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An oil strike has forced around a fourth of the country’s stations to close because of lack of gasoline. ___ Some 3,000 gasoline stations in France—around a fourth of the country’s stations—have had to close because an oil strike has shut off their fuel supply, Telesur reports. For the first time in more than five years, France is dipping into its strategic oil reserves, while unions block refineries. Those stations lucky enough to have fuel are under government orders to restrict the sale of diesel or gasoline to around $30 per customer. Unions are picketing French refineries in protest against...

Ten riot police squads left Athens this morning and are expected to take position at the refugees camp of Idomeni that will be evacuated from the 8.500 men, women and children living there since last February. Other police forces from Northern Greece will be deployed in the area for “as long as it takes.” According to Greek media, the evacuation of the camp is scheduled to be launched at 6 a.m. on Tuesday and conclude after a week to ten days. Spokesman of Migration Coordination Body, Giorgos Kyritsis said Monday morning that operation may start “Tuesday or Wednesday.” Buses will...

Irreconcilable Positions Greece owes the Troika over €11 billion in bailout repayments through the end of July. Greece is unable make those payments unless the Troika releases the funds. Position 1: “We need a big debt restructuring, no more kicking the can,” says Greece’s Minister of State. Position 2: Germany offers a possibility of unspecified debt relief, at a future point in time, only if necessary. First, Greece must make another round of budget cuts on top of the pension cuts its just made. Greece has caved in every time, and in the most humiliating ways. Greece even caved in...

After Donald Trump secured the Republican nomination on Tuesday night, the BBC rounded up the reactions from the global press to Trump's victory. Aside from some gloating in authoritarian Russia and China, the reaction was pretty shocked. "The craziest US presidential election campaign begins," Germany's Die Welt daily wrote. "The unthinkable has come to pass."

Hillary Clinton's son-in-law is finally shutting down the Greece-focused fund, after losing nearly 90% of its value. Investors were told last month that Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity would finally be put out of its misery and would shutter. The closure comes as the worst possible time: we are confident that Donald Trump will be quick to work it into his political attack routine.

All people who arrive safely on the beaches of eastern Greece via smugglers' boats from Turkey have the right to seek asylum in the country and are entitled, under European Union law, to a fair adjudication of their claims. But at least 300 non-Syrian asylum-seekers have been deported in the past several weeks without any examination of their claims, members of European Parliament told the Guardian Tuesday after interviewing dozens of people in Greece. “All refugees interviewed told us they were not given the opportunity to ask for asylum, neither in Greece nor in Turkey,” members of European Parliament Cornelia...

It was a hedge fund portfolio pitched by Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, as an opportunity to bet on a Greek economic revival. Now, two years later, the Greece-focused fund is shutting down, after losing nearly 90 percent of its value, according to two investors with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Investors were told last month that the fund would close. The fund, Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, had raised $25 million from investors to buy Greek bank stocks and government debt. Eaglevale Partners, a Manhattan hedge fund firm founded by Mr. Mezvinsky and two...

Some 95 percent of the 220 billion euros disbursed to Greece since the start of the financial crisis as loans from the bailout mechanism has been directed toward saving the European banks. That means about 210 billion euros was eventually channeled to the eurozone credit sector while just 5 percent ended up in state coffers, according to a study by the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) in Berlin. “Europe and the International Monetary Fund have in previous years mainly saved the banks and other private creditors,” concluded the report, published yesterday in German newspaper Handelsblatt. ESMT director Jorg...

Fr. Lubomyr Yavorskyy, head of the Chaplaincy Services of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, on the physical trials and spiritual challenges of ministering to Ukrainian soldiersIn mid-February 2016, Fr. Lubomyr Yavorskyy, Deputy Head of Chaplaincy Services of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, visited numerous parishes and venues in Toronto and parts of southern Ontario at the invitation of Bishop Stephen Chmilar, Eparch of Toronto, and of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC). Bishop Chmilar and the UCC had jointly organized a fundraising campaign called “Save Lives” in order to assist Ukrainian soldiers with their extensive humanitarian...

The Tata Steel sale has revived the battle between protectionists and free traders, a debate that became particularly acute in the run-up to the creation of the World Trade Organisation in 1995, which marked the success of “free traders” all around the world. In the protectionist camp, there is now a wide range of political parties from the extreme left to the extreme right: from Syriza to Ukip, from the Front National to Podemos. The common element for all these parties is that they dream of returning to a time when “we were in control”; when we could easily open...

Billionaire financier George Soros has warned that the European Union is in mortal danger of collapse if it doesn’t agree a massive cash injection to fix the refugee crisis. In an essay written for the New York Review of Books, Soros also claimed that a humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Greece. “The asylum seekers are desperate. Legitimate refugees must be offered a reasonable chance to reach their destinations in Europe,” the investor wrote in the publication.

The International Monetary Fund is considering forcing Germany’s leadership to quickly grant wide-ranging debt relief for Greece or allow the Fund to exit Athens’ bailout programme after six years, according to a transcript of an internal IMF teleconference published by WikiLeaks. The teleconference, between the head of the IMF’s European operations and its top Greek bailout monitor, is the clearest sign to date that the Fund wants to leave Greece’s €86 billion ($97 billion) rescue to the European Union alone and wash its hands of a programme that has led to a torrent of criticism. During the call, which occurred...

If Israel does not take steps to separate from the Palestinians, Jews will continue to be killed in terror attacks and the two-state solution will be in danger, opposition leader Isaac Herzog told US Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday. Biden met with Herzog before concluding his three-day trip to Israel in a conversation that focused on the current wave of terror and on Biden's impressions on the Palestinian issue based on his talks with leaders during his visit. The US vice president's trip saw him meet both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas separately. Biden...

There was a lot of whining inside the beltway last March about whether then-House Speaker John Boehner broke diplomatic protocol by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without informing the White House. This was during the critical period a few months before the Senate weighed in on President Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement. The results are in: the Prime Minister’s speech will stand the test of time, while partisan hand-wringing will have nothing to do with the outcome of Iran’s nuclear development. Let’s review the record though to see how the political people in charge behave when something...

The European Union fears Mediterranean migrant smuggling gangs are reviving a route from Egypt, officials told Reuters, putting thousands of people to sea in recent months as they face problems in Libya and Turkey. "It's an increasing issue," an EU official said of increased activity after a quiet year among smugglers around Alexandria that has raised particular concerns in Europe about Islamist militants from Sinai using the route to reach Greece or Italy. Departures from Egypt were a tiny part of the million people who arrived in Europe by sea last year; more than 80 percent came from Turkey to...

On February 26, the ayatollahs have scheduled two "elections" in Iran: one for the parliament and one for the Assembly of Experts, a body that is supposed to monitor the supreme leader and choose a replacement when the time comes. Some in the West tout this as the potential start of a new era of moderation. After all it is the first election since the conclusion of nuclear negotiations between Iran and six world powers. But the nuclear deal cannot be the only criteria by which the West determines the prospects for moderation in Iran. Equally or more important is...

Merkel is battling for a deal that will see refugees more evenly spread around the European Union after Germany welcomed 1.1 million asylum seekers last year. But instead, eastern European countries are planning new razor wire fences, and even Paris -- traditionally Berlin's closest EU ally -- has shown little enthusiasm for Merkel's welcome policy. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Saturday that the mood in France was "not favourable" to Merkel's call for a permanent quota system. "Europe cannot take in all the migrants from Syria, Iraq or Africa," Valls told German media. "It has to regain control over...

First let’s understand what we ‘re talking about. We are talking about thugs who learned their tactics from the Brown Shirts... Back then they spoke mostly German. Today they speak mostly Arabic even if it’s in English. The target? The Jews. Anybody else? Nobody else. Think Kristallnacht (the infamous Night of Breaking Glass) – except on a daily basis, not just one night – and focused on every business imaginable, and the campuses. Nearly every college and university in the United States has them, and has them ready to “break glass” and riot against anything Jewish or Israeli. Mostly a...

EU authorities want to reintroduce Greece to ‘Dublin system’, which lets governments send asylum seekers back to the first country they arrived inEuropean Union authorities have given Athens one month to improve conditions for asylum seekers in the hope of eventually sending more refugees back to Greece. The plan to overhaul Greece’s migration and asylum system is part of the EU’s effort to get to grips with the biggest refugee crisis since the second world war, amid apocalyptic warnings that the union is falling apart. The European commission issued Athens with a list of instructions on Wednesday to bring Greece...

Putin’s war cost Russia its centuries-long shared identity with its neighbour. Now, Kyiv risks betraying the spirit of the Maidan revolution. When the Russian inquest finally comes, the answer will be clear. It was President Vladimir Putin who lost Ukraine – after a millennium of shared east Slav identity. When the Ukrainian inquest into who lost the ­Euromaidan’s “Revolution of Dignity” finally comes, the answer, on the present evidence, will also be clear. It was an elite core of politicians and oligarchs who first worked a miracle in fighting Russia’s military Goliath to a stalemate – only to revert to...