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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

Monday, December 4, 2017

Turkey violates Greek airspace 34 times three days before Erdogan’s visit

Erdogan doesn't seem interested in making friends


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American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce Conference on Greek Economy Kicks-off in Athens

US Ambassador to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt, addressing the Greek Economy Conference in Athens on December 4. For the 28th consecutive year, the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce kicked-off its its annual flagship event, “The Greek Economy Conference ...


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New flatbread products spark category

Kontos sells more than 50 flatbread products, spanning a range of cultures (GREEK, Indian, Hispanic) and uses. What separates Kontos from other flatbread makers is its commitment to traditional methods of baking, Mr. Stoll said. “All of our flatbreads start out as a yeast doughball that's hand-stretched ...


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Is GREEK Life Worth Saving?

As the tragedies, and public outrage over them, mount, colleges and universities are reconsidering the purpose of fraternities and sororities on campus, and wondering how to prod students to change the culture of these organizations from within – or whether to do away with the GREEK system entirely.


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French investments in GREECE grew by 9% in 2016

A report by the Greek embassy in Paris, based on recent figures released by the Bank of GREECE, showed that French direct foreign investments in GREECE totaled 2.1 billion euros, up 9.0 pct from the previous year, ranking fourth with a market share of 8.6 pct of FDIs in GREECE, following the Netherlands ...


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Yiannis Amanatidis: Erdogan's visit to Greece a historic moment

… . A Turkish president is visiting Greece after 60 years. We hope … ;Don't forget that Greece is an important pillar of …


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Notice to members

… Floras (Greek) on the alleged lack of regulation in Greece of … a limited liability company in Greece, which went bankrupt involuntarily, … Recommendation on insolvency into Greek law is very far … the largest employers in Greece, with the result that …


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Sources: Eurogroup Approved Staff-Level Agreement for Greece

BRUSSELS (ANA/C. Vasilaki) – Eurozone finance ministers have approve the staff-level agreement (SLA) for the third review of the Greek programme, government sources said on […] The post Sources: Eurogroup Approved Staff-Level Agreement for Greece appeared first on The National Herald.


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Dekemvriana: Greek Civil Wars’ Ground Zero, in December 1944

On December 3, 1944, one of the bloodiest and most polarizing incidents in the history of the 20th century Greek civil war occurred in Athens. Known as “Dekemvriana” (from December, the month they started), the incident has come to characterise the ...


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Fitch: Bond swap may support market return

GREECE'S exchange of sovereign bonds held by private sector creditors is another step toward the resumption of regular bond issuance, Fitch Ratings said on Monday. “Efforts to re-establish full market access would be bolstered by continued compliance with GREECE'S bailout program and the prospect of ...


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Post-bailout conditionality in GREECE – a proposal

Since the first memorandum of understanding (MoU) between GREECE and its creditors in 2010, one word has been the central point of reference: “conditionality.” In other words, the conditions attached to the loans from our European partners and the International Monetary Fund are based on a certain ...


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'Red carpet' of Phelypaea flowers blooms around Prespes Lakes in GREECE'S Macedonia

A sight unique to the Prespes Lakes region in northern GREECE is the small red carpet of velvety flowers that is laid around the lake each year, when hundreds of the endemic parasitic plants of the species Phelypaea boissieri are in bloom. The red blossoms, which are found nowhere else in GREECE, are ...


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GREECE Ambivalent about Turkish President Visit

GREECE doesn't know what to expect from this week's visit of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; which is to take place in GREECE after an invitation from Greek President Pavlopoulos'. The two men met in May at the 25th Anniversary of the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation ...


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Some in SYRIZA unsettled by concessions in deal with lenders

Outgoing Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who was replaced on Monday by Portuguese Finance Minister Mario Centeno, described GREECE'S latest deal with creditors as “good news.” However, he and other European officials in Brussels underlined the need for Greek authorities to move forward ...


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Chinese Investors Look for Bargains in Foreclosure Auctions in GREECE

Chinese investors are embracing online foreclosure auctions in GREECE, while demand for buying real estate property in GREECE has gone up 158.5%, according to Juwai.com. Juwai.com is a platform connecting international agents real estate agents and Chinese buyers. According to its figures, ...


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This is the cult-favorite workout tool you need to get the abs you want without ever doing sit-ups

_The __Insider Picks__ team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase._ [FS_Ab_wheel 4x3]Amazon If given the choice, most of us would trade 15 minutes a day to have great abs. It actually seems like an unbelievable deal — I spend double that just scrolling through social media every day. The problem is that no one can sit you down and say definitively that if you put X amount of input into sit-ups every day (15 minutes, let’s say), that it will yield X output in two months, which looks exactly like a mixture of your favorite athlete and a Greek statue. It also doesn’t help that sit-ups at home have a way of feeling completely useless. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if your energy is activating your core or being diverted to your spine digging into the floorboards. (If you’re sticking to the sit-ups, you might want to grab this to eliminate those roadblocks). Couple the aforementioned uncertainty with an exercise that feels like you might be wasting your time, and few of us trade those 15 minutes for great abs and a healthier lifestyle — because how do we know they’re actually working towards anything at all? WELL, NOW YOU CAN KNOW FOR SURE. IF YOU WANT TO CUT OUT THE UNCERTAINTY OF "IS THIS WORKING?" GRAB YOURSELF THE AB CARVER PRO ROLLER AND GET TO IT — YOU’LL KNOW WITH THE FIRST MOVEMENT THAT IT’S WORKING. The "ab carver" is an apt name — the patented spring design makes the most out of every movement, straining your muscles all over and toning your arms at the same time. It’s simple, as the best workout accessories are, and gives you the freedom of motion to twist and turn in order to target different muscle groups. If you really want to hit the obliques, simply wheel it side to side. [abs situps workout fitness exercise woman gym sit ups]Shutterstock For most of us, the act of wheeling something out in front of us by the strength of our core alone would do enough to "feel the burn," but the Ab Carver Pro Roller uses that spring design to push against your movements and adds resistance to engage your core. Like many of the most effective workouts out there, not only does the ab carver roller use resistance to get you a better body using the weight of the one you have, but it also uses the great practice of unpredictability. Instead of the linear motions of a machine at the gym, you’ll deal with variables that make for more engaged muscles in different patterns and get better, more natural definition as a result.  For $39.99, it's a pretty good investment for home workouts, especially if you don't make it to the gym every day. Thanks to affordability, efficacy, and actually being pretty fun to use, it's warranted almost 5 stars after nearly 4,000 reviews on Amazon. It also comes with complimentary pads for your knees, so you won’t trade a spine digging into floorboards for knees. And if your own particular workout roadblock happens to be that you don’t know which exercises to start, the wheel also comes with a 21-day workout guide so you get the most out of it and learn some new moves. If you're looking for a way to ditch sit-ups and/or ways to make your ab workouts much more effective and fun, look into picking up the Ab Carver Pro Roller and you'll likely have an easier time starting a habit.  PERFECT FITNESS AB CARVER PRO ROLLER FOR CORE WORKOUTS, $39.99


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Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Israel, EU to Sign on Gas Pipeline Development

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the construction of the world’s longest underwater natural gas pipeline is to be signed by the the energy ministers of Israel, Cyprus, Greece, Italy and the European Union on Tuesday. The MOU, to be signed in ...


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Auschwitz prisoner's 13-page message has been deciphered

At 26 years old, Marcel Nadjari, a Greek Jew, was one of many at Auschwitz forced to escort fellow Jews to gas chambers and aid with the disposal of their bodies during World War II.


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Greek Police Believe Serbian Man Arrested Could Lead to Chief of Cocaine Ring

A 33-year-old Serbian man arrested for the 135 kilograms of cocaine found in an apartment in Athens, is believed to be the guard of the drugs, who was directly connected to the mastermind of the ring that brought the mass quantity of cocaine from South ...


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Nikos Kotzias in Brussels on December 5-6

The Greek Foreign minister Nikos Kotzias will travel to Brussels on Tuesday December 5 in order to participate in the twoday 56 of DecemberMeetings of NATO Ministers of Fore


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Erdogan's visit to Athens and the European expectations

The visit of Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Greece has been officially announced and apparentlythe final details of his programme have also been finalisedAccording to the official p


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Ancient forbidden Christian text of Jesus' 'secret teachings' to his 'brother' found

Biblical scholars have discovered the first-known original GREEK copy of an ancient forbidden Christian text that purportedly describes Jesus' secret ... The experts found several fifth- or sixth-century A.D. GREEK fragments of the First Apocalypse of James, one of the books from an ancient collection known ...


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Greece’s Benaki Museum wins Expert Choice Award 2017

Benaki Museum in Athens was recently announced as a winner of the TripExpert 2017 Experts’ Choice Award, which recognises the best attractions around the world based on reviews by journalists and professional travel writers. “With positive reviews from Michelin Guide, Fodor’s and Travel + Leisure, Benaki Museum is one of the top ranking attractions in […] The post Greece’s Benaki Museum wins Expert Choice Award 2017 appeared first on Hellenic News of America.


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Portugal’s socialist Mario Centeno wins Eurogroup Presidency

Portugal’s Finance Minister, socialist Mario Centeno won the Eurogroup presidency in two rounds of voting in Brussels Monday afternoon! The Latvian and Slovak finance ministers dropped out after the first round. Centeno won in a head to head against Luxemburg’s Pierre Gramegna. 51-year-old Mario Centeno is an economist and academic  who is the Portuguese Finance … The post Portugal’s socialist Mario Centeno wins Eurogroup Presidency appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.


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Weather forecast warns of sharp temperature drop, snow, rain and very strong winds

Winter is rushing to get us in its grip even though the last two days were sunny and bright with south winds. Greece’s meteorologists forecast bad weather ahead with sharp temperature drop, snow even in the mountain areas around Attica, strong winds on the islands and frost in North Greece. By Tuesday noon, Dec 5 … The post Weather forecast warns of sharp temperature drop, snow, rain and very strong winds appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.


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Rare Greek Document Identified by Religious Scholars

AUSTIN, TEXAS—Newsweek reports that fragments of a rare Christian text dating to the fifth or sixth century have been found in the Nag Hammadi Library, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945 and is now housed at Oxford University. A collection of 13 ...


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EXCLUSIVE: Miyazaki meets GREEK myth in Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky's PERSEPHONE

Today, BOOM! Studios' imprint Archaia announced that they plan to bring French cartoonist Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky's Persephone to American shores. To publish in May 2018, Persephone presents a “modern-day retelling of the GREEK myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone in an exciting ...


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President: GREECE and neighbors united by what they have in common

SERRES, GREECE – GREECE seeks a true friendship with its neighbors in the region, which are countries with whom Greeks have many things in common, President Prokopios Pavlopoulos said on Sunday during an event where he was proclaimed as an honorary citizen of a small town near Serres.


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Greece's economy growing but not likely to hit annual target

… announced on Monday suggests that Greece could miss its target of … finance ministers in Brussels discussed Greece's bailout programme and … the terms of future disbursements. Greece is set to exit the …


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The 23rd Auction of Cypriot & Greek Artworks

… , Michael Kashalos A collection of Greek and Cypriot artworks from the … artworks by prominent and influential Greek and Cypriot artists. Viewing of … styles and periods of the Greek and Cypriot Art.” (Gaitis) – Viewing …


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Greece can become the energy gateway to all Europe

The Greek gas and oil sector is where the smart money is heading, thanks to planned pipelines, platforms and hydrocarbons hidden beneath the Mediterranean, writes a German energy expert. Has Greece's ship come in at last? Source: Fotolia Too few German ...


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Holy Cross School of Theology Receives Innovation Grant

BROOKLINE, MA – The Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology has received an innovation grant from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) for an […] The post Holy Cross School of Theology Receives Innovation Grant appeared first on The National Herald.


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Chicago: Annunciation Cathedral Celebrates 125th Anniversary

CHICAGO, IL – A large crowd packed the ballroom of the world famous Drake Hotel in Downtown Chicago to celebrate the 125th Anniversary of Annunciation Greek […] The post Chicago: Annunciation Cathedral Celebrates 125th Anniversary appeared first on The National Herald.


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Escaping Europe: Why Some Syrian Refugees Have Chosen to Leave

The route from Turkey to GREECE was once crowded with Syrian asylum seekers fleeing to Europe. But in recent months some refugees have begun to move in the opposite direction because of what they describe as a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment in host countries.


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The Trials of Andreas Georgiou and the Fraud That Drove GREECE into Austerity

ATHENS, GREECE — The mainstream narrative regarding the cause of the severe economic crisis GREECE has experienced is that the Greek people and Greek state were irresponsible with their finances, lived “beyond their means” at the expense of EU taxpayers, and provided overly generous social ...


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European Stability Mechanism Implements Short-Term Debt Relief Measures For GREECE

The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) has successfully implemented the short-term debt relief measures for GREECE over the course of 2017. The package is intended to reduce the interest rate risk on GREECE'S outstanding loans with the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) and ESM.


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Eurogroup praises Greek deal with creditors, elects Centeno as president

The Eurogroup today approved the staff-level agreement between the Greek government and its creditors, in the context of the ongoing third evaluation of the country’s bailout programme, and elected Portuguese Finance Minister Mario Centeno as its new ...


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Cypriot President Anastasiades: Turkey withholds information on missing persons

A total of 873 Greek Cypriots & 282 Turkish Cypriots are still missing


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2nd World Olympiad of Modern Greek Language 2018

The Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Centre for the Greek Language organize the 2nd World Olympiad of Modern Greek Language under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs. The event is sponsored by the “Charitable Foundation of Ivan Savvidi”. Participants are people aged 18-25, born outside Greece or Cyprus, and […] The post 2nd World Olympiad of Modern Greek Language 2018 appeared first on Hellenic News of America.


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Children’s reading on screen: in the beginning was the word, not a hotspot

Research shows gaps in children’s digital books, but their potential is still untapped Children’s story apps and digital books face an international content crisis. In the US, an in-depth evaluation of best-selling apps showed that the majority do little to extend children’s learning beyond rote academic skills. An analysis of Greek digital books available on the Android app store concluded that they ‘in no way justify their title as educational, as they do not meet the developmental needs of the target age group.’ The most popular apps in Hungary, Turkey, Greece and the Netherlands have extremely low levels of quality and often don’t even offer stories in local languages. These findings follow the reports condemning the digital format for impeding children’s language learning and dialogue between parents and children. Is children’s reading on screen doomed forever? Continue reading...


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Education Ministry seeks protection behind metal sheets but angry students….

High school students protesting outside the Education Ministry? “No, thanks!” said minister Kostas Gavroglou and barricaded the building gates and doors with metal sheets. Minister Gavroglou could not see the protesters and the protesters were hindered into looking inside the ministry.   However, the angry students were not bothered by the metal sheets and hurled … The post Education Ministry seeks protection behind metal sheets but angry students…. appeared first on Keep Talking Greece.


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The Art of Keeping Guantánamo Open: What the Paintings by Its Prisoners Tell Us About Our Humanity and Theirs

[(Image: Muhammad Ansi, Untitled (Pier), 2016.)](Image: Muhammad Ansi, Untitled [Pier], 2016.)   Truthout is funded by readers, not by corporations, lobbyists or government interests. Help us publish more stories like this one: Click here to make a tax-deductible donation! We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn. Skyscrapers floated in the distance and my toddler kept handing me cigarette filters she had dug out of the sand. When we got home, I checked my email. I had been sent a picture of a very different beach: deserted, framed by distant headlands with unsullied sands and clear waters. As it happened, I was looking not at a photograph, but at a painting by a man imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. Of the roughly 780 people once imprisoned there, he is one of 41 prisoners who remain, living yards away from the Caribbean Sea. Captives from the Bush administration's Global War on Terror began to arrive at that offshore prison in January 2002. Since Guantánamo is located on a military base in Cuba and the detainees were labeled "alien enemy combatants," they were conveniently to be without rights under either United States or international law and so open to years of whatever their jailers wanted to do to them (including torture). President Barack Obama released 197 of them in his years in office, but was unable to fulfill the promise he made on his first day: to close Guantánamo. The man whose painting I saw has been held for nearly 15 years without trial, without even having charges filed against him. The email came from his lawyer who had volunteered to defend a number of Guantánamo detainees. Some had been released after she helped them convince a military tribunal that they were no longer "threats" to the United States. The others remain in indefinite detention. Many of her clients pass their time by making art and, of all the unexpected things to come into my life, she was now looking for a curator who wanted to exhibit some of their paintings. COLLECTING THE ART OF GUANTÁNAMO I'm a professor at John Jay College in New York City. It has a small art gallery and so one day in August 2016 I found myself in that lawyer's midtown Manhattan office preparing, however dubiously, to view the art of her clients. She was pushing aside speakerphones and notepads and laying out the artwork on a long table in a conference room whose windows overlooked the picturesque East River. As I waited, I watched from high up as the water cut a swath of silence through the city. When I finally turned my attention to the art, I was startled to see some eerily similar views. Painting after painting of water. Water trickling through the reeds at the edge of a pond. Water churning into foam as it ran over rocks in rivers. Calmly flowing water that reflected the buildings along a canal. But above all, there was the sea. Everywhere, the sea.  In those paintings in that conference room and in other work sent to me as word spread among detainees and their lawyers that I was willing to plan an exhibit, I found hundreds of depictions of the sea in all its moods. In some paintings, storms thrashed apart the last planks of sinking ships. In others, boats were moored safely at docks or scudded across vast expanses of water without a hint of shore in sight. Clouds bunched in blue midday skies or burned orange in mid-ocean sunsets. One detainee had even made elaborate models of sailing ships out of cardboard, old T-shirts, bottle caps, and other scraps of trash. Puzzled, I asked the lawyer, "Why all the water?" She shrugged. Maybe the art instructor at the prison, she suggested, was giving the detainees lots of pictures of the sea. The detainees, it turned out, could actually take art classes as long as they remained "compliant." But when there was a crackdown, as there had, for instance, been during a mass hunger strike in 2013, the guards promptly confiscated their art -- and that was the reason the lawyer's clients had asked her to take it.  They wanted to keep their work (and whatever it meant to them) safe from the guards. As it turned out, the art doesn't leave Guantánamo that much more easily than the prisoners themselves. Military authorities scrutinized every piece for hidden messages and then stamped the back of each work, "Approved by US Forces." Those stamps generally bled through, floating up into the surface of the image on the other side. The lawyer had even nicknamed one of the model ships the U.S.S. Approved because the censors had stamped those words across its sails. So I found myself beginning to plan an exhibition of a sort I had never in my wildest dreams imagined I would curate. And I began to worry. A curator makes so many choices, judgments, interpretations of art. But how could I make them with any kind of accuracy when I was a woman, a non-Muslim, and a citizen of the very nation that had detained these men for so many years without charges or trial?  Wasn't I, in other words, the ultimate Other? [(Image: Ghaleb Al-Bihani, Untitled [Red and Purple Boats], 2015.)](Image: Ghaleb Al-Bihani, Untitled [Red and Purple Boats], 2015.) GREEK TO ME By training, I'm a classical art historian. I expand fragments. If I show my students a broken ancient Greek vase, I use my words to mend it. I pour in more words to fill it with the memory of the wine it once carried, yet more to conjure up the men who once drank from it, and still more to offer my students our best guesses at what they might have been talking about as they drank. This mode of dealing with art was known to the ancient Greeks.  They called it ekphrasis: the rhetorical exercise of describing a work of art in great detail. For them, ekphrasis was a creative act. The speaker often explained things not shown by the artist, such as what happened just before or just after the illustrated moment. The maiden in this painting is smiling because she has just received a declaration of love, they would say. But faced with this art from Guantánamo, ekphrasis seemed somehow inappropriate. These artists are still alive, even if entombed. Their artworks are as they intended them, not the fragmentary remains of some past world that needs a framework of interpretation. And whatever interpretation these might need, how in the world was I to provide it?  Who was I to pour my words over them? And yet I knew that they needed help or why would that lawyer have come to me? The detainees certainly couldn't curate their own exhibit in New York because they would be barred from entering the United States even after being released from Guantánamo. So I told myself that I would have to help them realize their desire for an exhibit without inserting my own judgments. I told myself that I would instead be their amanuensis. From the Latin: a manu, servant of the hand, the term once referring to someone who aided in an artistic project by taking dictation. Consider, for instance, John Milton's daughters, Mary and Deborah, who took down his seventeenth century epic poem Paradise Lost after he had gone blind. They were his amanuenses.  He composed the verses in his head at night.  Then, in the morning, as a contemporary of his wrote, he "sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it" while they wrote down what he recited. If they dawdled coming to him, he would complain that he needed to be milked. I would similarly let the artists speak for themselves through me, or so I thought. I wrote out a list of questions for their lawyers to ask them, including "What do you like about making art?" and "What would you like people to think about when they are looking at your art?" Then I waited for those lawyers to pose them during their Guantánamo visits in the midst of conferences about legal matters.   The answers were strikingly uniform and seemingly unrevealing.  They wanted people to see their art, they said, and through it know that they are actual human beings. Really?  I didn't get it. Of course, they're human beings. What else could they be? At first, I wasn't too concerned that their answers didn't really make much sense to me. That's part of the role of an amanuensis.  Milton's daughters were ten and six when he began Paradise Lost. It would take them all nearly a decade to finish it. In those years, their father also taught them to read books aloud to him in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, of which they couldn't understand a word. I was used to being an amanuensis myself. When I was a year and a half old and my mother was still pregnant with my sister, my father had an accident and broke his neck. The fractured edge of a vertebra sliced into his spinal cord, leaving his arms and legs paralyzed. As soon as we were old enough -- and I can't remember a time when we weren't considered old enough -- my sister and I would spend hours a day being his "hands." We opened mail, paid bills, slid computer disks in and out of the desktop that he operated by stabbing at the keys with a long pointer held in his mouth. Through us, two daydreamy little girls, he did all the work of a stereotypical man of the house -- fixing broken appliances, hanging Christmas lights, grilling steak. To be an amanuensis is, by the way, anything but a passive act. After all, there wouldn't be enough time in the world if you had to tell your own hands what to do in every situation: reach for the coffee cup, close that finger around its handle, bring it to your mouth. In the same way, an amanuensis must anticipate needs, prepare tools, and know when something's missing. And this sense that something was missing -- honed from my years with my father -- was growing in me as I looked at the artwork and thought about those responses. It was the midsummer of 2017 and the exhibit was set to open in the fall.  The file cabinets in my office were filled with paintings, overflowing into piles on the floor that came up to my shins. After the struggle to pry those artworks out of Guantánamo, I didn't know how to say that one piece should be seen by the world and another should stay a prisoner in some dark drawer. FREEDOM OF THE SEAS So I asked again -- this time by emailing Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee working on a memoir about his time at Guantánamo. He explained that the cells of detainees were right by the sea.  They could smell and hear the surf, but because tarps blocked their view, they could never see it. Only once, when a hurricane was coming, had the guards removed those tarps from the fences that separated them from the water. A few days later, when they went back up, the artist-inmates began to draw pictures of the sea as a substitute for what they had glimpsed during that brief moment of visual freedom. Suddenly, those endless visions of water -- that is, of freedom -- made sense to me.  And I understood something else as well.  Guantánamo is a system designed to paint the men it holds as monsters, animals, sub-humans who don't deserve basic rights like fair trials.  That was the reason those prisoners were speaking, but not speaking, in their art. Why would they say anything that risked a further fall from whatever precarious hold on humanity they still had? They hoped someday to be released, which was unlikely to happen if the authorities became convinced that they bore any anger towards the United States. And even release would not mean freedom of speech, since they would be sent to countries that had agreed to host them. Dependent on the good graces of these governments, they would continue to live constrained lives in constrained circumstances, needing never to offend these new sets of authorities either. [(Image: Khalid Qasim, Untitled [Fins in the Ocean], 2016.)](Image: Khalid Qasim, Untitled [Fins in the Ocean], 2016.) I was indeed the Other. I might misinterpret and misrepresent, but so undoubtedly would anyone else in our world speaking for those artists. And they were incapable of speaking for themselves. So I added an essay of my own to the catalog, becoming ekphrastic. I pointed out what was movingly missing in their artwork. It wasn't that there weren't people in their paintings.  It was that those works had invisible holes where the people should have been. All those unmanned boats, sailing across those open waters, were carrying invisible self-portraits of the artists as they hardly dared to imagine themselves: free. Even when there were no boats, the famously mutable sea served as the perfect disguise. Its winds and waves and rocks represented the all-too-human emotions of the artists without ever making them visible to the censors. It was, of course, so much less dangerous for me to interpret what they were saying than for them to say it directly. I had held many doors open for my father when I was his amanuensis, running ahead to make sure the path was clear and that there were no surprising flights of stairs. If there were, it was up to me to find a new way. This is what I wanted to do for the artists. Open doors, scout out paths -- but their choice of doors, their choice of paths, not mine. They had told me they wanted people to see them as human beings and that was the case I tried to make for them. As it turned out, I evidently succeeded a little too well. After the exhibit opened and received a surprising amount of media attention, the artists' lawyers noticed that the authorities were taking longer and longer to clear artworks to leave Guantánamo. Then, three weeks ago, the Department of Defense declared that all art made at Guantánamo is government property. Detainees reported that their guards then told them any art left behind if they were ever released would be burned and works in their cells deemed "excess" would simply be discarded. As with so many policy decisions about Guantánamo, the true rationale for this one remains hidden. My guess: the US authorities there were surprised that the artwork they had been scrutinizing so carefully for hidden messages had a unifying one they had missed: that its makers were human beings. Which is precisely the realization the authorities need to stop the rest of us from having if Guantánamo is to remain open.


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GREEKS have been chewing gum for the last 2500 years

Mastic was then so precious that during the 1822 Chios Massacre, when52.000 Chios' inhabitants were massacred and 50000 enslaved as a revenge for the GREEK Revolution, the people of the Mastichochoria region were spared by the sultan, because they provided mastic. The Turkish name for the ...


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Report: GREEK American joins Ivanka Trump at GES Summit in India

GREEK American entrepreneur Christos Marafatsos was elected to be part of the US delegation led by Ivanka Trump at this year's Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) that took place in Hyderabad, India, on 28-30 November. Speaking to the GREEK Reporter, Marafatsos noted that more than 1,000 ...


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“Thoughts and Prayers” in Greek Tragedy

With national tragedies now as frequent and predictable as sunrises, no phrase has lost consolatory power more swiftly than “thoughts and prayers.” Although it is intended to “signal an authentic care for others,” this utterance has become so ...


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EY Report Concludes Greece has Among the Best Government Financial Reporting in the Eurozone

ATHENS, Greece, Dec. 4, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- An EY report, disclosed today at the American Hellenic Chamber of Commerce 28 th annual The Greek Economy Conference in Athens, concludes that Greece has among the best government financial reporting in the ...


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Quadrilateral energy meeting taking place on Tuesday, MoU expected

Cyprus, Israel, GREECE and Italy are expected on Tuesday to sign a memorandum of understanding for laying an underwater gas pipeline from the Eastern Mediterranean region to Italy which will allow the transportation of Israeli and Cypriot gas reserves to mainland Europe. The quadrilateral meeting in ...


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Greek economy grows for third straight quarter

ATHENS--Greece's economy grew for a third consecutive quarter for the first time in more than a decade, but at a slower pace, according to figures published Monday. The latest snapshot of the Greek economy shows the country is on course for returning to ...


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Raising voices and funds

… .30pm. Vissi, who moved to Greece in 1973 to pursue a … and Greece. She is also famous for performing in the first Greek … Vissi Live performance by the Greek singer. December 6. THOC New …


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Explainer on ESM short-term debt relief measures for Greece

… measures for Greece: explainer When was it decided that Greece would receive … sets of short-term measures: * smoothing Greece's repayment profile; * reducing … finances and thus stifle the Greek economy. Gross Financing Needs (GFN …


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