Welcome, 77 artists, 40 different points of Attica welcomes you by singing Erotokritos an epic romance written at 1713 by Vitsentzos Kornaros
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Strong Earthquake Rocks Western Greece, Injuries Reported
Quake rocks Greek Island
Ukraine: Greek Catholic Bishop denounces violence against protestors
Terrorists blamed for series of bank robberies in Greece
Kelly Davis gets some tips on Greek cooking
Tripadvisor: Top Ten Hotels in Greece
Greece faces new black hole in finances amid rising tensions with creditors
Greek island hit by 5.8-magnitude earthquake; damage reported, minor injuries reported
5.8 quake hits Greek island; minor injuries
Greek Pensioners Sue For Lump Sum Payments
Greek Crisis: Unwanted Toddlers, Child Beggars
Greek island of Kefalonia hit by 5.8-magnitude earthquake; damage reported, no casualties
Greece: Strong earthquake hits Kefalonia island
5.8-Magnitude Quake Hits Greek Island
Greek bankers embroiled in corruption scandal
Strong earthquake in Western Greece (Cephalonia)
Professions in Greece That Recovered From Recession
Born In Debt: Greece’s History of Borrowing
Golden Dawn Spokesman Wants Athens Mayor’s Seat
Golden Dawn’s Kasidiaris Eyes Mayor’s Job
Although he's facing prosecution, the spokesman for the Golden Dawn far-right extremists, Ilias Kasidiaris, said he will run for Mayor of Athens next year.
The post Golden Dawn’s Kasidiaris Eyes Mayor’s Job appeared first on The National Herald.
Local Greek chapters hand out backpacks to homeless
GREECE: RECESSION IS OVER, TOURISM IS GROWING
Gerald Ensley: Our Greek community
Greece honours filmmaker Angelopoulos
Greek Marxist terrorist escapes from prison, says 'It's time for battle'
Greek patient airlifted to Rome for liver transplant
Police seek Georgian woman in connection to Thessaloniki woman's death
Authorities investigate mercury lead in Xanthi
Two agricultural co-ops being probed over use of EU funds
Albanian fugitive caught and due for extradition to Greece
FinMin to face questions on progress as auditors mull Greek proposals
Putting the message across
Greek sorority, fraternity deliver backpacks to LR homeless
Two Greek Organizations Celebrate Service in the Wiregrass
Hungarian far right leader Gábor Vona vows to address rally in London
Anti-fascist protesters to attend speech of Vona whose Jobbik party is accused of fuelling hatred against Roma and Jews
The leader of an extreme Hungarian nationalist party has declared that the furore over his controversial visit to London on Sunday has made him even more determined to speak in Britain.
Gábor Vona, 35, whose party has been accused of strong antisemitic views, and of fuelling hatred against the Jewish and Roma communities, posted a diatribe on Facebook in which he said: "I wish to be there more than ever."
Vona's plans to speak at a rally at Holborn tube station, in central London, a day before Holocaust Memorial Day, have drawn condemnation and calls for him to be banned from entering the UK.
Fears are growing that his rally, allegedly organised to allow him to speak to Britain's 50,000 Hungarian expats before this year's election, could be a violent flashpoint, with members of Unite against Fascism expected to attend in protest.
Scotland Yard has made contact with Vona through his party's Facebook page to ask him about this motives and plans, according to the far-right politician, who added on the social media site: "Polish groups living in England declared that if anyone tries to attack Hungarians, they will be there and they will step up."
Vona has advocated segregation for Hungary's 800,000 Roma. His foreign policy spokesman Marton Gyongyosi has called for a register of Jewish people who allegedly pose a "national security risk". He subsequently apologised.
The party's paramilitary wing, Hungarian Guard, likened to the Nazi brownshirts for the habit of wearing traditional dress, with black boots and trousers, was banned in 2009.
Last week, a petition of 14,000 signatures was presented, at the Home Office asking Theresa May, the home secretary, to ban Vona from the UK. But sources close to the government said Vona had been careful not to make comments that could permit such a ban on the grounds of inciting racial hatred.
Last Saturday, Vona, whose party, Jobbik, is Hungary's third-largest, winning 17% of the vote and nearly 50 seats in parliament, said in a speech that his party now shunned racism.
While endorsing capital punishment and chemical castration for some criminals, he told a party meeting: "We've had enough of racism! There won't be a law in Hungary that would allow for a differentiation to be made on ethnic or religious basis between a human and another one.
"We want equality. Even the honest Gypsy will do better if Jobbik gets to govern. Not because he is Gypsy, but because he is honest."
But the London assembly member for Barnet and Camden, Andrew Dinsmore, whose constituency includes Holborn, said Vona should be banned on the basis of his party's previous rhetoric and record. "The parallels with Hitler are frightening We produced our petition in 24 hours and there has been silence from the Home Office. From what I understand, this lot are even worse than Golden Dawn in Greece."
Baroness Hussein-Ece, the Liberal Democrat spokesman for gender and equality in the Lords, also said she supported those campaigning against Vona's visit. She said: "We have a responsibility for community relations and someone like this is going to add anything to the fabric of our society. He is anti-semitic, Islamophobic and racist and there is a coaltion of views saying we do not want him in this country".
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "The visit to the UK of a man who has become the face of far-right and antisemitic sentiment in Hungary on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day is deplorable.
"Jobbik, the party which Vona leads, have expressed explicitly antisemitic views, including calling for a list of Jews in Hungary to be drawn up due to their 'national security risk'. How can such views be welcome in this country, on this day of all days?"
The Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations will be launched in the UK at King's Cross station on Monday, less than a mile from where the rally is expected to take place. On the grounds of the Auschwitz concentration camp, more than 60 members of the Israeli parliament, including the speaker in the Knesset, will gather to remember those who suffered there.
LondonHungaryThe far rightEuropeRace issuesRoma, Gypsies and TravellersMark TownsendDaniel Boffeytheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsGreece hosts economic forum
Escaped Marxist guerrilla Christodoulos Xiros alarms Greece with pledge to return to arms
Parliament Takes Disciplinary Action Against Golden Dawn MP Zaroulia
Prosecutors Who Released Xeros Prosecuted
Economists can't always see what's coming – not even with a Treasury view
Economic history is littered with innacurate predictions. At least this time, with unemployment, the news is better than expected
The news that unemployment is falling – and faster than most forecasters expected, not least the Bank of England – is extremely good news. It was the memory of the high unemployment between the first and second world wars that drove governments to make the pursuit of high, indeed "full", employment a supreme goal of economic policy for many decades after 1945.
Indeed, it was curiosity that there should be unemployment at all that first interested my mentor at the Financial Times, Sir Samuel Brittan, in the subject of economics. (Sir Samuel has recently celebrated his 80th birthday and is as interested as ever.)
Of course, policymakers could never really achieve full employment. There was bound to be some unemployment, called "frictional", as people changed jobs. But in the 1950s the conduct of economic policy was so successful that rates of 1.5%-2% were considered perfectly normal.
The aim was to maximise economic growth and employment, provided inflation was kept under control and the balance of overseas payments (exports and imports) was manageable.
Well, whole libraries have been filled on the problems that arose after the 1950s, and policymakers faced no shortage of problems with inflation and the balance of payments. But one thing they could take for granted until 2007-08 was a reasonably well-functioning banking system. It was Gladstone who put it succinctly: "Finance is, as it were, the stomach of the country, from which all the other organs take their tone."
The banking crisis, as we know, led to the recent depression, a depression that in my opinion was severely aggravated by mistaken policies. It was therefore interesting to hear Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the urbane permanent secretary to the Treasury, reflect recently on the achievements, or lack of them, of British economic policymakers in general over the years, and of the Treasury in particular.
In his lecture to the Mile End Group on 15 January, Macpherson made no secret of his admiration for Gladstone and the 20th century Labour chancellor Philip Snowden, both of whom are often accused of being more concerned with balancing the budget than balancing the economy.
His lecture – The Treasury View: a Testament of Experience – is well worth reading in full. After running through all the "panaceas" on which policymakers placed their counter-inflationary bets – from incomes policy to monetary targets, shadowing the deutschmark and entering (and exiting) the ERM – they eventually arrived at "inflation targeting".
Like the good public servant he is, Macpherson managed the transition from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling's Treasury to George Osborne's – an example to those who would "politicise" the civil service. He is in his 30th year at the Treasury, and has counted them all in, and counted them all out. He says: "The Treasury exists to serve the government of the day: to promote and achieve its objectives in the financial and economic field… It needs to understand, interpret and apply the philosophy and agenda of the governing party (or parties)." But experienced officials ought to be able to offer an understanding of what works and what doesn't.
Well, the Treasury has had plenty of experience of that, but nevertheless found itself deficient in resources and experience when the bankers almost brought the entire edifice down.
Macpherson has certainly tried to make up for lost time. And he is frank about one of the great policy mistakes of the 1990s and early 2000s: the belief that price stability would bring overall stability, and the lack of attention to the growth of credit.
"Looking back to the last decade," said Macpherson, "I think senior Treasury officials – myself included – became mesmerised by the length of the upswing." It was not just Brown!
Macpherson enunciated a number of propositions, one of which was that there are limits to what the state can do to regulate demand, another that fiscal policy should support monetary policy. When your correspondent asked him whether he thought fiscal policy was supporting monetary policy at that crucial time in the summer of 2010 when the new chancellor raised VAT sharply and stopped the recovery in its tracks, he said he had feared "an inflection point", at which there would be problems selling government debt.
I disagree. The Debt Management Office was having the time of its life selling debt with an average maturity of 14 years – and not, as in the case of Greece, worrying about where the next investor was coming from. Interestingly, the permanent secretary distances himself from Osborne's (and the Bank's) absurd comparisons of our problems then to those of Athens.
At all events, the latest economic panacea in trouble appears to be Mark Carney's "forward guidance" and associated forecasts that have made the new governor a laughing stock. But for those of us who have always worried about unemployment, it remains good news that it is falling – and, personally, I have not lost faith that higher productivity will follow.
However, output is still 2% below its 2007 peak, and if past trends had continued, GDP would now be 20% higher than it is. Personally, I am less concerned about the disarray of Carney's forward guidance than with his apparent lack of concern about bankers' so-called "remuneration".
Unemployment and employment statisticsEconomic policyEconomic growth (GDP)Economic recoveryEconomicsCivil serviceWilliam Keegantheguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsTurkey’s Schizophrenia Pushes EU Away
Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan's seems to have accepted his country will never become a member of the European Union despite its economic attractions.
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Where Have All The Prophets Gone?
As an 81-year old Greek American I am surprised that, in our day and age, a member of the clergy, our clergy, chooses to suggest that “All Prophets Who Came after Jesus are False” (Letters, Nov. 16). Clearly, and sadly, Father Emmanuel Hatzidakis fails to see that we live in a whole new world where, […]
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Xiros Makes Greece Pay Wages of Fear
One certainty about terrorists, who, by definition, are zealous nuts, is that they will never change their ways, which is what Christodoulos Xiros from the dreaded November 17 group proved almost as soon as he walked away from a holiday vacation he was given despite serving six life sentences in the alleged high-security Korydallos Prison […]
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Behrakis on Greece, Community, Church
BOSTON, MA – Prominent businessman and philanthropist George Behrakis of Lowell, MA in an exclusive interview with TNH spoke about many important issues pertaining to Greece, our Greek-American community, and the Greek Orthodox Church in America. He also discussed his home parish, Holy Trinity of Lowell, and its Day School, which is the only Greek […]
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