Back to Work: Greece Deletes Computer Leave

Wall Street JournalBack to Work: Greece Deletes Computer LeaveWall Street JournalATHENS—Greek civil servants stand to lose the six extra days of paid vacation they get each year—just for using a computer—after the government moved Friday to rescind a privilege that has been around for more than two decades. The bonus, known as ...Greece's civil servants who use computers lose extra paid holidaysToronto StarGreece axes holiday bonus for computer use in civil serviceYahoo!7 NewsThe Dream of the European Union: Greece Under the Rule of TroikaHuffington Post (blog)Press TV -Greek Reporterall 16 news articles »

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Life Sentence Sought For Tsochatzopoulos

It's been a hard fall for disgraced former Greek defense minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos, one of the founding members of the fading PASOK Socialists. ATHENS - A figurehead for generations of political corruption, former Greek defense minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos stole so much money from defense contracts he couldn't keep track of it, prosecutors in his money-laundering trial in asking ...

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Workers Lose Holiday Bonus For Computer Use

Greek civil servants who used computers for at least five hours a day instead of manual paperwork will lose a perk of six paid days off a year under reforms being undertaken by the government on the orders of international lenders. The bonus has been eliminated by Administrative Reform and e-Governance Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis who said the law which allowed it, passed 24 years ago in the ...

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Ex-Minister Mantelis Tried Over Siemens Scandal

Greece’s crackdown on corruption is continuing with the prosecution of former Transport Minister Tasos Mantelis, along with another four people on charges of being involved in the Siemens bribery scandal, according to the decision of the Council of Appeals Court Judges on Sept. 13. Mantelis faces charges of accepting bribes and money laundering. The sum is said to be 450,000 German marks ...

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Aristotle’s Trail Open To The Public

According to Greek Travel Pages, Aristotle’s Walk,’ the first of eight historically-based walks in the Greek peninsula of Chalkidiki, was presented to the public by the Mount Athos Area Organization, a tourism promotion group in northern Greece. The trail of Aristotle, as Greek Travel Pages (GTP) website reports, starts from the EU-recognized Natura 2000 network at Aristotle’s ...

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Stock investors opted for a long weekend

In a bourse session that stood out from the rest of the week, stocks saw very little action, with a small majority slipping marginally lower as investors seemed to have taken a long weekend. The absence of any developments concerning Greece in ...

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Greece to buck tourism trend

By Stathis Kousounis Against the backdrop of an expected general decline in global tourism next year, Greece is hoping for record revenues from foreign visitors next year, according to sector professionals.A recent survey by the ...

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Cyprus bicommunal start-ups get awards from Stelios foundation

For a fifth consecutive year, the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation of Stelios Haji-Ioannou awarded a total of 100,000 euros to 10 start-up businesses set up by at least one Greek Cypriot and one Turkish Cypriot.This ...

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Athens plots effective use of EU funds

By Evgenia Tzortzi The government is employing two parallel resource management strategies as it tries to achieve the fastest possible absorption of the 18.4 billion euros approved for Greece in the context of the next European Union subsidy period of 2014 to 2020.Athens has ensured that the second National Strategic Reference Framework, or NSRF II, will be funded by 90 percent from Brussels, a ...

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Russell Brand and the GQ awards: 'It's amazing how absurd it seems'

The comedian on his evening at the GQ awards, from which he was ejected after cracking a joke about sponsor Hugo Boss

Last week, Russell Brand was in hot water again after cracking a Nazi joke at the expense of GQ award sponsors, Hugo Boss. Here, he gives his side of the story.

I have had the privilege of scuba diving. I did it once on holiday and I'm aware that it's one of those subjects that people can get pretty boring and sincere about, and sincerity, for we British, is no state in which to dwell, so I'll be brief. The scuba dive itself was numenistic enough, a drenched heaven; coastal shelves and their staggering, sub-aquatic architecture, like spilt cathedrals, gormless, ghostly fish gliding by like Jackson Pollock's pets. Silent miracles. What got me though was when I came up for air, at the end. As my head came above water after even a paltry 15 minutes in Davy Jones's Locker, there was something absurd about the surface. How we, the creatures of the land, live our lives, obliviously trundling, flat feet slapping against the dust.

It must have been a while since I've attended a fancy, glitzy event because as soon as I got to the GQ awards I felt like something was up. The usual visual grammar was in place – a carpet in the street, people in paddocks awaiting a brush with something glamorous, blokes with earpieces, birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison. I'm not trying to pass myself off as some kind of Francis of Assisi, Yusuf Islam, man of the people, but I just wasn't feeling it. I ambled into the Opera House across yet more outdoor carpets, boards bearing branding, in this case Hugo Boss, past paparazzi, and began to queue up at the line of journalists and presenters, in a slightly nicer paddock who offer up mics and say stuff like:

"Who are you wearing?"

"I'm not wearing anyone, I went with clobber, I'm not Buffalo Bill."

Noel Gallagher was immediately ahead of me in the press line and he's actually a mate. I mean I love him, sometimes I forget he wrote Supersonic and played to 400,000 people at Knebworth because he's such a laugh. He laid right into me, the usual gear: "What the fook you wearing? Does Rod Stewart know you're going through his jumble?" I try to remain composed and give as good as I get, even though the paddock-side banter is accompanied by looming foam tipped eavesdroppers, hanging like insidious mistletoe.

In case you don't know these parties aren't like real parties. It's fabricated fun, imposed from the outside. A vision of what squares imagine cool people might do set on a spaceship. Or in Moloko. As we come out of the lift there's a bloody great long corridor flanked by gorgeous birds in black dresses, paid to be there, motionless, left hand on hip, teeth tacked to lips with scarlet glue. The intention I suppose is to contrive some Ian Fleming super-uterus of well fit mannequins to midwife you into the shindig, but me and my mate Matt just felt self-conscious, jigging through Robert Palmer's oestrogen passage like aspirational Morris dancers. Matt stared at their necks and I made small talk as I hot stepped towards the preshow drinks. Now I'm not typically immune to the allure of objectified women but I am presently beleaguered by a nerdish, whirling dervish and am eschewing all others. Perhaps the clarity of this elation has awakened me. A friend of mine said, "Being in love is like discovering a concealed ballroom in a house you've long inhabited." I also don't drink so these affairs where most people rinse away their Britishness and twitishness with booze are for me a face-first log flume of backslaps, chitchat, eyewash and gak.

After a load of photos and what-not, we descend the world's longest escalator, which are called that even as they de-escalate, and in we go to the main forum, a high ceilinged hall, full of circular cloth-draped, numbered tables, a stage at the front, the letters GQ, 12-foot high in neon at the back; this aside though, neon forever the moniker of trash, this is a posh do, in an opera house full of folk in tuxes.

Everywhere you look there's someone off the telly; Stephen Fry, Pharrell, Sir Bobby Charlton, Samuel L Jackson, Rio Ferdinand, Justin Timberlake, foreign secretary William Hague and mayor of London Boris Johnson. My table is sanctuary of sorts; Noel and his missus Sara, John Bishop and his wife Mel, my mates Matt Morgan, Mick and Gee. Noel and I are both there to get awards and decide to use our speeches to dig each other out. This makes me feel a little grounded in the unreal glare, normal.

Noel's award is for being an "icon" and mine for being an "oracle". My knowledge of the classics is limited but includes awareness that an oracle is a spiritual medium through whom prophecies from the gods were sought in ancient Greece. Thankfully, I have a sense of humour that prevents me from taking accolades of that nature on face value or I'd've been in the tricky position of receiving the GQ award for being "best portal to a mystical dimension", which is a lot of pressure. Me, Matt and Noel conclude it's probably best to treat the whole event as a bit of a laugh and, as if to confirm this as the correct attitude, Boris Johnson – a man perpetually in pajamas regardless of what he's wearing – bounds to the stage to accept the award for "best politician". Yes, we agree, this is definitely a joke.

Boris, it seems, is taking it in this spirit, joshing beneath his ever-redeeming barnet that Labour's opposition to military action in Syria is a fey stance that he, as GQ politician of the year, would never be guilty of.

Matt is momentarily focused. "He's making light of gassed Syrian children," he says. We watch, slightly aghast, then return to goading Noel.

Before long John Bishop is on stage giving me a lovely introduction so I get up as Noel hurls down a few gauntlets, daring me to "do my worst".

I thanked John, said "the oracle award" sounds like a made-up prize you'd give a fat kid on sports day – I should know, I used to get them – then that it's barmy that Hugo Boss can trade under the same name they flogged uniforms to the Nazis under and the ludicrous necessity for an event such as this one to banish such a lurid piece of information from our collective consciousness.

I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control and won't tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool, comedy.

The jokes about Hugo Boss were not intended to herald a campaign to destroy them, they're not Monsanto or Halliburton, the contemporary corporate allies of modern-day fascism; they are, I thought, an irrelevant menswear supplier with a double-dodgy history. The evening though provided an interesting opportunity to see how power structures preserve their agenda, even in a chintzy microcosm.

Subsequent to my jokes, the evening took a peculiar turn. Like the illusion of sophistication had been inadvertently disrupted by the exposure. It had the vibe of a wedding dinner where the best man's speech had revealed the groom's infidelity. With Hitler.

Foreign secretary William Hague gave an award to former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, for writing a hagiography of Margaret Thatcher, who used his acceptance speech to build a precarious connection between my comments about the sponsors, my foolish answerphone scandal at the BBC and the Sachs family's flight, 70 years earlier from Nazi-occupied Europe. It was a confusing tapestry that Moore spun but he seemed to be saying that a) the calls were as bad as the Holocaust and b) the Sachs family may not've sought refuge in Britain had they known what awaited them. Even for a man whose former job was editing the Telegraph this is an extraordinary way to manipulate information.

Noel, who is not one to sit quietly on his feelings, literally booed while Charles Moore was talking and others joined in. Booing! When do you hear booing in this day and age other than pantomimes and parliament? Hague and Johnson are equally at home in either (Widow Twanky and Buttons, obviously) so were not unduly ruffled, but I thought it was nuts. The room by now had a distinct feel of "us and them" and if there is a line drawn in the sand I don't ever want to find myself on the same side as Hague and Johnson. Up went Noel to garner his gong and he did not disappoint: "Always nice to be invited to the Tory party conference," he began, "Good to see the foreign secretary present when there's shit kicking off in Syria."

Noel once expressed his disgust at seeing a politician at Glastonbury. "What are you doing here? This ain't for you," he'd said. He explained to me: "You used to know where you were with politicians in the 70s and 80s cos they all looked like nutters; Thatcher, Heseltine, Cyril Smith. Now they look normal, they're more dangerous." Then with dreadful foreboding, "They move among us." I agree with Noel. What are politicians doing at Glastonbury and the GQ awards? I feel guilty going and I'm a comedian. Why are public officials, paid by us, turning up at events for fashion magazines? Well the reason I was there was because I have a tour on and I was advised it would be good publicity. What are the politicians selling? How are they managing our perception of them with their attendance of these sequin-encrusted corporate balls?

We witness that there is a relationship between government, media and industry that is evident even at this most spurious and superficial level. These three institutions support one another. We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticise the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information.

Now I'm aware that this was really no big deal; I'm not saying I'm an estuary Che Guevara, it was a daft joke, by a daft comic at a daft event. It makes me wonder though how the relationships and power dynamics I witnessed on this relatively inconsequential context are replicated on a more significant scale.

For example, if you can't criticise Hugo Boss at the GQ awards because they own the event do you think it is significant that energy companies donate to the Tory party? Will that affect government policy? Will the relationships that "politician of the year" Boris Johnson has with City bankers – he took many more meetings with them than public servants in his first term as mayor – influence the way he runs our capital?

Is it any wonder that Amazon, Vodafone and Starbucks avoid paying tax when they enjoy such cosy relationships with members of our government?

Ought we be concerned that our rights to protest are being continually eroded under the guise of enhancing our safety? Is there a relationship between proposed fracking in the UK, new laws that prohibit protest and the relationships between energy companies and our government?

I don't know. I do have some good principles picked up that night that are generally applicable; the glamour and the glitz isn't real, the party isn't real, you have a much better time mucking around trying to make your mates laugh. I suppose that's obvious, we all know it, we already know all the important stuff like: don't trust politicians, don't trust big business and don't trust the media. Trust your own heart and each another. When you take a breath and look away from the spectacle it's amazing how absurd it seems when you look back.

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Greeks protest against Golden Dawn attack on Communists

Thousands demonstrate in Athens after supporters of neo-Nazi party leave nine seriously injured amid fears of civil war

Thousands of Greeks took to the streets of Athens on Friday to protest against a violent attack on Communist party members by black-shirted supporters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party which left nine people in hospital with serious injuries.

In what was described as a murderous attack – and the most serious violence since the extremist group was elected to the country's parliament last year – about 50 men wielding crowbars and bats set upon leftists as they distributed posters in a working-class district of the capital late on Thursday.

In a statement KKE, the Communist party of Greece, said: "The way in which they acted and the weapons employed … are evidence of the murderous nature of the attack. Among the Golden Dawners, some of whom had covered their faces or wore helmets or [party] shirts, were their leaders, well-known fascists and thugs."

With the Communist party preparing to stage a youth festival in the coming days, Thursday's midnight assault comes amid mounting fears that the far right is trying to cultivate an atmosphere of civil war in Greece. Prominent members of the virulently anti-immigrant Golden Dawn have openly predicted that the debt-stricken country is heading towards civil war.

Dimitris Psarras, a writer who has chronicled Golden Dawn's rise over almost four decades since the collapse of military rule, said: "Their agenda, clearly, is to create a climate of civil war, a divide where people have to choose between leftists and rightists."

Psarras argues the attack in the dock-side district of Perama – a Communist stronghold where Golden Dawn has made considerable inroads in recent years on the back of anger over austerity measures – was indicative of that strategy.

"It was very well organised and the most serious incident yet," he told the Guardian. "They are no longer only targeting immigrants in the middle of the night. They are deliberately increasing tensions, expanding their agenda of hate, by going for leftists."

Earlier this year, the Muslim Association of Greece received a letter bearing the insignia of the group and an implicit threat that its members would be "slaughtered like chickens" unless they left the country. Marking the anniversary of the September 11 attacks this week, the party posted a vehemently antisemitic diatribe on its website denouncing "world Zionism [as] the architect of global terrorism".

Greece, whose political faultlines were entrenched by a bloody civil war in the wake of brutal Nazi occupation, is mired in a sixth year of recession that has seen poverty and unemployment soar as it navigates its worst crisis in modern times.

Recent opinion polls have shown that no other party has managed to capitalise on the growing levels of desperation and despair as effectively as Golden Dawn.

Surveys released by the pollsters Public Issue and Pulse in recent days confirmed that the extremists – who recently blasted people attending a "Greeks only" food handout with the official anthem of Nazi Germany – were the nation's fastest growing group and, at 13% and 15% respectively, its third biggest political force.

The main opposition party, the radical left Syriza, topped the ratings with 29% of support, marginally ahead of prime minister Antonis Samaras's centre-right New Democracy party. Many worry that Golden Dawn, which won 18 seats with almost 7% of the vote last June, will further boost its share of votes when local elections are held next year.

According to analysts, Thursday's attack demonstrates Golden Dawn's growing self-confidence and ability to spread its appeal. They point to the inroads the party is making into middle-class neighbourhoods of Athens.

With prominent clerics also voicing support for the group, commentators have begun to ask whether the ruling conservatives should join forces with Golden Dawn, whose views on issues of public order are strikingly similar.

"It is a particularly worrying turn of events that we should now have a debate suggesting that Golden Dawn be brought in from the cold," Psarras said. "Talk that it should end its isolation and link up with New Democracy is dangerous at a time when Greece is going from bad to worse."

Mainstream political parties – like foreign embassies – currently have no official contacts with Golden Dawn.

Leftists rallying near the spot where the attack took place called on authorities on Friday to "finally take action" and "erase" the fascist group.

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Greek public servants lose computer holiday

by  NEOnline

Authorities in Greece have scrapped an extra six-day holiday enjoyed by civil servants who use a computer for more than 5 hours a day, that is practically every civil servant with a desk job. 

"The working hours that will be the result of this measure are the equivalent of hiring an extra 5,000 civil servants," Reform Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said adding that the holiday, which was first granted in 1989, belonged to another era."

The move is part of Athens' austerity drive after it received bailouts totalling €240 billion since 2009 by the EU and the IMF.  The money comes with strict conditions, along them drastic reform of Greece's bloated and inefficient civil service. 

Greece has pledged to place up to 25,000 public sector workers into a mobility pool by the end of this year. If a civil service position job is not found for them within a few months, they will be made redundant. 

 

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Greece axes holiday bonus for computer use in civil service

Recession-wracked Greece plans to scrap a perk for its civil servants who enjoy an extra six days of holiday per year -- if they use a computer at work.

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Greek Journalist's Death Still Unexplained

Greek ReporterGreek Journalist's Death Still UnexplainedGreek ReporterXekoukoulotakis A newsletter in memory of the Greek journalist Haris Xekoukoulotakis, which was published in June 2013, two months after his death, does not make any reference to the causes of his death, raising questions. The text simply extols his ...

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Environmental groups slam lake water-skiing competition

Animal lovers have slammed the government and local authorities for allowing an international water-skiing competition to take place on Pamvotida Lake in Ioannina, northwestern Greece, saying it put rare birds at risk.The Greek Ornithological Society said that the Europe and Africa Water Ski Championship earlier this month was only hosted because environmental laws were ignored.Earlier this year, ...

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Cypriot ex-minister given more time to prepare defense

Former Cypriot Interior Minister Dinos Michailides was on Friday granted an extension until Wednesday to defend himself before a Greek investigating magistrate in connection with a money-laundering racket centered around former Greek Defense Minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos.Michailides, who was extradited to Greece Friday, has been implicated in the laundering of money from kickbacks that ...

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Homes in Greek capital lose half their market value in five years

KathimeriniHomes in Greek capital lose half their market value in five yearsKathimeriniThe economic crisis and extremely sluggish demand in the real estate market have resulted in house prices nosediving by more than 50 percent since 2008, according to experts. While there are plenty of great bargains to be found all around the Greek ...

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New Greek Peak Owners Promise Resort’s First High-Speed Quad

Virgil, NY - Greek Peak’s new owners are hitting the ground running by investing $4 million into the central New York State ski and snowboard resort for the coming winter, including its first high-speed quad chairlift. Construction workers ...

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Greek Hardship Days No Longer Compute

Greek civil servants will no longer get a hardship bonus—six extra paid holidays a year—for using a computer, following the government's move to rescind a special privilege they have enjoyed for more than two decades.

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Lehman Brothers collapse: five years on, we're still feeling the shockwaves

Lehman's trillion-dollar bankruptcy shook the foundations of the global economy. Larry Elliott retraces the reverberations

Threadneedle Street August 2013

Green shoots of recovery were bursting out all over as Mark Carney, the new governor of the Bank of England, presented his first health check on the UK economy. Napoleon hungered for "lucky generals" and George Osborne appeared to have followed the Bonapartist doctrine to the letter when he poached Carney from the Bank of Canada.

After two years of moving sideways, economic growth has accelerated in the second quarter; there are solid reports from the manufacturing, construction and services sector; even the news from the battered eurozone is better.

The housing market is humming, courtesy of ultra-low interest rates and Treasury subsidies for new buyers. Just three months earlier economists had been agonising about the risks of an unprecedented triple dip recession. Now, the talk was of boom-boom Britain.

Not so fast, Carney said. A broad-based recovery may be under way but it is weak by historical standards. Interest rates – pegged at 0.5% for more than four years – will need to stay unchanged at least until unemployment comes down to 7%. Whereas the US and Germany have more than made up the ground lost during the recession, Britain has not. Output is still below its pre-Lehman level and the recovery is slower even than during the 1930s.

Lurking in the shadows as Carney made his debut were the other big economic themes since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008: the magnitude and scope of the crisis; the fact that only a handful of politicians and central bankers saw it coming; the rise and fall of global co-operation; the unprecedented policy response with its as yet unknown side-effects; the transformation of a private debt crisis into a sovereign debt crisis; the squeeze on living standards; and the shift in the global economy away from the developed west towards emerging markets.

Early on, there had been much talk about rebalancing the economy. Osborne talked of the "march of the makers" as he said the new economy would be built on investment and exports, not public or private debt. But while there has been some pick-up in industrial output, the driving force behind UK growth in 2013 is again the housing market, just as it had been in the years before the crash.

Memories have proved short. Households are taking on more debt in order to get on the property ladder. The economist Ann Pettifor struck a chord when she dubbed Britain the Alice in Wongaland economy.

It is an uneasy situation. Osborne last week said the UK had turned the corner. Others are unsure, but what is certain is it has been a tumultuous ride.

Threadneedle Street August 2008

Same venue, same occasion, different governor. Mervyn King's message – six weeks before the sky fell in on the financial sector – was sombre but not, as it turned out, nearly sombre enough.

Noting that growth was slowing and inflation rising, the governor said: "The adjustment of the UK economy to higher commodity prices and a more realistic pricing of credit will be painful.

"The next year will be a difficult one," he predicted, "with inflation high and output broadly flat. But with monetary policy focused on its task of bringing inflation back to the target, we will come through the adjustment."

King was both right and wrong. Right that the next year would be difficult; completely wrong in the judgment that the UK would get away with a soft landing followed by a rapid bounce back.

Revisions to official data since then show that the UK was already in recession by August 2008 and much worse was to come. The economy would shrink by more than 5% in 2009, the biggest annual decline in almost 90 years. Of the nine members of the Bank's monetary policy committee – made up of Threadneedle Street insiders and independent experts – only David Blanchflower thought a cut in interest rates from the then 5% was warranted. One MPC member even voted for rates to rise.

Blanchflower had outlined his reasoning in the spring of 2008, when he said the UK was following the US through four stages of descent into recession. "First the housing market weakens, then consumer confidence collapses, then the labour market falls, then output drops. In the UK by the spring of 2008 we had gone through three of the four steps. Mervyn was sure the UK had de-coupled from the US and was more worried by the risk of exploding wage pressure. The high quality US economists I was speaking to were telling me that the world was coming to and end.

"It was a complete disaster and even by the beginning of September 2008 the MPC had no idea what was coming. It was the shock of a lifetime."

To King's fury, Blanchflower went public with his views. "I got a message from the governor's private secretary asking me to go and see Mervyn." Blanchflower refused to apologise for what King saw as uncollegiate behaviour. "I told him to go fuck himself," Blanchflower recalls, adding: "I was furious. I said you guys are out of your minds and you had better start doing something".

By this stage house prices in some parts of the US had plunged by 50% and millions of housebuyers faced foreclosure.

The Excel Centre in London's docklands April 2009

In the previous six months industrial output and global trade had shrunk at rates last seen in the early stages of the Great Depression, but Gordon Brown was in upbeat mood as he outlined the results of a summit of the crucial G20 group of rich and developing nations.

"This is the day that the world came together, to fight back against the global recession", the PM said. "Not with words, but a plan for global recovery and for reform and with a clear timetable."

There was a six point plan including reform of the global financial system and a common approach to dealing with toxic assets, together with a $1tn stimulus package to supplement $5tn from individual countries.

Few knew it at the time, but the London G20 marked the nadir of the downturn following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. It also marked the pinnacle of global co-operation in which countries were thrown together by the scale of the crisis.

Policymakers abandoned the nostrums that they had held dear for the past three decades. Copies of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory were dusted down to find a cure for a slump that the high priests of free-market economics said would never happen. Blanchflower won his battle on the MPC. Interest rates were slashed to the bone; central banks started to print large quantities of electronic money to compensate for the credit crunch; taxes were cut and public spending increased. Governments rediscovered the urge to intervene. Germany provided subsidies to keep workers in jobs. America bailed out the automobile industry. The UK put pressure on mortgage lenders to show forbearance to struggling home-buyers.

On the left, the assumption was that the financial and economic crisis of 2007-09 would bring an end to three decades of free-market hegemony, in just the same way that the oil price spike of the mid-1970s called time on the golden era of post-war social democracy.

It didn't work out that way. Within a year Keynes was back on the shelf. Austerity replaced interventionism. Instead of seeking global solutions to a global problem, countries went their own way. The London G20 had three big objectives: to prevent a second Great Depression, to agree a joint plan for financial supervision, and to come up with a global growth plan. Only the first was achieved, because although the global economy contracted in 2009 for the first time since 1945, by the second half of the year output was increasing, most markedly in the big beasts of the emerging world, India and China.

But the other two legs of the grand plan fell by the wayside. Nobody was really interested in a global growth pact, while the attempt at a joint approach to regulating the banks was scuppered In Europe and the US. Ever since, governments have been seeking national solutions to a global problem.

Alistair Darling sensed the changing mood at his last IMF meeting as chancellor, in April 2010. "One school of thought was that we were through it so we could take our foot off the accelerator. Then there was the rightwing aversion to doing things together," he recalled.

HM Treasury May 2010

After Britain's inconclusive general election, the country had a new coalition government and Osborne wasted no time in making clear that there would be a change of strategy. "Last year our budget deficit was the largest it has ever been in our peacetime history. This year it is set to be among the largest in the world. This is the legacy of 13 years of fiscal irresponsibility. And it poses a very real threat to the recovery."

Growth had returned to Britain by polling day. As Europe's financial centre, the UK had been particularly vulnerable to a crisis detonated deep in the banking industry. Consumers had taken on more and more debt in the years leading up to the crash; now they had lost the appetite to borrow. With companies hoarding their cash, the burden for supporting the economy through the recession fell on the government, but at a cost. Public borrowing, which stood at £34bn in 2006-07, had more than quadrupled three years later.

Osborne's fear was that the markets would take fright and push up market interest rates in the way they had in Greece, which received its first bailout on the weekend after the election. Unemployment across the eurozone was rising. In Greece it was 12% – and on its way to the current 28%.

The young were to take the greatest hit. In Greece today 59% of those aged 15-24 are out of work and across the eurozone one in four of those aged under 25 are unemployed.

The new chancellor's strategy involved keeping fiscal policy (taxes and spending) tight and monetary policy (interest rates, quantitative easing, the exchange rate) loose. King provided crucial political cover for the chancellor by stating publicly that it was right "to put in place a serious plan to tackle the fiscal deficit".

Public spending was cut and VAT raised to 20% that summer in pursuit of what the government hoped would be "contractionary fiscal expansion".

Osborne thought that the markets would be impressed by his promise to reduce the structural deficit – the part that would not disappear even when the economy was fully back to health – within four years. The expectation was that lower interest rates would result, providing incentives for the private sector to invest.

It hasn't happened yet. The chancellor said the UK was blown off course by the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and by higher global commodity markets. Darling says his successor at the Treasury only has himself to blame.

"The mistake Osborne made was to trash confidence. His message was 'we are Greece. It's panic stations. It's terrible.'" People said if that's the case we are going to stop spending. The idea of eliminating the structural deficit in a four-year period was foolish and we are paying a heavy price for that – 2.5 million people unemployed, and the economy smaller than it was in 2008, young people struggling to find jobs."

Cannes November 2011

There was little of the film festival glitter when the G20 met two and a half years after its successful London summit. It sheeted down with rain all day, matching the mood inside. A deal to provide more funds so that the IMF could help poor countries came to nothing. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, resisted pressure from the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, to allow the European Central Bank to be the lender of last resort for the euro.

The US president, Barack Obama, and prime minister David Cameron vocally expressed their frustration at the inability of the Europeans to end the sovereign debt crisis that by this stage had resulted in three countries requiring international bailouts – Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

"Every day that the eurozone crisis continues and every day it is not resolved is a day that it has a chilling effect on the rest of the world economy, including the British economy," Cameron said. "I am not going to pretend all the problems in the eurozone have been fixed. They have not."

It was now more than three years since the Lehman Brothers collapse and still there was no sign of the crisis ending.

The summit communique noted that recovery was slowing down and unemployment unacceptably high. Tensions in the financial markets were high and higher commodity prices were putting growth at risk. Even the emerging markets were losing their lustre.

London July 2012

Europe's single currency was fighting for its life when the president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, arrived in London to address a global investment conference. Bond yields on Spanish and Italian debt were heading for the 7% levels that had made life financially intolerable for the governments in Athens, Dublin and Lisbon and resulted in them going cap in hand to the IMF and EU for bailouts.

But these were small countries on Europe's periphery: Spain was the fourth biggest economy in the eurozone; Italy, a founder member of the Common Market, the third biggest. Markets doubted whether the combined firepower of Europe and the IMF would be enough to bail out Rome and Madrid; speculation was rife that the single currency was on the point of disintegration.

In just 20 words, Draghi turned the market tide. "The ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough."

There had been periods of uneasy calm throughout the eurozone crisis, but Draghi's intervention brought Europe's leaders a genuine breathing space to sort out the mess. Faced with the threat that the ECB would wade into the markets and buy Spanish and Italian bonds, the speculators backed off. Bond yields moved rapidly out of the danger zone.

There was a heavy price to pay for the sovereign debt crisis: an 18-month double dip recession and an unemployment rate of 12.1%. Politicians paid with their jobs. By October 2012 every major European country had replaced its government apart from Germany.

Today

In Britain, by the time of Carney's arrival at the Bank, growth prospects appeared the rosiest in more than half a decade. Confidence was rising and forward-looking surveys were positive. City economists were revising up their growth forecasts for the first time since the coalition came to power.

But after all the false dawns and the many setbacks, few – apart from George Osborne – are confident enough to say the crisis is over.

Nicola Smith, chief economist at the TUC, says one persistent problem since Lehman has been that prices have tended to rise more quickly than wages, leading to falling living standards. "That may be appropriate for a period of recession in order to keep people in jobs but not when the economy is growing. It doesn't give you a sustainable model for the future."

Bill Martin, an economist who has looked closely at Britain's recent growth record, says the recovery will be unsustainable if it involves the household sector moving into financial deficit, and that rising house prices would materially add to that risk. Although it is early days, that does seem to be happening.

Finally, there's the question of how and when policymakers unwind the colossal stimulus they have provided. Stephen King, the chief economist at HSBC, says stimulus was originally needed to prevent a Second Great Depression. "But it has morphed from an anti-biotic to an addictive painkiller. The acid test for a sustainable recovery is whether interest rates can return to normal levels. If they can't there is something wrong. But in the near term it is difficult to imagine how they can."

Lehman BrothersBankingEconomicsEurozone crisisEuropean UnionEuropean monetary unionEuropean banksFinancial crisisFinancial sectorEuroEuropeEconomic policyUnited StatesLarry Elliotttheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Greece Deletes a ‘Hardship Bonus’ for Working With Computers

Six years into Greece’s grinding recession, the country is finally rebooting an arcane benefit that civil servants have enjoyed since 1989. They will no longer get an extra six days of annual holiday as a “hardship bonus” if their work ...

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Teach your children Greek

He said that Greek school provided so much more for him than just an education into his culture and ... but to feel like they too belong. He grew up in a difficult time; extreme poverty and the ugly face of racism was felt as a daily occurrence of his ...

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Greek birthrates decline in crisis

The birthratein Greece has fallen by more than 10 percentsince the start of the debt crisis in 2009, according to data released by the Greek Health Ministry. With Greeks affected by harsh austerity and recession, parenthood is postponed for the future, under better financial conditions, or cancelled outright. According to the official data released on Friday, in 2008 the number of childbirths ...

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Greek civil servants lose holiday perks for computer use

The Greek authorities have scrapped six days of extra holiday awarded to civil servants for using computers, as part of its austerity drive. The privilege was granted in 1989 to all who worked on a computer for more than five hours a day.

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.bbc.co.uk

Greek workers lose computer perks

The Greek authorities scrap extra holiday awarded to civil servants for using computers more than five hours a day, as part of an austerity drive.

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.bbc.co.uk

Otto Sander obituary

Versatile actor at Berlin's Schaubühne theatre who made films with Wim Wenders and Eric Rohmer

The German actor Otto Sander, who has died aged 72 after suffering from cancer, made his name as one of the members of Peter Stein's Schaubühne theatre in Berlin, where he developed a versatile but precise stage presence that he brought to all kinds of roles. Sander also had more than 100 credits in film and TV productions, most notably Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot (The Boat, 1981), as a drunk and disillusioned U-boat captain, and Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, 1987), as one of the two angels in Wim Wenders's magical survey of the divided city.

Born in Hanover, Sander grew up in Kassel, where he graduated from the Friederichsgymnasium in 1961. He did his military service as a naval reserve officer. In 1965, in his first engagement at the Düsseldorf Kammerspiele, he showed a natural gift for comedy; he had no lines in Václav Havel's The Garden Party, but with thick glasses and skilfully mimed myopia he brought the house down. The great stage actor Bernhard Minetti pronounced Sander a fine character actor in the making.

He moved on to Heidelberg Stadttheater, where he was a memorable Malvolio in Twelfth Night, struggling visibly with itchy cross-gartered stockings as he performed a series of athletic gags on a steep staircase. From Heidelberg he moved to the Freie Volksbühne, where in 1968 he made his West Berlin breakthrough as a four-year-old in rompers and suspenders in a Philippe Adrien farce. By 1969 Sander, with his sloping shoulders and his air of melancholy as Benedick in a pop version of Much Ado About Nothing, was emerging as a new type of actor for the changing social climate in Germany.

In its first post-Nazi phase, the West German theatre had cultivated symbolism, rhetoric and artifice. In the 1970s a new generation, notably directors such as Stein, Peter Zadek and Claus Peymann took over and, in their different ways, cultivated a style that was realistic, uncompromising and sometimes irreverent. Sander was recruited at this transitional stage by Stein for the new Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer in Berlin, which in the 1970s and 80s was to supersede the Berliner Ensemble as the flagship of German theatre.

For Stein's intensively researched productions, Sander sailed round Greece, gathering background material with the company for the Antiquity Project (1974) for which he appeared as Tiresias in The Bacchae, plastered from head to foot in clay. He immersed himself in the Elizabethan world for Shakespeare's Memory (1976) and As You Like It (1977), and absorbed Russian atmosphere with the company on a trip to the Soviet Union for Chekhov's The Three Sisters (1984), in which he gave a subtle and complex performance as Vershinin, part charmer, part embittered failure. He changed Colonel Kottwitz in Heinrich von Kleist's The Prince of Homburg from a Prussian colonel into a gruff Brandenburg sergeant-major.

Sander was an ideal interpreter of Botho Strauss, the house dramatist at the Schaubühne, whose plays anatomised West German society in the Wirtschaftswunder – economic miracle – years. In Strauss's Trilogy of Reunions (1980) he was a down-to-earth printer doggedly fighting his blue-collar corner in an art club full of bourgeois snobs. "These people are us," he told me at the time. His hilarious struggle with the domestic appliances in Kalldewey Farce, when his wife has left to join the feminists, or his dishevelling efforts to extract gladioli from their cellophane wrapping in Final Chorus were two of many tours de force in Strauss's plays.

His Tati-esque mastery of serious slapstick was unique in recent German theatre. In the beginning the Schaubühne was organised on democratic lines, with all decisions made by the entire staff. In the early years Sander tried repeatedly in the plenary discussions to have a comedy included in the classical repertoire, eventually succeeding with Seán O'Casey's The End of the Beginning in 1975.

Sander's range was considerable. He won the player of the year award in 1979 for his part in Robert Wilson's five-and-a-half-hour Death, Destruction and Detroit, a plot-free collage of exquisitely composed stage images. Sander proved to be perfectly at home with Wilson's technique of giving the performer total freedom while containing him within the director's aesthetic vision.

His dazzling swansong at the Schaubühne, after 25 years, was as a suave ladykiller in Sacha Guitry's Faisons un Rêve, directed by Luc Bondy. In the UK, he was seen at the National Theatre in London when the Schaubühne brought over Gorky's Summerfolk in 1977 and as Claudius in Zadek's production of Hamlet at the Edinburgh festival in 2000.

His film appearances ranged from shoestring shorts by young film-makers who caught his imagination to elegant literary films such as Eric Rohmer's 1976 version of Kleist's The Marquise of O and Volker Schlöndorff's 1979 film of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum. In Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg (1986) he played Karl Liebknecht, with whom Luxemburg co-founded the Spartacus League. He reunited with Wenders and his co-star Bruno Ganz for In Weiter Ferne, So Nah! (Faraway, So Close!), a 1993 sequel to Wings of Desire. In 2000 he joined Gérard Depardieu, John Malkovich and Jeanne Moreau in a TV adaptation of Les Misérables.

Sander was, like his idol from the Weimar Republic, Curt Bois, an accomplished Kabarettist, performing in the Bar Jeder Vernunft, a hot venue in a Spiegeltent off the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin. Appearing on the German TV series Tatort (Crime Scene) as a tramp, he extracted a grand banquet from the police in return for essential evidence in a murder case. In this supporting role he gave a mesmerising cameo of a gourmet fallen on hard times, a mouth-watering celebration of gustatory delight.

His warm, strong tones earned him the nickname "The Voice" and he was used frequently as narrator for television documentaries, and many talking books in the 1990s.

Sander is survived by his wife, the actor Monika Hansen, and his stepchildren, Ben and Meret Becker, who are also actors.

• Otto Sander, actor, born 30 June 1941; died 12 September 2013

TheatreGermanyEuropeHugh Rorrisontheguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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Google doodle celebrates Greek theatre legend Karolos Koun's birth anniversary

Daily News & AnalysisGoogle doodle celebrates Greek theatre legend Karolos Koun's birth anniversaryDaily News & AnalysisThe Art Theatre nurtured Greek playwrights and acquainted the Greek public with the works of playwrights like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhardt. The plays by these playwrights were ...Google Dedicates Doodle to Karolos KounGreek Reporterall 2 news articles »

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Teachers Start Striking on September 16

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Great Greek theater director celebrated by Google

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Eurozone Ministers Avoid Greek Talk

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Estonia open to more aid for Greece

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Greece’s civil servants who use computers lose extra paid holidays

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Greece scraps extra holiday for civil servants using computers

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Eurogroup chief says Greece not on agenda at Vilnius summit

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Greece stuns Spain in 2nd round

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Why Are Oil Prices High? Part I

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Greece and Canada work together in education

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REFILE-UPDATE 1-Vodafone says to speed up 4G development in Greece

Under its "Project Spring" plan which follows the $130 billion sale to Verizon of its 45 percent stake in Verizon ... 6 billion pounds over three financial years to improve its network quality in European countries and emerging markets.

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Greek Org of Football Prognostics S.A. : Replacement of resigned non-executive member of the BOD

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Greek Crisis Kills Off Mickey Mouse

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Google Dedicates Doodle to Karolos Koun

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Troika’s Back In Town

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Greeks Hide €200 B in Switzerland

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Hicksville Celebrates Greek Pride

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Greek budget gains with bonds no succor for Samaras

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