companies are more efficient than the public sector. While G4S staff have failed in their thousands to turn up at one Games location after another, the police and the army have had to sort out the corporate chaos.

As even G4S's Nick Buckles conceded in parliament on Monday, this is a "humiliating shambles": of epic incompetence, driven by unrelenting cost-cutting and the lodestar of shareholder value above everything. And that from a company which as Group 4 was already famous in the 1990s for its prisoner escapes, and under whose control the Angolan refugee Jimmy Mubenga notoriously died two years ago.

The fact that this outfit is already running prisons and Lincolnshire police's control room, detention cells and administration – and was poised to take over similar roles with a string of forces before the Olympics debacle – is truly alarming. But what has now become a global demonstration of the dangers of outsourcing can also be used to help turn the political tide against it.

Public opinion in Britain has always opposed privatisation. But after the G4S fiasco, even paid-up Conservatives are getting restless. The Tory MP Michael Ellis told Buckles the public was "sick of huge corporations like yours thinking they can get away with everything". And the Thatcher minister William Waldegrave warned Conservatives in Monday's Times never to "make the mistake of falling in love with free enterprise", adding that people who believe "private companies are always more efficient than the public service have never worked in real private enterprise".

Now they tell us. But of course privatisation failures are nothing new. Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, says it's "completely normal" that private contractors fail to deliver – and he's absolutely right. The G4S saga is only the latest in a series of recent outsourcing scandals: from the alleged fraud and incompetence of A4E's welfare-to-work contract, to the "staggering losses" incurred by Somerset council in a disastrous private-sector joint venture, to the shipping of vulnerable children half way across the country to private equity-owned care homes in Rochdale.

That's not to mention the exorbitant private finance initiative to build and run schools, hospitals and prisons, which, it is now estimated, will cost up to £25bn more than if the government had paid for them directly; or the £1.2bn of public money lost every year because of rail privatisation and fragmentation; or the water shortage achieved in rain-drenched southern England this summer by a privatised water company that had sold off 25 reservoirs over the past 20 years while rewarding shareholders with £5bn in dividends.

The experience of privatisation and outsourcing is that it routinely reduces service quality while failing to deliver promised savings. And where it does make early savings, it typically does so at the expense of low-paid workers' wages, jobs and conditions. Meanwhile, the public service ethos is eroded, and administration and transaction costs are driven up, as power slips from purchaser to provider and effective democratic control is lost.

Privatisation has been central to the neoliberal economic model that reigned supreme for a generation and crashed in 2008: creating profit growth out of existing provision – rather than delivering new goods and services, as entrepreneurial capitalism is supposed to do. It is a parasitic business whose main beneficiaries are taking the rest of us to the cleaners.

Most of the key companies in the outsourcing game are now not in fact specialist providers at all, but conglomerates that have mastered the skill of winning contracts, rather than running services. Why wouldn't such a racket flourish when there are such easy profits to be made and ministers and civil servants to reward with jobs? After all, it was a former privatising New Labour Home Secretary, John Reid, who walked out of government to become a G4S director.

But despite the growing revulsion against privatisation, the coalition is accelerating the outsourcing drive, while the European commission is forcing countries such as Greece and Portugal to privatise to "promote growth". The G4S experience is a warning of where all this could end up: will the army be asked, say, to cover for contractors who find themselves unable to provide a full ambulance service?

The danger, as Ajay Bhalla of Cass Business School argues, is that as it devours core services and displaces public knowledge and capacity, outsourcing becomes more difficult to reverse. Difficult, but not impossible. As the failures and costs of privatisation have become clearer in recent years, there has been a parallel trend to "remunicipalise" services and bring them back in-house. Power companies in Germany, water in France, transport and other local services in Britain – and much more in Latin America and elsewhere – have been successfully returned to the public sector.

The privatisation juggernaut isn't unstoppable. Just as energy and water were brought under public control through the "municipal socialism" of a century or more ago, services and industries can be taken into modern forms of democratic social ownership today.

But while unions can resist outsourcing on the ground and groups like UK Uncut take direct action against the privateers, the emerging consensus against a discredited neoliberalism now has to find a real voice in national politics. Labour frontbenchers, such as Maria Eagle and Jon Trickett, have started to float the case for returning rail to public ownership and a "change of direction" on public services. But after G4S, what's needed is a political sea change.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne


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