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As the antiausterity demonstration in Athens on Tuesday, June 28, devolved into familiar violent, tear-gas-soaked clashes between fringe anarchists and police outside Parliament, Giorgos Rallis shut off his television and stewed quietly about the immense dilemma facing his country.
This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde.
Crisis, drama, Herculean, Sisyphean, hubris and catharsis: the Greek language offers some apt words to describe Europe’s current dilemma.
When Henry James sailed out of New York harbor for Europe in 1875, Ellis Island, to his right, was just an empty rock, and the city he left behind was ethnically familiar. When he returned for a visit three decades later, everything had changed.
It’s not quite World War III, but tension over Greece’s debt crisis has ignited a battle of words between Athens and Berlin, reopening old wounds and raising the specter of Nazism.
Your official commencement speaker tackles the big themes, tells you to abjure greed, to play fair, to serve your community, to know thyself. Your more personally devoted commencement speaker agrees with all that
Defending champions Shakhtar Donetsk opened the group stages of UEFA’s new-look Europa League with a comfortable 4-1 win away to Belgian club Bruges on Thursday night. The Ukrainian side, who won the final edition of the UEFA Cup last season after being knocked out of the Champions League group stage, went 3-0 ahead in the first 35 minutes to clinch their first win at the Jan Breydel Stadium in four attempts
Greek firefighters planned to continue to work through the night to contain dozens of wildfires, including a massive blaze outside Athens, authorities said. Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis called for calm on Saturday and said ground forces “will continue their superhuman efforts” until dawn, when air operations and water drops will resume. Authorities reported 75 fires across the country.
A man, apparently upset at the way his fellow students had been treating him, opened fire outside a training center for the unemployed in Athens on Friday, police said.
The Olympic torch relay for the 2012 London Games will be confined to Britain, organizers confirmed on Friday. The past two summer Olympics have seen the torch taken on a world tour, but the experiment, started for the Athens Games in 2004, has now been scrapped. It follows the widespread political protests which disrupted the passage of the torch ahead of last year’s Games in Beijing.