|
by talos
Or rather the exiled: And they're pissed. If you believe them, and you certainly don't have to, they're in Panama.
Comments >> (1 comment) by talos
Tales of organ trafficking by the KLA during the Kosovo campaign surfaced recently:
BELGRADE, Serbia: Serbia's war crimes prosecutor is looking into reports that dozens of Serbs captured by rebels during the war in Kosovo were killed so their organs could be trafficked, the prosecutor's office said Friday.
Here's the more detailed story from Belgrade's B92 and here is the story in Russia Today.
Promoted by Migeru Read more... (48 comments, 1637 words in story) by talos
A bit more than a year ago, noting Ramush Haradinaj's immense luck (a streak which, goes way back), I made the point that "the Haradinaj case is a litmus test for the impartiality of the Hague tribunal - at least as far as any credibility it might still have among Serbs".
The test results are in. They're negative. Comments >> (17 comments) by talos
Well I haven't been able to write much on events in Greece after the last elections, so here's a quick review of a very eventful past five months that has seen social protest, sex scandals, financial scandals, both mainstream parties struggling in opinion polls and the "hard"-left reaching unprecedented opinion poll ratings, while an international crisis is brewing concerning the name of Greece's "unspeakable" northern neighbor.
Read more... (3 comments, 2002 words in story) by talos
...today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Promoted by Migeru Read more... (29 comments, 2067 words in story) by talos
On August 16, a day after the major Greek summer holiday and as mount Penteli and a part of Athens' Northern suburbs were burning, yet another fire in what was becoming a disastrous forest fire season (with the worse still to come), prime-minister Kostas Karamanlis, announced early elections for the 16th of September (today). The snap elections were of course widely expected, but the date chosen was the earliest possible. August is the holiday month in Greece and thus a majority of the electorate were relaxing, swimming or lying on some beach, a situation which was to last more or less (public servants' leaves were canceled - and a lot of people headed for their homes in a hurry) until the end of the month. Thus the pre-election period was shortened to four weeks - and for two of these weeks the major cities were half-empty. Then the huge forest fires in the Peloponnese and Evia erupted and for another ten days the country's attention was focused on the evolving catastrophe...
Polls until the great fire disaster were showing that the conservatives, Karamanlis' New Democracy (ND) Party, were holding a comfortable yet narrowing lead over the Socialists (PASOK) led by George Papandreou, despite a series of scandals, the largest of which was about corruption and mismanagement of public pension funds. Sensing that the pension funds scandal was not going away as details of the affair crept out slowly to Greek media, Karamanlis opted for the snappiest of snap elections possible, under flimsy pretexts (the proper scheduled date for the elections was March 2008), in an obvious effort to limit discussion and catch his opponents unprepared.
From the diaries ~ whataboutbob
Update: with 99.54% of the precincts reporting, the final seat and vote tally is as follows: Read more... (16 comments, 2433 words in story) by talos ![]() I've been away on holidays for a few weeks (working holidays up to a point) and usually with not enough time or opportunity to post. However despite the saying that there are no news in August, two major events happened in Greece while I was away: 1. One of the greatest peacetime disasters in modern Greek history, as fires razed (and are still razing) >2000 sq. km of forest and farmland and something like 120 villages in the Southern Peloponnese and the island of Evia, killing 65 firefighters and residents and destroying livelihoods, affecting as many as 16.000 people directly. Fires were occurring simultaneously in Attica (the prefecture that Athens is part of), for the fifth time or something this season, Western Greece, a few islands and pretty much all over. (more below) From the diaries - with format edit ~ whataboutbob Read more... (10 comments, 1321 words in story) by talos
This is so bizzare yet scary a statement of the Commission's disdain for democracy, coming from so legitimate a source, that it should be more widely disseminated:
I quote from the rather unradical EUobserver:
The new EU reform treaty text was deliberately made unreadable for citizens to avoid calls for referendum, one of the central figures in the treaty drafting process has said. There is an audio file (mp3) of Amato's speech and he is being very open about it. Read more... (26 comments, 552 words in story) by talos
IEEE Spectrum has an excellent article, written by two Greek Computer Scientists (V. Prevelakis and D. Spinellis) about last year's wiretapping scandal, a scandal about which I reported here in the European Tribune at the time (1, 2, 3, 4, see also the relevant Wikipedia article, and former US diplomat's Brady Kiesling summing up of the affair)
The article provides an astonishingly detailed investigation on the technical aspects of the wiretap, and explains the highly sophisticated methods used. This highlights the fact that the operation was surely the work of highly skilled professionals, with intimate knowledge of Vodafone's and Ericsson's systems (Prevelakis and Spinellis mention in a sidebar the various scenarios circulating). It's also a great introduction to various technical aspects of mobile telephony BTW. Update: One of the two authors (Dr. Spinellis) of the IEEE Spectrum article was kind enough to comment on the issue in the discussion thread. Promoted by afew Read more... (21 comments, 232 words in story) by talos
The only facts you need to know to understand the enormity of what the following video shows is this: it was taped on a cell phone in a Central Police station in Athens, approximately a year ago. The two guys in blue and orange shirts are teenage
Read more... (6 comments, 652 words in story) by talos
The latest issue of Eurotopia [pdf file] - published on the Trans-National Institute's website - is about Public Services in Europe, their privatisation and the grass-roots efforts to build alternatives to it, all around Europe. It highlights the problems of accountability, democratic participation and efficiency that the privatisation process has created. It also showcases some of the (mostly but not totally) municipal-level grass-roots reactions to the privatization of the commons in Europe - thus its title: "Public Services in Europe: From privatisation to participation"
From the diaries ~ whataboutbob Read more... (19 comments, 328 words in story) by talos
New Left Review published two extensive articles on the Russian economy and the Putin regime's handling of it. Together they provide a summary of the economic and social situation in Russia, providing information not readily found in much of the western press - well beyond the usual stereotypes.
Vladimir Popov, in Russia Redux?, discusses Russia's "recent social and economic fortunes" that reveal "a number of problems that Putin's successor will inherit, presenting him with a difficult agenda". Tony Wood from NLR, in Contours of the Putin Era, responds to Popov and "examines the geographical and social distribution of Russia's recent economic growth. What are the priorities and outlook of the emerging business-state elite--and whom will Putin's `stabilization' benefit?" From the diaries ~ whataboutbob Read more... (6 comments, 912 words in story) by talos
Matt Taibbi has yet another excellent piece over at Rolling Stone magazine, this time about proposed new Bush tax cuts and what they mean for the average US taxpayer - as well as about the utter indifference shown by the corporate media to a story with great "shock value" - because it's the wrong value.
The story is brilliantly written and worth your while anyway, but the way it illustrates the economic facts (as given to MT by the folks over at rep. Bernie Sanders' office, the socialist congressman from Vermont) is impressive and should be emulated. And so should its tone, because what is being presented is the sort of information that in the not-so-distant-past made peasants and craftsmen grab bats, pitchforks and torches - and march menacingly towards the palace...: Read more... (11 comments, 633 words in story) by talos
Raed Jarrar has obtained a copy of the Iraq Oil Law that will be heading to the Iraqi cabinet for approval. Jarrar has translated the Law in Eglish [pdf here] and comments that:
...This law legalizes PSAs (production sharing agreements) in Iraq. Iraq will be the only country in the middle east with such contracts privatising Iraqi oil and giving foreign companies crazy rates of profit that may reach to more than three fourth of the general revenue. Iraq and Iraqis need every Dinar that comes from oil sales. In addition to the financial aspects of this law, it can be considered the funding tool for splitting Iraq into three states. It undermines the central government and distributes oil revenues directly to the three regions, which sets the foundations for what Iraq's enemies are trying to achieve in terms of establishing three independent states. From the diaries -- whataboutbob Read more... (5 comments, 494 words in story) by talos
So a few days ago Kosovo's former prime-minister Ramush Haradinaj, was called back to the Hague, after surrendering himself to the ICTY in 2005 (where he was indicted for crimes against Serbs, Roma and Albanians in Kosovo), and then being released and allowed to resume political activities in Kosovo.
As chance would have it, a key witness for the prosecution was killed yesterday in Podgorica, in what could be murder or a stroke of exceptionally good luck for the indicted Kosovar Albanian politician... Read more... (16 comments, 565 words in story) by talos
As a crackdown against the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), the Turkish Kurd armed revolutionary organization, that Turkey (and most of the West now) considers "terrorist", seems to be (had been?) unfolding in Europe (possibly with US backing), and over 10.000 Kurds from all over Europe demonstrated recently in Strasbourg for the release of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan... I'd like to recommend an excellent article on the Kurds, Turkey and Iraq from the NY Review of Books (titled The Uncontainable Kurds), which provides a good idea of the forces and attitudes involved in the greater Kurdistan area, forces that include Turkey, the Iraqi Kurdish leadership, the PKK (or whatever it calls itself nowadays), its Iranian Kurdish offshoot, the US, Iran and possibly Syria - not to mention assorted islamist groups, Shia and Sunni Iraqi leaders and the Iraqi insurgency/anti-occupation struggle.
The situation as it is currently unfolding doesn't seem to have a likely stable and peaceful long-term option... From the diaries -- whataboutbob Read more... (19 comments, 1086 words in story) by talos
This article on "Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis" is an exceptional example of - lying with statistics I'd say, but this goes far beyond lying, into such realms of ideological foolishness and self-deceit, that words fail to describe, but it does have a high entertainment value... OK, the fact that it is from the von Mises Institute prepares the casual reader for the usual statistical acrobatics - but this... this ought to win some prize.
It isn't worth the time to debunk point by point (an easy but colossal task), but I'd like to single out a few things: First of all, the two graphs presented as supporting empirical data: notice that the time-series for European countries stops at 1997 and tells a rather different story for, say, Ireland than the author suggests (and misses the recent demographic uptrend in "socialist" - by the authors standards - France which now has a higher fertility rate than the UK or Ireland - a fact that the author is silent about)...
Another hair-raising piece documenting how the high priests of the Economic Faith look at Europe and the world through coloured glasses. Promoted by DoDo Read more... (38 comments, 571 words in story) by talos
On the aftermath of Christmas - and anticipating New Year's Eve:
...'Tis the season for some follies. A quick denouncement of the rotund commercialising icon in red, british parental concerns and the Perfect Christian Gift. Read more... (4 comments, 758 words in story) by talos
Via This is Not My Country, I repost the plea of the 225 detained illegal refugees at in the Greek Island of Chios:
To whom it concerned, The situation is desperate, one of the results of a Greek-Turkish refugee "exchange" war, in which Turkey puts the refugees on boats and Greece sends them back - and so on, many times. The human toll of this exercise is agonizing (and often deadly) for the unfortunates caught in the middle (of the Aegean). Since the Greek Government reacts much more promptly to pressures from abroad - and very little to "bleeding heart leftists" at home, I urge any of you that find the time, to send some form of letter of complaint to both the Greek Prime Minister's office (pressoffice@primeminister.gr) and the Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner (commissioner@coe.int) - or suggest any other meaningful recipient, and republish this plea wherever you can. PS: Note the comment from a guy calling himself "Lawful European" in the original TINMC post. Exemplary fascism, eh? by talos
Matt Taibbi, formerly of "The Exile" and now writing for Rolling Stone magazine, has a great piece on the whole "work harder to compete with China" meme, which I think most Eurotribbers will find close to their own hearts. Excerpt:
"Protectionism conveniently shifts the blame for trade-related hardships to foreigners, which is easier than adapting homegrown business practices to make America more competitive." Read more... (12 comments, 248 words in story)
|
Recommended Diaries
The Withering of Labour
by Helen - Sep 4 8 comments China wants 380 km/h trains by DoDo - Sep 4 57 comments George Lakoff's take on Sarah Palin by ARGeezer - Sep 2 51 comments LQD: Loss Wish? by ChrisCook - Sep 3 1 comment Friday Photography Blog No.51 by In Wales - Sep 5 10 comments Countdown to $200 oil (11) - almost $100 now: time to bet! by Jerome a Paris - Sep 3 31 comments First U.S. troop incursion into Pakistan alleged, 20 dead by Magnifico - Sep 3 1 comment Would California have HSR today if it had been settled by... by BruceMcF - Aug 5 52 comments Recent Diaries
Friday Photography Blog No.51
by In Wales - Sep 5 10 comments Red Fish, Blue Fish -- Old Fish, New Fish by Maryscott OConnor - Sep 4 1 comment Mini Diary concerning Friday evening Paris meetup. by LEP - Sep 4 3 comments The Withering of Labour by Helen - Sep 4 8 comments Paris ET Meetup, September 19-21, Update by Fran - Sep 4 83 comments China wants 380 km/h trains by DoDo - Sep 4 57 comments LQD: Loss Wish? by ChrisCook - Sep 3 1 comment Zionist nationalist myth of enforced exile by shergald - Sep 3 3 comments Countdown to $200 oil (11) - almost $100 now: time to bet! by Jerome a Paris - Sep 3 31 comments First U.S. troop incursion into Pakistan alleged, 20 dead by Magnifico - Sep 3 1 comment George Lakoff's take on Sarah Palin by ARGeezer - Sep 2 51 comments Inefficient Health Care as a Social Good by rdf - Sep 2 LQD Guitar by Sven Triloqvist - Sep 2 7 comments A Temperate-climate Garden in Summe by paul spencer - Sep 1 14 comments US and Israel oppose UN anti-racism summit by shergald - Sep 1 42 comments Embryonic Police State : Installment zwei * by THE Twank - Sep 1 11 comments Long Term Population Statistics = Bollocks by nanne - Sep 1 25 comments Getting Cranky with The Times by Frank Schnittger - Aug 31 22 comments Hurricane Gustav by ATinNM - Aug 31 48 comments We refuse to serve in the Israeli occupation by shergald - Aug 30 3 comments More Diaries... Debates
Campaigns
Occasional Series
Blogroll
ASSOCIATED SITES
BooMan The Oil Drum Energize America L'Etoile de Martin
THE TRAIL BLAZERS
THE FRONT PAGERS
OUR COUSINS FROM AMERICA
EUROPEANS
EUROTRIB USER BLOGS OR RECOMMENDATIONS
Inside the USA (FR)
ENERGY
ECON
Recent Comments
|
||||
| |||||