The British Independent shows an ancient Greek marble column as an iceberg threatening the European Titanic while Hollande-Merkel “guarantee” safety in the Eurozone.

The Guardian shows Merkel as the “Liberty Leading the People” by famous French painter Eugène Delacroix, adding the comment “Austerity Electing a New People.” In a second caricature, the Guardian shows 300 Greeks trying to form a government and guard the “Hot Gates” against Chancellor Merkel and other European troops, adding the playful title “300^th attempt to form a Greek government.”

The German newspaper Tagesspiel presents horror alternatives that the Eurozone can opt for, while the newspaper Badische Zeitung shows a Greek abandoning a European boat to be found in the ‘safety’ of political extremism while thanking Zeus for the help.

Other newspapers, including the Belgian La Libre, depicts Greece as a contemporary Sisyphos, while the Belgian Le Temps shows Europe bringing Greece against two options.

The next rehearsal is planned for today (May 17), while two general rehearsals will take place on Monday and Tuesday (the final one), a few hours before the first Semi-Final.

Yesterday afternoon, the Greek Embassy in Baku held a special ceremony honoring the Greek singer and her team who promised to make Greece proud with their performance. Eleftheriou has given a series of interviews and has been invited on several radio and TV shows of Azerbaijan.

NET will broadcast the first Semi-final live on Tuesday, May 22, at 10pm. Greece will perform third.

Watch the video to see Eleftheriou in her first rehearsal in Baku:

The exhibition, which is composed of a large collection of photographs that capture countless aspects of the most fascinating city in the world at the beginning of the 20th century, was inaugurated by Consul General Nikos Mathioudakis. The photographs on display come from the work of Achilles Samantzis and Evgenios Dalezios and are exhibited in Constantinople for the first time; the album is dedicated to the great city and has been published since 2010.

Achilles Samantzis was born in Istanbul in 1870 and left the city in 1936. He was, without doubt, a typical grand bourgeois of Istanbul and served as the photographer of the Sultan and the Ottoman princes. He was, however, a cosmopolitan without a trace of Levantinism – Europeans and those who aspired to European modes do not appear before his lens.

He undoubtedly adores Istanbul: the entire city, the multinational and multi-religious metropolis, the then many-faced city of minorities. He immortalizes its buildings and its people, its general views, and its countryside, its Byzantine monuments but also political events that shook the city in the beginning of the 20th century. Istanbul seduced and guided him. The photographs have become the city’s own internal monologue, its own reflection, with no other attempts at interpretation.

Samantzis’s eye is spontaneous and internal, directed to an external world that is at the same time a familiar place for the soul. He was always completely genuine, and Istanbul unfolds before his lens exactly as it was.

Evgenios Dalezios, who belonged to the next generation, deliberately tried to save this heritage of memory. He gathered his father-in-law’s photographic collection and added many of his own photographs. He made repeated visits to Istanbul down to the early 1960s, which rekindled his memories and gave them concrete form once more. In this way, he managed to rescue the memory of Achilles Samantzis as an important artist, but also the memory of Istanbul itself, as it was in the last years of the Ottoman Empire.

The photo exhibition has already attracted many historians and intellectuals.

Find out more at the official website of the Greek General Consulate in Istanbul: www.mfa.gr

During his speech, honoring departing ECB board member Jose Manuel Gonzalez-Paramo, Draghi said, “Our strong preference is that Greece will continue to stay in the euro area.”

He declared that whether Greece will stay or go isn’t exactly up to ECB to decide, simply because its founding treaty “does not foresee anything on an exit.” He stressed the fact that the ECB is mainly focused on the anti-inflation mandate and “preserving the integrity of our balance sheet,” suggesting that the ECB won’t go out of its way to prop up Athens.

Draghi made it clear that Greece’s future in the eurozone lies (literally) at the hands of Greek voters, who will go to the polls again next month, in a second attempt to form a government.

Despite everything being said and done, the ECB is actually increasing the pressure on Greek authorities to carry out a recapitalization of the banking system, since most of its equity was wiped out by the restructuring of Greece’s privately held debt earlier this year.

Once Greek banks are recapitalized, they should be able to access the ECB’s normal operations again; that’s according to the ECB.

This statement was issued at the end of a very difficult day of speculation and rumors over an increasingly fragile financial situation in Greece.

According to the official announcement published on the London 2012 Olympics website, Beckham will travel to Greece to join the official British delegation headed by Princess Anne, who is president of the British Olympic Association and London 2012 board member.

The LA Galaxy player will be accompanied by five young students from British schools and colleges at the ceremony, who have been chosen to participate in the ceremony for their commitment to sports and Olympics-related ideas.

The chairman of the London 2012 organizing committee Lord Coe will be also present at tomorrow’s handover ceremony, which marks the end of a 7-day-long relay of the Flame across Greece and its passing on to this year’s host country.

According to Lord Coe, mixing a giant sports star with the younger generation of England is the best way to promote the 70-day-long relay of 8,000 torchbearers across the country.

Other members of the British delegation include Olympics minister Hugh Robertson and London Mayor Boris Johnson. The delegation will carry the Flame to the UK on Friday evening with the goldish-painted BA airbus “Firefly.” On Saturday morning, the 70-day long journey of the Flame will commence from Cornwall to reach its final destination, the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, by July 27.

The document belongs to Michael Critovoulos, a Greek politician, scholar and historian, who lived between 1410 and 1470. His birth-name was Kritopoulos, but he changed it to sound more ancient Greek-like.

He experienced the Siege and Fall of Constantinople and wrote about Mehmed II the Conqueror.

The discovery sheds light on issues, such as taxation during the Fall, relationships between Greeks and Ottomans, the contention between Venetians and Genoese.

Critovoulos refers also to the construction of the Rumeli Hisari fortress, which was the knockout blow for the Byzantine Istanbul. The chronicle of destruction and looting of the city by the Ottomans, in order to make it their capital, is also mentioned.

His book, according to the Turkish website Hubermonitor.com, was printed with the contribution of the Pavlos and Alexandra Kanellopoulos Foundation. This will be a bilingual issue, having the original manuscript and the Turkish translation by Aris Tsokonas on the one page and the colourful photocopy of the text on the other.

The book will be presented at Pera Museum, located in Istanbul, on May 21.

“That the euro can continue to exist without Greece is a foregone conclusion,” said Passera, speaking on a morning television news program.

“Attempts to form a government in Greece collapsed on Tuesday, jolting financial markets at the prospect that leftists opposed to the terms of an EU bailout could sweep to victory in a June election and tip the euro zone deeper into crisis.”

“Europe has been unable to manage Greece’s problems in the right way, and now it is making demands from Greece that are probably impossible,” he said to Reuters.

Passera added that a high-debt country like Italy would be the first to suffer from the impact of Greece’s exit, reports the article.

Maybe the Italian Minister wasn’t patient enough to wait until today to make his remarks, after a temporary yet efficient solution was given to the matter of Greece’s government formation. Nevertheless, the number of people saying Greece isn’t irreplaceable in the Eurozone is increasing.

Source: Reuters

Egemen Bagis said he hoped Greece would deal with its own economic problems, instead of dealing with Macedonia’s name, problems regarding the islands and barb wires across the border.

He advised Greece to mind its own business, and let things be when it comes to the Skopjan issue and the regular invasions of Turkish military aircrafts above Greek islands.

“We will support Greece in such a case (if it starts to deal with its economic problems),” Bagis said during his meeting with the Skopjan Minister in the Turkish capital city.

Egemen Bagis commented on the outcome of the Greek elections and the delay of the government formation saying that “everybody had to respect decision of the Greek people in the upcoming new elections.”

Bagis said his ministry decided to sign a cooperation agreement with Skopje to share the two countries’ experiences in EU negotiation process. He explained that Turkey and Skopje were aware that the reason for problems they were trying to overcome on the road to EU was prejudice, apparently pointing to Greece.

It appears that the two countries will form some kind of diplomatic alliance to fight against the “prejudice.”

Skopjan Poposki, in his part, said the EU is indispensable for the region where Turkey and Skopje are situated, and the EU integration process would become richer if it included Turkey and Skopje. The Skopjan foreign minister said it was not an easy path, but a path that would boost the welfare and peace in the Balkan region. Poposki also said everyone had to respect Greek election results.

“Default will be disastrous for Greece and the resulting contagion would be damaging for Europe. So goes the conventional wisdom. The only debate has been about the strength of contagion and the appropriate response of vulnerable countries and of the check-writing country. Might the debate be misguided because the premise is flawed? Expelled from the eurozone, Greece might prove more dangerous to the system than it ever was inside it – by providing a model of successful recovery,” explains the Financial Times article.

And he goes on. “There is an overlooked scenario in which default is not a disaster for Greece. If this is the case, the real, more existential threat to the eurozone might be a very different one, in which the Greeks have the last laugh,” calling everyone to consider this radical scenario.

Admitting that the initial consequences will be harsh, he explains that “this process would also produce a substantially depreciated exchange rate (50 drachmas to the euro, anyone?). And that would set in motion a process of adjustment that would soon re-orientate the economy and put it on a path of sustainable growth. In fact, Greek growth would probably surge, possibly for a prolonged period, if it adopted sensible policies to restore rapidly and sustain macroeconomic stability.”

The writer substantiates his skepticism. “Just look at what happened to the countries that defaulted and devalued during the financial crises of the 1990s. They all initially suffered severe contractions. But the recessions lasted only one or two years. Then came the rebound. South Korea posted nine years of growth averaging nearly 6 percent. Indonesia, which experienced a wave of defaults that toppled nearly every bank in the entire system, registered growth above 5 percent for a similar period; Argentina close to 8 percent; and Russia above 7 percent. The historical record shows clearly that there is life after financial crises.”

“This would also be true in Greece, even allowing for the particularities of its situation,” Arvind says.

“Greece, moreover, would experience a mega-depreciation, like the countries mentioned above, not a modest one. Such a change would necessarily create new opportunities for exports and convert marginally non-tradable activities into tradable ones…the strong incentives that will be created by a super-competitive exchange rate are undeniable,” he adds.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and author of ‘Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance.’

Source: www.ft.com

The failure of Greece’s leaders to form a government has renewed speculation that Greece could be forced out of the single currency. William Hill said the level of betting on Greece quitting first was so vast that it had become too risky to continue taking bets, with the odds pushed right down to 1/4.

“We’ve had Greece as hot favorites for some time, but increasingly it was becoming the only one that people wanted to bet on,” said a spokesman for William Hill, Britain’s largest betting firm. “It wasn’t a healthy situation for bookmakers. We found it was virtually impossible to make a book.”

Britain’s second-biggest betting firm, Ladbrokes, said it had suspended betting on Greece dropping out of the Eurozone by the end of the year, after repeatedly slashing the odds.

“It is safer for us to suspend betting than to keep cutting the odds,” a spokesman for Ladbrokes said. “We have been slashing the odds repeatedly over the last few days.”

Ladbrokes also stopped taking bets on the Greek stock market losing more than 25 percent of its value in a single day’s trading by the end of 2012. Ladbrokes was offering odds on the euro ceasing to exist by the end of 2012, which could make punters 33 times their original stake, but according to Le Monde, bets were paused as of May 10.

Ladbrokes is offering odds of 5/6 that the euro will cease to exist by the end of 2015 and 4/1 on two or more states to leave the euro by the end of the year.

William Hill, however, has closed betting on the euro still being in existence by the end of 2015 – a possibility it sees as closely linked to what is happening in Greece – with the latest odds before suspension at 4/6 in favor and 11/10 against.

Once the situation in Greece becomes less volatile, the bookmakers say they will see to reopen the market.