How the world sees Greece
 New Europe | Doing Business in Greece New Europe The investment opportunities in Greece in the context of the economic crisis were the focus of an event organised by the Greek Delegation of the EPP Group in the premises of the European Parliament. Talking to politicians, diplomats and businessmen ... |
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 Eurosport.com AU | Greek league leader Olympiakos no longer undefeated after 3-2 home loss to ... Victoria Times Colonist ATHENS, Greece - Olympiakos lost for the first time this season, going down 3-2 at home against Atromitos in the Greek league Sunday after Elini Dimoutsos scored the winner in the 79th minute. Atromitos had opened the scoring in the opening minute ... UPDATE 1-Soccer-Olympiakos appoint Michel after first league defeat Asteras ties Panathinaikos 2-2, stays in 2nd place |
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 Greek Reporter | Greek Bookstore On World Best List Greek Reporter 455533_Athina The bookstore Papasotiriou at Panepistimiou street, Athens, is included in the list with the 49 best bookstores around the world. It is in the compilation Bookshops: Long Established and The Most Fashionable Ones, from the Brown ... |
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 Kathimerini | New 28-month low for Greek bond spread Kathimerini Greek bonds have experienced a steady increase in their price since December as investment interest in them among foreign funds continues unabated. This is attributed to expectations for an improvement in the prospects of the Greek economy and the ... |
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 FRANCE 24 | Greek Dockworkers Extend Strike Wall Street Journal ATHENS—Greek dockworkers said on Sunday that they will continue to strike until the middle of the week, extending the latest bout of protests that are testing the coalition government's resolve to push through changes demanded by international creditors. Greek seamen to continue strike, disrupting ferry links Greek seamen, farmers protest budget cuts, reforms Greek Dock Workers Strike for 2nd Day |
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 FRANCE 24 | Images of Turks in the Greek Press during the 1996 Imia (Kardak) Crisis Balkanalysis.com Balkanalysis.com editor's note: readers who enjoy this insightful analysis of Greek media representation of the Imia crisis are strongly recommended to also read our review of Greek Military Intelligence and the Crescent, a book which concentrates on ... In Greek parliament, standards slip as tensions rise Greek neo-Nazis hold torch-lit march through Athens Golden dawn vows to put a Greek flag on disputed Kardak islets |
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When the man known to his activist girlfriend as John Barker disappeared, she embarked on a journey that led her to the former home of a child whose name he used as an alias
John Barker was an eight-year-old boy who died of leukaemia in 1968. Nineteen years later his identity was quietly resurrected by the police. The man who adopted the boy's identity, claiming it as his own, was John Dines, an undercover sergeant in the Metropolitan police's special branch.
In 1987 Dines was tasked with posing as an anti-capitalist protester, feeding intelligence to his handlers in a secret unit called the special demonstration squad (SDS). It was a controversial and morally dubious deployment that lasted five years and will now return to haunt him.
Like many SDS officers, Dines had a long-term girlfriend who was a political activist. She does not want to be identified and has asked to be referred to as Clare.
Her story lays bare the emotional trauma experienced by women whom police have described as "collateral" victims of their spy operations, as well as the risks police were taking by adopting the identities of dead children.
In 1990 the man Clare knew as John Barker asked to borrow money so he could fly to New Zealand for his mother's funeral. "The night before he got the flight to go there, he stayed at my place and kind of poured his heart out. We became emotionally close. When he got back, we got together."
There was no funeral in New Zealand and Dines had no need to borrow money. But Clare had known Dines as a fellow protester for three years and had no reason to suspect him. The couple would end up in an intimate relationship for two years.
"He said he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me and I was madly in love with him," she said. "He said he wanted us to have kids. He used to say he had once seen an elderly Greek couple sitting on a veranda gazing into the sunset, and that he pictured us growing old like that."
By the summer of 1991, as part of an exit strategy, Dines began exhibiting symptoms of a mental breakdown.
"He kept talking about how he had nobody left apart from me," Clare said. "His parents had both died. He had no brothers and sisters. The only woman that he had ever loved before me, a woman called Debbie, had left him. He said he was convinced I was going to do the same to him."
Dines gave the impression he wanted to run away to escape inner demons. "I saw him crying loads," Clare said. "He told me that he had thrown all of his mother's jewellery into a river because he thought she never loved him. He told me his parents had abused him."
In March 1992 an emotional-sounding Dines called from Heathrow airport saying he was about to fly to South Africa. After that, Clare received two letters with South African postmarks. Then her boyfriend vanished altogether.
Clare was left distraught and confused. "I was very worried about his mental state," she said. "I was also sick with worry that he might kill himself."
Clare contacted the British consulate in South Africa and frantically phoned hostels she thought he may have stayed in Johannesburg. She later hired a private investigator who could find no trace of Dines.
It was the start of a journey for the truth that would last almost two decades and eventually take her to New Zealand. It was not until 2010 that she found out for sure that the man she had loved was a police spy.
For some of the time that Clare thought her boyfriend was missing abroad, he was actually working just a few miles away. When his undercover work finished, Dines changed his mullet-style haircut and returned to a desk job at the Met headquarters in Scotland Yard where, according to a colleague, he appeared "very miserable".
In her search for clues, one of the first things Clare did was locate a copy of what she assumed was her boyfriend's birth certificate. The document confirmed the details he had always given her: it named a city in the Midlands where he was born in January 1960. She had no idea that the identity was a forgery, or that the real John Barker had died as a boy.
In April 1993, desperate after a year of searching, Clare decided to visit Barker's family home in the hope of finding any surviving relatives, but when she knocked on the door of the terrace house there was no answer. She went back later but the occupants said the family no longer lived there.
Looking back, she wonders what would have occurred if the dead child's parents had opened the door. "It would have been horrendous," she said. "It would have completely freaked them out to have someone asking after a child who died 24 years earlier."
It was another 18 months before Clare decided to inspect the national death records. "I just suddenly got this instinct. It was a whim: I thought, I'm going to go in there and look through the death records."
She recalls her horror when she discovered the real John Barker was dead. "It sent a chill down my spine," she said. "When I got the certificate itself, it was so clear. The same person. The same parents. The same address. But he had died as an eight-year-old boy."
The Guardian has been unable to find surviving relatives of the child.
The discovery turned Clare's world upside down. "It was like a bereavement but it was not something I could talk to people about. Now suddenly he didn't exist. This was a man I had known for five years, who I had lived with for two years. How could I trust anybody again?"
Clare now knew her boyfriend had lied about his identity, but still had no idea who he was. The idea that he might have been a police spy crossed her mind, but he might also have worked in corporate espionage or had a hidden criminal past. It was another 10 years of searching before she got closer to the truth.
Clare had two clues to go on. One was the name of a woman in New Zealand who Dines had told her was an aunt. The other was a letter in which he had made a curious reference to his biological father being a man he had never met, called Jim Dines.
The woman in New Zealand was not his aunt but, bizarrely, the mother of Dines's real wife. Stranger still, Jim Dines was, in fact, the police officer's real father and had brought him up in London.
Clare has no idea why the undercover police officer chose to compromise his deployment by giving Clare cryptic references to people in his real life. Perhaps he was psychologically traumatised by his dual identities and wanted to leave a trail that would allow Clare to find him.
Whatever his reason, the clues led Clare to a public archive in New Zealand. It was there, in 2003, that she made a crucial connection: a document that linked Dines with the woman he married, Debbie.
Clare instantly realised they must have been a married couple. Back in London, she ordered the couple's wedding certificate. "What hit me like a ton of bricks is that he listed his occupation as a police officer," she said. "When I read that, I felt utterly sick and really violated. It ripped me apart basically, just reading that."
Clare was now agonisingly close to the truth. She knew that Dines was a police officer when he married his wife in 1977. But there was still a possibility that he gave up his job before becoming a political activist.
She shared the evidence with friends and family. Some cautioned her against concluding Dines had been a police spy. "I remember my dad and others said: 'You're being paranoid – that would never happen in this country.'"
In 2010 she was contacted by a woman who had recently divorced a police officer who had worked undercover for the SDS shortly after Dines. The woman said her ex-husband had revealed that Dines was a fellow spy.
The Met refused to comment on the Dines case, adding: "We neither confirm nor deny the identity of any individual alleged to have been in a covert role."
Dealing with the confirmation has been an emotional ordeal for Clare. "Although it was massively painful, there was a sense of relief that I finally knew the truth. I didn't have to keep wondering." For nearly 20 years she hoped that, despite his betrayal, Dines may have genuinely loved her. It was only recently that she decided his love was also fake.
"I got out all the old letters that he sent me and read them again, with the knowledge he was an undercover police officer," she said. "What had once seemed like heart-wrenching stories in these letters, disclosures that made me really worried about his wellbeing, were completely false. That is manipulation. It is abuse."
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Threetime PM promises to refund €4bn proceeds from loathed property tax if his rightwing coalition wins wide-open elections
Silvio Berlusconi has been accused by opponents of spouting "dangerous electoral propaganda" after he vowed to ease the tax burden on austerity-stricken Italians if his rightwing coalition wins elections later this month.
With only three weeks to go before the country goes to the polls, the threetime prime minister is gaining ground on centre-left frontrunners in what he described on Sunday as his "last great electoral and political battle". One opinion poll released on Friday had his grouping within five points of the Democratic Party (PD)-led coalition.
In a speech aimed at winning over the large number of undecided voters, the billionaire media mogul cast himself once again as a friend of the people who would break with the agenda of technocrat prime minister Mario Monti.
The centrepiece of a series of measures announced in Milan was a promise not only to abolish a loathed property tax but also to refund Italians the money paid for it during 2012 – an exercise that would cost the treasury an estimated €4bn (£3.5bn).
"This tax caused Italian families worry, anxiety, fear of the future," said Berlusconi, describing the refund as "an act of peace" from the state to the people. Known as the IMU, the tax on first homes has been highly unpopular ever since Monti imposed it in 2011. Berlusconi has already abolished it once, upon returning to power in 2008.
The 76-year-old, who has said he will be finance minister rather than prime minister if his alliance pulls off an unlikely triumph, also said a rightwing government would abolish, over the course of five years, a regional tax on business. He promised not to increase VAT and said that, "above all", there would be no "wealth tax" on high earners.
The speech was met with a standing ovation from party chiefs and supporters but with stinging criticism from Berlusconi's opponents who accused him of irresponsible electoral trickery that Italy's stagnant and struggling economy cannot afford.
The country – in recession for the fourth time since 2001 – has the second-highest public debt-to-gross domestic product ratio in the eurozone, behind Greece. Unemployment has risen from 8.4% in 2011 to 11.2% in December.
Monti, whose eclectic group of centrist parties is lagging behind in the polls, said: "Berlusconi governed for so many years and kept none of his promises. Moreover, he created many problems, so much so that he to leave [office] … Italians have good memories."
Rosy Bindi of the PD denounced the speech as "dangerous electoral propaganda", while Pier Ferdinando Casini, the head of the Union of Christian Democrats (UDC) and former Berlusconi ally, said the former premier was "a great salesman [who] would be capable of selling anyone a car without a motor".
But the man himself was defiant. "We think we are close to an historic result," he said. "Simply put, we are sure we are going to win."
Berlusconi was forced to stand down as prime minister at the end of 2011 by a combination of personal scandal and economic crisis, and his Freedom People (PDL) party supported Monti's government until December, approving nearly all the technocrats' austerity measures.
But Berlusconi now says that, instead of reviving the Italian economy, tax hikes and other measures have merely served to cause unemployment to rise and consumption to fall. He claimed he would cover the revenue lost by the refund with other measures including a reduction of state funding to political parties and a tax, to be agreed with Switzerland, on financial activities by Italian citizens in the neighbouring country.
A SkyTG24-Tecne opinion poll published at the end of last week put Berlusconi's right-wing coalition on 28.7%, just 4.9 points behind Pier Luigi Bersani's centre-left grouping on 33.6%. The same poll had Monti's centrists on 13.8%, beaten into fourth by comedian-turned-politician Beppe Grillo, whose Five Star Movement was on 15.7%.
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Greece's Venizelos to Stay in Hospital for One Day, Pasok Says Bloomberg Evangelos Venizelos, leader of Greece's socialist Pasok party, was admitted to hospital today in the country's second-largest city of Thessaloniki for a scheduled health check, Pasok said. Following Venizelos's admission, it was declared necessary for ... |
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Greece rejigs taxation of gambling monopoly OPAP Chicago Tribune ATHENS (Reuters) - Cash-strapped Greece on Sunday introduced a tax-free threshold on small gambling winnings, as it tries to increase tax receipts from gambling monopoly OPAP without hurting its sales. According to a legislative amendment to be ... |
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ATHENS (Reuters) - Greek seamen extended a strike to protest against government austerity for a further 48 hours on Sunday, meaning dozens of islands will have been cut off from the mainland for six days. Farmers also briefly disrupted traffic on major motorways across Greece in the latest wave of protest over budget cuts and labor reform that is needed to satisfy international lenders. Greece's biggest labor union has called a general 24-hour strike for February 20. ...
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What Ontario can learn from Greece Troy Media 3, 2013/ Troy Media/ – Greece, experiencing a massive fiscal crisis rooted in rampant debt which is resulting in cuts to public spending and services and a decline in quality of life, is an intriguing fiscal example for Ontario, given it has a ... |
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 Press TV | Greek seamen, farmers protest government cuts, reforms Fox Business Reuters. ATHENS – Greek seamen extended a strike to protest government austerity for a further 48 hours on Sunday, meaning that dozens of islands will have been cut off from the mainland for six days. Farmers also briefly disrupted traffic on several ... Greek transport workers, doctors strike over austerity Greek Dock Workers Strike for 2nd Day Greek workers hold demo to demand release of union members |
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Greek Gold Mining Plans Raise Hopes, Fears Greek Reporter goldprotest_390_2411 A gold mining operation planned for northern Greece has sparked a debate between those who see it as potential job bonanza during a period of record unemployment and environmentalists who fear it will ruin the area and hurt ... |
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FRANCE 24 | In Greek parliament, standards slip as tensions rise FRANCE 24 Greek members of parliament stand in the chamber in Athens, on November 4, 2011. Elections in June brought in a host of new lawmakers from across the political spectrum -- including many from the radical left and far-right -- as voters punished ... Golden dawn vows to put a Greek flag on disputed Kardak islets Thousands of extreme-right supporters march in Athens to commemorate 1996 ... Greek neo-Nazis hold torch-lit march through Athens |
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Rush-Henrietta's Bay Barley's super shot ranks No. 1 on ESPN Rochester Democrat and Chronicle Rush-Henrietta's Bay Barley hit a game-winning 3-point shot from his knees while spinning around near midcourt to lift the Royal Comets to a 57-54 win over Greece Athena at the Rochester Area Players Classic. The shot was selected by ESPN as the play ... |
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 Jakarta Globe | Greece travel outlook: Lower prices, less tourists NWAOnline (subscription) I keep getting asked if Greece is “safe” for travelers — a question that feels absurd the instant you arrive there. Ask anyone who has been to Greece recently, and you'll learn that safety concerns have been played up by Greek and international media ... Athens: Back to the Cradle of Europe |
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 Cyprus Mail | Surtitles light the way for non-Greek speakers Cyprus Mail WOULD you like to go to the theatre more often but find it's all Greek to you? Greek speakers and the hearing impaired can now enjoy the Cyprus theatre organisation's (THOC) Greek-language productions featuring 'surtitles' projected above the theatre ... |
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