This is a question on the tip of many people’s tongues, in Europe and elsewhere. As the folks at Debating Europe phrase it: should Turkey join the European Union? Have events in Turkey the past few days changed opinions about the intentions and objectives of the current Turkish government?
“At least he [Erdogan] is leaving us some crumbs. The previous bastards never gave us everything.” — Turkish supporter of the AKP
By Livy Merchant When I was a curious teen-aged kid, I subscribed to a series of Time Life books on history and civilization. One was a beautiful book entitled Islam, the Religion of Peace. It was the early fifties and this was the only source of my knowledge of Islam at the time. It was illustrated with […]
Catchy title in today’s euronews: “Could youth vote stir up next European elections?” Excerpts from Anders Melin’s article below. “A survey released by the European Commission last week showed 65 percent of eligible voters below the age of 30 plan to vote next year, with a particular rise among first-time voters. That represents a sharp […]
Newsworthy, I think… “Our main goal is to show that the regime that is governing Europe through this crisis is neither democratically legitimate nor acting in any responsible way for the people. It’s really working for profit. One of it’s symbolic places is the ECB – the place that has economic and financial reign over […]
Economists and others have stqated repeatedly that Greece needs to become more competitive to remain within the eurozone. We are rarely told why. Here, Stefan Garelli of IMD explains the meaning of competitiveness in this clip marking the release if the IMD’s 2013 World Competitiveness Ranking.
June 8 is “Unfuck the World Day.” Seriously. According to the team at UFTW, “Unfuck The World Day is dedicated to all the people who are awakening, who get up, go out and make this world a better place, every day.” You can organize your own party to mark the date. Here is how. “On […]
A nice ad from Aegean. When you come to Greece learn to do it the Greek way.
By David Wisner We often have the sense that politics is not working, yet conceivably it is working all too well, if what we expect from politicians is that they will prioritize getting elected and then getting reelected. Robert Kaiser has a keen perspective on what has happened in the US federal government, and one […]
A nice article in today’s Deutsche Welle celebrates the tenth anniversary of the launch of WordPress, one of the main platforms for blogging world wide. “Over the last decade, WordPress transformed from a simple platform to write a blog into an online content management system used by multinational corporations to maintain their Internet presence. A […]
The World Naked Bike Ride will take place again in Thessaloniki on June 7 for the sixth consecutive year. Organizers are calling citizens to say STOP to indecent exposure of humans and to the pollution of the planet. The World Naked Bike Ride is a worldwide movement that supports the use of the bicycle as […]
Is this a hoax? We don’t know, but the idea might just be sound. Invest in a country and earn a non-resident passport for your troubles. It’s the Dominica Economic Citizenship Program. For 100,000 USD you can get a passport for yourself; 200,000 USD will buy you passports for your whole family, valid for 10 […]
By Krysta Kalachani I have been following this website from time to time for a year or more, and particularly one of the contributors, Jerome Roos, who started writing when the Syntagma gatherings started taking place. Here is his bio, taken from the magazine’s web site: “Jérôme E. Roos is a PhD researcher in International […]
The right to vote for and stand as candidate in legislative and municipal elections for women was secured on 28 May, 1952, through law 2159, which gave women equal rights to men. Women did not vote in the elections of November of that year, however, because the electoral rolls had not been yet been brought […]
Who’s doing what and where to get Greece out of this mess, courtesy of the Omikron Project.
“It is often said that our political system is incompetent, but it is doing a perfect job in reproducing the existing model. “ — Paschos Mandravelis, Kathimerini English Edition
“There’s a lot more optimism in the air . . . but we’re not yet through the crisis. It’s still a tough balancing act for [small and medium-sized] companies like ours. — Fotis Sousalis, Export Manager, Terra Creta
Thousands of runners who never finished the Boston Marathon last month, along with bombing victims and spectators, gathered in the rain on May 25 to run the OneRun, a one-mile road race that spanned the last mile of the Boston Marathon. The race started at Kenmore and ending at the finish line in Copley Square. […]
By David Wisner I have been watching the anti-gay marriage demonstrations in France for some time now (live blog here). Were one perfectly objective, one would appreciate the degree to which a grass roots mobilization of civil society was seeking to make its point. Granted, there are extremes to this movement, as there are in […]
“Truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.” — Bill Watterson