Hell will have frozen over before Britain ever consents to a Tobin tax, meaning the EU will never adopt one. All the noise about such a tax from Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel is cynical politicking. By Yanis Varoufakis.

Tobin’s financial transaction tax was a simple, down-to-earth, logical proposal for dealing with the ridiculous volatility that became the norm in the era of the Global Minotaur (my metaphor for the way in which the combination of US trade deficits and capital flows into Wall Street kept the global economy going between the early 1970s and 2008). The original idea was to introduce a little sand in the wheels of financialisation for the explicit purpose of slowing down the ebb and flow of the capital tides. To use a tiny tax as a brake that will slow down the rapid, uncontrolled, unsustainable migratory oeuvre of global capital which, unruly as it was, threatened emerging markets with the boom and bust that came every time capital flooded in only to depart just as swiftly soon after (recall the South East Asian crises of the 1990s). Tobin had never intended his tax to be a substitute for normal taxes or a means by which to finance governments, or transnational entities like the eurozone, that were unwilling to tax the richer members of their polity so as to provide society with promised services and public goods.

Ten years to the day since the first detainees entered Guantánamo Bay, it seems unlikely that the detention centre will close any time soon. By Fiona de Londras.

It is now ten years since the United States began to hold suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay. At the time, the motivation was clearly to find a place outside of the immediate theatre of war where people could be held and interrogated without oversight from the federal courts. It seemed, to the US government, that Guantánamo Bay was just such a place, as it was under the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States but strictly speaking outside of its territory and so - it was thought - outside of the jurisdiction of the courts. Although the number of people detained in Guantánamo is relatively small compared to the number of those held in other detention centres over the course of the War on Terror - including Bagram Airbase near Kabul - the camp has become a lightning rod for rights-based opposition to the United States’s contemporary approach to counter-terrorism. Closing Guantánamo Bay was a central plank of Barack Obama’s election campaign in 2008 and one of his first acts as President was to sign an Executive Order committing to its closure. This followed an important series of decisions (summarised here) by the US Supreme Court confirming that at least some parts of the Constitution applied to Guantánamo Bay and moving it – as I have written before - “towards legality”, i.e. towards constitutionalist oversight. Bearing all this in mind, how can it be that this prison remains open?

In the beginning there was Wholesale Denial. Then the Denial began to subside under the weight of circumstances. It did so slowly, agonisingly so, with the result that, in the process, Greece lost any capacity it might have had to rebound. It also caused the crisis to spread like a bushfire throughout the eurozone, turning liquidity problems into unyielding insolvencies first in Ireland, then in Portugal. Still, to this day, Denial is in the air. But it cannot remain intact without the whole eurosystem crashing and burning. The Greek PSI may be the harbinger of denial’s end. If not, it is hard to see what will stop the juggernaut of the crisis from destroying the few chances the euro has of survival.

Following the publication of hte Bassiouni Report into human rights abuses in Bahrain the eyes of the world have largely turned away from the Gulf state, satisfied that a human rights “process” has run its course. However, substantive abuses continue unabated. By Colin Murray.

The publication of the Bassiouni Report into human rights abuses in Bahrain in late November seemed to offer a turning point for international human rights. Bahrain’s reaction to the welter of international criticism of the actions of its security forces (see Amnesty International’s new report upon the Arab Spring, “Year of Rebellion”, p.32-36 for a useful overview), however, has been very different from those of other Arab governments.

Greece's present could be Europe's future, writes Mihalis Panayiotakis.

As the Eurozone crisis unfolds, and the European social model remains under attack by the mindless political armies of orthodox neoliberalism, all is hardly well in Greece. The Greeks, having served as lab rats for extreme austerity, have come to realise one thing: austerity is not a fiscal programme. It is a political project: a project of societal and financial sabotage, aiming at a radical upwards redistribution of wealth in an already very unequal country - indeed across a whole continent. This is how the austeritarian disaster zone looks like from the ground:

On last Tuesday, 13 December, two Senegalese street vendors, Samb Modou and Diop Mor, became the most recent victims of fascism on the streets of Europe. They were shot by a right-wing extremist, Gianluca Casseri, at the local market of Piazza Dalmazia in Florence, targeted simply because of the colour of their skin. Three more of their Senegalese compatriots were gravely wounded in a killing spree which continued in the popular tourist market of San Lorenzo close to the Duomo in the city centre. Casseri proceeded to take his own life when he was surrounded by police in an underground car park.

The immense tragedy of Tuesday cannot be dismissed as simply another case of a pathologically unbalanced individual waging his own private struggle against society. The killer was an active participant in the Casa Pound Italia (CPI) movement in the Florence area, a group which proudly describes itself as a ‘third millennium fascists’.

Amnesty International today urged states to act on a UN report confirming that Syrian security forces committed crimes against humanity during their violent crackdown on demonstrators this year.

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry’s report, released in Geneva yesterday, called on the Government of Syria to launch “independent and impartial investigations of these violations and to bring perpetrators to justice”.

It also called on the Syrian government to put an immediate end to the “ongoing gross human rights violations”, such as summary execution, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearance, and torture, including sexual violence.

Socialist Party MEP Paul Murphy has spent the past week in Gaza, and has been writing about his experiences for Politico. Read his account of days one and two here and here, and of the final two days of his trip below.

Back on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, with our bus headed towards Cairo, our visit to Gaza has come to an end. Although far too short, it has given me a real insight into the devastating effects of the blockade as well as the potential for things to be so different. In many of the meetings we had today and yesterday, the all-consuming effect of the siege on daily life was clear, despite people’s attempts to simply get on with things. Even just driving around, the devastating lack of basic infrastructure is clear – with literally no traffic lights and the roads in very bad disrepair.