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NEWS
The main stories…
What the editorials said
Ever since the crash of 2008, Europe’s Left has “waited in vain
for a great anti-capitalist revolt on the part of electors”, said
Greek voters sent shock waves across Europe
The Independent. Greek voters have now
last Sunday when they elected a far-left party
delivered it, setting the scene for a test of wills
that has pledged to defy Europe’s financial
between Athens and the EU elite. This was an
establishment and roll back austerity. Syriza,
“understandable howl of rage” from a country
led by 40-year-old Alexis Tsipras, fell just two
where a quarter of workers, and half of all
seats short of an outright majority. It has since
young people, are unemployed, said The Daily
formed a coalition with the Independent
Mail. Although Syriza’s plans for a “massive
Greeks, a small far-right party that shares
public spending binge” in Greece are clearly
Syriza’s determination to rip up the terms of the
“bonkers”, the party’s victory presents the EU’s
$271bn bailout imposed by the so-called
de facto leader, German Chancellor Angela
troika: the European Central Bank, the
Merkel, with a nasty dilemma. Does she now
International Monetary Fund and the EU.
ease Greece’s debt burden, thereby inviting
Tsipras, Greece’s youngest postwar prime
other struggling nations such as Spain, Italy and
minister, declared that his country was “leaving
Portugal to demand similar concessions? Or
behind five years of humiliation”; his new
does she hold firm, running the risk of Greece
Tsipras: Asking the impossible?
finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, described
defaulting and crashing out of the eurozone?
the German-backed austerity regime as a form of “fiscal
It’s in everybody’s interest to prevent the latter, said The
waterboarding” that had turned Greece into a “debt colony”.
Guardian. Three-quarters of Greeks want to keep the euro.
Tsipras said he wanted to write off half of Greece’s debt, but
With luck, the two sides will devise some sort of compromise
stressed that the country planned to keep the euro and would
that includes an element of debt relief. But unless demand is
not default. EU leaders, however, signalled that, while they
boosted in Greece, and other countries, the EU is going to face
might be willing to relax Athens’s repayment schedule, they
many more moments like this. “It is not just Greece that needs
would not yield to demands for debt forgiveness.
a fresh start, but the whole eurozone.”
Greece’s verdict
What happened
Warfare against ISIL
What happened
What the editorials said
Nothing is yet known for certain about Yukawa’s suspected
death, said Japan’s Asahi Shimbun. “But we cannot contain a
surge of anger from deep down in our hearts if
the extremists have carried out an execution, as
they had warned they would do. We know our
words will probably not reach the hearts of those
extremists, but we still want to say to them out
loud: stop taking any more lives.” Another
Japanese newspaper, Mainichi, said ISIL was
“dramatising” the bargaining process in a bid
to increase its “presence”. The newspaper
warned the jihadist group that “such an act
only highlights the inhuman aspect of the
organisation and increasingly isolates itself in
the community of some 1.6 billion Muslims
throughout the world.
The lives of Japanese journalist Kenji
Goto and Jordanian F-16 pilot Moaz
al-Kasasbeh hung in the balance this
week as their governments scrambled to
negotiate their release from Islamic State
in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). The terrorist
group had earlier issued a video purporting
to show that Goto’s 42-year-old friend,
Haruna Yukawa, had been beheaded after
the expiration of a deadline for Japan to
pay a multimillion dollar ransom. Jordan said
it was willing to release Sajida al-Rishawi, an
Iraqi al-Qaeda militant sentenced to death in
Jordan, if Lt Kasasbeh was released and his
life spared.
Goto: Life hanging in the balance
Meanwhile, Kurdish forces have struck a “symbolic
blow” against ISIL by taking full control of the Syrian city
of Kobane. The Kurdish victory follows a four-month
campaign by Kurdish
peshmerga
forces backed by
relentless US-led air strikes.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post warned
against triumphalism in relation to the Kurdish victory in
Kobane. It points out that Kobane accounted for 75% of
nearly 1,000 airstrikes carried out in Syria since September and
the liberation of a “single border hamlet” does not mask the
fact that ISIL is “growing stronger rather than weaker”.
A 13-year-old boy from California
has put his Lego skills to use by
creating a braille printer. When
Shubham Banerjee discovered
that blind people had to rely on
out-dated, pricey equipment, he
got to work on a low-cost
alternative that would print
using raised dots instead of ink.
He designed a prototype at his
family’s kitchen table using a
Lego robotics kit – and his start-
up, Braigo Labs, has already
received investment from Intel
Capital. Shubham is too young
to sign documents or write
cheques, so for now his mother
is the company’s CEO.
It wasn’t all bad
The UAE’s first female crane
operator says her job requires a “lot
of attention and focus” Aisha Al
.
Marzouqi, 28, is in the final stages of
training at Khalifa Port in Abu Dhabi.
She’ll soon be flying solo at the
controls of one of the port’s super-
post-Panamax cranes weighing
1,932 tonnes and measuring 126.5
metres. Her main job will be to
unload container vessels using the
crane, which has a lifting capacity of
90 tonnes. “As part of my job, there
are challenges like getting on the
crane in the first place, she told Gulf
”
News. “However I love the job.
”
At the age of 90, a
Kenyan great-great-
grandmother is going
to primary school for
the first time. Having
worked as a midwife
for 60 years, Priscilla
Sitienei enrolled at
Leaders Vision
Preparatory School in
Ndalat five years ago
with the intention of
learning to read and
write. She has since been made a prefect – and is now believed
to be the world’s oldest pupil. Sitienei hopes to inspire young
people – especially girls – to study. “Too many older children are
not in school,” she said. “They tell me they are too old. I tell
them, ‘Well I am at school and so should you’”
.
THE WEEK 1 FEBRUARY 2015
…and how they were covered
What the commentators said
Outside Germany, said Robert Peston on BBC News online, it’s “almost impossible to find an
economist” who believes that Greece’s debt repayment plan was ever likely to work. The
country’s GDP has shrunk by about a fifth since 2010, “thanks in large part to austerity
imposed by Brussels”. As a result, the debt burden, despite falling a bit in absolute terms, has
become increasingly unaffordable. At the end of 2009, Greece’s debts were equivalent to 127%
of GDP, but by the end of last September that share had soared to 176%. The troika has been
pursuing “fantasy economics”, agreed Paul Krugman in The New York Times. Back in 2012,
the IMF itself looked for an example of where a Greek-style austerity programme had
succeeded – and couldn’t find one. By calling for radical change, Tsipras “is being far more
realistic than officials who want the beatings to continue until morale improves”.
This crisis should be resolved “largely on Greece’s terms”, said Jeffrey Sachs in The Guardian.
It’s clear that it can’t repay its debts under current arrangements “without a level of pain that is
simply beyond the tolerance of democratic societies”. Germany should remember its own
unhappy experience with war reparations after the First World War. While debt relief alone
won’t solve all of Greece’s economic problems, it would at least “open the door to a solution”.
For Greece, perhaps, said Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. But an “explicit debt write-off
would cause more problems for Europe than it solved”. It would infuriate northern countries such
as Finland and the Netherlands, whose voters were sceptical about bailing out Greece in the first
place. This would undermine trust in the EU and fuel the rise of nationalist parties. What chance
would there be of a German parliament ever voting through another bailout if Greece were let off
the hook? Tsipras is a skilful politician, said Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph, but what he’s
demanding – the advantages of a German-style hard currency along with “the fiscal flexibility of a
sovereign state” – just isn’t possible under EU rules. An impasse thus looks inevitable. “Whether the
glide path is steep or gentle, it points unambiguously towards exit.”
NEWS
5
What next?
Tsipras has promised not
to get into a “mutually
destructive clash” with the
EU but to seek “realistic
proposals” for a Greek
recovery, reports Reuters.com.
His plans are expected to
include a crackdown on tax
evasion, giving free electricity
and food stamps to the poor,
reversing a cut to the
minimum wage, and the
possible cancellation of
some privatisation plans.
The first deadline for a deal
between Athens and the
troika will come on 28
February, when the current
bailout agreement is due to
be replaced with a follow-up
programme. Greek banks rely
on the ECB for cheap credit,
which the bank has warned
will stop if a new agreement
isn’t reached.
What the commentators said
The BBC’s world affairs correspondent, Paul Adams, said it is hard to see how ISIL would let both
Goto and al-Kasasbeh walk free. “That leaves Japan and Jordan in a macabre contest, not of their
own making, to get their citizens back.”
The fact that Jordan has made the “sensational offer” to free a
suicide bomber, whose device failed to explode, illustrates the
“tremendous pressure” on King Abdullah II and his government,
said Taylor Luck and William Booth in The Boston Globe. An
exchange of prisoners would be a first for ISIL, which has reportedly
released European captives in exchange for ransom. But Jordan’s
offer could “undermine” the US-led coalition fighting the jihadists
by “encouraging hostage-taking”.
The hostage situation has prompted enormous debate in Japan, said
Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi in an article for CNN. There have been
questions about why nothing was done sooner when the two had
been missing for months, and also why they were in such a
Kurdish forces in Kobane
dangerous part of the world in the first place. Many Japanese
believe the two “bear some responsibility” for travelling to the region “despite public warnings by
the Japanese government about the risks of citizens travelling there”. Writing on the BasNews
website, Junaid Aman said the fight for Kobane was a “battle between humanity and barbarity, a
battle between freedom and tyranny”. Ultimately, it was the “free will of the people and the will of
humanity” that succeeded.
What next?
As The Week went to press,
Japan and Jordan were
urgently studying a message,
purportedly from ISIL, that
extended the deadline for
Jordan’s release of Sajida
al-Rishawi. The recording
said Jordan must present
al-Rishawi at the Turkish
border by sunset Thursday,
or al-Kasasbeh would be
killed. Meanwhile, the Kurds
who fled Kobane to escape
the fighting face a huge task
before they can resume their
lives in the devastated city.
Homes and infrastructure
have been destroyed by four
months of air strikes and
street-to-street fighting;
unexploded devices, mines
and booby-traps need to be
found and cleared.
THE WEEK
Given the turmoil that has
engulfed parts of the region,
it’s interesting – not to
mention reassuring – to read that Abu Dhabi has been ranked
the safest city in the Middle East and Africa. The Economist
Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index for 2015 also ranked the
UAE capital as the 25th safest city in the world, ahead of GCC
neighbours Doha (29th), Kuwait City (36th) and Riyadh (46th).
Tokyo is the world’s safest city, according to an assessment
that included digital security, health security, infrastructure
safety and personal safety, followed by Osaka and Singapore.
Stockholm and Amsterdam rounded out the list of the top 5
safest cities, while Jakarta, Mexico City, Johannesburg and
Tehran only just scraped into the Top 50. Interestingly, the
report found that wealth is not always a guarantee of safety.
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1 FEBRUARY 2015 THE WEEK

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