ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek police intercepted a booby-trapped parcel addressed to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Monday, after another package exploded at a courier company in Athens, slightly wounding an employee.
Police suspect the parcels were linked to Greek leftist guerrilla groups. Greece has been rocked by a wave of gas canister and bomb attacks, usually claimed by leftist groups, since the police killing of a teenager in Athens in 2008 sparked the country's worst riots in decades.
The parcel that exploded in the hands of a female employee was addressed to the Mexican embassy in Athens, police said.
Shortly after the explosion, police arrested two suspects and detonated two more makeshift parcel bombs they carried and a third one found at another deliver company.
"One of the explosive devices that the suspects were carrying was addressed to the president of the French Republic, Nicolas Sarkozy," police spokesman Thanassis Kokkalakis said, adding the other packages were addressed to the Belgian and Dutch embassies in Athens.
"It is not clear what the motive behind these attacks was," he said.
Another police official said the quantity of explosives used in the parcel bombs was too small to kill.
In June, a booby-trapped package exploded at the ministry in charge of police, killing one of the minister's closest aides.
On Friday, two air cargo packages containing bombs, both sent from Yemen and addressed to synagogues in Chicago, were intercepted in Britain and Dubai.
Kokkalakis said police believed Monday's events in Greece were not linked to this. "We don't see a link with al Qaeda, but we are still investigating," he said.
The suspects, aged 22 and 24, were carrying weapons and one was wearing a bullet-proof jacket, police said. The youngest is suspected to be a member of a Greek leftist guerrilla group known as the Fire Conspiracy Cells.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry confirmed that a parcel was addressed to the Dutch embassy but declined to comment on the type of explosives or the reason the embassy was targeted.
(Reporting by Renee Maltezou; Editing by Ingrid Melander and Janet Lawrence)
Just one in three of the French people now back their president, according to polls - making him even more unpopular than General Charles de Gaulle in 1968, when millions took to the streets in protest against him.
Opposition leader Martine Aubry, head of the Socialist Party, has accused Sarkozy of treating the French 'with contempt' after pushing through the pension reform bill.
Author Besma Lahouri has also blamed Sarkozy's wife, Carla Bruni, for his popularity nosedive.
Lahouri's unauthorised biography about France's First Lady describes her as a 'frothy Marie-Antoinette' character and a 'liability'.
Nigel Farage MEP, UKIP, Co-President of the EFD group, made the statement during a meeting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on October 20, 2010.
Transcript
Well, president Barroso, you’re certainly flexing your muscles, using the powers given to you with the Lisbon treaty which you pushed through using illegitimate means. You now do everything you can on the world stage and within the EU to acquire all the attributes of statehood.
And nowhere could that be more apparent than in your recent proposal for a direct tax to be levied by the European institutions on the peoples of this continent.
Of course in previous times there was a very successful independence movement that campaigned on the slogan of ‘No taxation witout representation’.
And you certainly, sir, are not a representative. We haven’t voted for you and we can’t remove you. So I think with this direct tax you actually made a mistake.
And what an expensive club it’s becoming. Just two years ago, Britain’s net contribtuion was £3 billion a year. This year it’s £6 billion. Next year it will be £8 billion. The year after that, it’s due to be £10 billion. And now we hear that you want to take away the British rebate. You want to get rid of the British rebate, which will mean by 2013 our contribution will be £13 billion. It would have quadrupled in the space of six years.
And simply, the taxpayers of Britain, realising all of this, seeing your direct tax will conclude that we simply can’t afford the European Union.
But I do see a ray of hope. The Doville deal between Merkel and Sarkozy – the thing that you’re all so terrified of today – I hope it happens.
Let’s have a new treaty. You yourself seem to be almost supporting it (to Barroso). Let’s have a new European treaty and let’s put it to a referendum – in lots of countries, particularly in Britain, and the British people will conclude that this is a very bad deal for Britain, they’ll vote for us to leave the European Union and begin the unravelling… [sarcastic applause]… Thank you. We;ll be happy to go, thank you.
Schulz:
Mr Farage, I have a question, maybe you .. you seem concerned about the tax coffers in the UK and you, the same as I, have an opportunity to decide where you get your daily allowances from at the start of the legislature – whether it be from the nation coffers or the European Union coffers. Maybe you could tell the House whether your daily allowances come from the EU budget or from the national system in the UK.
Farage:
I think we ought to do away with this notion of European money. Prior to their being a direct tax there is as we speak today no such thing as European money. It’s our money. We are a massive net contributor into this European Union for no single economic benefit in return whatsoever.
Barroso:
I usually do not intervene, but there is a point of order that I want to make. It is nit the first time that Mr Farage, addressing to myself, says ‘you have no been elected’.
Certainly I have not been elected by you, but I’ve been elected by this parliament. I have been elected in a secret vote by this parliament. And you belong to this parliament. I can say that always saying that myself and the commission have not been elected is a lack of respect to the Commission and to the European Parliament where you belong.
Whoever wins the election must make sorting out the public finances the top priority, the European commission warned on the eve of the poll, as it predicted the British budget deficit would swell this year to become the biggest in the European Union, overtaking even Greece.
The commission’s spring economic forecasts put the UK deficit for this calendar year at 12% of GDP, the highest of all 27 EU nations and worse than the Treasury’s own forecasts.
The country’s budget shortfall was the third largest in the EU last year but will overtake both Greece and Ireland this year, according to the forecasts. Greece’s measures to tackle its public finances problems are projected to cut its deficit to 9.3% of GDP.
Swine flu corresponds to the classic "beneficial crisis" model, says Christopher Booker
By Christopher Booker
So swine flu – eventually found to be only a tenth as virulent as ordinary flu – passes into history as yet another massive scare. Hyped out of all proportion by drug companies and the World Health Organisation, this fooled our endlessly gullible politicians into spending £1 billion on vaccines which turned out not to be needed. Thus, quite predictably, did the swine flu panic follow the classic pattern of so many other scares before it, as Dr North and I analysed in our book on the phenomenon, Scared To Death. Tracing the history of many examples, we showed how the most damaging point in any scare, from BSE and salmonella in eggs to the Millennium Bug, comes when governments fall for the hype, needlessly costing us all billions of pounds.
With perfect timing, the European Parliament last week shelled out 70,000 euros on a propaganda exercise at Olympia, designed to turn children into "active EU citizens". I was alerted to this shameless PR stunt by Gawain Towler, press officer for the group in the Brussels parliament which includes the UK Independence Party.
The EU's interactive game, dubbed "Crisis Point", asked children to imagine that they were an MEP or a European Commissioner faced with a deadly new disease, Xtreme Drug Resistant TB, which had sent Europe into meltdown. The players were told they had just a day to choose from a range of strategies to save their fellow European citizens from disaster. Clicking the buttons, Mr Towler soon saw the point. If national governments were allowed to take unilateral action, the screen showed that millions would die. But if the EU was allowed to assume control, it would be possible to reduce the number of deaths to only a few dozen.
This is what North and I dubbed "the beneficial crisis", whereby the EU has repeatedly used some panic over health, energy, finance or terrorism to justify seizing more power from national governments. A glaring instance was the Belgian dioxins panic of 1999, which gave Brussels the excuse to take over from member states all power to regulate on food safety. No sooner had it done so than the hysteria over dioxins in Belgian chickens, which led to losses of £1 billion, was found to have been completely baseless. But once again, the EU had succeeded in the one thing it is really good at – sucking ever more power to the centre, in order then, corruptly and very inefficiently, to misuse it.
