Fresh allegations in a Greek phone-hacking scandal

has tried for months to keep a lid on a simmering scandal over the wiretapping of a journalist and two left-of-centre politicians. But on November 5th , an investigative weekly, published a list of 33 prominent Greeks, among them several cabinet members and a former prime minister, whose mobile phones were reportedly targeted for hacking by Predator, a bit of Israeli-made spyware. Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister, denies that his government has ever bought Predator, which is similar to Pegasus, a better-known Israeli tool used by authoritarian regimes. He says he was unaware of the phone-hacking. But he has admitted that Greece’s intelligence service, routinely snoops on thousands of citizens for reasons of national security.