How the world sees Greece
 Greek Reporter | Greece Remembers WWII Jewish Community Greek Reporter “Greece's role in the Allies' victory has been well documented and recognized by all and it should never be forgotten. On October 28th, 1940, Greeks wrote another very important chapter of their contemporary history,” Panagopoulos said on the ... |
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 Telegraph.co.uk | Greece says EU/IMF lenders refuse to concede on reforms Reuters ATHENS (Reuters) - Greece's foreign lenders have refused to make any further concessions on changes to labour laws contested by a junior coalition partner, the country's finance minister said on Sunday, prolonging an impasse on a crucial austerity ... Germany rattled as taxpayer losses loom in Greece Lenders press for Greece to be given new debt write-off Troika proposes 150 new reforms for devastated Greece - report |
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Kostas Vaxevanis at centre of political storm after publishing names of wealthy Greeks alleged to have Swiss bank accounts
A magazine editor in Greece will appear in court after publishing the names of more than 2,000 wealthy Greeks alleged to have Swiss bank accounts, triggering a row over tax evasion that threatens the stability of the government.
Kostas Vaxevanis was arrested on Sunday, after his weekly journal, Hot Doc, printed the list of names, which including prominent members of Greece's political and business elite.
The editor was giving a live radio interview when police arrived, and broke off saying he had to go "to be arrested". At the same he tweeted about the arrest, comparing the police to German stormtroopers in the second world war. In another tweet he wrote: "They're entering my house with the prosecutor right now. They are arresting me. Spread the word."
Police officials said that Vaxevanis had illegally published personal details without proof that the people involved had broken the law. But he and other critics of the government have portrayed his arrest as part of a cover-up intended to obscure claims that the finance ministry had had the list for more than two years without taking action against those named.
"If anyone is accountable before the law then it is those ministers who hid the list, lost it and said it didn't exist. I only did my job. I am a journalist and I did my job," Vaxevanis said in the video sent to Reuters news agency.
The case has triggered a parliamentary inquiry and could provide the basis for prosecutions at a time of rising radicalism on both left and right and a sense of injustice over the widespread destitution and despair created by Greece's economic crisis set against the relative impunity of the country's rich, who have a long history of tax evasion.
George Papaconstantinou, a former finance minister, said the Greek tax authorities had failed to act on the list because they were afraid of confronting the country's elite tax evaders. He also claimed that the affair brought to light only a small part of a massive tax evasion problem that was part of what he described as a "broken and corrupt system".
The scandal has its origins in a raid in January 2009 on the French home of a former computer technician for HSBC bank's Geneva branch, Herve Falciani, accused by the Swiss of selling stolen data on the bank's clients. The French police found computer files on 130,000 potential tax evaders and, to the fury of the Swiss authorities, held on to them and began investigating them.
In mid-2010, the French intelligence service, the DGSE, informed Athens that many of those named in the Falciani dossier were Greek.
Papaconstantinou, then finance minister, asked his French counterpart at the time, Christine Lagarde, to pass it on. It arrived through diplomatic channels in the form of an unlabelled CD containing spreadsheets for the roughly 2,000 accounts now known in Greece as the "Lagarde list". What happened to it next is at the heart of the current political storm in Athens.
"I handed the head of the tax police the 20 people with the biggest balances, and who accounted for about half of the total amount on the files we got from the French authorities, and asked him to see what we could learn by looking at their profiles," Papaconstantinou told the Guardian. "He came back and told me that their profiles did not justify these kind of bank accounts in Switzerland. On the basis of this information, I asked him to go ahead and do a full investigation. I was not happy with the lack of follow-up."
As Greece faced economic meltdown, Papaconstantinou enacted a series of measures aimed at cracking down on tax evasion, but was forced out as his austerity programme became politically toxic. "Before I left the ministry in mid-2011, I handed all the files to the new head of the tax police and asked him to proceed with a full investigation," he said.
Papaconstantinou told a parliamentary inquiry last week that the French CD stayed at the ministry when he left and he did not know what had happened to it since. He has been lambasted in some parts of the Greek press for having lost it.
"I am being accused of having lost the original. I did not; I gave all the information to the tax police with instructions to investigate, so it is there on the record in electronic form," the former minister said. "The CD of course I left at the office when I left finance. I don't know where it is now, but even that is not the original. It is a copy of a CD which the French authorities have."
Papaconstantinou also rejected the argument presented to parliament by a former tax chief that the data could not have been used for an investigation as it had been illegally obtained, saying: "This information is equivalent to getting an anonymous tip. It is not permissible in court but the tax police are obliged by law to follow it up and use it in their investigations. And they did not."
Papaconstantinou argued that the tax authorities deliberately chose not to pursue information on the list. "My interpretation is they probably got scared. They looked at the names on the list and saw it was full of important people from business and publishing and decided not to go ahead without clear political instructions and cover," he said, adding that the Lagarde list was only the tip of a Greek tax evasion iceberg.
"It is not insignificant [about €1.5bn in total] but the truth is that compared with other lists it's not the treasure trove everyone is looking for," Papaconstantinou said. "There is a list from the Bank of Greece of 54,000 people who took €22bn out of the country. That is official and can be used in court. The first check found 6 billion that can't be justified and letters are going to 15,000 people on that list who will be taxed at the 45% rate."
The former finance minister said measures he took to tighten tax collection still face resistance and delay in the bureaucracy and judiciary, adding: "What we have is a corrupt and broken system."
Petros Markaris, an author and social commentator, who recently published a bestselling detective novel about a serial killer targeting tax evaders, said: "This really is a mess, and it has become a mess because the politicians have handled it so badly. This was not incompetence but because they did not want to make public what could harm them."
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Telegraph.co.uk | Germany rattled as taxpayer losses loom in Greece Telegraph.co.uk Greece must carry out a further 150 reforms, some involving a drastic loss of sovereignty. Troika payments will be held frozen in a special account under creditor control. The Troika will have power to raise taxes automatically. There must be new laws ... Troika proposes 150 new reforms for devastated Greece - report Lenders press for Greece to be given new debt write-off Spiegel: Troika Seeks 150 New Greek Reforms |
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The Troika of lenders overseeing Athens’ progress in meeting its reform programme was today reported to be pressing for a new Greek debt write-off to help ease the country’s deepening financial crisis, despite stiff opposition from Germany.
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 Sky News Australia | Greece have given everything - president Sky News Australia Greek President Carolos Papoulias says the nation's people have given all they have to drag the country out of its crippling economic crisis, and voiced hope it will end soon. Papoulias says recovery from the crisis, which has made the heavily indebted ... Papoulias Says Greece Can Solve Debt Crisis Greece celebrates anniversary of being involved in WWII |
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Prominent American sceptic who targeted bogus science, religious beliefs and the paranormal
Paul Kurtz, who has died aged 86, was one of America's most prominent and persistent sceptics, targeting religious beliefs as well as the claims of bogus science and the para normal. However, after decades of devotion to his cause, he was forced to acknowledge that his nation had become more in thrall to spiritual excesses than at any time he could remember. The public's embrace of religions and belief in God had soared.
Psychic "channellers" proliferated; television ran features hardly questioning dubious religious claims (such as a CBS programme in 1993 about the "discovery" of a piece of Noah's Ark – which turned out to be the result of a hoax); "angels" were pictured on news magazine covers; creationism thrived; millions practised the "power of prayer"; and no career politician dared admit to being a non-believer. Belief in faith healing, astrology, reincarnation and fortune-telling had all risen.
Kurtz reflected in 2000: "It is frightening that what was once considered fringe thinking has now entered mainstream thought." The reason, he speculated in the magazine he founded and edited, Free Inquiry, was that the "frenzy" of US culture and daily life had caused people to latch on to religious and paranormal views as a compensation for their chaotic lives.
Although often labelled an atheist, Kurtz wrote in Multi-Secularism: A New Agenda (2010) that he considered "a sceptic about religious claims" to be a more appropriate term because "it emphasises inquiry. The concept of inquiry contains an important constructive component, for inquiry leads to scientific wisdom – human understanding of our place in the cosmos and the ever-increasing fund of human knowledge."
He believed that the sceptical inquirer is dubious of five claims regarding religion: "1. that God exists; 2. that he is a person; 3. that our ultimate moral principles are derived from God; 4. that faith in God will provide eternal salvation; and 5. that one cannot be good without belief in God."
Kurtz exposed dozens of fraudulent healers, tricksters, shamans and mystagogues through the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (later known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), which he founded in 1976. His most successful achievement was probably the formation in 1969 of Prometheus Books, a publishing house devoted to scientific-rationalistic thinking and the foremost of its kind in the world. Named after the Greek mythological figure who mocked the gods, it published many of Kurtz's own works.
Free Inquiry was published by another of his creations, the Council for Secular Humanism, based in Amherst, New York. Into old age, Kurtz travelled to international conferences, wrote editorials, appeared on television and published prolifically (a total of more than 40 books). Throughout all of this he fended off several lawsuits and received daily batches of abusive letters. These came mainly from those describing themselves as Christians, although Kurtz was equally sceptical of Judaism and Islam. After the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, he wrote in Free Inquiry: "Unfortunately, the basic tenets of Islam can be interpreted to support terrorism."
Although brought up by non-believer middle-class parents in Newark, New Jersey, where he was born, Kurtz emphasised that on matters such as extrasensory perception and even UFOs he had an open mind until well into adulthood, when the evidence persuaded him otherwise. After high school he fought on the western front as a sergeant in the second world war and then studied at a college in Shrivenham (then in Berkshire and now in Oxfordshire).
Returning to the US, he graduated from New York University in 1948 and then attended Columbia University for a master's and his PhD in philosophy, which he obtained in 1952. His dissertation was entitled The Problems of Value Theory. He taught philosophy at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, a conservative institution, from 1952 to 1959, then at Union College, New York, from 1961 to 1965.
In 1960 he married Claudine Vial, with whom he had four children. A fluent French speaker, Kurtz became visiting professor for one year at Besançon University, in France, in 1965. Then from that year until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1991 he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The better known of his books were The New Scepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (1992), The Courage to Become: The Virtues of Humanism (1997), Skeptical Odysseys: Personal Accounts by the World's Leading Paranormal Inquirers (2001), which he edited, and Skepticism and Humanism: The New Paradigm (also 2001).
He is survived by Claudine; his daughters, Valerie, Patricia and Anne, and son, Jonathan; and five grandchildren.
• Paul Winter Kurtz, philosopher and publisher, born 21 December 1925; died 20 October 2012
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 Greek Reporter | Papoulias Says Greece Can Solve Debt Crisis Greek Reporter Greek President Karolos Papoulias said on Oct. 28 – Oxi Day – that he believes the debt-ridden country will overcome the current economic crisis which threatens it with chaotic default, although he didn't say how, and as the economy continues to flounder. Greece celebrates anniversary of being involved in WWII |
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Munich Re CEO: Renewed Greek Debt Writedown Must Be Avoided -Report Fox Business Munich Re CEO: Renewed Greek Debt Writedown Must Be Avoided -Report. Published October 28, 2012. Dow Jones Newswires. A renewed writedown of debt owed by financially ailing Greece must be avoided or capital markets will lose all trust in ... |
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ECB's Nowotny: Giving Greece More Time Makes Sense, But is Political Decision NASDAQ FRANKFURT--Greece has good chances to overcome its debt crisis provided it tackles its structural problems and receives support from its partners in the European Union, European Central Bank Governing Council Member Ewald Nowotny said Sunday. ECB'S Nowotny says Spain has no immediate need of help |
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Investors Buying in Greece Quest Greek Islands I investors buying in greece nvestors buying in Greece: Greece for a number of years has long been one of the more popular tourist destinations globally. However, during the last few years despite the crisis in Greece, an increasing amount of buyers ... |
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Greek liaison program proves a win with police Corvallis Gazette Times As the program developed some momentum, Hurley recalled an occasion in which member of a Greek house came to him, advised him of plans for a social function and gave him the names of three frat members to call if there were problems. Again, Hurley ... |
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Greek people have given everything, says president The Sun Daily ATHENS (Oct 28, 2012): Greek President Carolos Papoulias said Sunday the country has to exit its crippling economic crisis soon because the nation's people have given all they have. Papoulias said recovery from the crisis, which has made the heavily ... |
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