You don’t expect to see so many hungry people in a major European city. They line up each day looking for a handout in the soup kitchens and bread lines run by the municipality. But the 40 workers under contract to prepare a basic lunch of pasta and bread say they will lose their jobs in June because the city has run out of money to pay them.

Essentially, the country is broke. And to borrow enough money to stay solvent, the Greek government has agreed to severe austerity measures imposed by the European Union, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The money will run out next month unless another chunk of the bailout is handed over. But the European Union wants even more cuts in government job, salaries and benefits.

Public employees have already taken a 40 percent pay cut and pensions are being reduced. The private sector has also been hit and unemployment is nearing 20 percent. A staggering 40 percent of youths between the ages of 18 and 24 are without jobs.

Take, for instance, Leo, a 64-year-old painter of religious icons for devout Greeks and tourists. His business dried up. The money ran out and he ended up living on the street. Evicted for not paying rent, Leo, who didn’t give his last name, took warm clothes, books and ten boiled eggs to his new home – a metal bench near a park in central Athens. He spent 45 days in the open with what he called the “unhappy homeless.”

What makes Leo unhappy is the realization that the government is to blame. “They borrowed,” he said. “Every time they needed money they borrowed and then borrowed some more.”

Successive Greek governments borrowed an estimated $498 billion, in essence to bribe the Greek people into being happy. Governments who could offer cushy office jobs, fat pensions and long vacations got re-elected. It made perfect political sense, but it was economic suicide.

Imagine for a moment taking a 40 percent pay cut. Then suffer an increase in sales tax to 23 percent. Add on increased rates for electricity, a new tax on heating oil and the cost of a gallon of gas hitting almost $10. Oh and your pension is not secure, and your kids stay home because there aren’t enough teachers. It is enough to make you sick.

And that’s precisely what the Greeks are doing. Getting ill. Hospital admissions are up 25 percent. At the same time hospital budgets have been cut 40 percent so there are shortages of medicine and staff.

Nikitas Kanekis is the director of Doctors of the World, a charity that runs health clinics. He has the genteel manner necessary to be a pediatric dentist, but the economic decline has unsettled him. “We have seen four times the number of Greek patients over the last year,” he said. “We are afraid the humanitarian crisis can develop into a humanitarian catastrophe.”

It may already be happening. The department of health reports that suicides are up 40 percent. And violent crimes including murder are up almost 100 percent. “We have all the characteristics we see in big cities in the Third World,” said Kanekis. “People with no shelter, starving people and people looking for doctors and medicine.”

Source

Top 10 EPI

1 76.69 Switzerland
2 70.37 Latvia
3 69.92 Norway
4 69.2 Luxembourg
5 69.03 Costa Rica
6 69 France
7 68.92 Austria
8 68.9 Italy
9 68.82 United Kingdom
9 68.82 Sweden

Bottom 10 EPI

123 37.68 Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
124 36.76 Bosnia and Herzegovina
125 36.23 India
126 35.54 Kuwait
127 35.49 Yemen
128 34.55 South Africa
129 32.94 Kazakhstan
130 32.24 Uzbekistan
131 31.75 Turkmenistan
132 25.32 Iraq

Source

My favourites this time are 3 St Swithuns St, 2 Great Minster St and 8 Great Minster Street (same building as The Old Vine)

Due for completion in July this year, work on the pavilions is really moving forward, with most of the major construction work completed. Currently the verandahs and walkways are being built in a horseshoe, linking the seven buildings with boardwalks.

The pavilions are heated using a geothermal system. Deep down, the temperature is a constant 14 degrees C year round. Installed by a local company using the most efficient technique for heating, it uses a multiplier to build the heat enough for hot water and underfloor heating. A heat exchanger will circulate the warm air. The pavilions are highly insulated using paper pulp in the walls and polystyrene under the floor. The windows and patio doors are triple glazed, made in Sweden.

Each pavilion is for accommodation, with shared kitchen spaces. Two will be for students only, one for staff only, and the others a mix of students, mature students and staff. The staff pavilion has two flats, each with two bedrooms, designed for those staff with a family.

I’m looking forward to seeing the project move toward completion in the coming months, with the interior fittings, walkways and landscaping.

My favourite buildings this time are 46 Kingsgate Rd, 55-57 Kingsgate St, 65 Kingsgate St, and 47 Canon St. These are ordered first below, after the view looking north up Kingsgate St:

Ther is a suburbe at the est gate of sum caullid the Soken: and is the biggest of al the suburbes longging to the cyte of Winchester.

Minns says:- The Soke, so called from the Saxon soc, which signifies a free domain, the independent jurisdiction of the Bishop with its own Courts and a taxation probably lighter than that within the city.

Outside the old East Gate of the city the suburb of ‘The Soke’ was established. This is in the area of Chesil Street and St Johns Street running along the bottom of St Giles Hill. Here are photos I took today of those Listed Buildings, ranging from the C19 to the churches from C12. To the north, at Blue Ball Hill the buildings have a more rural feel, with the C18 workers cottages and the stables at St Johns Croft. Indeed this area feels more like a village than a part of the city, with its own church. Chesil Street runs parallel with the Itchen and is a very busy road, with many of the buildings sooted up, tight to the street. There are some fine C18 town houses here, many with gardens backing onto the river, along with smaller house from C13 on. Further south is the Wharf area with a Black Rat, Black Boy and Black Bridge, around the top of the Itchen Navigation. Favourites this time are 34 Beggars Lane, 21 St Johns Street, Chesil House, and The Black Boy pub. I have put these images before the rest of the gallery below:

He is one of the most vilified men in the highly vilified field of climate science, yet Professor Michael Mann is surprisingly jolly. Despite being the focus of a brutal campaign orchestrated by the fossil-fuel industry and senior politicians within the US Republican Party, Mann’s cheery stoicism is positively infectious.

“I’ve been the focus for attack by those who deny the reality of climate change for so long that it almost seems like forever,” the professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University says. “I’m a reluctant public figure, but I have embraced the opportunity to communicate the science.”

Mann became a chief target of the climate change contrarians for being the outspoken author of an iconic graph of global warming science known as the “hockey stick” – the most politicised graph in science, according to the journal Nature.

It was the hockey stick that generated much of the opprobrium heaped upon climate scientists as a result of the “climategate” emails stolen from the University of East Anglia and leaked on to the internet two years ago. Indeed, many of the leaked emails were copies of correspondence between the UEA team in the UK and Mann and his colleagues in the US.

Mann believes the theft of the emails was not the work of a random hacker, but part of a sophisticated campaign. “It was a very successful, well-planned smear campaign intended … to go directly at the trust the public had in scientists,” he insists. “Even though they haven’t solved the crime of who actually broke in, the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups.”

The hockey stick graph appeared to demonstrate how world temperatures had remained fairly steady for several hundred years before shooting up at the end of the 20th century, just like the straight blade jutting out from the shaft of an ice-hockey stick (the analogy doesn’t quite work with a curved field hockey stick).

The original study was published in Nature in 1998. Within five years, Mann had become the focus of an orchestrated campaign to undermine the entire field of climate science by rubbishing the hockey stick – a term coined by a colleague rather than Mann himself. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe picked up the hockey stick to beat climate science, famously declaring in 2003 that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.

Mann became the target of Freedom of Information requests and was served with a subpoena by Republican Congressman Joe Barton demanding access to his correspondence. This was followed with a further subpoena from Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican Attorney General of Virginia, and yet more FOI requests from industry front-organisations, notably the American Tradition Institute.

Climate contrarians argued that Mann and his colleagues were concealing their research methods because they had something to hide. In reply, Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology, but the aim of these requests has more to do with intimidation than openness. “What they are trying to do is to blur the distinction between private correspondence and scientific data and methods, which of course should be out there for other scientists to attempt to reproduce.

“I think it’s intentional and malicious. It’s intended to chill scientific discourse, to intimidate scientists working in areas that threaten these special interests,” he says. “It’s the icing on the cake if they can also get hold of any more private correspondence that they can mine and cherry pick. It’s a win-win for them.” Why an obscure graph published in a scientific journal should enrage so many people has been the subject of much internet conspiracy (or genuine scientific debate, depending on your point of view).

via Michael Mann: The climate scientist who the deniers have in their sights – Profiles – People – The Independent.

Prana is the energy permeating the universe at all levels. It is physical, mental, intellectual, sexual, spiritual, and cosmic energy.

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Prana is special because it carries awareness. It is the vehicle of consciousness.

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There is a conduit available directly to cosmic consciousness and intelligence.

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By lifting and separating the thirty-three articulations of the vertebral column, and opening the ribs from the spine like tiger’s claws, we deepen and lengthen the breath.

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By learning to appreciate breath we learn to appreciate life itself. The gift of breath is the gift of life.

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Pranayama is the beginning of withdrawal from the external engagement of the mind and senses. That is why it brings peacefulness.

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Introversion in its positive sense, not shying away from the world out of feelings of inadequacy but a desire to explore your inner world. The breath, working in the sheath of the physical body, serves as a bridge between body and mind.

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Breath builds up the tremendous power needed to face the infinite light when grace dawns.

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Because of this fast life we are neglecting the body and the mind. The body and mind are beginning to pull each other in opposite directions, dissipating our energy.

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Life is of itself stressful. People go to the cinema to relax. But even watching the picture is stressful. In sleep there is also stress.

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Our aim is to be able to deal with stress as and when it arises, and not to imprint and accumulate it in the body’s systems, including both conscious and unconscious memory.

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The main causes of negative stress are anger, fear, speed, greed, unhealthy ambition, and competition, which produce a deleterious effect on the body.

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The practice of asana and pranayama not only de-stress you but energise and invigorate the nerves and the mind in order to handle the stress that comes from the caprices of life.

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While yoga may begin with the cult of the body, it leads towards the cultivation of our consciousness.

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Stress must be dealt with before one can truly meditate.

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When you are emotionally disturbed, insecurity and anxiety from the conscious mind is converted into the unconscious mind.

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We seek freedom but cling to bondage.

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The pranayama kosa, the energetic sheath, is not only where we work with breath but also where we work with our emotions.

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Most Westerners try to solve their emotional problems through intellectual understanding.

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We carry around within the recollection of mind our rancour, resentments, hates, greed, and lust, even when the motivating stimulus is absent.

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Look at your dog. When you leave him he is sad; his heart is on the ground. When you come home, is there resentment? No, he is overjoyed to see you. Are you closer to reality  or is your dog?

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The ‘di’ root in Sanskrit is the same as ‘division’ and ‘devil’ in English.

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The ego seeks power because it seeks self-perpetuation; it seeks at all costs to avoid its own inevitable demise. To achieve that impossible end, it devises a thousand ruses. … Lust is self-validation through consumption.