How the world sees Greece
 News 10NBC | Foodlink holds mobile pantry in Greece News 10NBC Foodlink helps give food to hundreds of families in our area, and on Saturday there was another opportunity to serve those in need. The Affinity Orchard Place Apartments in Greece sponsored a Foodlink Mobile Pantry food giveaway at West Ridge School. |
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 Sydney Morning Herald | Austerity-hit Italians head to polls Sydney Morning Herald ROME: Austerity-hit Italians take to the polls with centre-left leader Pier Luigi Bersani leading the fray against Silvio Berlusconi in a vote that could prove crucial for the future of the eurozone. Three-time prime minister Berlusconi had been rising fast in the ... Italy awaits opening of general election polls amid uncertainty Italy election: Why voters back Berlusconi, no matter what Tremonti sees instability after Italian vote |
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Theere are good reasons why sterling has taken such a battering – and why the dollar is in the ascendant
Thinking about booking a holiday abroad this summer? Well, get ready for a nasty surprise, because your money is not going to stretch as far as it did in 2012. Sterling has been the seven-stone weakling of foreign exchanges since the turn of the year. It dropped to a two-and-a-half-year low against the dollar and touched a 16-month low against the euro last week after the Bank of England revealed that three members of its monetary policy committee – including governor Sir Mervyn King – had voted for extra stimulus to boost the economy. Meanwhile, some of its weakness reflected mounting expectations of an imminent loss of the UK's AAA rating – which has now occurred. Apparently, investors would rather hold a currency used by Greece (riots on the streets), Spain (55% youth unemployment) and Italy (threatened by the possible return of Silvio Berlusconi) than the one circulating in the UK. That's not a healthy sign.
Nor is there anything to suggest that the hedge funds – which have turned negative in their attitude towards the pound in recent weeks – are going to become bullish any time soon. There are, after all, only two reasons to hold a currency: an attractive yield or the prospect of strong growth. Sterling has neither attribute.
Interest rates have been at 0.5% for the past four years, a record never previously approached in the Bank of England's 319-year history, with not the remotest possibility of their being raised. That's despite the fact that inflation is expected to remain above its 2% target for at least a further two years, a total of six in all.
Far from thinking about tighter monetary policy, the Bank is thinking about a further easing. Its monetary policy committee discussed cutting the interest rate at its latest meeting earlier this month and the City is expecting a further dollop of electronic money creation through the quantitative easing programme within months.
If the markets believed that this stimulus – unprecedented in both scale and duration – had transformed the growth prospects for the UK economy, they might think differently about whether the pound is such an obvious sell. But they don't. The economy has drifted sideways for the past two years and even the most upbeat economist is expecting little more than 1% growth in 2013.
In part that's because the Bank's blatant attempts to drive down the level of the pound add to the economy's headwinds by making imports dearer. Wages are already going up more slowly than prices, and raising the cost of fuel, food, clothes and consumer goods brought into the UK simply makes that gap wider.
Some analysts believe that the aggressive sell-off of sterling since the turn of the year has been overdone. The eurozone is still, they argue, an accident waiting to happen and could flare up again at any time. An inconclusive result in this weekend's Italian election could easily be the catalyst for a fresh period of tension, while the performance of the eurozone economy has been even more dire than that of Britain. All that is true, and suggests that further big falls in the pound against the euro are less likely than continued weakness against other currencies, especially the dollar.
There is both a yield and a growth case for holding the greenback. The Federal Reserve is debating whether to scale back its QE operation because there are signs that the world's biggest economy may at last be recovering strongly. Manufacturing is doing well, helped by cheap energy, and activity is returning to the real estate market. So if you are heading for the US this summer and haven't bought your dollars yet, that's a pity. It's probably already too late.
The green pastures and ancient villages of Lancashire's Lune Valley have long been a refuge for walkers. More recently, they have become home to some of the country's fastest internet connections. Over the past few months, 300 properties in this quiet corner of England have plugged into fibre-optic cables offering download speeds of 1,000 megabits per second or, if you want that in English, extremely fast.
This is not a BT service, or any other that you've heard of. Uncertain whether proper broadband would ever reach them, the villagers formed a collective called B4RN, took up shovels and dug their own cable trenches.
It is a novel solution to a familiar problem. Around 20% of those who live in rural England and Wales have achingly slow, unreliable internet connections with no prospect of improvement. For many, the best option – DIY solutions aside – may be fourth-generation (4G) mobile networks. Spectrum auctioned last week is expected to deliver mobile connections as fast as the average home broadband line. Eventually.
Five companies were awarded licences. The deal won by O2 comes with an obligation to build enough masts to get a signal to 98% of premises, but not until 31 December 2017 – a lifetime in internet years.
Meanwhile, the deadline for a government-funded project to speed up rural broadband has slippedfrom 2013 to 2015, while its target speeds fall far short of the 30Mbps the European commission wants in every home and business by 2020. And David Cameron's insistence on a cut in the European budget has made things worse: a €9bn fund that would have provided long-term loans, not grants, to local networks was axed.
Europe was quicker than the US to deploy mobile networks, and companies such as Vodafone used that advantage to thrive. Today, we have nothing to compare with Apple or Samsung in the technology market we once led. The Lune Valley is a long way from Silicon Valley, but faster connections can only narrow that gap.
So it's farewell then to dear old Marius Kloppers, the BHP Billiton boss, who we discovered last week is to retire. He leaves the post in possession of a decent reputation, but will probably still be remembered for the deals he couldn't deliver: most obviously his 2008 tilt at Rio Tinto, plus a 2010 hostile bid for Potash Corp.
Still, as the final days of Kloppers were partly overshadowed by write-downs on acquisitions completed, he may have been fortunate to fail with the big two.
Overpaying for boomtime takeovers is having a huge effect on the makeup of mining boardrooms, with Anglo American replacing Cynthia Carroll with Mark Cutifani and Rio Tinto promoting Sam Walsh to take over from Tom Albanese.
HSBC pointed out earlier this month that all the major mining bosses had been in place for longer than five years – so change was likely. It's happening.
In the world of commodities, investors have long talked of cycles. This is the latest. The sector is under new management.
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Greek Space Program Gets Boost Greek Reporter Members of si-Cluster-Greek high tech companies and research centers represent a significant proportion of the Greek research and industrial potential, in the field of space technology and applications. The majority (59%) of the members are limited ... |
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Irene Macris, 92, native of Greece who worked in lunchroom at Alpharetta ... Atlanta Journal Constitution Born on the island of Zakynthos on Oct. 20, 1920, she lived through Greece's war with Turkey in the 1920s, the brutal occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the 1940s, and a nasty civil war afterward between Greek Communists and ... |
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Transcripts from the Pollard review reveal some senior executives were 'queasy' about tribute programme
The BBC misled the public by broadcasting glowing tributes to Jimmy Savile although key managers knew he had "dark sides" to his personality, detailed interviews with BBC staff reveal.
Celebrations of the life and work of Savile that were aired on the BBC after his death helped to continue to mask his criminal behaviour and hide the damage he had left behind him, aside from the now notorious dropping of the planned Newsnight investigation into his crimes at a children's home.
The BBC inquiry transcripts that were made public on Friday show that those who commissioned programmes about the late radio DJ and television presenter were "queasy" about portraying his personality. Interviews given by top BBC executives to last year's inquiry panel, chaired by Sky's Nick Pollard, have now laid bare the extent of the corporation's communication failures and errors of judgment when it came to telling the truth about Savile.
Helen Goodman, the shadow culture minister with responsibility for media reform, called this weekend for a thorough review of BBC policy on communication about potentially difficult programmes. "The transcripts reveal the total chaos at the BBC's higher management when it came to communication. Some people seem to have known, while other people were busy working on tributes."
New evidence shows that Jan Younghusband, the BBC's head of music and obituaries, told George Entwistle, who was then in charge of television output, that she had been asked not to make an obituary "because of the darker side of the story". Nick Vaughan-Barratt, the BBC's head of events, who had worked closely with Savile, informed colleagues that he was "queasy" and told Younghusband the BBC should not make a straight obituary film because they could not cover his personal life. A tribute to his broadcasting career was thought preferable.
"We have to be clear at that point I didn't know what that dark side was," Younghusband told Pollard's panel. "I just thought he was a creepy guy." She went on to explain that "In the entertainment industry all kinds of things happen, but if they were going to celebrate his television career at that point I knew nothing that would prevent you celebrating his television career."
She told the inquiry she had a suspicion that "he was into boys".
Savile was being lauded elsewhere in the media, she told Pollard, explaining that she could not make a film based on rumour. Pollard replied: "But you could refrain from making an unalloyed celebratory film if there was a dark side, even if you hadn't defined it completely?"
Younghusband made no film, but was given a tribute to run, put together by the TV production company, True North. "The half hour, I imagine, was taken because it was available," she told Pollard. "And it was convenient to take it, and inexpensive."
Later Younghusband emphasised that, had she known of Savile's crimes, she would have demanded the tribute was cancelled.
Labour's Goodman said this weekend that new evidence shows the BBC dodging responsibility for Savile. "The difference between an obituary and a tribute would be lost on most people watching, to be frank," she told the Observer. "I don't think they should have been playing about with these words. They should have got control of the situation much earlier."
In his evidence to Pollard the Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman blamed the BBC's "aloofness". "They have never felt comfortable with popular culture and they have therefore given those who claim to perpetrate it too much licence," he said.
Alan Yentob, the BBC's creative director, denied the charge that the programme makers are aloof and told the Observer that Danny Cohen, the head of BBC1, and other commissioning editors, including Younghusband, have repeatedly reviewed what went wrong and are changing procedures following the death of controversial figures.
"In the world of blogs and tweets on the web there is just so much rumour out there about celebrities, much of it anonymous, and so it is even harder now to handle these issues. It is more difficult to authenticate things," Yentob said.
"But you do have to interrogate such rumours and, at the point you take them seriously, you then have to pursue an inquiry."
The psychologist Oliver James said that rumours abound about celebrities who behave badly, so it can be hard to draw a line. "But the BBC is riddled with micro-managers and when there is an issue like this it becomes a question of micro-blindness," he said.
When Pollard published the findings of his report last December he said Cohen and Entwistle were guilty of mishandling the tribute shows, but transcripts now show that grave doubts about Savile's personality were widespread. Younghusband was one of the few to raise the issue explicitly.
The evidence of Liz MacKean, the former Newsnight reporter who wanted to investigate Savile, reveals that BBC website moderators took down a succession of negative comments about Savile following his death, including a number that accused him of paedophilia. Website moderation, or monitoring, Entwistle explains to Pollard's panel, is done by an independent company.
One experienced BBC production insider told the Observer the divisions in the BBC have made it malfunction. "If everyone on Newsnight knew it was true that Savile was a paedophile, it should not have run a tribute to someone who was molesting girls in wheelchairs before they went on to Top of the Pops. A culture of secrecy has taken over at the BBC that would make the Greek Junta of the 1960s green with envy."
Entwistle, who left the BBC after 54 days as director-general, told Pollard that the question of how to handle the death of a celebrity with a dubious personal life was one of judgment. "You might feel that the key thing was that you wanted to get it out as fast as you possibly could, because the fact that there was one popular attitude to Savile needed to be corrected by the journalistic revelations that would indicate that another attitude should be taken," he said.
He later added he had no sense that Savile commemoration was "a massive part of our Christmas plan" in the TV schedules.
The BBC has formally advertised for directors of TV and news, as its incoming director-general, Lord Hall, assembles a new team.
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Greece Says Smoking Ban To Start Greek Reporter The new wave of inspections is expected to meet with opposition from entrepreneurs who argue that the smoking ban will affect business amid the ongoing financial crisis, the same arguments they make every time Greece passes alleged smoking bans. |
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