An update. The strike and the unions' demonstrations went on relatively without incident. Afterwords there were some fighting between protesters and police, but none of the blind large-scale looting and destruction (if one doesn't count the trash bins). There is fighting between a lot of people barricaded inside the Athens Polytechnic School building and the cops outside, ditto in Thessaloniki. But the protests seem to be more localized in the "traditional places". Possibly a respite after the blind rage of days past, but not a stop: 100 schools are occupied and 15 university buildings all over Greece, and tommorrow, the high-schoolers are planning sit-downs in major roads. But it seems that it might be starting to calm down.

The defendant (his slimeball lawyer probably) published a shocking attack against the dead pupil that left everyone aghast. Soon enough the accusations started to collapse (he tried to present the deceased as a problem child that was expelled from his previous school - something that the school promptly refuted angrily).

Yesterday, Panathinaikos palyed for the champions league at home. Alexis was a fan of the club, and the teams supporters turned the match into a tribute (and so did his team passing to the cup's 16 phase). All the banners were about him, against the police (the chant of "cops, pigs, murderers" was sung many times), and the cop's lawyer was booed when he entered the stadium.

A sign of changing Zeitgeist/love of banks: today I listen to skai radio, Athens most popular news radio, with a center-right slant. The presenter talks with the mayor of Ioannina (in NW Greece) and the conversation gows something a lot like this (from memory):

Presenter: Mr. Mayor the crowd there is more civilized, as we saw. They didn't touch a single person's shop. they just burned a couple of banks and attacked the police station
Mayor: Yes, we didn't have these sorts of problems here. The kids were behaved. They just torched two banks and threw rocks against the police, but they left the shops alone...

Brilliant.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake