FEW NEWS EVENTS can unleash more schadenfreude within the security community than watching a notorious firm of hackers-for-hire become a hack target themselves. In the case of the freshly disemboweled Italian surveillance firm Hacking Team, the company may also serve as a dark example of a global surveillance industry that often sells to any government willing to pay, with little regard for that regime's human rights record.

On Sunday night, unidentified hackers published a massive, 400 gigabyte trove on BitTorrent (peer-to-peer file sharing) of internal documents from the Milan-based Hacking Team, a firm long accused of unethical sales of tools that help governments break into target computers and phones. The breached trove includes executive emails, customer invoices and even source code; the company's twitter feed was hacked, controlled by the intruders for nearly 12 hours, and used to distribute samples of the company's hacked files. The security community spent Sunday night picking through the spy firm's innards and in some cases finding what appear to be new confirmations that Hacking Team sold digital intrusion tools to authoritarian regimes. Those revelations may be well timed to influence an ongoing U.S. policy debate over how to control spying software, with a deadline for public debate on new regulations coming this month.

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can't pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie ... not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

In summary, the banks wrecked the Greek government and deliberately pushed it into unsustainable debt so that oligarchs and international corporations can profit from the ensuing chaos and misery.

Greece invented democracy. Greek mythology forged the way the West looks at itself. Greece even invented the denomination of this Eurasian annex - "Europa".

"For it is only criminals

who presume to damage other people nowadays

without the aid of philosophy."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities.

Odysseus/Ulysses took ten years to go back home after the Trojan War. His descendants are now making history in the original home of democracy. And they are not going anywhere. They have already placed their Trojan horse in the home of intolerance and austerity. There's no turning back from restoring dignity. And if the Muses rule it, it will be back to the drachma.

The so-called EU "institutions" - along with cosmically mediocre politicians of wealthy EU nations — behaved like barbarians all along, proving, graphically, how the whole Kafkaesque EU construction hates democracy with a vengeance.

Brussels and Berlin proved they are in the regime change business. Updating the exceptionalists on Iraq in 2003, they were advocating the destruction of a democratically elected government via economic Shock and Awe. Their subsequent wet dream was to impose renewed austerity on an interim, unelected technocratic government.

Euclid Tsakalotos has been appointed as the new Greek finance minister following the resignation of Yanis Varoufakis, Greek presidency official said. Greek media reported he will be sworn in at an official ceremony at 20:00 local time (17:00 GMT).

Tsakalotos "will be sworn in with the political oath as finance minister," the presidency official told Reuters.

Tsakalotos was previously the deputy foreign minister responsible for international economic relations.

The US government will pay the salaries to the staff of Georgia's former President Mikhail Saakashvili, who is now serving as a new governor of Odessa Region, Ukraine, Saakashvili said, adding that California police will also train Odessa's officers.

"Within the framework of Odessa's anti-corruption pressure, the US government agreed to provide funds for the salaries of the new team of [Mikhail] Saakashvili," Saakashvili wrote on his Facebook page after the meeting with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US Ambassador to Ukraine.

He added that American police officers from California "will train new Odessa police."

Chaos and economic disaster are still stirring up in Greece, with a sharp rejection of foreign control of their troubled affairs.

More austerity and new rounds of loans? Voters in Greece's emergency referendum were overwhelmingly against it. Whatever happens next, they stood up to the authoritarian tactics of the European Union. Hurrah.

Greeks voted overwhelmingly to reject creditors' proposal of more austerity measures in return for rescue loans, in the country's first referendum in 41 years Sunday.

The referendum "will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage," Varoufakis said. (source)

Now signal the panic. Collapse may be impending. Then doom. Contagion could spread to America, too, and trigger global market implosion and derivatives meltdown.

US hawks want Washington to shape its Russian policy around mounting military and economic pressure along with tough rhetoric thrown in. President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations Leslie H. Gelb calls this a "dangerous and losing strategy."

Anti-Russian sanctions and NATO's military buildup "merely invite Russian toughness and intransigence. That's the story of the last two years," he pointed out in an article titled America's Losing Russia Strategy.

Apparently, this approach is not working. Russia has long called the restrictive measures counterproductive (with many European countries echoing this sentiment) and slammed the enhanced military presence on it borders as jeopardizing European peace and security.

Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed the outcomes of the Greek referendum with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras on Monday, and expressed his support to the Greek people in overcoming the future difficulties in the country, Kremlin press service said.

On Sunday, more than 61 percent of Greek voters rejected the lenders-proposed bailout plan, which stipulates spending cuts and tax increases in exchange for further financial assistance to the country.

The referendum was preceded by several rounds of talks between Athens and its major international creditors — the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Eurogroup that ended without a deal.

Just days after the U.N. released its "Report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—during a closed meeting of Israeli officials— remarked that "Israel is considering whether or not to stay in the Human Rights Council in light of the recent UN Gaza report."

Flight or fight? It appears that because the report took a critical stance in questioning Israel's motives and actions during last summer's 51-day-bombardment of Gaza and the West Bank, Netanyahu is more willing to bow out altogether than to confront the issues detailed in the report head-on.

Some crucial findings: Since Operation Protective Edge, Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have maintained the same assertion— that Israel did everything in its power to avoid hitting Palestinian civilians and that it went above and beyond the standards of international humanitarian law. The U.N, report contradicts that very claim and others—in its principal findings and conclusions.

When you continuously kick a can down the road, one day the receptacle is so battered that it can be propelled no more. That day has finally arrived for the EU and Greece. Whatever the outcome of today's landmark vote, Europe will never be the same again.

If the Greek people say yes, the EU's peripheral states will be consigned to German domination. This is not necessarily always a bad thing. There is no doubt that many of the world's more unstable nations could do with becoming a little more German.

Nevertheless, while being economically strapped to Berlin is mostly beneficial for well-run countries like the Netherlands or Austria, it's a complete disaster for the likes of Greece or Portugal.

Southern Europe, from Lisbon to Athens, via Belgrade and Rome, prospered in the post-war decades. The reason was pretty prosaic. These nations, which could devalue their currencies to their hearts content, were part of the world's largest market-place, Europe.

After Italy first joined the then EEC (initially the Coal and Steel Community), favorable access to German and French markets allowed the country to thrive like never before. Inspired by Rome, Portugal, Greece and Spain demanded entry after jettisoning fascist and military regimes. So too, did other non-core European countries like Ireland and Finland. Even the British, who had originally dismissed the alliance as a club for "German-speaking Catholics," had signed up by 1973.

At the time of the first tentative negotiations, all three main players (France, Italy and Germany) were indeed led by German-Speaking Catholics. Robert Schuman of France was originally a Luxemburger, Italy's Alcide De Gasperi was born into the then Austrian-controlled Tyrol and West Germany's Konrad Adenauer hailed from a staunchly Catholic family in Cologne. This alienated the largely Protestant British, led by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin - a Baptist lay preacher - who according to the historian John Charmley had difficulties with reading and writing in English, let alone German.