Group items tagged

Sixty-five percent of respondents in the Ethnos/MARC survey said that the country should "negotiate hard" to revise the bailout's terms, while 54 percent believed that there was no way Athens could leave the euro. A total of 82 percent said the country should keep the single currency.

SYRIZA, led by its charismatic 37-year old leader Alexis Tsipras, is doing particularly well among the young who are particularly hit by unemployment, pollster Pulse said.New Democracy, by contrast, had a big lead among the over-60s, Pulse said.

In a bid to woo anti-bailout voters, conservative leader Samaras said on Saturday Greece should be given more time to comply with a bailout term to generate about 11.5 billion euros in savings over the next two years."All new spending cuts ... should take place over four years, not two," he was quoted as saying by Real News.

Without new bailout funds, Athens may run out of cash by end of June, newspaper To Vima reported, citing a memo compiled by former Prime Minister Lucas Papademos on May 11."From June 20, the government's available cash will cross negative territory to the tune of 1 billion euros," the document said, confirming earlier reports by finance ministry officials that Greece might run out cash by the end of June.

The data compares trust and mistrust in the EU at the end of last year with levels in 2007, before the financial crisis, to reveal a precipitate fall in support for the EU of the kind that is common in Britain but is much more rarely seen on the continent.

Five years ago, 56% of Germans "tended to trust" the EU, whereas 59% now "tend to mistrust". In France, mistrust has risen from 41% to 56%. In Italy, where public confidence in Europe has traditionally been higher than in the national political class, mistrust of the EU has almost doubled from 28% to 53%.Even in Poland, which enthusiastically joined the EU less than a decade ago and is the single biggest beneficiary from the transfers of tens of billions of euros from Brussels, support has plummeted from 68% to 48%, although it remains the sole country surveyed where more people trust than mistrust the union.In Britain, where Eurobarometer regularly finds majority Euroscepticism, the mistrust grew from 49% to 69%, the highest level with the exception of the extraordinary turnaround in Spain.

"Overall levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy [declined] across much of Europe, but this varied markedly between countries. It was significant in Britain, Belgium, Denmark and Finland, particularly notable in France, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain, and reached truly alarming proportions in the case of Greece," it said.

Aart de Geus, head of the Bertelsmann Stiftung, a German thinktank, also warned that the drive to surrender more key national powers to Brussels would backfire. "Public support for the EU has been falling since 2007. So it is risky to go for federalism as it can cause a backlash and unleash greater populism."

Whereas only 21% of the older group view Muslims as compatible with British life, the figure among young Britons is almost twice as high, at 38%. Whereas almost half of the over-sixties view British Muslims as posing a serious threat to democracy, the equivalent figure among more recent generations is just 19%.

Even a majority of Germans are now anti-EU, and a third want the deutschmark back.

Cameron and the sceptics therefore need to be constructive to be plausible. They need to argue for a European Bretton Woods, to write off bad debts and recalibrate regional economies by returning to revalued regional currencies. They need to propose European institutions that respect national politics and character, not just grab more power to the centre. There needs to be a sceptics' vision of Europe.Closer European union was an answer to war. After that it offered an answer to communist dictatorship. In both it could claim success. Finally, at Maastricht in 1992, it flew too near the sun. It pretended that one currency traded within a single politico-economic space could overcome economic diversity and yield a common wealth. It overreached itself. In refusing to recognise this failure, Barroso and his colleagues now risk jeopardising even Europe's earlier successes.

Another Jewish Home candidate, Jeremy Gimpel, was the subject of a furore when a video revealed that he suggested in 2011 that the Dome of the Rock, the revered mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, could be "blown up" to allow the building of a third Jewish temple on the site, which is also sacred to Judaism."Imagine today if the golden dome, I'm being recorded so I can't say blown up, but let's say it was blown up, right, and we laid the cornerstone of the temple in Jerusalem … it would be incredible," he said. Following calls to disqualify him as a candidate, Gimpel said the remarks had been "a joke".

The big question is what would happen to the oil industry in Venezuela, which vies with Saudi Arabia in claiming the biggest proven oil reserves in the world. Until now Russian and Chinese companies have struck the biggest deals for future exploitation. "We have to revise every deal. I think they are agreements that are not functioning," Capriles said.

Capriles has said he will continue to work with Beijing – because "everyone deals with China" – but he appeared ready to distance Venezuela from Iran. "How have relations with Iran and Belarus benefited Venezuela? We are interested in countries that have democracies, that respect human rights, that we have an affinity with. What affinity do we have with Iran?"

Capriles is the grandson of Jewish émigrés who escaped the Holocaust. He studied law at the Catholic University in Caracas, and says that if he wins the first thing he will do is pay homage to the Virgin Mary in El Valle on the island of Margarita.

Capriles, who spent eight months in prison after allegedly trying to break into the Cuban embassy in the days after a 2002 coup attempt against Chávez

The catalyst for the crisis was Geert Wilders, whose anti-euro, anti-Islam Freedom Party had pledged to support the minority government in parliament and give it the majority to pass legislation.But after seven weeks of talks, Wilders suddenly backed out just when a deal appeared close.Wilders' supporters are against budget cuts, particularly cuts in welfare, health and unemployment benefits, and there was talk, which he denied, that the Freedom Party was split over the proposed cuts."We don't want to make our pensioners bleed for the sake of diktats from Brussels," Wilders told reporters on Saturday.

"This was a package that would damage our economy over coming years and increase unemployment. And all that to meet a demand made by Brussels, accepted by the Liberals, of reaching a 3 per cent deficit in 2013."