Sources of up-to-date news on Greece

This Guardian Business Blog seems as good a place as anywhere to get the latest Greek economic news (if your nerves can stand any more). Switch the automatic update ON.

And the good old BBC

Relevant updates and views:

International Herald Tribune

A Czech view from Corfu

Peter Oborne in The Telegraph

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Telegraph (has it really come to this? Surely not)

Who's smearing whom? (Bild)

Kathimerini: one way to give Greece a partial rebate

Athens News, The Memorandum Documents (Final Versions)

And a thoughtful view from Democracy Street, the blog authored by Simon Baddeley, currently in Corfu (I am sure he will not mind me quoting some extracts from his February 15 letter to a friend/posting):

"You ask 'how did it get like this?'. Explanation risks sounding like excuse. Greece is an extreme victim of the credit-pushers, corrupt politicians the portal for their access to the people who, over the last 15-20 years, went mad with plastic in a country that produces mainly tourism, now in weak competition with many other tourist destinations...The same leadership used the new credit to compete in buying voters instead of investing it in advanced tourist infrastructure, hi-tech industrialisation, improvements in the built environment of cities, green spaces and traffic management that cities in other parts of the world have carried out to attract white collar professionals. They failed failed to make higher educational institutions competitive with the universities to which bright Greeks head in droves in US, Australia and northern Europe. Why did wiser voices not prevail as this great failure of vision occurred? That’s because the arrogant, male-dominated, queue-jumping, bribe-ridden, clientelist, patronage culture of Greece, especially Athens, was never flushed from its corridors. (see my friend Richard Pine's latest op-ed Letter from Corfu for the Irish Times) The legacy of Ottoman occupation, like colonialism in Africa, is forever cited as explanation and excuse for a dependency in Greece that was continued by her role as post-war pawn of Britain and later America. A weakened US and now a weakened Europe makes that dependency unfruitful, and now new ideas and capital are beginning, as in Africa, to arrive from China; a new global ball-game…Even now Greece’s political leaders, aware of a General Election planned in April, might be said to be playing on fears in the rest of Europe of what will happen if the country descends into some sort of Argentinian chaos. I’m reminded of the old maxim about 'bacon and eggs’ ‘pigs and chickens'. Greece’s highly privileged politicians (in terms of income, expenses and other benefits) are the chickens with their eyes on the ballot box while proclaiming their enthusiasm for Greece to change through greater and more prolonged austerity. The ordinary people are the pigs who are, when it comes to bacon and eggs, committed in a rather more serious way. "