Athens faces a geopolitical balancing act in having to please China, the US and Europe

News Snapshot:

Last month a member of the Greek parliament vandalised four paintings in the National Gallery in Athens on the grounds they were blasphemous to Christianity. Nikolaos Papadopoulos is one of 10 MPs representing the fundamentalist Democratic Patriotic Popular Movement, known for short as Niki (which means “victory” in Greek). The works, by artist Christophoros Katsadiotis, were part of an exhibition called The Allure of the Bizarre, inspired by the 18th-century painter Goya. Papadopoulos’s fundamentalist action in attacking paintings of which he disapproves is not unlike Donald Trump’s refusal to countenance otherness or difference; both are symptomatic of Greece’s current geopolitics....