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Javier E

Greece's failed state and Europe's response | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • the problem with Greece is much more profound than most politicians and analysts have so far calculated. In stark reality, and far more dangerously than its present financial crisis threatening the euro project, Greece looks like a failed EU state, which, as such, puts at risk the stability of the entire European project. This is why a European political, rather than simply economic, plan for rescuing Greece must become a most urgent priority.
  • failed states, according to the definition provided by the Crisis States Research Centre of the London School of Economics, can no longer reproduce the conditions of their own existence and, therefore, are under threat of imminent collapse.
  • Greece’s increasing difficulty in coping with border security as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers enter each year from Turkey.
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  • The civil service, notorious for its inefficiency and endemic corruption, has long ago lost all popular confidence in it. It is also unable to collect tax revenue.
  • The failure of the state is clearly reflected in the fast deterioration of the services it provides in basic goods, such as education, health, sanitation, and transport. Diminished funds, frequent strikes, and low morale in public administration have combined to bring the state virtually to a halt.
  • Nor are authorities able to protect citizens, and their properties, from social disorder, widespread vandalism, and occasional bouts of violence
  • this has caused a breakdown in the rule of law.
  • Turn to the political class and you will find that its authority has vanished into thin air. Prime minister George Papandreou may have shown political courage at times, but has no control over either his party or his government.
  • Greece’s GDP will shrink by 5% this year and will be 2% smaller in 2012; the economy is expected to contract for four successive years. Greece is meanwhile faced with one of the greater human flights in her history. This includes three categories of individual, mostly young people, who should be the most valuable to Greece if Greece is to overcome its present crisis: academics and intellectuals; entrepreneurial middle-class professionals with technical skills and expertise; and long-term immigrants who, in the last two decades, were the backbone of Greece’s development
  • Evidently, the problem with Greece is far deeper and much more serious than this country’s (already deep and serious) financial crisis. It involves nothing less than a complete and drastic overhaul of the Greek state system. It should however be equally obvious that, as Greece is an EU country, Europe cannot but face up to this problem and contribute to its solution, as any alternative route must inevitably lead to the collapse of the entire project of European integration.
Javier E

Greek Patience With Austerity Nears Its Limit - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In 2010, with Greece crippled by debt and threatening the survival of the euro, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank began imposing German-inspired austerity on the country. The aim was to slash the budget deficit and address fundamental problems like corruption and a failure to collect taxes. Such policies, they promised, would get Greece back on its feet, able to borrow again on financial markets.
  • Greeks grudgingly went along, assured that painful reform would return the country to growth by 2012. Instead, Greece lost 400,000 jobs that year and continued on a decline that would see a drop in the gross domestic product since 2008 not much different from the one experienced during the first five years of the United States’ Great Depression.
  • Greece’s unemployment rate was supposed to top out at 15 percent in 2012, according to International Monetary Fund calculations. But it roared to 25 percent that year, reached 27 percent in 2013 and has ticked downward only slightly since.
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  • at the street level in Greece, there is little debate anymore, if there ever was. The images of suffering here have not been that different from the grainy black and white photos of the United States in the 1930s. Suicides have shot up. Cars sit abandoned in the streets. People sift garbage looking for food.
  • But the failures have been striking, leaving millions of Greeks baffled and angry as their lives disintegrated while the elite often escaped, untaxed and unbothered,
  • Even if more recent optimistic projections are to be believed, and a steady rate of growth can be expected, it would take Greece perhaps 15 years to regain the jobs it has lost,
  • Now, Greece is no longer spending far more than it receives, when debt payments are excluded, its officials say. It has remained in the European Union, and can again borrow in the bond markets, t
  • “The mix was not right,” Mr. Liargovas said of the austerity measures. “It was a cure that has almost killed the patient.”
  • In a wide-ranging review of the Greece program last year, the I.M.F. found that many of its predictions had failed. There was a sharp fall in imports, but little gain in exports. Public debt overshot original predictions. Predicted revenues from selling public assets were way off. The banking system, perceived as relatively sound at the beginning of the bailout, began having problems as the economy soured.
  • the I.M.F. concluded that many errors had been made, including too much emphasis on raising taxes instead of cutting expenses. In addition, the monetary fund overestimated the ability of the government to deliver the changes it was demanding — because they were proving politically unpopular and because Greek institutions were far weaker that anyone understood.
  • Administering these changes would have been difficult in a country with sound institutions, but Greece’s were filled with poorly qualified political appointees and were undergoing hiring freezes and budget cuts even as they were supposed to be managing a huge overhaul: a large assortment of new taxes, the opening of closed professions and the sale of state-owned assets.
Javier E

Greece Over the Brink - The New York Times - 0 views

  • most — not all, but most — of what you’ve heard about Greek profligacy and irresponsibility is false. Yes, the Greek government was spending beyond its means in the late 2000s. But since then it has repeatedly slashed spending and raised taxes. Government employment has fallen more than 25 percent, and pensions (which were indeed much too generous) have been cut sharply. If you add up all the austerity measures, they have been more than enough to eliminate the original deficit and turn it into a large surplus.
  • So why didn’t this happen? Because the Greek economy collapsed, largely as a result of those very austerity measures, dragging revenues down with it.
  • And this collapse, in turn, had a lot to do with the euro, which trapped Greece in an economic straitjacket. Cases of successful austerity, in which countries rein in deficits without bringing on a depression, typically involve large currency devaluations that make their exports more competitive
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  • Greece, without its own currency, didn’t have that option.
  • the ruling leftist coalition, was willing to accept the austerity that has already been imposed. All it asked for was, in effect, a standstill on further austerity.
  • But the troika was having none of it. It’s easy to get lost in the details, but the essential point now is that Greece has been presented with a take-it-or-leave-it offer that is effectively indistinguishable from the policies of the past five years.
  • The purpose must therefore be to drive him from office, which will probably happen if Greek voters fear confrontation with the troika enough to vote yes next week.
  • But they shouldn’t, for three reasons. First, we now know that ever-harsher austerity is a dead end: after five years Greece is in worse shape than ever. Second, much and perhaps most of the feared chaos from Grexit has already happened. With banks closed and capital controls imposed, there’s not that much more damage to be done.
  • Finally, acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence.
  • it’s time to put an end to this unthinkability. Otherwise Greece will face endless austerity, and a depression with no hint of an end.
  • Hooray for Obamacare JUN 25
lenaurick

Greece buses 2,000 refugees from border camp to Athens | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Greece buses 2,000 refugees from border camp to Athens
  • Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans, but people of other nationalities, who make up roughly 10% of the total number, have been stopped at the border since early November. Instead of returning to Athens, many of them set up camp for several weeks – and several sewed shut their mouths – leading to Wednesday’s dispersal.
  • In northern Greece, an activist and an aid worker said hundreds of Greek police arrived in the morning to disperse the camp, which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco. The vast majority went without protest, though some Iranians held a short demonstration at around midday, before being bussed back to Athens in a convoy of around 50 coaches.
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  • And you have UNHCR [the UN refugee agency] telling people how to apply for asylum.”
  • Many migrants instead tried their luck on the triple razor-wire fence that lines the borders of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, which more than 2,000 migrants and refugees managed to scale in 2014
  • t was the third boat attempting the crossing in as many days. On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.
  • The numbers arriving on the islands nevertheless remain a far cry far from those in 2006, when more than 31,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands. Hundreds of others drowned or died of thirst and exposure while attempting the journey, which can take up to two weeks.
  • Meanwhile, the bodies of 11 migrants attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat were recovered on Tuesday, the latest victims of a perilous migration route that appears to be regaining popularity with sub-Saharan migrants desperate to make it to Europe.
  • Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees
  • Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees
  • EU announced that over 1 million people had now claimed asylum within its borders since the start of the year.
  • Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans
  • on Wednesday 11 people were confirmed to have drowned in the Atlantic Ocean during an attempt to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat from west Africa.
  • which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco.
  • he morning to disperse the camp,
  • Other observers speculate that those who have been returned to Athens will not remain for long, with many expected to try to reach northern Europe via Bulgaria or Albania instead.
  • On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.
  • Rough estimates suggest that more than 400 people have arrived in the Spanish archipelago since the start of the year,
Javier E

Greece and Turkey, Long at Odds, Vow to Work Together Peacefully - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Top officials from both countries were also engaged in talks on issues including migration, energy, tourism and trade. The two leaders said their aim was to double annual trade between their countries, to $10 billion.
  • Mr. Erdogan appeared relaxed and smiling in a televised exchange with his Greek counterpart, President Katerina Sakellaropoulou. Greek television also showed Mr. Mitsotakis and Mr. Erdogan engaged in an unusually cordial handshake before ascending the steps of the prime minister’s mansion for talks.
  • “There is no problem between us so large that it can’t be resolved,” Mr. Erdogan said later in televised remarks with the Greek leader, “as long as we focus on the big picture.” “We want to make the Aegean a sea of peace and cooperation.”
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  • Mr. Mitsotakis said, “Geography and history have ensured that we live together, and I feel a historic duty to bring the two states side by side, like our borders. We owe it to the next generations to build a tomorrow with calm waters where a tailwind blows.”
  • The countries signed a total of 15 agreements in areas including education, exports and agriculture, according to the Greek prime minister’s office. They vowed to hold continuing talks on political and economic issues like energy and tourism, and they agreed on confidence-building measures to eliminate unwarranted sources of tension.
  • They pledged to keep communication channels open and to refrain from any act or statement that might undermine the friendly spirit of the pact. If any dispute emerges, they vowed, both countries will try to solve it by peaceful means.
  • Mr. Mitsotakis said that resolutions to longstanding disputes over the so-called continental shelf and mineral rights in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean would be explored as a “next step” once high-level talks had progressed.
  • The only moment of slight unease was when Mr. Mitsotakis responded to Mr. Erdogan’s reference to a “Turkish minority” in Greece, noting that the international treaty that set the countries’ modern borders refers to a “Muslim” minority in Greece rather than a Turkish one, as the latter is perceived in Greece as implying territorial aspirations.
  • For Turkey, improving ties with Greece is also a way to fix relations with the West, according to Ahmet Kasim Han, a professor of international relations at Beykoz University in Istanbul. “Turkey basically cannot afford to have a further point of tension with the West” because of its domestic economic difficulties, he said. “And Greece is presenting a great window of opportunity in that sense.”
  • Turkey also wants to protect its interests in the eastern Mediterranean, an important route for natural gas to Europe that borders other important regional players like Israel and Egypt. That is particularly critical given Turkey’s strained relations with Israel over the war in Gaza.
Javier E

The Decline and Fall of Greece - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • While the debate continues over how much to give Greece and when to give it, Russell Shorto, a contributing writer for the magazine, takes you on a journey to discover how Greeks live now. In the process, he ends up unveiling much about how Greece is likely to live tomorrow, and the place it — and Europe? — may occupy in an international order that is rapidly shifting:
  • By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed.
  • The situation at the macro level is, if anything, even more transformational. The Chinese have largely taken over Piraeus, Greece’s main port, with an eye to make it a conduit for shipping goods into Europe. Qatar is looking to invest $5 billion in various projects in Greece, including tourism infrastructure. Other, relatively flush Europeans are trying to make “Greece the Florida of Europe,” Theodore Pelagidis, a Greek economist at the University of Piraeus, told me, referring in particular to plans to turn islands into expensive retirement homes for wealthy people from other parts of the continent. Whether or not the country pays its debts, he went on, other nations and foreign companies “now understand the Greek government is powerless, so in the future they will take over viable assets and run parts of the country by themselves.”
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  • Mr. Pelagidis envisions a two-tiered Greek society: the middle class, 30 to 50 percent of the population, who rebound from the current crisis, and the rest: They “will be living on 300 or 400 euros ($400 to $500) a month. This part of Greek society won’t be living a Western European lifestyle. It will be more like Bulgaria.”
rachelramirez

Migrant crisis: EU proposes $760 million emergency aid for Greece - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Migrant crisis: EU proposes $760 million emergency aid for Greece
  • The European Union announced plans Wednesday for 700 million euros ($760 million) in emergency aid to Greece as the economically struggling country copes with an influx of migrants stranded
  • Greece, the main gateway to Europe, had asked the EU for help to provide for tens of thousands of migrants in its territory.
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  • The aid proposal -- intended to meet basic needs such as food, water and shelter over the next three years -- came a day after NATO's top general told a Pentagon briefing that ISIS was exploiting the migrant crisis.
  • the U.N. refugee agency warned the constant influx of migrants meant Europe faced "an imminent humanitarian crisis."
  • The U.N. refugee agency said the number of migrants stuck in Greece had soared to 24,000 by Monday night, with about 8,500 of them stuck at Idomeni.
  • Some member states have temporarily suspended 1985's Schengen Agreement, which has guaranteed free movement within Europe.
Javier E

He Saved 31 People at Sea. Then Got a 142-Year Prison Sentence in Greece. - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Alexandros Konstantinou, of the Greek Council for Refugees, said that convicting refugees as smugglers was part of a broader strategy to deter more arrivals.
  • Other measures included the criminalization of illegal entry in 2020, applied to migrants at the Greek-Turkish land border, which led to dozens receiving prison terms instead of going to reception centers for identification, and a recent decision by Greece to designate Turkey as a safe country for asylum seekers. That move was aimed at pressuring Turkey to take back migrants currently in Greece and make it harder for migrants to apply for asylum there.
  • A root of the problem is Greece’s strained relationship with Turkey, which early last year stopped enforcing an agreement struck with Brussels in 2016 to halt the flow of migrants, and take back those who manage to cross into Greece illegally that do not qualify for E.U. protection, some observers say.
Javier E

As Germans Push Austerity, Greeks Press Nazi-Era Claims - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.
  • Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.
  • Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.
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  • Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s government has compiled an 80-page report on reparations and a huge, never-repaid loan the nation was forced to make under Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1945.
  • Some members of the National Council on Reparations, an advocacy group, are calling for more than $677 billion to cover stolen artifacts, damage to the economy and to the infrastructure, as well as the bank loan and individual claims.
  • Even the figure for the bank loan is in dispute. The loan was made in Greek drachmas at a time of hyperinflation 70 years ago. Translating that into today’s currency is difficult, and the question of how much interest should be assessed is subject to debate. One conservative estimate by a former finance minister puts the debt from the loan at only $24 billion.
  • Experts say that the German occupation of Greece was brutal. Germany requisitioned food from Greece even as Greeks went hungry. By the end of the war, about 300,000 had starved to death. Greece also had an active resistance movement, which prompted frequent and horrific reprisals like the one that occurred here in Amiras, a small village in Crete. Some historians believe that 1,500 villages were singled out for such reprisals.
  • A few individual cases have made their way through the Greek courts, including one representing the victims of a massacre in Distomo in 1944. Germans rampaged through the village gutting pregnant women, bayoneting babies and setting homes on fire, witnesses have said. Lawyers for Distomo won a judgment of $38 million in Greece. But the Greek government has never given permission to lay claim to German property in Greece as a way of collecting on the debt.
  • “What is unusual about that loan is that there is a written agreement,” said Katerina Kralova, the author of “In the Shadow of Occupation: The Greek-German Relations During the Period 1940-2010.” “In other countries, the Germans just took the money.”
Emilio Ergueta

Greece misses IMF payment in warning shot as showdown with Europe escalates - Telegraph - 0 views

  • Greece is to take the drastic step of skipping a €300m payment to the International Monetary Fund on Friday, invoking an obscure mechanism in abeyance since the 1970s to bundle all debts due in June and pay them at the end of the month.
  • The IMF said it had been notified by the Greek authorities that they would pay the entire €1.6bn due this month on June 30, dusting down a procedure last used by Zambia in the 1980s.
  • The Greeks accuse the IMF of violating its own rules by colluding in an EMU-led policy that leaves the country with unsustainable debts. Athens is implicity threatening to escalate the situation all the way to a full default to the IMF, setting off a grave institutional and political crisis within the Fund itself.
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  • The decision to bundle the payments to the IMF brings forward a decision that was coming anyway. EU sources say the Greeks cannot meet a fresh deadline for €750m next week.
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    Greece defaults on latest payment to IMF, may signal the end for the countries economy.
jlessner

U.S. Urges Greece to Reject Russian Energy Project - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • ATHENS — The United States, wading into the international efforts to shape Greece’s economic and geopolitical orientation, is pushing the leftist government in Athens to resist Russia’s energy overtures.
  • The dueling sales pitches, reminiscent of a Cold War struggle, come as debt-burdened Greece is desperate for new sources of revenue of the sort that a gas pipeline could bring.
  • That pipeline would carry Russian gas to Europe through Turkey and Greece, bypassing pipelines that run through Ukraine.
knudsenlu

Greek protesters demand release of two soldiers held in Turkey | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Protesters have taken to the streets of northern Greece demanding the release of two Greek soldiers detained by Turkey, amid rising tensions between the two countries.
  • Greece’s defence minister, Panos Kammenos, described the pair as “hostages” and ordered border patrols to be stepped up along the heavily defended land frontier the two nations share.
  • In rallies in Orestiada, the Greek town closest to the border, and Thessaloniki, the country’s northern capital, protesters called for the soldiers to be set free immediately.
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  • Athens’ leftist-led government raised the case with Nato and the United Nations last week, asking both to intervene. Internationalising the case further, Kammenos told his Romanian counterpart during a visit to Bucharest that Greece was seeking support for the “immediate release of Nato, European and Greek servicemen.”
  • Diplomats in Europe have become increasingly alarmed as tensions have risen markedly not only along the land border between Greece and Turkey but in the Aegean Sea and off the coast of Cyprus, where Ankara has threatened to use military force in a dispute over the ethnically divided island’s right to explore for oil and gas reserves.
  • At a rally this weekend, Erdoğan surprised supporters by making a hand gesture long associated with the fascist Grey Wolves, an unprecedented move by any leader since the foundation of modern Turkey.
Javier E

Opinion | Why Was Philosophy Born In Greece? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.
  • Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land-based. It essentially existed at sea and, where it touched the land, it appeared and manifested itself as the cities from which these philosophers came.
  • What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia
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  • Those mercantile qualities of fluidity and connectedness were precisely the governing aspects of the new thought. The philosophers’ emphasis was on interchange and, in Heraclitus in particular, the virtues of tension.
  • Just as in a bow, he wrote, the string pulls against the frame, and would collapse if either string or frame failed; a just society needs to be founded on a tension between its constituent parts. Everything flowed through everything else, multiplicity was goodness and singularity the grounds of either sterility or tyranny.
  • These early Greek forms of thought cross all the boundaries between poet and thinker, mystic and scientist, in a rolling, cyclical, wave-based vision of the nature of reality. The thinkers did not provide a set of rationalist solutions nor of religious doctrines, but again and again explored the borderland between those ways of seeing. Possibility and inquiry, the effects of suggestion and implication, rather than unconsidered belief or blank assertion, were the seedbed for the new ideas.
  • This harbor mind holds lessons for us now. We may want fixed answers and rigid definitions. but vitality — and perhaps even health — lies in the ability to stay afloat, stay loose, stay connected, stay with the questions and entertain doubt as the unlikely bedrock of understanding. The only understanding is in the fluidity of mind
grayton downing

Greece's Tangled Land Ownership Is a Hurdle in Recovery - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings
  • No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.
  • As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress.
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  • Since then, Greece has tried, and tried again. But still, less than 7 percent of the country has been properly mapped, officials say.
  • Boundaries can be the “three olive trees near the well” or the spot “where you can hear a donkey on the path.”
Javier E

More Children in Greece Start to Go Hungry - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The Greek economy is in free-fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. Unemployment is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year
  • Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary- and middle-school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said.
  • , several of Evangelia’s classmates are frequently hungry, she said, and one boy recently fainted. Some children were starting to steal for food, she added. While she did not excuse it, she understood their plight. “Those who are well fed will never understand those who are not,” she said.
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  • When the hunger comes, Ms. Petrakis has a solution. “It’s simple,” she said. “You get hungry, you get dizzy and you sleep it off.”
  • He has not found work for three years. Now, he said, his family is living on what he called “a cabbage-based diet,” which it supplements by foraging for snails in nearby fields. “I know you can’t cover nutritional basics with cabbage,” he said bitterly. “But there’s no alternative.”
  • Mr. Nikas, the principal at 11-year-old Pantelis’s school, has taken matters into his own hands and is organizing food drives at the school. He is angry at what he sees as broader neglect of Greece’s troubles by Europe. “I’m not saying we should just wait for others to help us,” he said. “But unless the European Union acts like this school, where families help other families because we’re one big family, we’re done for.”
Javier E

Gerald O'Driscoll: How the Euro Will End - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • Markets fear a "Grexit," or Greek exit from the euro. That exit is almost a foregone conclusion. The endgame for the euro will be played out in Spain.
  • there is scant credit in Greece. Anyone who can is moving their money out of the country, either to banks in other euro-zone countries, such as Germany, or out of the euro to banks in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and U.S. (the franc, pound and dollar, respectively).
  • A Spanish exit would be an entirely different matter. Unlike Greece, Spain is a major economy. According to the International Monetary Fund, at official exchange rates in 2011 the Spanish economy was more than five times the size of Greece's. And unlike Greece, Spain has numerous banks, some large and global.
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  • Greece will exit the euro not by choice but by necessity. It will do so not because the drachma (its old currency) is superior to the euro, but because the drachma is superior to barter
  • How the Spanish banking situation is handled will determine the future of the euro and possibly of the larger European Union. Will Germany's taxpayers and those of other solvent countries be willing to fund an even larger bailout of Spanish banks to save impecunious Spaniards? Will the citizens of EU countries outside the euro zone, such as Sweden and the U.K., be asked to chip in? Or will Spain be allowed to descend into a catastrophic 1930s-style banking crisis and Great Depression?
lenaurick

Migrant increase on Mediterranean route, UNHCR says - CNN.com - 0 views

  • "One in three people arriving to Greece were children as compared to just one in 10 in September 2015
  • While more than 80,000 people crossed the Mediterranean safely -- more than 74,000 to Greece alone -- "near daily shipwrecks" had left at least 400 dead so far this yea
  • Some 36% of the migrants arriving in Greece so far this year have been children, and 21% were women, the U.N. says
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  • Most of the people arriving in Greece cited conflict as a reason for their journey, with more than 56% of January's arrivals coming from war-torn Syria
  • Fueled by xenophobia and propaganda campaigns based on fear, refugee families, homes and places of worship are being targeted with hate crimes varying from physical attacks, vandalism, arson, and even more sinister incidents such as one where a mosque had blood thrown on its walls and a pig's head left at its door
lenaurick

Thousands of refugees stuck on border as new rules start - CNN.com - 0 views

  • Thousands of refugee children like him find ways to pass the time as they wait to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia.
  • More than 12,000 people are stranded here in Idomeni, as borders across Europe have slowly been shutting in the face of those most vulnerable and fleeing from atrocities.
  • They sleep in hundreds of little brightly colored tents that have popped up on fields along the border, now demarcated by a double concertina wire fence.
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  • Some tents are spray-painted with messages like "help us, it's cold" and "borders are racist." Refugees stand in long lines waiting for food, usually bread with a piece of cheese.
  • It's gotten harder in recent weeks for refugees to get across the border so they can continue toward what they hope will be safe havens like Germany and Sweden.Macedonia is allowing only a few dozen Iraqis and Syrians to cross the border each day, which has created a backlog in Greece
  • A spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for refugees told CNN on Sunday that office was told by the Greek border police that Macedonia will now restrict acceptance of refugees from Iraq and Syria by province.
  • The geographical restrictions would mean that Syrians from the provinces of Damascus, Homs, Qamishli, Latakia and Tartus as well as Iraqis from the provinces of Baghdad, Diyala and Kirkuk and from Iraqi Kurdistan would not be allowed to continue on the route.
  • "There were strikes and people ran away. I happened to have my ID in my pocket, hers was in the house. We ran away, people were running away barefoot," he says, remembering the day they fled. If they had known what would happen, Ahmed says, they never would have come. They were sold a dream by those who made the journey before them.
  • At least 18 people trying to reach Greece drowned when their boat capsized off of Turkey's western coast, according to Turkey's semiofficial Anadolu news agency.
  • So far this year, more than 418 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration.
  • Last year, more than 3,700 migrants died crossing the Mediterranean in attempts to reach Europe, making it the deadliest year on record for such deaths.
sarahbalick

Migrant crisis: Boat sinking off Didim, Turkey claims 25 lives - BBC News - 0 views

  • Migrant crisis: Boat sinking off Didim, Turkey claims 25 lives
  • A boat carrying migrants from Turkey to Greece has sunk with the loss of 25 lives, Turkey's coast guard says.
  • Reports suggest Macedonia has set new curbs on Syrian migrants trying to cross the land border from Greece.
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  • Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement: "The purpose of Nato's deployment is not to stop or push back migrant boats, but to help our allies Greece and Turkey, as well as the European Union, in their efforts to tac
  • At least three children are believed to be among those who died.
  • More than 2,000 migrants, most of whom the IOM says are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, are arriving into Greece from Turkey every day hoping to travel further north through Europe.
  • Babar Baloch, a spokesman for the UN's refugee agency, called the development "concerning".
  • On Saturday, Apostolos Tzitzikostas, governor of a northern border region, said the number of migrants on the frontier waiting to cross north into Macedonia had grown to at least 13,000.
  • In other developments:
Alex Trudel

Migration group: Weekly influx into Greece hits 2015 high - CNN.com - 0 views

  • just recorded the highest influx of migrants to Greece yet in 2015.
  • 48,000 refugees and migrants crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands
  • flummoxing European policy-makers and swamping the ability of authorities to care for them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The greatest proportion of refugees comes from Syria, where a brutal civil war over the last four and a half years has killed perhaps a quarter of a million people,
  • Since Monday, the IOM said, 18 people are believed to have drowned trying to reach Europe since Monday, in two incidents.
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