Word: messes
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Papandreou says fixing Greece's mess will require rebuilding people's trust in the government. "This is more than an economic problem," he told reporters. Greece's government, he said, had a "credibility deficit" at home and abroad...
...will be difficult. Greece's tax-collection system is an antiquated mess. The state's various financial-information databases are haphazard and fragmented. No single program can pull up all the data about a single taxpayer; without tedious manual cross-checks, there's no way to flag the Kolonaki doctor who is declaring a pittance but living in a multimillion-dollar apartment. So decentralized is the whole system that until recently, Greece's government didn't even know how many people it had on its payroll. (See 10 things to do in Athens...
...Greece struggles to convince its European partners it is working to end its crisis, George Pagoulatos, a professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, says the mess may have a positive side. For the first time in recent history, he says, there's widespread consensus in Greece that radical reform is needed. "Now it's a choice between survival and nonsurvival of the state," he said. "The range of dissenting choices is limited...
Athens has scrambled to calm jittery investors and skeptical European Union partners that it can clean up its mess without any assistance. In mid-January the Papandreou government, which has to raise $75 billion to close its gaping fiscal shortfall, announced an ambitious three-year austerity plan to reduce the deficit to 2% of output by 2013. "Greece is playing by the euro zone's rules and it will put its house in order," Greek Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou tells TIME. "To borrow words from an ad: Watch this space...
...waves, Banner tries to center himself, to push aside thoughts that a giant wave could grind him against the spiky reef that a surfer described to me as being "like an underwater Manhattan, with all its skyscrapers." Says Banner: "Being mentally prepared is not having that stuff mess with you." He adds, "You need to feel lots of air in your body, light." He will wait on his choice of surfboard until the morning of the contest, when he sees the size and direction of the massive Pacific swells calved from a storm off northern Japan...