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Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Greece's state-run TV service resumes with a blast from the past

A black and white Greek movie from the 60s may have been an unusual way to launch Greece's new “Public Television” channel — but with most of the staff from the former public broadcaster still on strike, it was the best they could do.



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Undemocratic and unconstitutional Media unions attack Greeces new Public Television channel as staff from the former broadcaster remain on strike

A black and white Greek movie from the 60s may have been an unusual way to launch Greece's new "Public Television" channel -- but with most of the staff from the former public broadcaster still on strike, it was the best they could ...

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Greeces Eurobank bids for bailed-out Proton Bank

ATHENS, July 11 | Thu Jul 11, 2013 1:50pm EDT
ATHENS, July 11 (Reuters) - Greece's fourth-largest lender Eurobank has submitted a bid to buy small lender Proton Bank, it said on Thursday, ahead of a July 15 deadline for the country's bank rescue fund to sell it.
Greece completed the recapitalisation of its four big banks last month and wound down others deemed non-viable to ...

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Two policemen remanded in connection with prostitution racket

Two policemen were remanded in custody in Larissa, central Greece, on Thursday on suspicion of being part of human trafficking ring in the city.The two officers were among 20 people arrested for allegedly smuggling women into the country and forcing them into prostitution at nightclubs in the area.Two more suspected members of the gang were remanded on ...

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Greece broadly on the right track IMF

The International Monetary Fund says it expects that Greece, supported by the international bailout, will not face a financial gap before August next year."There is no financial gap through July 2014," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice said.The IMF and its partners in the Greece bailout, the European Union and the European Central Bank, announced on Monday that Greece's progress under the ...

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UPDATE 1-Greece to lift short-selling ban on July 15

Thu Jul 11, 2013 12:54pm EDT
(Recasts with announcement by Greece's securities watchdog)
ATHENS, July 11 (Reuters) - Greece's securities watchdog said on Thursday a short-selling ban on bank shares would be lifted on July 15, two weeks before its expiration date, as the country's top lenders had completed share issues to plug capital holes.
A senior official at the regulator told ...

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Deja Vu Greek Unemployment Breaks Another Record

From police to garbage collectors, Greek municipal workers took to the streets of Athens for a fourth day running on Thursday to protest against government plans to slash public sector jobs, while unemployment figures hit a new high.Fuelled by three years of austerity Athens has imposed in return for bailout funds from its foreign lenders, unemployment inched up to 26.9 percent in April, the ...

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Greek Yogurt Maker Chobani Lures Kellogg Executive


Greek Yogurt Maker Chobani Lures Kellogg Executive
Wall Street Journal- India
Greek yogurt now accounts for around 43% of all U.S. yogurt sales after barely registering in 2007, according to Sanford C. Bernstein analysts. Chobani's rise has shaken up not only the yogurt industry, where General Mills Inc.'s Yoplait yogurt has ...
Chobani Announces Two Additions To Its Executive Leadership TeamPR Newswire (press release)

all 2 news articles »

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Pinkberry adds Greek yogurt to fro-yo line


Pinkberry adds Greek yogurt to fro-yo line
MiamiHerald.com
As summer heats up, a swirled frozen yogurt cup or waffle cone hits the spot at Pinkberry. Two months ago, the company added thick, unfrozen Greek yogurt plus two savory toppings perfect for those who crave salty over sweet. The new Ocean Drive shop ...


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Bernanke sends markets rallying, as more protests held in Greece


MiamiHerald.com

Bernanke sends markets rallying, as more protests held in Greece - eurozone ...
The Guardian
Another example of industrial action in Greece - medical staff have called two one-day strikes for later this month. The protest is against the government's plan to move 2,500 health sector workers into the 'mobility scheme' -- where they will receive ...
European stocks at 5-month highsIndependent Online
EUROPEAN OPENING NEWS INCLUDING: Eurogroup's Dijsselbloem said the ...Proactive Investors UK

all 881 news articles »

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Greek banks ECB funding drops in June ELA up

ATHENS, July 11 | Thu Jul 11, 2013 10:40am EDT
ATHENS, July 11 (Reuters) - European Central Bank funding to Greek banks fell by 4.26 billion euros ($5.55 billion) in June while emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) from the country's central bank increased by 930 million, Bank of Greece data showed on Thursday.
Greek banks resumed funding from the ECB in December. Borrowing from the ...

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Samaras to meet Obama on August 8

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras is scheduled to meet with President Barack Obama in Washington next month. According to a statement released by the White House on Thursday the two leaders will meet on August 8.The meeting's agenda includes the issues of Greek-US defense cooperation, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, regional cooperation, mutual counterterrorism efforts as ...

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Greece faces no funding gap before August 2014 IMF

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The International Monetary Fund on Thursday said it expected that Greece, supported by the international bailout, would not face a financial gap before August next year."There is no financial gap through July 2014," IMF spokesman Gerry Rice ...

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Greek Bank Recapitalization Goes Smoothly

Greece’s strained banks, undercut when a previous government imposed big losses on investors and bond holders, are rebounding thanks to a recapitalization program intended to prop them up and get lending going again, according to a review from one of the beneficiaries, Alpha Bank. Alpha Bank analysts wrote that, after the successful recapitalization of the systemic banks of Greece, the ...

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Most Greeks Will Holiday at Home

Where most Greeks spend their vacations While Greece is looking forward to a record 17 million visitors this summer, Greeks buried under three years of austerity – with more coming – will find themselves sitting on the balcony or hanging around the house for a vacation. A survey conducted by INKA (General Federation of Consumers in Greece) found that 73 percent of Greeks, up 4 ...

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CATS Songs Coming To Greece

The legendary Broadway musical CATS, running for 30 years and breaking records, will come to Greece finally, in 2014. CATS is a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. The musical tells the story of a tribe of cats called the Jellicles and the night they make what is known as ';the Jellicle choice'; and decide which ...

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Charlemagne: Lessons from Lagarde




WHEN the euro crisis began in 2010, Germany insisted that the IMF should be brought in as an enforcer: to be tough with the ill-disciplined Greeks and put steel into the soft-hearted European Commission. Three years later the fund is dispensing tough love not just to bailed-out countries but to the euro zone itself. This week in Brussels Christine Lagarde, the IMF’s self-assured boss, was every bit the polite but firm school inspector.Yes, she said, the euro zone had done good work, for instance in starting a banking union. And yes, the commitment by the European Central Bank (ECB) to intervene in bond markets had restored some order. But the euro zone must do better. The chronic underachievement of its economies and its mass unemployment were worrying. “The centrifugal forces across the euro area remain serious and are pulling down growth everywhere,” said the IMF’s annual Article IV consultation.The fund forecasts a deeper-than-expected recession in the euro zone this year, and slow growth in 2014. Disruptive Greece is again falling behind in its reforms, particularly in its promise to cull thousands of civil servants, and will doubtless need another debt write-...


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Obama to discuss Greece's economic reforms with Prime Minister Samaras in August meeting

WASHINGTON - The White House says Greece's leader will meet with President Barack Obama next month at the White House.

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Greece Resumes Official State TV Programming


Greece Resumes Official State TV Programming
New York Times
ATHENS — Exactly a month after Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of Greece closed the state television station ERT in a cost-cutting move that almost brought down his fragile coalition government, a bare-bones version of the service was back on the air.


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Ancient Greece, the Middle East and an ancient cultural internet

The ancient Greek world is being recast from an isolated entity to one of many hybrid cultures in Africa and in the East

If you walk through the entrance hall of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, you come to a large display case devoted to the ancient world. Here, alongside each other, lie an Iraqi ceramic model of a river boat from around 2900 BC; a model of a covered wagon from Syria from about 2300 BC (collected by Lawrence of Arabia); Cretan jars wreathed with sinuous, octopus designs from about a millennium later; and a sixth-century BC Attic vase from Sicily, decorated with an image of a chariot. The display is designed to illustrate ancient trade routes; but what if it told a deeper story, too?

As Tim Whitmarsh, professor of ancient literatures at the University of Oxford says: "What if what we think of as the classical world has been falsely invented as European, for reasons serving the cause of 19th-century imperialism? Should the Greek and Roman worlds, albeit in different ways, be seen rather as part of the Iraqi-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian complex? If so, what would that mean for ideas about European identity today?"

It's not new to think in terms of Greece borrowing from the east and south in the period before its fifth-century BC efflorescence: Greek statuary and temple-building have long been known to have had their origins in Egypt, for example, and it is well-rehearsed that there is, say, a relationship between Homer's Iliad and the much earlier Babylonian epic Gilgamesh.

In a controversial three-volume book, Black Athena (1989), the late author Martin Bernal also sought to place the origins of Greece in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, which in turn was a riposte to the 19th century racist view – what Whitmarsh calls the "massive cultural deception" – that the Greeks owed their brilliance to Aryan origins in central Europe.

But there is a fresh urgency, according to Whitmarsh and like-minded scholars, in the study of the classical world's relationships with what is now the Middle East, and new approaches are significantly different from those offered in the past.

Access to newly discovered or newly available texts is allowing classicists to reframe the terms of engagement between cultures: less a one-way importation (followed by transformation and "perfection" of the original influences) and more a dialogue or an "intertwining" as put by Johannes Haubold, professor of Greek at Durham University.

So, instead of the study of ancient Greece being predicated on its uniqueness, its isolated, exceptional and untouchable brilliance, some scholars are recasting the Greek world (and in different ways, the Roman world) as part of a series of networked cultures in multivoiced conversation with the lands lying east and south of the Mediterranean.

This is not a universally applauded approach to the study of classics. On the right, Bruce Thornton, professor of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, has written slightingly about "multiculturalist attempts to denigrate the Greeks' achievements" (he has also described their victory against Persian conquest in the 480s BC as a liberation "from the shadows of superstition and bondage to the irrational").

From a less politically freighted perspective, other scholars suggest caution, too: Greg Woolf, professor of ancient history at the University of St Andrew's, warns against taking the notion of a happy ancient multiculturalism too far. The ancient Greeks, he says, "were in the business of creating an autonomous civilisation. There were cultural conflicts, and separateness, and limits to transferability. We don't have a Greek version of Gilgamesh, or Babylonian versions of Homer".

Woolf talks in terms of deliberate moments of hybridisation – such as the creation of the cult of Isis in Egypt after Alexander the Great's conquest. That was, he argues, an official fusing of Greek, Egyptian and Macedonian elements, as a practical and locally contingent act (though the cult later spread widely through the Roman world, even as far as York). "Someone has to think of a chicken tikka pizza," he says. "It doesn't just happen."

Whitmarsh concedes: "In a way what we are saying is modish, it's multicultural, it's a model almost resembling the internet projected back on to the ancient world." But, he says: "It does in fact make sense of the archaeological data."

He adds: "There is a strongly political dimension to the kind of claim I am making, and you would probably find that most people who were pushing for a very hybridised vision of the Greek world would … be naturally more left leaning and have their own idealised view of the ancient world as a place of opportunity and hybridisation.

"There's obviously a political parallel in the present – yet at the same time I wouldn't want to reduce the argument, because there is new data available that shows that the ancient world was rather different from the way it was even recently understood to be. Let's say the implications of the view are political, rather than the motivations behind it."

So what are these implications? Barbara Graziosi, professor of classics at Durham University, says: "It is getting classics out of its splendid isolation, finding intellectual common ground in antiquity. And it means working more closely with colleagues in places such as Egypt and Iraq – something that is of course made more difficult by political dichotomies."

As Haubold argues in his new book Greece and Mesopotamia: Dialogues in Literature, it is an approach that can beckon towards the "cultivation of multilingualism, polyglossia, the arts of cultural mediation, deep intercultural understanding, and genuinely global consciousness. It can develop these things both as scholarly endeavours and as new forms of citizenship in a globalised world".

Graziosi offers a resonant event from her life: attending a conference on classics at Cairo University following the 2011 revolution against Hosni Mubarak. She recalls European and American colleagues' shock that Cairo even had a classics department – in fact it was established in 1925. To her surprise, she found a cadre of eager, revolutionary students hungry to engage with classics, and to find a way of thinking about Egypt's classical past (it was drawn into Alexander the Great's empire and then became part of the Roman empire) that might help them develop ideas about their present.

"The students were saying that the revolution does not mean a clean break with the past, but a search for different pasts," she recalls. "Classics offers a way of looking at an Egyptian multilingual, multicultural past, when Greeks, Romans, Egyptians lived alongside each other." More broadly, she says, the approach is a reminder that "it is a fiction that once upon a time cultures were pure and are now mixed".

Graziosi also emphasises the diffusion of classical texts into the medieval Islamic world. With the emphasis on Greece and Rome as "the foundation of western civilisation", it is easy to forget how important the classical world has been in the east, she argues: we owe the survival of many classical scientific and medical texts, for example, to their translation into Arabic during the golden age of Islam in Baghdad in the eighth and ninth centuries. Indeed, argues Whitmarsh, the Roman empire was "the facilitating grid that produced Islam, in dialogue with Persia". Woolf talks too of Latin translations of the Qu'ran circulating in 12th-century Europe.

In this story of interconnectedness and hybridity – rather than isolation and exceptionalism – there lie enormous intellectual and humanist opportunities, Whitmarsh says. "What is the implication," he speculates, "for a utopian, post-imperial education system? There are three million Muslims in Britain, many of them learning an ancient language already. There's no reason why in 50 years' time undergraduate courses shouldn't be packed with people studying Arabic and Greek culture side by side. Of course, this already exists in a limited way, but it's not a cultural phenomenon at the moment and these worlds mostly exist entirely separately, but it seems to me there's nothing natural in that."

How does this new approach to the classical world manifest itself? For a start, it means looking at already familiar texts with fresh eyes. Take, for example, approaches to Herodotus, the "father of history" who provided The Histories, the great account of the causes and events of the Persian wars of the 480s BC. A decade or so ago, a postcolonial approach to his work might have looked at the way he wrote about non-Greeks – Egyptians, Persians, Scythians and others – and concluded that his reponses to the "other" tell us more about his own projections than what his, say, Persian characters actually thought or did.

Recent scholarship, though, might emphasise Herodotus's own culturally hybrid origins in Asia Minor: he was raised in Halicarnassus, on the Carian coast of modern Turkey – a city that during the Persian wars was part of the Persian Achaemenid empire, ruled by Queen Artemisia, herself half Halicarnassian and half Cretan. Whitmarsh says: "Halicarnassus was a bilingual Greek and Carian city that had been under Persian occupation. It's not inherently implausible that he had a much more informed sense of the world than we have previously given him credit for. It comes down to networks. If you see Herodotus as occupying a single point from which Greek culture is 'beamed out', that's a less interesting way of thinking of him than as a kind of nodal point between multiple different traditions and cultures. Herodotus's The Histories is a predominantly Greek-voiced text, but that doesn't mean that we should quieten all the other voices that can be detected within it."

Into this story of cultural cross-currents also falls the study of the Greek-language novel – a Roman-empire era prose fiction genre originating in Asia Minor, and revived in medieval Byzantium in Persia. Iambilichus, author of the fragmentary work Babylonian Affairs, was writing in his second language, after that of Syriac, and he may have known Akkadian too.

Another culturally hybrid work is the Alexander Romance, a story that recasts the Macedonian conqueror as secretly Egyptian, so the story of his annexation of Egypt becomes one not of conquest but of the return of pharaonic rule. Whitmarsh says the story reflects a Demotic Egyptian literary forebear. "It is forged in a very distinctive culture in which there are Greeks and Egyptians working together."And it tells the story of Alexander the Great in Egyptian-friendly terms. The interesting thing about this text is that, other than the Bible, it's the biggest seller in antiquity – it goes into 26 languages in antiquity alone, and eventually into [the ancient Iranian language of] Pahlavi, French, Armenian, Bulgarian, Old English." (It is also mentioned in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales). Whitmarsh adds: "It is a world away from the model of Greek culture as continuous, organic, hermetically sealed from outside influence."

The other corollary of this approach is, Graziosi says, to "learn other languages – which is of course hard work, but often the only way". "Traditional" classicists such as Haubold, trained in Latin and Greek, have learned Akkadian: he passes on his linguisitic skills to about 20 undergraduates a year. Whitmarsh's ventures into Semitic languages have enabled him to read works by, for example, Bardaisan, the second-century AD scholar who inhabited the fringes of the Roman empire and whose works fuse Hellenic, Babylonian and Christian influences.

There is, says Graziosi, "an inequality of availability in source texts: cuneiform [the script in which most Mesopotamian texts are written] was not even deciphered until the 1850s. The first fully scholarly edition of even a text as central as Gilgamesh is only 10 years old. New texts are continually being found – and indeed destroyed – in Iraq and elsewhere."

She adds: "We need to have a sense of shared ownership and care for these traditions: it's crucial both in terms of scholarship and politics."

Although there may be far-reaching implications for this fresh angle of scholarship, Whitmarsh says that the approach is squarely in the tradition of a supple discipline which has always had "expansiveness and courage and ranginess … Everything we are talking about comes out of an intellectual tradition that has been devoted to self-analysis. You analyse the thing you are looking at, but you also analyse your own motivations for looking at it in that particular way. That's our version of scientific empiricism. Classics is a progressive discipline, constantly confronting its own demons, and coming out better and fresher for it."

Two views of the ancient world

From the introduction to Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization by Bruce Thornton, published by Encounter, 2002

One multiculturalist tactic for diminishing the Greeks is to deny their originality, asserting that they begged, borrowed or stole their ideas from other cultures. We need not dwell on Afrocentrism, the idea that the Greeks stole everything good they knew from black Egyptians; the incoherence and historical ignorance of this theory have been amply and repeatedly demonstrated. But even scholars who should know better indulge the current fashion for Greek-bashing by attributing their achievements to a vaguely defined East ... That the Greeks borrowed from their Mediterranean neighbours is obvious: no human society lives in a vacuum, untouched by the customs of other peoples ... More important, however, is what the Greeks made of their borrowings. Consider the Greek alphabet, the elements of which were adapted from the Phoenician around the 9th century. The Greek changes ... made possible in just a few centuries the language of Homer's epics and Sappho's lyrics, a literary speech unrivalled in expressive power ... by anything found among the few remnants of Phoenician writing.

From Tim Whitmarsh's introduction to The Romance Between Greece and the East, edited by Tim Whitmarsh and Stuart Thomson, to be published in September 2013.

Classicists are used to thinking of "Greek culture" as solid and self-evident, perpetuated through the ages by repetition of certain forms of social praxis (religion, education, athletics, etc.). But such a "traditional" conception was only one aspect of Greekness. Collective identities, as Stuart Hall reminds us, have many different modalities: they can be defensive, conservative and resistant to hybridity, but they need not be. In Ptolemaic Egypt, for example, where ethnic groups were taxed differently, those classed as "Greeks" included ethnic Egyptians working in the administration, and some Jews. In this context, Greekness was defined in a much more capacious (but no less rigorous) way than most scholars would be prepared to admit. Scholars of classical literature (even the phrase betrays exclusionary instincts) have, by contrast, typically cleaved to the most conservative definitions of Greekness possible. The reasons for this lie deep in the history of the formation of the discipline, which has shaped its practitioners into guardians of cultural and aesthetic value. This is not the occasion to explore those reasons, but it is certainly time to dispense with the prejudices that have followed from them.


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Portugal crisis abates, but expected to return

Portugal's immediate political crisis is contained but after rejecting demands for a snap election, Portuguese President Anibal Cavaco Silva may have inadvertently pushed the country further into political uncertainty and another bailout.

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The Stock Market Is Right At Its All-Time Closing High (DIA, SPY, QQQ)

motorcycle stunt jump canal valley canyon greece

Markets are heading higher again today.

The S&P 500 is at 1,670, up 17 points for the day.

The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high of 1,669.1 on May 21, 2013.  It got as high as 1,674.9 that day.

All of this comes after the dovish tone from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke yesterday afternoon. 

During a Q&A following a speech in Massachusetts yesterday, the Chairman clarified that that even though the Fed may begin tapering its quantitative easing program soon, interest rates will still be pinned at current ultra-low levels for a long time.  He also noted that the unemployment rate – a key indicator that will determine the future path of Fed monetary policy – probably understates the weakness in the U.S. labor market.

Immediately after these comments, U.S. stock market futures soared and the dollar fell.

SEE ALSO: TOM KEENE: These Are The 9 Charts I'm Watching Right Now

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Greek hunger strike militant bailed

A court in Greece rules a suspected far-left militant should be released on bail after he went on hunger strike to protest against his two-year detention without trial.

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Greece reprieve may be short-lived


Greece reprieve may be short-lived
Irish Independent
"They're kicking the issue a couple of months into the future ... we're going to continue with this charade between the troika and the government where everyone knows what's going on - that it's entirely unrealistic for Greece to live up to its ...


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Demonstrators blockade city hall in north Greece


Demonstrators blockade city hall in north Greece
U.S. News & World Report
Comment ( ); Tweet. THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — Protesting municipal workers blockaded the entrance of city hall in Greece's second largest city Thursday, amid mounting anger against new austerity cuts that will affect thousands of public sector workers.


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