Greece: Syriza declares war at home on Greece's 'oligarchs'

International attention on Greece since the Syriza party took over has focused on the leftist government's fight against austerity.

But Panagiotis Nikoloudis (65), a supreme court prosecutor and specialist on economic crime, is leading another battle declared by Syriza: one on the home front, against some of the wealthy businessmen who dominate Greek political and economic life.

Speaking to parliament last week, Nikoloudis denounced an elite that included a "handful of families who think that the state and public service exists to service their own interests."

"Such businessmen influence politicians and state officials abuse their control of the media to unfairly win state
contracts, change regulations to their advantage or escape prosecution for illegal conduct," he said.

As a non-political outsider with a clean record, Nikoloudis is a popular appointment among Greeks who believe corruption is deeply embedded in society.

He has a reputation for action, and says the financial intelligence unit, which he led until now, developed a system of audits that identified over 20,000 people whose assets do not match their tax declarations.

Read more: Syriza declares war at home on Greece's 'oligarchs' - Independent.ie

NATO : The Problem: We Europeans must face up to our own security challenges - by Natalie Nougayrede

The return of war to the European continent has come as a profound, if delayed, shock to the west. No one, just a year ago, could have imagined that it would come to this. A Europe struggling with its financial and economic woes is caught off guard by Ukraine’s turmoil and Russia’s role in that. Now, we have the immediate flashpoint in eastern Ukraine, which the Minsk declaration announced by the leaders of France, Germany, Ukraine and Russia, aims to address. And then there is the long view, the wider picture to be grasped: and that concerns Europe’s future and its long-term security.

For what we are witnessing is a truly a defining moment for how the continent may look like in the 21st century, in a context where the transatlantic bond is significantly weakened. The key question revolves around how Europe will deal in the future with ensuring a stable security architecture on its territory, capable of preventing more bloodshed and thus ensuring it can defend its interests in a changing world. There are far more, and far deeper, unknowns here than in how the ceasefire will hold out in eastern Ukraine.

Note EU-Digest: Yes indeed,  Europe needs to look at its own defense. Even though it might sound completely ridiculous, an obligatory EU - wide military conscription program which mixes up conscripts from EU countries and stations them around the EU would not only solve the problem of putting together an integrated EU defense force, but also by the sheer fact of mixing the conscripts from different EU member states together in a united  military force create a strong base for unity in the EU on a long term basis.   

Read more: We Europeans must face up to our own security challenges | Natalie Nougayrede | Comment is free | The Guardian

Surveillance: 9 Ways You're Being Spied On Every Day

Casinos. Banks. Airports. We all know there are public places where we're being watched, ostensibly for crime-prevention purposes. But with the advancement of digital technologies, "Big Brother's" reach has gotten way wider, recording our movements—and our conversations—in a surprising amount of places.

"Big Brother is becoming more and more intrusive in our private lives and until something is done to scale it back or eliminate it, it's only going to get worse," says David Bakke, Money Crashers tech expert.

Read more: 9 Ways You're Being Spied On Every Day

Turkey: Murder of Student Ozgecan Aslan inTurkey causes Uproar and Focus on Women’s Rights - by RM

The burned body of Turkish female student Ozgecan Aslan discovered on Feb. 13 in a riverbed in the Tarsus district of Mersin in Turkey has enraged people from all walks of life around Turkey.

This has resulted in many demonstrations around the country, where both women and men have expressed their anger and called for justice and equal women's rights in the culturally male dominated Turkish environment.

Female empowerment still lags in most Muslim countries including Turkey. Despite the progress made there in regard to women during the 20th century through the efforts by its first President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey now faces attempts at going backwards again by defining women’s role as mainly domestic.

Even recently elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that women and men cannot be equal because it “goes against the laws of nature.”

The sheer size of Turkey’s protests, however, are perhaps the most important indication yet of how much Muslim women today are challenging traditional male dominance based on the old interpretations of gender roles within Islam.

Almere-Digest

Greece: Which Side Are You On, Jeroen Dijsselbloem? - by David Lizoain

Just over a hundred years have passed since the greatest failure of European social democracy. The workers’ movement was unable to halt the needless slaughter of World War I. First, Jean Jaures was assassinated, silencing his powerful anti-militarist voice. Soon after, the German SPD voted to authorize war credits for the Kaiser. Proletarian internationalism gave way to social patriotism.

Between the collapse of the Second International during the war and the divergent responses to the Russian Revolution, a rift opened up between socialists and communists in Europe that persists until this day.

Representatives of these two political traditions now find themselves at odds in a Eurogroup presided by Jeroen Dijsselbloem of the Dutch PvdA. The backdrop is one where events in the Balkans have the capability of triggering a much bigger conflict. And once more a situation has arisen where ultimatums issued by the strong against the weak run the risk of only making the conflagration worse.

The key points of disagreement are not technical but political. The eventual size of Greece’s primary surplus, for instance, is important for economic but also symbolic reasons. The real issue is what sort of Europe will emerge out of the ongoing negotiations.

One possible outcome is a deepening of a Europe split on debtor-creditor lines, organized in a manner that leads to an ever-increasing divergence between the core and the periphery. This is a Europe divided into those who give charity and those who beg for alms, as opposed to a Europe with automatic mechanisms of solidarity. This is a Europe acting as a potent incubator for mutual recriminations and rapid breakdowns in good will.

Merkel, Rajoy, and Passos Coelho all favour this outcome. In spite of their different national circumstances, they are united in their preference for a hard line on account of shared preferences and a shared project. The ties that bind them are ideological.

Many social democrats too are reproducing the debtor-creditor fault line. In the midst of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression, with democracy being hollowed out, with inequality on the rise, and with the far right on the march, social democracy is once more unable to act as a cohesive European actor. And the rise of Syriza has exposed its internal contradictions.

Read more: Which Side Are You On, Jeroen Dijsselbloem?

France: Hooded gunmen fire at police in Marseille

Hooded gunmen armed with Kalashnikov rifles fired on police in the French city of Marseille, where Prime Minister Manuel Valls was paying a visit on Monday, a police source said.

Elite police trooops were being sent to the scene, in the northern suburbs of the Mediterranean port city, after the shots, the source said by telephone.

Police had originally arrived in the area, a suburb to the north of Marseille, after locals reported weapons being discharged into the air.

However when they arrived they found themselves targeted. The shots reportedly missed by only a couple of feet.

The area was cordonned off and locals, including children evacuated or ordered indoors

Read more: Hooded gunmen fire at police in Marseille | euronews, world news

Banking Industry: British HSBC ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’

The Swiss arm of British banking giant HSBC helped wealthy clients dodge taxes and hide millions of dollars from authorities, according to a report by a network of investigative journalists released Sunday based on a cache of leaked bank files.

The allegations prompted the bank to release a statement admitting it was “accountable for past compliance and control failures” at its Swiss subsidiary HSBC Private Bank.

The files, analysed by reporters in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in collaboration with more than 140 journalists from 45 countries, showed that British banking giant HSBC provided accounts to international criminals, corrupt businessmen, politicians and celebrities.

"HSBC profited from doing business with arms dealers who channeled mortar bombs to child soldiers in Africa, bag men for Third World dictators, traffickers in blood diamonds and other international outlaws," ICIJ reported.

The leaked files were first obtained by French daily Le Monde, which then distributed them through the ICIJ to news outlets around the world, including The Guardian in the UK, Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung and 60 Minutes in the USA, who published their reports simultaneously on Sunday.

The Guardian alleged in its report that the files showed HSBC’s Swiss bank routinely allowed clients to withdraw “bricks” of cash, often in foreign currencies which were of little use in Switzerland, marketed schemes which were likely to enable wealthy clients to avoid European taxes and colluded to conceal undeclared accounts from domestic tax authorities.

Read more: Business - HSBC ‘helped clients dodge millions in tax’ - France 24