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ATHENS â€" The Greek government might come under pressure to reopen the state broadcaster, ERT, as one of the country’s highest courts weighs an appeal by a union representing more than 2,600 of the broadcaster’s employees.
The administrative court, the Council of State, is expected to rule on the appeal Monday.
A decision in favor of the workers, who have been operating underground broadcasts of Greek news through satellite streams since ERT was pulled off the air in a surprise government decision on Tuesday, could lead to ERT’s signal being restored temporarily, until the decision could be reviewed in a hearing by the Council of State that would be scheduled for September.
Meanwhile, a Greek prosecutor, acting at the behest of the country’s finance minister, has begun an investigation into ERT’s finances, looking for signs of mismanaged funds.
Whatever the court verdict on the workers’ appeal, Monday will be a critical day for the country’s conservative prime minister, Antonis Samaras. He is to meet in the afternoon with the leaders of the two junior partners in his increasingly fragile coalition, socialist Pasok and the moderate Democratic Left. They have vehemently opposed his decision to shut down ERT as part of a broader cost-cutting drive imposed by Greece’s international creditors, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Although a court decision vindicating the laid-off ERT employees might be considered an embarrassment for Mr. Samaras, political analysis on Greek blogs and news Web sites on Friday suggested that such an outcome might less damaging to his image than if he were forced to reverse his decision under political pressure.
In a speech before members of his conservative New Democracy party’s youth arm on Friday, Mr. Samaras suggested a compomise in an apparent bid to head off a government crisis. His proposal â€" for the "immediate creation of a cross-party committee to hire a small number of staff so that public television can immediately resume broadcasting" â€" was rejected within minutes by Pasok, which said the proposal "does not constitute a response to what Pasok has said."
The political upheaval came amid reports from Brussels that the disbursement of the next tranche of rescue funding for Greece, a sum of about $4.4 billion, was expected to be released next week.
Earlier on Friday, a Greek Finance Ministry official said that European officials had approved the disbursement, subject to a final endorsement by euro zone finance ministers. That decision, the official said, had been largely influenced by the government’s decision to save money by closing ERT.
The state broadcaster, condemned by Mr. Samaras earlier this week as ‘'an emblem of lack of transparency and waste,'’ is to be the focus of a criminal investigation ordered on Thursday by the finance minister, Yannis Stournaras. Greece’s corruption prosecutor, Eleni Raikou, on Friday assigned two deputies to review all the employment and procurement contracts issued by ERT over the past decade for signs of mismanagement and waste.
The scale of suspected misuse of money within ERT over the years remains unclear. But, addressing Parliament on Friday, Mr Stournaras said the broadcaster’s ‘‘finances and viewing figures were very poor.’’
‘'I don’t want to raise tensions in the current climate,'’ he said, ‘'but when the time comes I will present the statistics.'’
Dismissed ERT workers, who have occupied the broadcaster’s headquarters in a suburb of Athens since ERT’s signal was cut on Tuesday night, continued to operate underground broadcasts of Greek news on Friday. Those streams were picked up Thursday evening by the the European Broadcasting Union, an alliance of public service media organizations in 56 countries, and re-transmitted via satellite link to Greece. The move had symbolic, rather than practical, value as only a few hundred thousand out of some 11 million Greeks have satellite connections; most have been following ERT’s pirate broadcast via online news Web sites.
The head of the European Broadcasting Union, Jean-Paul Philippot, who was in Athens on Friday, said he would ask the Greek government to restore the ERT signal. ‘'The reason we are here is because this has never happened before,'’ he told a media conference in the old headquarters of ERT. ‘'No European country has ever cut its broadcaster’s signal.'’
Mr. Stournaras had warned Thursday that any other television channel retransmitting the pirate broadcast of former ERT employees would be prosecuted. The announcement was apparently aimed at the Communist Party’s channel, called 902 TV, which had been carrying the underground broadcast but reverted to normal programming after the ministry’s warning. ‘'This is not a country where everyone does whatever they want,'’ Mr. Stournaras said.
When President Rafael Correa of Ecuador won re-election this year, and for the first time captured a majority in the National Assembly, he vowed to push forward with major proposals that had been stalled in his earlier terms. On Friday he gained a victory that he had long coveted when the Legislature passed a law regulating the news media, which he says will force news organizations to act fairly and which opponents say will quash freedom of expression.
“The perspective for the media and the practice of journalism is very difficult,†said José Hernández, an adjunct director of Hoy, a newspaper in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. “It has been turned into a field full of land mines where no one can work with freedom and confidence.â€
But Gabriela Rivadeneira, the president of the National Assembly and an ally of Mr. Correa, said the law would promote more balanced news coverage.
“Let there be no doubt that there are rights for everyone and not just for a privileged group, which is what is wanted by some opposition legislators or the mercantilist press that has commercialized information,†Ms. Rivadeneira said.
Mr. Correa, a leftist who has promoted social programs, was re-elected by a wide margin in February when voters also gave him his first legislative majority, with 100 of the 137 seats in the National Assembly. Mr. Correa began his new term last month, and one of his priorities was to pass the so-called Communication Law, which had been stalled in the previous Legislature because his party, Alianza PaÃs, was in the minority.
On Friday the Legislature took up the law without debating its contents and it passed easily. It is packed with controversial measures.
The law creates a Superintendency of Information and Communication, with the power to regulate the news media, investigate possible violations and impose potentially hefty fines.
And it creates a five-member Council for the Regulation and Development of Information and Communication, led by a representative of the president, to oversee the news media.
Among other things, the law prohibits “media lynching,†which it defines as the repeated publication or broadcast of information intended to smear a person’s reputation or reduce one’s credibility. And it bars the news media from publishing or broadcasting content that incites violence or promotes racial or religious hatred.
Carlos LaurÃa of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a group based in New York that advocates press freedom, said the wording of such measures was vague enough that it left ample room to define a wide variety of content as being in violation of the law, opening the door to censorship.
“This is the latest step in the deterioration of press freedom in this country that has occurred under Correa,†Mr. LaurÃa said. “This law, if it’s put into practice, is not only going to undermine the ability of journalists to report critically, but it also threatens the rights of citizens to be informed on issues like corruption or other sensitive issues.â€
Mr. Correa has long campaigned energetically against what he says is a biased news media controlled by special interests. He has often clashed with reporters or news media companies, sometimes suing them for what he has called biases or errors in reporting. His government has been known to interrupt critical news coverage on television by forcing stations to broadcast rebuttals giving the government point of view.
The law also calls for a redistribution of broadcast frequencies, with a third reserved for government-controlled news media, a third for private news media companies and a third for community broadcasters.
William Neuman reported from New York, and Maggy Ayala reported from Quito, Ecuador.
The Obama administration, which had long resisted sending weapons to antigovernment forces in Syria’s civil war, has announced plans to supply the rebel forces with small arms after concluding that the troops of President Bashar al-Assad have used chemical weapons against them.
The shift in administration policy on Syria seems reflective of public opinion. Polls have consistently shown Americans are deeply wary of the United States becoming involved in the fighting in Syria. But they also show that public support for intervention increases sharply under circumstances where it is confirmed that the Assad regime used chemical weapons.
Over all, the vast majority of Americans say they do not believe the United States has a responsibility to intervene in the Syrian conflict, which has killed more than 90,000 people over more than two years. On average, only about one in four Americans say the United States has an obligation to intervene.
Polls that have asked whether the United States ought to get involved in Syria â€" rather than whether the United States simply has the responsibility to â€" have found similar numbers: A Gallup poll from late May found that 24 percent supported intervention. Just 17 percent supported intervention in a survey conducted in December by ABC News and The Washington Post.
Fewer surveys have asked respondents to suppose that the Assad regime used chemical weapons, but the ones that have found support for intervention increased substantially.
According to an average of the three surveys in the PollingReport.com database that asked, 58 percent of adults said they would support military intervention if it were confirmed that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons either on antigovernment forces or on civilians. (It remains to be seen, of course, whether public support for military intervention will actually increase now that such a confirmation has come.)
Polls have generally shown that, when presented with options, the public is more likely to support less invasive interventions in Syria. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey [PDF] conducted from May 30 to June 2 found that 42 percent of respondents supported providing only humanitarian aid to the Syrian rebels, 15 percent favored taking military action, 11 percent supported providing arms and 24 percent advocated taking no action. Another NBC/Wall Street Journal survey [PDF] conducted from Feb. 29 to March 3 found similar results.
Two CNN/ORC surveys last year, conducted in August and December, found that roughly one in three respondents supported sending ground troops into Syria, while roughly 45 percent favored helping the rebels with military airstrikes.
The present course President Obama has chosen â€" sending small arms and ammunition to antigovernment forces â€" was supported by 41 percent of adults in the CNN survey from December. A Pew Research poll from around the same time found that just 24 percent of adults favored sending “arms and military supplies to anti-government groups in Syria.â€
Uli Seit for The New York Times Paula Pecorella, the managing editor of the student newspaper at West Islip High School, and Nicholas Krauss, the features editor, were prosecuted for trespassing while working on an article on the school's security procedures.
Out for a scoop, a pair of student journalists on Long Island wanted to compare their high school’s security measures with those of a rival school down the road.
LUXEMBOURG â€" European Union ministers were struggling here Friday to reach a deal to begin trade negotiations with the United States, as France ratcheted up pressure to protect state-sponsored film and television industries.
If the ministers can come to terms, their agreement to start the trans-Atlantic trade talks would enable Britain, a member of the European Union, to hail the official start of the trade round when the leaders of the Group of 8 biggest economies hold a summit meeting that gets under way Monday in Northern Ireland.
A trade pact would aim to cut tariffs and streamline regulations between Europe and the United States, which are already the world’s two biggest trading partners.
But before the talks can go ahead with the United States, the European Union’s 27 trade ministers, meeting in Luxembourg on Friday, must reach a unanimous deal to give the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, formal authority to start the negotiations.
The sticking point as the ministers convened Friday â€" France’s demand to exclude films, TV shows and other audiovisual services from the talks â€" could prompt the United States to require exclusions of its own. Such exclusions could limit the value of any eventual deal for both sides of the Atlantic.
France is arguing on behalf of Europe’s so-called “cultural exception†â€" in practice, a thicket of quotas and subsidies for audiovisual productions. Excluding such material from a trade deal would disappoint American technology and media companies, including the online movie distributor Netflix, which wants easier access to European markets.
Early this week, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, told filmmakers in France that “the total exclusion†of audiovisual services from the negotiations “is not necessary.â€
But France dug in its heels on Friday. Nicole Bricq, the French trade minister, told her 26 counterparts in Luxembourg that she had a “fundamental misunderstanding†of why most other European governments were opposed to the French stance.
“You want to call into question a fundamental principle that’s part of the European project â€" the cultural exception,†Ms. Bricq told her counterparts. “And you have chosen to do this with a partner that dominates the world in the areas of audiovisual production with the tendencies and temptations that go with power,†Ms. Bricq said, referring to the United States.
In a thinly veiled reference to the European outcry over recent disclosures that the National Security Agency in the United States had gained access to e-mail, Web searches and other online data from many of the biggest Internet companies, Ms. Bricq added that “current events unhappily remind us†of American influence over the online world.
A day earlier, Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French prime minister, threatened to veto the start of the trade talks if audiovisual services were not sufficiently protected.
In contrast to France, however, Britain, Spain, Sweden and Denmark want to move quickly to begin talks to open protected business like the transportation of goods along the United States coastline and American government procurement markets at both the federal and state levels.
“Huge benefits are expected from this initiative,†Jaime GarcÃa-Legaz, the Spanish secretary of state for trade, and Vince Cable, the British secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, said in a joint message on Thursday.
“The economic situation in Europe obliges us to be proactive,†they said. “We have to provide our companies and professionals with the best possible conditions to provide their goods and services in both markets.â€
But how much progress Europe and the United States can make is an open question. Tariffs are already low, and the main goal â€" harmonizing regulations â€" is likely to pose a huge challenge for negotiators.
Europeans are generally more likely to see a need to regulate new technologies, including genetically modified foods and online services that already are dominated by American companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft.
There are also questions about their differences over regulations on car safety, pharmaceuticals and financial derivatives.