How the world sees Greece
Olympiakos seal 40th Greek title euronews ATHENS (Reuters) – Olympiakos Piraeus clinched their 40th Greek title with a 3-0 derby victory over AEK Athens at the Georgios Karaiskakis stadium on Sunday. Two goals from Greece defender Avraam Papadopoulos and one from Algerian winger Djamel ... Olympiakos clinches 40th Greek league championship |
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Cyprus to seek Greek aid to rescue banks Financial Times A senior Greek banker who declined to be identified said: “This transfer would be hard to justify, given that there's barely enough funding available for the Greek banks, while the economy is still deteriorating, with more non-performing loans in the ... |
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Business secretary accused of failing to know difference between acting like a politician and an economics commentator
Measures to galvanise investment spending, as well as reforms to the funding for lending scheme aimed at helping small businesses, are to be included in next week's budget, but unfunded increases in borrowing proposed by the business secretary, Vince Cable, have been ruled out, senior Liberal Democrats said.
Some senior Lib Dems are furious with Cable, accusing him of failing to know the difference between acting like a politician and an economics commentator. One cabinet minister said: "The trust of the markets takes years to establish, and can be lost very quickly. We are going to stick to our plans."
In two interventions last week, including a Guardian interview, Cable said the balance of risk had shifted in favour of a direct government capital injection into housebuilding of the order of 1 % of GDP. Treasury ministers responded: "The budget will contain no unfunded extra tax cuts and no extra borrowing."
In an oblique riposte to Cable's call for a multibillion-pound direct investment, Nick Clegg on Sunday said: "We will and must do more to mobilise investment into our long-term infrastructure needs." The Lib Dem leader said that Cable and the Liberal Democrat Treasury secretary, Danny Alexander, were agreed on this point. But he also warned that there were "no cost-free, risk-free ways of finding such huge sums of money. Not at a time when Labour left the cupboard bare and we still have the second highest deficit in Europe, behind only Greece."
He continued: "Balancing the books is a judgment, not a science. And our plan has always allowed room for manoeuvre."
The budget will instead provide another modest switch from current to capital spending, as well as efforts to make the existing funding for lending scheme more effective. Funding for lending, a form of government guarantee to the banks to encourage them to lend, has helped increase cash for mortgages but has had little impact on lending to small and medium sized businesses.
Shadow chancellor Ed Balls said the scheme should be reformed so that banks can access the lowest rates of funding only if they increase lending to businesses as well as overall lending. It is likely the government will introduce a reform of this kind.
Treasury ministers also says cabinet colleagues who continue to increase public pressure over cuts to their departmental budget in the separate summer spending review will find out disruptive public lobbying will make them the biggest losers. The Treasury was praising the home secretary, Theresa May, for making her demands in private, unlike the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, and Cable.
Specific proposed departmental budgets have not been sent out by the Treasury, but the "Quad" of senior ministers –David Cameron, Clegg, Alexander and George Osborne – were looking for an extra £10bn in cuts, and were certain the savings could be found in the small number of departments that have unprotected budgets. Defence and the police service remain targets, as does ending the duplication of public services through the introduction of so-called community budgets.
Cabinet sources defend the ringfencing of both health and schools on grounds of the demographic pressures both services are facing.
The Quad is due to meet on Monday with a package on housing to be considered for possible announcement before the budget. A large-scale subsidy on child care is also expected around the time of the budget, and is deemed to be the single biggest vote winner in the proposals.
Clegg has advised Osborne that the budget should be a relatively no-frills event, since it comes close to what was effectively a mini-budget in his December autumn statement.
But with the economy flatlining, Osborne is under pressure to produce measures to boost growth.
Ministers in the Department of Communities and Local Government are arguing that rules on public borrowing could be changed to allow them to borrow to build houses without the amount appearing on government books. Local authorities are also lobbying for the existing borrowing caps to be dropped.
A Labour attempt to cajole the Lib Dems into voting together to defeat the government on the so-called "mansion tax" in the Commons on Wednesday is set to fail.
Lib Dems said no formal decision had been made, but the schools minister, David Laws, revealed his party's disdain for Labour's parliamentary tactics.
He said: "If we flounced off every time an opposition party for opportunistic reasons put down motions in the House of Commons that either backed the Tory position or the Lib Dem position we'd end up in a complete shambles, so we have to agree policy for each budget with our coalition partners."
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 Times of India | Eldorado Gold Protests In Greece Prompt Vancouver Denial Huffington Post Canada VANCOUVER - A Vancouver mining company says its planned gold mine in Greece that has spurred local opposition isn't a threat to the environment. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets Saturday in Greece's second largest city of Thessaloniki to ... Large protest in Greece against Canadian goldmine project Thousands of Greeks protest planned gold mine Gold Mine Protest Draws 10000 |
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Takis Athanasopoulos quits after being charged with dereliction of duty in former role as chief exectutive of public utility PPC
In another setback for Greece's reforms, the country's privatisation chief Takis Athanasopoulos has resigned after only a few months in the job, after being charged with dereliction of duty in his former role as chief executive of the public utility PPC.
An official at the Greek finance ministry, Giorgos Mergos, also stepped down after being charged. Both men denied knowingly commissioning a loss-making plant when on the board of PPC, which led to losses of more than €100m for the state-owned power company.
Athanasopoulos said he welcomed the charges. "It gives me the opportunity to prove that the interest of the PPC and the state were fully served," he wrote in a resignation letter, insisting his decision to step down had been motivated by the desire not to further impede Greece's problem-plagued privatisation process.
The Greek finance minister, Yannis Stournaras, is under pressure to clean up corruption from international creditors keeping Greece's debt-stricken economy afloat.
The departures are a fresh blow for the privatisation agency following successive changes of administration since its creation two years ago.
The sale of state assets is among the issues being discussed between Stournaras and visiting inspectors from the country's "troika" of lenders at the EU, ECB and IMF.
The talks will determine whether Greece receives €2.8bn aid at the end of March. The country's debt load is expected to rise to a staggering 185% of GDP this year.
Greece's privatisation programme aimed to raise €50bn by 2015 through the sale of publicly owned properties ranging from islands to former royal palaces and hotels. But foot-dragging, red tape and at times outright resistance have repeatedly obstructed progress, with Athens reducing the target to €19bn by 2015. A mere €1.6bn has been raised since the debt crisis began three years ago.
The resignations come just as headway was beginning to be made with the entity recently completing its first international deal in almost 15 years, leasing a prime plot on the popular island of Corfu.
Last month, the Fund succeeded in luring back Qatar to the table with Doha announcing that it would participate in an international tender for the development of Athens' former airport at Hellenikon, the country's biggest privatisation project.
Athanasopoulos, who faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, is expected to be replaced on Monday.
Amid popular anger at an elite perceived to have brought Greece to the brink of bankruptcy, prosecutions of politicians and businessmen have accelerated in recent months. Public figures, including the former mayor of Thessaloniki and former defence minister, have received long prison sentences after being found guilty of fraud and corruption.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said at the weekend that while Greece's predicament has improved dramatically since the summer "it is out of intensive care but it is not out of the hospital yet."
Highlighting the country's fragile state, one of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's senior allies insisted at the weekend that Athens remained the biggest risk for the euro zone despite the stabilization of its economic and political scene.
"The greatest risk for the euro is still Greece … I still believe that Greece's exit would be a possible long-term alternative for Europe and for Greece itself," Alexander Dobrindt, a leading conservative told Die Welt am Sonnrag newspaper.
"We have created a situation that gives Greece a chance to return to stability and restore competitiveness. But I still hold that, if Greece is not able or willing to restore stability, then there must be a way outside the euro zone."
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Panels from a seaside mansion at Herculaneum, which like Pompeii was overwhelmed by Vesuvius in AD79, go on display
Shimmering as if still lit by the Mediterranean sun, two spectacular Roman marble panels have been reunited at the British Museum for the first time in almost 2,000 years.
Both come from a seaside mansion in Herculaneum, the town overwhelmed by a torrent of boiling mud from Vesuvius, when the wind changed direction 12 hours after Pompeii had already choked to death. They will be seen in the most eagerly awaited archaeological exhibition in decades, on life and death in the Roman towns when it opens at the museum later this month.
The remains of the owner of the palatial villa may still lie on the ancient shoreline, now half a mile inland. In AD79 the sea was the beautiful view that his sumptuously decorated room looked out on, with its fourth wall open to the sea.
It used to be thought that unlike the thousands known to have perished at Pompeii, most of the population of Herculaneum had escaped. Then in the mid 20th century, after more than 200 years of excavation at the site, archaeologists found the shore littered with the bodies of those who left it too late. More must lie in the town's main port, which is still buried under a layer of petrified ash up to 30m thick.
"The last person to see these pieces together like this was the master of the house, in AD79 – it's an awesome and slightly eerie thought," said Paul Roberts, curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition is already creating a buzz, with more than 34,000 tickets sold. Roberts compares it to the famous Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum in 1972, when as a teenager he queued for half a day before the era of online bookings and timed admission tickets.
Many of the objects have never been exhibited even in Italy, and some – such as one of the marble reliefs – were only excavated in the last few years. Others are among the treasures of the national archaeology museum in Naples, including a startlingly lifelike fresco portrait of a baker and his wife from Pompeii and a marble from Herculaneum, startling to modern eyes, of the god Pan having sex with a nannygoat.
Treasures are being unpacked in Bloomsbury every day. At midnight on Monday an entire garden will arrive, fountains, statues, singing birds in flowering bushes, all painted on huge panels of plaster. The giant packing crates fitted through the museum doors with inches to spare. It was one of the most beautiful room interiors found in Pompeii, surely the setting for a happy life – except the exhibition will also display the pathetic casts of the bodies of its last owners, man, woman, tiny children, found huddled together under the stairs.
The first of the marble reliefs, an ecstatic and tipsy celebration of the god Bacchus, was found at Herculaneum in a controversial excavation 30 years ago. The excavation was launched to find more of the House of the Papyri, an extraordinary complex the size of a small village, most of which is still buried under the modern town. When it was discovered in the 18th century almost 2,000 papyrus scrolls, a princely library, were recovered along with wonderful sculptures some of which are coming to the exhibition.
The 20th-century excavations failed to find any more scrolls, but did uncover a previously unknown villa terraced down to the sea and one of the marble panels. The reliefs, in the classical Greek style – possibly carved by a Greek artist for a Roman master – were wildly fashionable among the wealthy of Herculaneum and the Roman elite. There are records of the philosopher and statesman Cicero seeking such panels to decorate his home.
It was feared the excavation had destabilised the site, so three years ago the American-financed Herculaneum Conservation Project, which has been working in the town for the last decade, returned for consolidation work. On the last day of the work, mud caked on a broken wall fell away revealing the second panel, in pristine condition. It has never been exhibited before.
Roberts suspects there must have been a third panel, on a wall that was swept into the sea below in the eruption that ended the life of the town and ensured its place in history. "Like so much of the town and its people, the third panel must have been crushed to atoms – we're so astonishingly lucky in what has been left to us to bear witness to what has been lost."
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 IBNLive | Nigerian Militants Say 7 Hostages Dead Wall Street Journal ACCRA, Ghana—A newly emerged militant sect in Nigeria said it killed seven foreign hostages, a claim the Greek and Italian foreign ministries confimed Sunday, as a violent campaign targeting Europeans across North and West Africa escalates. The seven ... British hostage 'killed' in Nigeria in 'act of cold-blooded murder' Nigeria hostage killings 'cold-blooded murder' says William Hague Foreign hostages feared killed in Nigeria |
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 Kathimerini | Chinese products bear 'Made in Greece' tag, avoid high levies Kathimerini Hundreds of Chinese products bear the label “Made in Greece” as they are manufactured using parts produced in China which are then assembled in this country to facilitate their circulation in the European Union, with the blessing of the European ... Europe rethinks appeal to China's tourists |
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 Greek Reporter | Foreign ministry expresses condolences over Greek hostage's death in Nigeria Shanghai Daily (subscription) ATHENS, March 10 (Xinhua) -- Greek Foreign Ministry said on Sunday that available information pointed to the death of a Greek national abducted in Nigeria along with six others in February by a local terrorist group. "Foreign Minister Dimitris ... Nigerian Terrorists Say Greek Hostage Killed Nigeria: Islamic militants Ansaru kill 7 foreign hostages UPDATE 1-Italy, Greece say hostages in Nigeria were killed |
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 MINING.com | Vancouver resource company defends controversial Greek gold mine project Victoria Times Colonist She says the mine, which is set to begin digging soon, will follow the necessary European Union and Greek environmental rules. Activists say the mine will put out toxic substances and throttle the local tourism industry. But others living near the mine ... Greek police used excessive violence and tear gas against anti-mining ... Village residents opposed to gold mine Greek clash with riot police, claim ... Greek police react brutally to anti-goldmine protests |
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Greek Bailout Talks Drag On Wall Street Journal Government officials signaled on Sunday that representatives from the European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, known as the troika, were expected to stay in the Greek capital for several more days to discuss plans to ... |
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 BBC News | British hostage 'killed' in Nigeria BBC News A British construction worker held hostage in Nigeria since 16 February "is likely to have been killed" by his captors, Foreign Secretary William Hague has said. Brendan Vaughan is one of seven foreign nationals thought to have been killed. Mr Hague ... British hostage killed because kidnappers thought UK was launching rescue ... Italy, Greece Confirm 7 Foreign Hostages Killed in Nigeria Nigeria greets killing of 7 foreign hostages with silence |
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 FRANCE 24 | Athens Mosque Will Cost Greece $1.1M Greek Reporter Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus said he was vehemently opposed to having Greece build a mosque who said it should be declared unconstitutional and anti-Greek. The idea of a mosque is still touchy in Greece, which suffered under 400 years of Ottoman ... Greece finally getting tough on corrupt politicians: experts |
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 CBC.ca | Italy and Greece confirm hostages killed in Nigeria Reuters By Gavin Jones and Renee Maltezou. ROME/ATHENS | Sun Mar 10, 2013 1:12pm EDT. ROME/ATHENS (Reuters) - Seven foreign hostages kidnapped last month by a Nigerian Islamist group from a construction firm's compound have been killed, the Italian ... A Nigerian Islamist militant group's claims to have killed seven foreign hostages ... Kidnapped Foreign Nationals Killed in Nigeria, Diplomats Say 7 foreign hostages killed in Nigeria |
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Another Greek Jailbreak, 7 Escape Greek Reporter jail Seven convicts serving sentences for a variety of crimes, including drug dealing and human trafficking, escaped from the low-security Feres Prison in northern Greece on March 10, setting police to scramble in a search and set up roadblocks in the ... |
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