Greece negotiated a four-month extension of its bailout on Friday, which has helped the country to avoid defaulting on its loans. Once an outline is ready to show how Greece will keep its finances in check, the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund will review the reforms before officially ratifying the extension.

Greece joined the EU in 1981 and replaced its currency, the drachma, with the euro two decades later. The country was at risk of defaulting on its loans after years of unrestrained spending and borrowing. That led to the rest of the eurozone’s having to bail out Greece twice, once in 2010 and again in 2012, with $275 billion.

The assistance, however, came with strict austerity conditions, leading to multiple tax hikes and a nearly 27 percent unemployment rate. That led to anger among the population and to strikes and mass protests in the streets. Last month voters elected Alexis Tsipras from the anti-austerity Syriza party after he promised to renegotiate the country’s loan deal.

Greece’s eurozone creditors balked at Tsipras’ changing the terms of its bailout, and the country will still have to deliver on fiscal reforms by this summer to receive further financial assistance.

During Al Jazeera America’s Sunday night segment The Week Ahead, Richelle Carey spoke to Dan Kelemen, a political science professor at Rutgers University, and to Megan Greene, the chief economist with Manulife Asset Management, who joined the discussion from Boston.

“For the most part, Tsipras and the Greek government had to climb down from a lot of their big promises and their demands, although he’s spinning it as having won a battle,” said Kelemen. “In reality, he had to give up on most of what he wanted.”

Greene mostly agreed, saying that “the Greek government did have to climb down on a lot, but they did as well as they possibly could have.” She said that Greek banks may be able to use European Central Bank funding now to prop up the banking sector.

In terms of unemployment, Kelemen said the government will have to deliver sustained growth for quite some time before there can be a significant dent in the jobless rate. He said Athens will also have to tackle the underlying structural problems with corruption.

Greene said the compromises that Greece had to make actually benefited the European countries that are lending to it. She said, “We haven’t seen any financial or economic contagion, because it’s been kept within Greece.”

“It’s a huge election year this year in Europe,” she added. “There are elections in Spain, Portugal, the U.K. and Finland. There are regional elections in France and Germany. And in almost all of those countries, you have a major anti-establishment party that has gained a lot of support in the past year.”

She said we could see a major anti-establishment movement spreading throughout Europe on the back of Syriza’s victory in Greece.

But Kelemen said it depends on how the situation is spun. He said creditors will push the idea that they have forced Syriza to back down, in an attempt to send a message to other similar parties across Europe.

February is Black History Month, celebrating the lives and contributions of African-Americans in the United States. However, more than half a century after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I have a dream” speech, racial discrimination persists across America.
A recent poll conducted by UCLA surveyed students across more than 200 colleges and universities. It found that 25 percent of students believe racism is a thing of the past. That’s not a very large number, but it is up 7 percentage points from 1990.
There’s still a major disparity in the number of African Americans receiving a higher education. According to a report by The Education Trust, only 69 percent of black students graduated from high school in 2012, compared to 86 percent of their white peers.
Still, the country has elected its first black president, and there are many influential African Americans across various industries, including television personalities, athletes, authors, and entertainers.
During Al Jazeera America’s Sunday night segment “The Week Ahead,” Thomas Drayton spoke to Christopher Emdin, Associate Professor of Science Education at Columbia University; and to Jamilah Lemieux, Senior Editor at Ebony.com.
“The conversations [about race] have always existed, but they are more critical than ever before because of platforms like social media and more avenues for the gathering of young people,” says Emdin.
“The election of President Obama kind of stirred up this notion of post-racialism in America,” says Emdin. “I would argue that the 25 percent who are under the impression that racism no longer exists are still falling under the myth that was created with the presence of a black president.”
Lemieux agrees and believes the president is not being allowed to reach his full potential. “The attempts to keep him from doing anything is a very obvious example of racism.”
When it comes to how blacks perceive themselves, Emdin says, “I think it’s a misperception that self-worth is not prevalent in [black] communities. It’s more a matter of whether or not the communities at large are able to identify the forms of self-worth that black males in particular exhibit.”
Emdin explains that a black student who under-performs in school may be mistaken as not wanting to do well, when in fact it may actually may be a result of the inability of schools to focus on the culture of the student or a disengaging curriculum.
Another, often over-looked, aspect of the African American community is the struggles of women. “Unfortunately, the civil rights and black power movements have centered black male struggle as the definitive black struggle.” Lemieux says that now particularly under the banner of “Black Lives Matter” women and their issues are becoming more visible.
The recent controversies over police incidents in which white officers use deadly force toward black men has set emotion running high. The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner last year led to massive protests across the country, and it’s raised questions about profiling and racial discrimination in police forces.
“I think something was triggered there,” says Lemieux. She says the deaths did not revisit standard ground laws the way they should have.                                          
Some people argue that young black males are not respectful of law enforcement officials. But Emdin disagrees. “The notion that one must subjugate his or her voice and civil rights for the sake of being treated better has been part of the narrative of causing dysfunction within African American communities,” he says. “It’s blaming the person being subjugated for the reason of their subjugation. The same case of ‘maybe if you listened’ is not applied to other populations.”
Back on the topic of schools, Emdin says that “schools in urban areas today are more segregated now than they were post-Brown vs. Board of Education,” the case that declared laws permitting separate public schools for black and white children to be unconstitutional.
He says funding for students should be equal across the board. “The issue is not the young people or whether or not they’re dangerous, but rather how we teach black children in a way that meets their unique needs. Our failure to recognize that leads to the kind of issues that we have today.”

The Senate confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary nominee Ashton Carter is scheduled for Wednesday. He is a former Deputy Secretary of Defense who served in that role from 2011-2013, and he’ll be replacing Chuck Hagel who resigned in November but has remained in office pending Carter’s confirmation.

Carter faces many challenges. His biggest task will be juggling the number of troops around the globe that are dealing with various threats and changing conflicts. That includes moving several thousand troops back to Iraq and training soldiers there, managing 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, and dealing with the threats from ISIL and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). He’ll also have to deal with Russian aggression in Ukraine, and challenges posed by North Korea and Iran.

Ashton Carter was trained as a nuclear physicist and is seen by many as a defense intellectual. A long-time Harvard professor, he’s written nearly a dozen books and more than a hundred articles on physics, technology, national security, and management.

During Al Jazeera America’s Sunday night segment “The Week Ahead,” Thomas Drayton spoke to Mike Lyons, a retired army Major and Al Jazeera America’s National Security Contributor; and to Lawrence Korb, a former US Assistant Secretary of Defense, who joined the conversation from Washington, DC.

“There are so many challenges ahead of him,” says Lyons. In addition to his international responsibilities, Lyons adds that Carter will have internal forces at the Pentagon that he will have to be concerned about, including soldiers facing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and sexual harassment.

Korb say the real question is how much an impact Carter can have given the relatively short amount of time remaining before President Obama leaves office and the administration’s tendency to centralize power in the White House. “In this administration, more and more power has gravitated away from the departments to the White House,” he said.

“They need to draw from [Carter’s] experience back from the late 1990’s in the Clinton White House,” says Lyons.

With President Barack Obama’s submission of his budget request to Congress this week, Carter will also have to deal with the defense budget, which is estimated to be around $534 billion in 2016, and which doesn’t include an additional $51 billion for war funding.

Carter, who’s pushed to restore Pentagon budget cuts in the past, will have to contend with wasteful spending in the military. According to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the Defense Department spent at least $46 billion between 2001 and 2011 on a dozen weapons systems that never entered production. That includes money spent on things the military says it’s been forced to build by Congress, such as $500 million spent on upgrading Abrams tanks in 2013, something the military says it doesn’t need. As well as the $1.5 trillion spent on the production of the F-35 fighter jet, which has been plagued by technical problems, production delays, and cost overruns.

“[Carter] is partly responsible for this,” says Korb. “He used to run the acquisition process and accelerated the F-35 production before all the development was complete. He certainly knows the issues, but in this short period of time, there’s not much he can do.”

Another challenge for Carter will be dealing with morale within the military. A Military Times Poll taken last year shows that only 15 percent of active duty troops surveyed believe the President is doing a good job, which is much lower than when President Obama first took office in 2009.

Many analysts agree that the sudden departure of Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was abrupt and mysterious.

“To me, it defies explanation,” says Korb. “Here you had a senator and combat veteran who was well-liked around the world and never publicly criticized the administration, like Secretary [Robert] Gates did.”

Korb says he does not expect a major shift in policy with Carter at the helm. “If Secretary Hagel, who had worked with President Obama in the Senate and had a certain amount of stature, didn’t get Obama’s ear, it’s hard for me to think that Carter, smart as he is, without that stature, is going to be able to convince the President to change his mind on a lot of things.”