The European Central Bank (ECB) has stopped offering liquidity to some Greek banks it does not consider solvent.

The move came as Greece called new elections for next month that look set to be won by parties opposing austerity measures, increasing international concern about the eurozone.

Fears that Athens is on the brink of crashing out of the eurozone and igniting a renewed financial crisis have rattled global markets and alarmed world leaders, with Greece set to figure high on the agenda at a G8 summit later this week.

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2012/05/2012516174530232391.html

Check out Kaiti Koullia singing the syrtos dance, Ena pikro ki ena glyko, which translates roughly as "Half bitter, half sweet".

It's hard to find much sweetness in Greece's situation right now. But Ms Koullia will make the short hairs stand on the back of your neck and remind you of two very important truths.

The first truth is this: no matter how much the "market forces" obsessives may want it to be so, not everything can be bought. There are, as Michael Sandel's new book What Money Can’t Buy is subtitled, "moral limits of markets".

How Kaiti Koullia pays her rent and puts food on the table, for example, are within those limits.

But the sound that comes from her throat is not. No money in the world could buy that voice, or the joyful response it elicits.

The second truth is related, but slightly subtler. It's this: the Greeks still listen to their own music. To miss that is to miss the point.

Yesterday Antonis Perris, a 60-year-old musician, pushed his 90-year-old mother from a rooftop in Athens, then followed her into oblivion. She had Alzheimer's. He was her sole carer. Sick himself, the money had suddenly run out. He couldn't afford food. This was in the week when Ken Dart trousered €400 million from the Greek government.

Perris probably did the only sane thing under the circumstances. Nobody's going to help. Do I bang on about Greece at the moment? Damn right. It's the laboratory where a vast and filthy experiment is being carried out. Only a fool wouldn't bang on.

The International Monetary Fund has ratcheted up the pressure on crisis-hit Greece after its managing director, Christine Lagarde, said she has more sympathy for children deprived of decent schooling in sub-Saharan Africa than for many of those facing poverty in Athens.

In an uncompromising interview with the Guardian, Lagarde insists it is payback time for Greece and makes it clear that the IMF has no intention of softening the terms of the country's austerity package.

Using some of the bluntest language of the two-and-a-half-year debt crisis, she says Greek parents have to take responsibility if their children are being affected by spending cuts. "Parents have to pay their tax," she says.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/25/payback-time-lagarde-greeks

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Why don't the rest of the world do a buy-back of all the treasures stolen over the centuries from the Greeks — to the value of the rescue package and leave it at that... Then the Greeks can go on their merry ways with the Greek pesetas (I know... it's Drachmas...). Meanwhile the banks that are owed money by the Greeks through the Euro cartel can consider their losses as a tax deductible art collecting contribution ... piece of cake...

Economic suicides' shake Europe as financial crisis takes toll on mental health "Perris wrote in an online forum late one night that he had run out of money to buy food and cursed those responsible for the economic crisis in Greece.

'I have no solution in front of me,' he typed. 

Perris took the hand of his ailing 90-year-old mother. They climbed to the roof of their apartment building and leapt to their death.