How the world sees Greece
Stonyfield Oikos Organic Yogurt Becomes Stonyfield Greek Marketwire (press release) LONDONDERRY, NH--(Marketwire - Mar 7, 2013) - Stonyfield, the world's leading organic yogurt maker, has changed the name of its Greek yogurt from Organic Oikos Greek to Stonyfield Greek. The change will help fans of pure, certified organic yogurt from ... |
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 Daily Free Press (subscription) | BU president and dean of students meet with Greek life leaders after student's ... Boston.com Boston University President Robert Brown and Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore met with the school's Greek life leaders Wednesday night after a freshman who had attended a BU fraternity party died early Saturday morning, according to university officials. Elmore, Brown meet with Greek leaders following death |
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 Kathimerini | Greece gets full marks for structural reforms Kathimerini Greece remains the best-performing country in the eurozone as far as adjustment to structural reforms is concerned, according to the updated “Euro Plus Monitor” report issued on Thursday by the Lisbon Council and Berenberg Bank. The countries of the ... |
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 Kathimerini | Demands for bribes in Greece down by a quarter last year, survey suggests Kathimerini The percentage of Greek households asked to pay bribes fell for a fourth year as austerity limited Greeks' ability to pay, according to a survey commissioned for the watchdog Transparency International Greece. The survey by Public Issue for the ... |
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Six million out of work is a figure reminiscent of the near-feudal agrarian state the country used to be
Not since the days of Franco has Spain suffered such high unemployment rates. The country was virtually a feudal, agrarian economy the last time almost six million workers were unemployed.
This year Spain is preparing for another year of recession. Output is expected to fall after the economy worsened in the final three months of 2012 and the housing crash that wrecked the country's banks showed no signs of abating. Factory and energy production figures on Friday are expected to show industrial output was down 6% year on year in January. Average house prices remain 36% below their 2008 peak.
Youth unemployment, which has spurred thousands of young people to protest in Madrid's main squares, has climbed to 56.5% without hitting a ceiling.
In a barely disguised jibe at Spain's employment laws, Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, said countries that put "all the weight of flexibility" on young people would continue to suffer problems. Spain's youth unemployment figure is surpassed only by Greece.
As well as its troubled banking sector, Spain suffers from a lack of competitiveness inside the eurozone and excessive household and company debts. Under pressure from Brussels, the government's answer to its own escalating debts has been to impose harsh austerity measures.
Unlike Italy, which has almost balanced its budget after a clampdown on spending, Spain is expected to spend more than it receives in taxes in 2013 in breach of eurozone rules. The government deficit is expected to fall to 4.5% after hitting 6.3% last year. Only in 2014 is it expected to fall within Brussels' 3% ceiling.
Prime minister Mariano Rajoy has faced strong criticism after he saved some of his toughest austerity measures for regional governments, which run the health and education services, while preserving the budgets of many departments run from Madrid.
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Greece: Corruption, Police State and Struggle in Skouries Global Voices Online In the Skouries region of Chalkidiki, Northern Greece, Canadian company Eldorado Gold obtained mining rights for the Kakkavos Mountain gold through its Greek subsidiary, Hellenic Gold, after a controversial transfer process in 2004. Local residents ... |
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 Hunterdon County Democrat - NJ.com | Greek Orthodox bishop visits insurer of 400 N.J. diners Hunterdon County Democrat - NJ.com Levine, owner of an insurance company in Flemington that bears his name, has been selling insurance for 40 years, and among his clientele are the owners of about 400 diners, which has made him an honorary member of the Greek community. |
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 Press TV | Greece's unemployment rate hits 26.4%: Official data Press TV Official figures show that the unemployment rate in Greece rose above 26 percent in December 2012, as the country embarks on its sixth year of recession. The Greek statistics office ELSTAT announced on Thursday that the unemployment rate hit 26.4 ... Greek unemployment dips to 26.4 percent More Than 1.3M Greeks Without Jobs UPDATE 1-Greek unemployment falls for first time since 2008 |
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 Kathimerini | Heads of Greek army, navy and air force replaced Kathimerini Lieutenant General Athanasios Tselios was named head of the Greek army, Vice Admiral Evangelos Apostolakis was appointed new chief of the navy and Lieutenant General Evangelos Tournas will take over the top position in the air force. As had been ... |
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Charlie from "Willy Wonka" stops by Greece Athena Middle School News 10NBC He stopped by Greece Athena Middle School Thursday morning. Peter Ostrum met students who are rehearsing for “Willy Wonka” the musical. He even got a chance to see a run through. Peter Ostrum said, “These kids have far more talent that I did. They can ... |
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 The Voice of Russia | Greece to start overcoming crisis at the end of 2013 The Voice of Russia Greece will start overcoming the crisis by the end of the year, addressing a conference of the European Parliament's largest faction, European People's Party Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said. The faction embraces centre-right parties in Europe ... |
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 Schenectady Gazette (blog) | School lunches: Next step in New York's Greek yogurt boom? Syracuse.com The letter also encouraged the USDA to amend the policy calculating protein content to better reflect the nutritional value of Greek yogurt. Replacing unstrained yogurt with Greek yogurt, which has more protein, schools could save money by offering a ... Cuomo wants NY tapped for Greek yogurt program |
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New Greek yogurt plant ready for production Wisfarmer Thirty or so invited guests got a close-up view of the new and soon to go into production, Greek yogurt plant at Klondike Cheese Company, a few miles west of Monroe in Green County. This "grand opening" marked another step forward for the Buholzer ... |
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Greek Austerity Measures Curb Bribe Payments, Watchdog Says Businessweek The percentage of Greek households asked to pay bribes fell for a fourth year as austerity limited Greeks' ability to pay, according to a survey commissioned for the watchdog Transparency International Greece. The survey by Public Issue for the ... |
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Historian to discuss plight of Greek Jews at annual lecture UMSL Daily (blog) Fleming, the Alexander S. Onassis Professor of Hellenic Culture and Civilization and Professor of History and Hellenic Studies at New York University, will discuss “Neither Jew Nor Greek – Greek Jews After the War” at 7:30 p.m. March 13 in Century Room ... |
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Irvington Middle School Experiences Ancient Greece Patch.com The gods were smiling down on Irvington Middle School Wednesday when the sixth grade class celebrated Ancient Greece with an event that would make even those on Mount Olympus jealous. Costumed students and school faculty— representing the ... |
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Pryce achieved her goal to bring cheating husband down, but private family matters were brutally exposed during two trials
Vicky Pryce maintained she was pressured by Chris Huhne into taking his speeding points because she felt, by refusing, the consequences for her and her family were too great to contemplate. Ten years on those consequences have proved to be immeasurably worse.
During the two trials she was forced to stand, excruciating details of two planned abortions, one proceeded with and one resisted, were exposed under the harsh strip lights of Southwark crown court.
A painfully damaged father-and-son relationship, narrated through private texts, was ripped open for public scrutiny.
A stepdaughter, brought up by the former energy secretary as his own, was forced to testify to his bullying of her mother.
And both Huhne and Pryce's prized reputations and his glittering political career were comprehensively annihilated – by their own hands.
As this drama unfolded over five weeks, the fact it was all sacrificed over three speeding points a decade ago almost defied belief.
Factor in human flaws of naked ambition, hubris, infidelity and vengeance, however, and this most bitter of marital breakdowns had components of a Greek tragedy bar one: there is no hero or heroine here. Today, both must be reflecting on how it had come to this.
It was, Huhne's barrister John Kelsey-Fry told the judge as he unsuccessfully fought to get the case against Huhne dismissed before the trial, a simple case of "scorned woman syndrome".
The trial heard that the true kernel of this sorry saga lay not late at night on 12 March 2003, on the M11 at Chigwell, when the then MEP was clocked speeding on his way home from Stansted airport to Clapham, south London, after a European parliamentary session at Strasbourg.
Rather, its emotional nub lay in the events of Saturday 19 June 2010 when Huhne, 58, midway through the Netherlands v Japan World Cup game Pryce was watching on TV, arrived home to declare a newspaper had discovered his affair with his PR adviser, Carina Trimingham, 46.
He had 20 minutes to write a statement: "I am in a serious relationship with Carina Trimingham and I am separating from my wife."
Pryce was shocked, not least because she believed Trimingham to be a lesbian in a civil partnership.
It had been going on for "a year and a half", said Huhne, according to Pryce, but he had not planned to tell her "for another year and a half" when their youngest son went to university. After delivering this news, he went to the gym.
He ran out of the house with Pryce and their son following and Huhne's warning "don't talk to the newspapers" ringing in their ears, she told the court. And that was that.
If Huhne ever dared to think that was, indeed, that, he had fatally underestimated his wife of 26 years. Hitherto, they were an affluent, aspiring power couple with five children, three of them together, and would seem to have it all, matching each other in sharp intellect as well as ambition.
He was the privately educated Oxford PPE starred first, who from being a financial journalist, on the Guardian among other newspapers, had risen through the City to embark on a political career that would see him become cabinet minister with the Liberal Democrat leadership within his grasp.
Pryce, born Vasiliki Courmouzis in Athens, had built a formidable professional reputation as an economist, holding senior positions at KPMG, Exxon Europe and the Royal Bank of Scotland. She would become the first female chief economist and director general at the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills, on a salary considerably in excess of £100,000, she said, and a CB, a companion of the order of Bath, "a very high honour", she said, for services to economics.
As an economist and business consultant, she said she earned more than Huhne for most of their marriage. Yet, she told the jury, he regarded her as intellectually inferior. He was "very driven, very ambitious", and "tended to be a bit arrogant". He regarded few people as his superior, and certainly not his wife, she said. "We would be at home and a Newsnight car would be waiting for me and he would be asking, 'Why are they asking you? You do not know anything'," said Pryce in evidence, describing herself as "possibly an intelligent woman".
Pryce felt her career was placed on the "backburner" to allow him to pursue his. She resigned from her cherished Whitehall post when Huhne entered the cabinet to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, taking up the position of senior managing director of FTI, the global business advisory group. Her choice would be to still be a senior civil servant, she has said in interviews. Some even tipped her to become permanent secretary.
But she supported her husband throughout the pursuit of his dream until his bombshell announcement that their marriage was over. During the 2010 election campaign in May his campaign leaflets had proclaimed: "Family matters to me so much – where would we be without them?", alongside photographs of his smiling children and wife. His youngest son, Peter, whose texts laid brutally bare the chasm between the two now – even helped deliver them.
It was Huhne's decision one month later to walk out. It was Pryce's vengeful response thereafter that would lay waste everything they had worked together for.
Three months later, in September 2010, Pryce attended the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool. But she was hurt and furious over newspaper reports at the time, instigated, she believed, by Trimingham, that she was merely a "scorned woman" there to "ruin her husband's conference and his career". "I didn't feel scorned. I was abandoned, badly treated, that's different," she said. People seemed to be "rewriting history" about the marriage breakup, blaming her, she thought.
A month later, Huhne took Trimingham to a state banquet with the Queen at Windsor Castle. Pryce's response was to throw his clothes out of the front door – then tell a newspaper diary what she had done.
Her decision to unleash her full wrath was almost immediate. By November, she was talking to the Mail on Sunday, "peddling a false story" that Huhne, when MEP, had forced one of his constituency aides to take his points. It was untrue and the paper did not publish it.
By March 2011, she was talking to the Sunday Times, confiding to its political editor, Isabel Oakeshott, that it was she, in fact, who had taken Huhne's points.
The problem was Pryce did not want to get prosecuted herself and go on the record. A plan was hatched whereby she would secretly tape record phone conversations with Huhne in the hope he would make an admission.
In those calls, Pryce, pretending to be hounded by the press and with Oakeshott's help, attempted to trap him.
English, she told the jury, was her fourth language – after Greek, French and German. But she had certainly learned to swear proficiently in it, as jurors would discover when listening to the tapes.
In the first three she was aggressive, accusatory, confrontational and provocative. It was not enough. Huhne, a former journalist, was conscious of the profession's darker arts, and too wary to make any admissions on the phone.
In the fourth, and final, call Pryce changed tack. She was less hostile, more conciliatory, seemingly canvassing him for advice on how to deal with the being hounded by a rapacious media. And, in so doing, elicited enough ambiguous responses that would later appear in the media, though it was still not enough to "nail" him.
On 7 May 2011, Pryce signed a confidentiality agreement with the Sunday Times. The following day the newspaper reported her as confirming "rumours" that Huhne had asked "somebody close to him" to take his points. The story was now out there.
There followed an official complaint to Essex police by the Labour MP Simon Danczuk, which triggered Operation Nigella, a full-blown police investigation into not just Huhne, but into his former wife as well.
Huhne fought to prevent his case going before a jury in a series of intense pre-trial hearings, which could only be reported after his dramatic change of plea to guilty on the morning of this trial on 4 February.
The denouement to this long drawn-out drama was finally played out with Pryce standing alone in the dock as the jury delivered its damning verdict on her.
Vengeance had cost Huhne. His career was over, his character trashed. Pryce had, ultimately, achieved her ambition to bring her cheating husband down.
But, with details of her and her children's most private matters brutally exposed in public, and as she now faces the prospect of jail herself, this was truly a pyrrhic victory and one she could never have envisaged she would pay so dearly for.
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 The Atlantic | No, the United States Will Never, Ever Turn Into Greece The Atlantic I ran another regression with country and time fixed effects on the PIIGS -- Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain -- from 2000 to 2011, and I got coefficients of 0.0605, 0.0209, and -.8952 for gross debt, net debt, and current account. The ... |
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 DigitalJournal.com | Angela Merkel asks Germans to vacation in Greece DigitalJournal.com Andreas Andreadis, President of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises (SETE), noted the "dramatic shift in the attitude of the German political leadership and public opinion" towards a more positive image of Greece, is partly responsible for the ... Merkel tells Germans to spend vacations in Greece Greece's All Time Classic campaign, tourism numbers |
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