Europe

Credit Rating Agencies are at it again. If the hole in the real economy, the one in which real people live, created by the virtual economy, where the speculators live, aka “rescuing the Banks during the subprime crisis”, were not big enough, Standard and Poor, has “downgraded” the US Credit Rating sending the world economy into a deeper hole. So who are they?

Death of a Tottenham resident in North London by Police shooting sparks three nights of rioting, looting, firebombing and attacks on Police by members of minority communities and youth gangs. Recent cuts to services in areas already deprived and marginalised seem to have created a toxic atmosphere that only needed a trigger, and sure enough, it happened.

According to a report by the British newspaper The Guardian new documents it has seen confirm what the ex Ambassador to Uzbekistan has been saying all along. That the UK Foreign Office knew torture was being used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects and in spite of its illegality and unreliability it accepted information thus obtained.

50 additional policemen are hardly going to put free circulation inside the EU in any real danger. Probably no European citizen is going to be denied entrance into Denmark. And, really, nobody believes that the border posts Copenhagen ordered reopening in the beginning of July will do anything to fight cross-border crime.

How did this woman become a potential frontrunner in Republican presidential politics? No, not Sarah Palin, Michele Bachman–the other “folksy,” anti-gay, anti-choice, Tea Party-lovin’ Republican female politician currently in the national spotlight.

This is an abridged version of Colson’s article on SocialistWorker on August 1rst, 2011.

Highlights of the Summer Tour 2011 include first concerts in Asia, a concert at Berlin’s Waldbühne, and a recording of all of Beethoven’s symphonies.
After its triumphant tour through the Middle East and Europe in May, Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra continue their Beethoven project on the upcoming summer tour.

By Aljosa Milenkovic

As Greece faces the worst economic woes in its history, Greek journalists struggle with their own fears and their failures in covering the crisis.

One of the most popular editorial coping mechanisms is to blame the problem on others, in this case the European Union. Many in Greece consider the EU to be part of the problem rather than the solution.

When one of the most arrogant men in the world is forced to issue a full-page apology in national newspapers, you know that he feels he has little other choice. That must have been the calculation in the inner sanctum of News Corporation when billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch signed off on a full-page ad in several of his (and his competitors’) British newspapers.

Can Lord Justice Leveson be really impartial? He socialised, like many other important people, with Rupert Murdoch, his family & his PR man. Are we surprised by this cosy relationship between Politicians, Media, the higher echelons of the Police (Sir Paul Stevenson, Metropolitan Police Commissioner resigned over indirect links to News Corps) and even the Judiciary? Sadly not.

What was incomprehensible only 20 years ago is commonplace today.

In the blink of any eye, messages, pictures, movies, everything that can be digitalized, can be sent from one corner of the earth to another. People have come to depend on the Internet and new media services to communicate with the world, from the person next door to a relative several time zones away.