#Psaropoulos

[estudioabogacia]

conversación de Whatsapp y la prueba electronica

La conversación de Whatsapp como prueba en el proceso civil taller a cargo de Ana Victoria Psaropoulos Savickas

Por: DerechoUBA Canal de Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@DerechoUBA https://youtu.be/ZyMZDtzwHTM Read the full article

[elladastinkardiamou]

Greek opposition parties have joined the government in approving the country’s biggest naval modernisation in 20 years.

Over the next four years, Greece will spend 2.26bn euros ($2.53bn) buying three Belharra frigates built by France’s Naval Group, considered state of the art in the Western arsenal.

[lollipoplollipopoh]

Refugee shelter burns as Greece rolls out new asylum restrictions by Al Jazeera English A fire razed a refugee centre on the Greek island of Lesbos as agencies aiding them clashed with right-wing groups. The island's residents have expressed dismay with the growing number of asylum seekers after Turkey opened its borders to allow the refugees it had been harbouring to cross into Greece. Al Jazeera's John Psaropoulos reports from Lesbos. - Subscribe to our channel: https://ift.tt/291RaQr - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://ift.tt/1iHo6G4 - Check our website: https://ift.tt/2lOp4tL

[theworldnew13]

Is Ukraine’s counteroffensive progressing?

Ukraine’s troops say some southern areas have been retaken, but Russia has reportedly slowed their advance. By John Psaropoulos Ukraine’s armed forces claim to have launched a long-awaited ground operation to take back territories in the Kherson region in the 27th week of the war, striking in eight directions simultaneously.“We have launched offensive operations in many directions … we can…

[expatimes]

Coming home: Greek youth repatriate for high tech opportunities

Volkswagen chose the island of Astypalaia for a ground-breaking experiment with electric vehicles [File: John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]

Athens, Greece – When Krystallia Sarantopoulou graduated from Thessaloniki’s Aristotelian University seven years ago with a degree in electrical and computer engineering, she landed in the worst job market in Europe.

Greek unemployment in July 2013 stood at 28 percent. The country was then still halfway through an eight-year recession that would claim a quarter of its economic growth. It still ranks as the worst contraction of any post-war developed economy.

“It’s already difficult to start a job as a new graduate, but during the financial crisis it was impossible,” she says.

Forced to seek her fortunes abroad, Sarantopoulou accepted an entry-level job in The Netherlands. The pay was basic but she felt at home. Walking into the Dutch company cafeteria, she recognised many fellow graduates from the Aristotelian University mess hall.

Still, she wanted to return to Greece and diligently kept an eye peeled for opportunities. This year, during the coronavirus pandemic, one finally surfaced.

A colleague of mine called and said Pfizer is going to invest in a software hub in Thessaloniki

Krystallia Sarantopoulou, repatriated Greek

“Last Easter, a colleague of mine called and said Pfizer is going to invest in a software hub in Thessaloniki. I said, ‘Really? It’s too good to be true’.”

Sarantopoulou is among the first wave of new hires at Pfizer’s Greek hub. A project manager, or scrum master in the industry’s rugby lingo, she coordinates a research team scattered around the world.

Some 200 employees will be at the site by December and Pfizer now plans to build it out to 600 employees, many of them repatriated Greeks.

“We have people coming from the US, the Netherlands, Germany – all Greeks who went away and are coming back,” Nico Gariboldi, the site manager in Thessaloniki told Al Jazeera.

Gariboldi says Pfizer chose Greece for a number of reasons: Political stability under the conservative New Democracy government, the biggest concentration of universities in southeast Europe and the city’s incubators and startups.

Those pull factors are no accident but part of the government’s strategic blueprint to competitively place Greece for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” merging the digital, biological and physical worlds. And that strategy for transformation has continued apace this year despite the myriad challenges from COVID-19.

All Greeks who went away and are coming back

Nico Gariboldi, the site manager, Pfizer

Determined to catch the next train

Greece, traditionally a pastoral society, largely missed out on previous industrial revolutions. Its industrial parks still bear the smokestacks and jagged factory roofs of experiments in manufacturing going back to the 1930s. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, much of its manufacturing fled to the cheap labour markets of Eastern Europe.

Though it was late for the last train, Greece is determined to catch the next.

It passed legislation last year slashing its corporate tax from 28 percent to 24 percent and has introduced a slew of tax incentives to attract investors, digital nomads (like Krystallia Sarantopoulou) and teleworkers – people who can work from anywhere to deliver a service.

The government also plans to invest a quarter of the income from next year’s 5G auctions in startups offering 5G services.

“Countries that want jobs with added value need to partake of the fourth industrial revolution, which is digital and data-based,” Alexis Patelis, the prime minister’s economic adviser told Al Jazeera. “[Digitisation] increases the productivity of the economy as a whole.”

Last January, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis met Microsoft CEO Brad Smith at the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland. Smith wanted Mitsotakis’s help in creating an “enhanced” reality app through which a traveller would see ancient Olympia as it was 27 centuries ago. Mitsotakis then put another item on the agenda.

“They discussed Olympia and then we suggested the data centre, which was then very prescient,” Patelis tells Al Jazeera. “A month later Brad Smith visited Greece and said, ‘you are in the running for a data centre’.”

In October, Greece and Microsoft signed an MoU to build three data centres in the greater Athens area – enormous server parks that form the backbone of the internet and cloud computing services. Currently, the region is served by data centres in Amsterdam or Dublin.

The presence of data centres is expected to make small companies that cannot afford servers and software more competitive and attract larger investors.

Countries that want jobs with added value need to partake of the fourth industrial revolution

Alexis Patelis, economic advisor to Greek prime minister

Island incubators

Two waves of COVID-19 are expected to contract Greece’s economy by more than 10 percent this year.

“We have an investment deficit. As it is, we cannot achieve the growth we want,” says Patelis – a reference to the government’s promise to achieve 4 percent growth this year.

Hoping to make good on its promise in 2021, the government plans to disburse 5.5 billion euros ($6.69bn) of its allotment from the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility.

It is also actively seeking and wooing corporate giants who want to incubate ideas in the real world.

“I am not of the view that we have to sit in our offices saying Greece has political stability and a good climate and expect that the phone will ring and it will be the chairman of a company that wants to build a factory here,” said Kostas Fragogiannis, deputy foreign minister for economic diplomacy.

Fragogiannis’s job it is to spearhead the search for high-tech investors.

“I believe in a proactive policy,” he told Al Jazeera.

That initiative bore fruit last month when Volkswagen chose the island of Astypalaia for a ground-breaking experiment with electric vehicles. 

Volkswagen will replace the island’s public internal combustion vehicles with electric ones for free [File: John Psaropoulos/Al Jazeera]

The German automaker will replace the island’s public internal combustion vehicles with electric ones for free. It will also sell electric vehicles to the island’s 1,300 inhabitants at cost, build a network of charging stations and test a mobility-on-demand app, through which people can rideshare without having to own a car. Eventually, it plans to test its driverless technology there.

Fragogiannis is also looking for an investor to build a solar-and-wind power station, making the island energy self-sufficient.

“I think this project will teach lessons applicable for the whole world,” he says. “It shows the world how public and private transport will work in the future.”

“Astypalaia serves as a future blueprint for the social consensus that we need across Europe to achieve a zero-emissions future,” said VW CEO Herbert Diess on November 4.

As with Microsoft, the deal with Volkswagen was the result of both sides coming forward with ideas. “This government targeted certain markets and countries and companies,” says Fragogiannis, saying more major projects are in the works.

“Astypalaia can and will be a model of sustainable development, not just on a national level but on a European and global level,” said Prime Minister Mitsotakis at the announcement of the deal. “At Astypalaia we shall have a picture of the future.”

It was, in a nutshell, what Mitsotakis is driving towards for the Greek economy as a whole.

#technology Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15633&feed_id=23307 #automotiveindustry #businessandeconomy #coronaviruspandemic #economy #europe #features #greece #scienceandtechnology #technology

[spicynbachili1]

Greece builds pipeline to transport natural gas from Caspian Sea | Greece News

Greece is thought for its historical past and local weather, however not for oil and fuel.

Which may be about to vary with a brand new pipeline being accomplished throughout the north of the nation that can transport pure fuel from the Caspian Sea to Western Europe.

It is a part of a European Union coverage to maneuver away from dependence on Russian fuel after shipments had been stopped for 2 weeks throughout the 2009 Ukraine disaster, inflicting shortages in southeastern Europe.

Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos experiences.

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from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/greece-builds-pipeline-to-transport-natural-gas-from-caspian-sea-greece-news/

[jblaumond]

#dessin #drawing #aquarelle #watercolor #cyprus #chypre #seaside #tree #leaves #picoftheday (à Psaropoulos Fish Tavern)

[ladystylestores]

Greece seeks return of Parthenon Marbles amid restoration project | Greece News

Greece has made the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum in London one of its top priorities.

In the meantime, a restoration project is under way to undo the damage done to the building, when a British aristocrat removed the sculptures in the early 19th century.

Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos reports from Athens.

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[yeskraim]

Turkey, Greece brace for standoff over Cyprus gas drilling plans

Turkey and Greece are braced for a standoff in the eastern Mediterranean over a controversial Turkish plan to drill for gas in Cypriot waters.

This comes as regional industry leaders discuss energy plans at a conference in Athens.

Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos reports from the Greek capital, Athens.

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The post Turkey, Greece brace for standoff over Cyprus gas drilling plans appeared first on Gadgets To Make Life Easier.

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[elladastinkardiamou]

When Taliban fighters ransacked Shagufa Noorzai’s home on August 29, she was not there.

The member of parliament from Helmand province had gone into hiding following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, as US and NATO troops were withdrawing from the country after 20 years of war.

“I was in a washroom without a window for 15 days,” she told Al Jazeera. “Even my family didn’t know where I was … The Taliban told my father, ‘tell her to come out of hiding and we will work with her’.”

Homa Ahmadi, who represented Logar province in parliament three times, said “They [the Taliban] are going to kill people who were working in government and they will do it quietly.”

“They break into people’s homes to show people that they have no rights, and to create fear that they can take whatever they want.”

Day after retaking Afghanistan, the Taliban announced a “general amnesty” for government workers, but reports have emerged of Taliban fighters killing members of ethnic Hazara men and torturing journalists. However, top Taliban leadership has reiterated that they will not target their opponents.

Noorzai and Ahmadi are among more than a dozen female MPs and their families who have arrived in Athens, the Greek capital, after being evacuated from Afghanistan in the past several weeks with the help of two non-governmental organisations, Melissa Network and Human Rights 360.

“We created a list of 150 women of influence who were mostly on death lists, who were facing tremendous risks and were willing to take any risk in the process of accessing the airport or exiting the country,” says Melissa co-founder Nadina Christopoulou.

“What they kept telling us before the withdrawal of US troops was [that] going back home means facing certain death.”

Greek diplomatic sources put the figure of evacuees at 177 so far, which includes female lawyers and judges arriving by chartered flight this month.

[lollipoplollipopoh]

🇦🇱 Albania: Protesters call for PM Edi Rama's resignation | Al Jazeera English by Al Jazeera English Supporters of Albania's opposition have fought with police while trying to storm parliament to confront a government they accuse of being corrupt. They also say Prime Minister Edi Rama is linked to organised crimes, allegations he rejects as "ridiculous". Al Jazeera's John Psaropoulos reports from Tirana. - Subscribe to our channel: https://ift.tt/291RaQr - Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AJEnglish - Find us on Facebook: https://ift.tt/1iHo6G4 - Check our website: https://ift.tt/2lOp4tL #Albania #AlbaniaProtests #AlbaniaPolitics

[lodelss]

John Psaropoulos | The Sewanee Review | Spring 2019 | 17 minutes (3.361 words)

  This essay first appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the country, which you can subscribe to here. Our thanks to the author and The Sewanee Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads. 

* * *

I met Doa Shukrizan at the harbormaster’s office in the port of Chania, in western Crete. She sat with her back to a balcony overlooking the street, and the strong morning light enveloped her delicate figure, so that there appeared to be even less of her than there was after her ordeal with the sea. Doa’s face had peeled from extreme sunburn; she spoke softly. Between the cavernous ceiling and polished concrete floor, the only furnishings were tables, chairs, and ring binders, so that voices, however slender, resounded. There were no secrets in this room. During the hour that we spoke, three coast guard officers sat at their desks not doing any work, transfixed by what she said.

Doa and her fiancé had been among some five hundred people who boarded a fishing trawler at the port of Damietta in the Nile Delta on September 6, 2014. Many, like Doa, were Syrian. Others were Palestinian or Sudanese. All were fleeing war and had paid smugglers to ferry them, illegally, to Italy.

Doa’s family had fled their native town of Daraa soon after the Syrian uprising began there in March 2011, when Doa was just sixteen. They spent more than two years in an unofficial refugee camp in Egypt, and pooled enough money to pay Doa’s and her fiancé’s passage, so they could start their lives in Europe.

“On the fourth day after we set sail, between noon and two o’clock, we were met by another fishing vessel,” Doa said. “The people on it asked us to stop. They threw pieces of metal and wood at us and swore at our captain. Our boat refused to stop and they rammed us. They waited until we had sunk and they left.”

Doa said the boat was submerged in ten minutes. She remembered hearing the screaming of women and children below decks. She survived along with about a hundred people because she had been on deck, but her fiancé did not. Over the next three days and two nights, all but five of those initial survivors would die of exhaustion and dehydration as they treaded water in the open sea. Doa and the other four were spotted by a Greek merchant ship south of Crete; a Greek coast guard helicopter airlifted them to Chania.

Only later, when I reviewed the video recording of our interview, did I realize that Doa wept quietly to herself during the breaks between answers, as I turned to the local mufti who translated from Arabic to Greek, recomposing herself each time she and I recommenced our conversation. “She cries herself to sleep every night,” the mufti, Ashraf Kabara, told me later. He and his wife and daughters had effectively adopted Doa.

In 2014, 1.6 percent of asylum-seekers who attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe was listed as dead or missing.

At the mufti’s apartment, I also met Hamad Raad, a Palestinian barber who also survived this mass murder on the high seas, and he corroborated much of what Doa said.

“Some people had their children in their arms, and when their children died they would let them slip under the waves,” said Hamad. “It was very difficult for relatives to look after one another. People looked after themselves.” Thirst led to desperate measures: “The men would urinate into bottles that were floating in the wreckage and gave it to their children to drink.”

Doa claims she found the strength to survive only because others entrusted children to her. “A grandfather who had a one-year old baby girl on a [floating] container asked me to look after it because I had an inflatable ring. And I put the baby on the ring and kept it,” she said fighting back tears. “Then a mother came with an eighteen-month-old baby girl and a six-year-old girl and asked me to take care of the baby, andI kept it too. I watched the grandfather and the mother and her older daughter die. The one-year-old baby died just before we were rescued.”

Hamad explained how the breakdown of social bonds isolated each person and made them more vulnerable to the elements: “In the beginning people were in groups but each day the groups grew thinner. On the third day people lost their senses. Two people came up to me and told me I had taken their life vest and that it belonged to them, and tried to drown me. Many of us were afraid after that.”

Hamad, dangerously disoriented, very nearly drowned himself. “I hallucinated that I had gone to a hotel and was asking for a room and food and drink,” he said. “I imagined that I was arguing with the hotelier, and I took off my life jacket and began to sink . . . the sinking brought me back to my senses.”

“Some people died of stress, others willed it to happen,” said Doa. “One man took off his own life vest and sank. Some died of fear, some of cold.”

“Those who had God beside them had strength, and those who didn’t began to end their own lives,” says Hamad.

Doa was not at liberty to tell me the name of the ship that rammed hers, but she did tell the Greek authorities, which passed the information on to Egyptian authorities.

I presumed that these were rival gangs of smugglers, who put no value on human life once they had collected their fare. Doa and Hamad had paid $2,500 and $2,100 for their passage, respectively, putting the value of just this trawler’s human cargo at well over a million dollars.

In 2014, 1.6 percent of asylum-seekers who attempted to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe was listed as dead or missing. This fell sharply to 0.37 percent the following year, as the numbers of asylum-seekers quintupled to over a million. As Europe devised a series of policies designed to discourage asylum-seekers and drove down the number of attempted crossings, the death rate again climbed to nearly two percent. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that the more we protect our borders from irregular migration, the more desperate we make those who are determined to cross. That in turn feeds the criminal groups who enable them. Turf wars among them kill people, as in the case of Doa and Hamad’s boat; but so does their greed.

The inescapable conclusion seems to be that the more we protect our borders from irregular migration, the more desperate we make those who are determined to cross.

Smugglers on the Turkish coast have placed refugees in rickety boats, or with engines that stalled, or given them barely enough fuel to reach the nearest Greek shore. And they have overcrowded the vessels.

One of the worst drownings in the Aegean took place on October 28, 2015 off Lesvos, when more than two hundred people were packed onto a two-decked wooden boat. I arrived at the port of Molyvos that evening and spoke to the interpreters who had interviewed survivors. Many refugees had refused to board, fearing for their lives, they said, but the smugglers fired guns in the air and intimidated them.

After they had been piloted away from Turkish shores, a second boat drew up alongside and took the smugglers off, leaving refugees to navigate by themselves in sixty-kilometer-per-hour winds and heavy seas. As a result, the boat’s top deck collapsed onto the people below, mostly women and children, and instantly capsized it. Eight bodies had been recovered by the following day, but three dozen remained missing.

The 17,500 refugees officially listed as dead and missing while crossing the Mediterranean since 2014 may only be part of the story.

In 2016, I heard evidence of shipwrecks no one witnessed and no one survived from doctors on the island of Ikaria, which sits at a solitary longitude across the Aegean’s predominant northeast wind. Its northern shore acts as a net for bodies originating in shipwrecks much further north and east, which have spent days or weeks on the sea floor until a storm stirs them from the depths.

My friend John Tripoulas, a general surgeon then at the Ikaria hospital, had to pronounce death on the body of a girl, perhaps six or seven years old, found bobbing off the north shore. She had spent so long underwater that her flesh had suffered what doctors call saponification — it had acquired a soap-like consistency. “It was a combination of sorrow and horror to see this young girl in an advanced state of decay,” Tripoulas told me, his voice quiet and trembling. “I’ll never forget what she was wearing — pink sweatpants with a Mickey Mouse patch, white boots, and a pink overcoat. Her facial features were not visible — they had been lost to the sea.”

The loss of facial features was a common observation. Kalliope Katte, a doctor at the Evdilos Health Centre on Ikaria’s north coast, described the body of an adult woman found washed up. “She was completely naked. It was an awful sight because although she had her arms and legs, her face was missing. There was no skin or flesh. It was just a skull.” When I asked about the missing faces, she said, “The bodies have been eaten by fish, they’re not just decomposing.”

‘I decided to leave Yemen so that I will never see my children fight for Al-Qaeda or any other side.’

Once past the dangers of the sea, refugees faced the peril of the Balkans. By 2015, the Balkan route was well trodden by refugees walking up through Greece to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. They were robbed of their passports, cell phones, and money.

Some ended up back in Greece. In the spring of that year I traveled up to the border village of Eidomeni with my camera crew to shoot a story. As we drove near the official border crossing, we saw a middle-aged woman staggering on the asphalt. She was leaning heavily to one side, about to fall over. We turned the car around and put her in the back seat. Barely conscious, she couldn’t speak for several minutes. Eventually she told us she was from Somalia, and had been turned back by FYROM police.

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We drove her to the local public clinic, put her in a wheelchair, and asked for someone to attend to her. The receptionists gave us a frustrated look suggesting they had seen it all before. I later spoke with Evdoxia Poutpara, a doctor at the clinic. “I’ve seen fractured shins, thighs, arms, and forearms, fractured fingers, bruised faces, broken noses, skull fractures,” she said. “These are not accidents. Sometimes sharp objects have been used on the head, face, and abdomen. And also crowbars.”

Stathis Kyrousis, a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told me that refugees had established a route along the railroad that follows the easy contours of the Vardar River Valley through FYROM and into Serbia. He had traveled the entire route as part of an MSF team. “It is a road strewn with a lot of death and a lot of pain,” he said. The Afghan refugees called it the Black Road. One night in 2015, my cameraman and I followed a group of thirty refugees through the maize and wheat fields that mark the extreme north of Greek territory, as they prepared to push into FYROM. They had spent the day camped on the parking lot of a motel and gas station with hundreds of other refugees. Now they walked quickly and in silence, their heads down, avoiding the furrows where wheat grew waist-high, and negotiating the ridges of hardened red clay in sneakers. They were nervous as their Greek guide showed them his proposed route on his cell phone, and tried to give them the latest intelligence from the other side of the border about where gangs of thugs were operating that evening.

As we reached the border, marked simply by a hedgerow, we heard loud chatting on the other side from people who were clearly making no effort to conceal themselves. The refugees quickly decided to withdraw for the evening and try another time.

Sitting on the platform of the Eidomeni train station, I asked Hashim, a Yemeni businessman traveling with his two teenaged sons, why he was taking the risk. “I decided to leave Yemen so that I will never see my children fight for Al-Qaeda or any other side. Sooner or later, one militia or another will approach them,” he said. Hashim had left behind his wife and four youngest children.

Police have sometimes behaved little better than the gangs. At Eidomeni I spoke to Ahmed, a young Syrian man shot in the lower spine during the Syrian War and unable to walk. Four friends had carried him from the Greek border as far as Veles, near FYROM’s border with Kosovo. There they were arrested and taken to the Gazi Baba prison near the capital, Skopje.

“This prison is very dirty,” Ahmed told me. “There was trash everywhere. We spoke with the [Syrian] women who were already there. They said that if they asked for anything, the police would demand sex. There were two rooms. In one, the women who were unwilling were kept locked up; in another, those who were willing were allowed to come and go, and anything they needed was provided.”

Police have sometimes behaved little better than the gangs.

Across the Balkans, according to this reporter, criminal gangs and police became natural allies. Police assumed thuggish practices, and thugs were effectively deputized. Apart from enforcing an exorbitant smuggling fee, the gangs were acting as vigilantes and creating a resistance to freelance crossings. They were effectively performing pushbacks — the practice of repulsing supplicants at the border without due process — illegal under the Geneva Convention regarding the Status of Refugees of 1951 — while providing police with plausible deniability.

Whether they were ordered to do so by their superiors or not, police and coast guard forces illegally forced asylum-seekers back across borders throughout the Balkans. Because of its pivotal position on migration routes, Greece became a key area of study. Amnesty International issued a report in April 2014, Greece: Frontier of Hope and Fear. John Dalhuisen, Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia Programme Director, said, “The treatment of refugees and migrants at Greece’s borders is deplorable. Too often, instead of finding sanctuary, they are met with violence and intimidation. There are cases where they have been stripped naked, had their possessions stolen, and even held at gunpoint before being pushed back across the border to Turkey.”

* * *

The worst instance of an apparent pushback I ever came across was on January 20, 2014. The Hellenic Coast Guard reported that eleven Afghans had drowned in a rescue operation, in which it attempted to tow a boat to Farmakonisi, an islet in the east Aegean.

Commodore Yannis Karageorgopoulos gave me the official version: “The towing operation was heading to Farmakonisi Island. However, during that towing operation, all of a sudden and for unknown reasons, the people on board moved to the right side of the boat altogether. That caused the capsizing of the boat.”

The dead consisted of eight children and their three mothers. Once they reached Athens, the bereaved husbands and fathers had a very different story to tell.

AP Photo/Santi Palacios

Their engine had died within sight of Farmakonisi just before the coast guard spotted them, they said. “We had almost reached the island — we could see mountains and houses — when our engine stalled,” said Abdul Sabur, a thirty-year-old tailor from Herat. Instead of towing them towards Farmakonisi, the three men said, the coast guard attempted to tow them back into Turkish territorial waters.

“I know it was Turkey, because the lights on the Turkish coast were orange and the lights on the Greek side were white,” Sabur told me. The rope’s mooring broke off the refugee boat after a few minutes of towing at high speed. “Where the mooring had come off the bow it had created a big crack in the boat, and from there water was entering the engine area,” Sabur said.

The coast guard reattached the rope and resumed towing, but the boat was now taking on water faster. “We were in the back of the boat, and the water had almost reached our waists,” said Sabur. “Haibar and his wife started to shout to them to stop. The coast guard vessel stopped beside us. Haibar asked them to take [his] baby. One of them moved to do so, and the commander told him not to. My wife was shouting for help from inside the cabin, which was filling with water. She was calling from the window. The coast guard officers shouted, “Fuck you! Fuck you!” and fired shots in the air.”

On board was Sanulah Safir, thirty-eight, a civil servant fleeing Afghanistan with his wife and eight children. The Taliban were threatening him, demanding that his wife stop working as a teacher, and accusing him of converting to Christianity during a stint in Norway years earlier. He relates what happened next. “I was bailing out water with a bucket. Those who were inside the cabin were calling for help. The coast guard was racing onward but saw that the boat was filling with water and was in danger of sinking, and they took a knife and cut the tow line. That was when the boat capsized.”

Haibar asked them to take [his] baby. One of them moved to do so, and the commander told him not to.

“Women and children were in the cabin, mostly. Only the one man managed to get his wife and child out. But they couldn’t get out [of the water] and drowned. We could have saved them by throwing them a rope but we weren’t allowed to. [The coast guard] neither helped nor allowed us to help.”

Abdul Sabur, the tailor fleeing Taliban militia, lost his wife and ten-year-old son. Civil servant Sanulah Safir lost his wife, two sons, and two daughters. Fedam Hamad, a car mechanic who was fleeing because the Taliban targeted him for working as a driver for US forces, lost his wife and three children. When I met the three men, they were ashen. They stared vacantly into the distance. They did not have the energy even to be angry. Their only demand was for the boat to be refloated so they could bury their wives and children.

The Hellenic Navy initiated a court-martial; the magistrate on the island of Kos, in whose jurisdiction the incident occurred, initiated an inquiry; and the Hellenic Coast Guard initiated an internal inquiry. All three investigations were terminated before reaching a conclusion. No report has ever been issued, and there have been no criminal prosecutions.

The coast guard vessel was equipped with GPS, which could track its exact movements via satellite. Unfortunately, it was switched off that night, to provide what the coast guard calls a “level of confidentiality.” So the case still came down to the word of the coast guard versus the word of the Afghans.

* * *

What had begun as an informal collusion between vigilantes and authorities to discourage inbound migration has now become official policy on both sides of the Atlantic. No one wants to declare the Geneva Convention a dead letter; the focus, instead, is on preventing asylum-seekers from reaching European (or US) soil, where they are in a stronger legal position to apply for asylum.

The hardening of attitudes is commensurate with the numbers. A record 68.5 million people are displaced by war and environmental catastrophe, says the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Over twenty-five million of those are displaced beyond their borders, making them refugees — also a record. The combined population of the developed world — more than a billion people — could, in theory, absorb all the world’s refugees today — a manageable ratio of one refugee per fifty people. Western electorates are worried about economic and cultural impacts. Allowing even genuine refugees, as distinct from economic migrants, into their country creates an unacceptable “pull factor” to other unfortunates considering a similar move. However, damming up unhappiness and misfortune is unlikely to work, as the experience of the past few years has shown. Those determined to cross will cross. Europe seems to accept this in principle, having created a resettlement program for fifty thousand refugees a year directly from the Middle East. However, that number falls far short of actual attempted crossings. With electorates divided on both sides of the Atlantic, Europe and the US are likely to continue to follow an incoherent and uncoordinated series of policies, aiming to salvage their self-definition as caring and open societies, while doing everything possible to keep the world’s unfortunates at bay.

***

John Psaropoulos has been covering Greece since 1992. He is an independent journalist based in Athens and has reported for CNN, NPR, the Weekly Standard, Al Jazeera International, and IRIN News. He blogs at thenewathenian.com.

This essay first appeared in The Sewanee Review, the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the country. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to The Sewanee Review for print and online access to more excellent non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Our thanks to the author and Sewanee Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

Longreads Editor: Aaron Gilbreath

[juliestacy]

Will Greece's rugby 'rebels' prevent a World Cup qualification?

Will Greece’s rugby ‘rebels’ prevent a World Cup qualification?

The rugby league season gets under way in its European heartlands of England and France on Thursday. Elsewhere, the sport is facing a crisis. Greece is on the verge of qualifying for their first-ever World Cup, but foul play off the field could ruin their chances.

Al Jazeera's John Psaropoulos reports from Athens.

Original Article

[thetrumpdebacle]

Thousands of protesters have gathered in Syntagma Square in Athens to demonstrate against Greece’s agreement with Macedonia to change the latter’s name to the Republic of North Macedonia.

Hundreds of buses, especially from northern Greece, brought protesters in for the rally that took place on Syntagma Square near the parliament.

Police estimates put the number of demonstrators at 60,000 around midday while organisers said 100,000 people turned up.

Some protesters clashed with riot police on the steps up to the parliamentary building on Sunday, throwing rocks, flares, firebombs, paint and other objects.

Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos reports from Athens, Greece.

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via The Trump Debacle

[newselleven-blog]

Greece emerges from eurozone bailout | Greece News

Greece emerges from eurozone bailout | Greece News

On Monday, Greece will emerge from eight years of financial dependence on its eurozone partners.

The country will now have to borrow exclusively from markets.

The government has balanced its budget and raised tax revenues to pay off its huge debt.

But the economy is far from stable.

Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos reports from Athens.

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n…

[katiezstorey93]

7 new Instruments making web design more easy in 2017

Nobody ever claimed that web design is not hard job. But, ideally, you would like to place your effort and energy into delighting users, solving problems and creating exquisite designs. You don’t wish to squander it on tasks that are boring, insistent and soul-sapping.  

New tools are being published all of the opportunity that will assist you simplify processes, and reduce time and energy. It can be challenging keeping track of them all, however. So in this informative article we round up some of our new instruments, all of which are currently making internet design easier .

01. Guetzli 

Google has found a way to Create JPGs even smaller, without affecting compatibility

Normally when it comes to enhancing a website’s rate, nothing leaves as much effect. But in case you thought we reached the limit of that which image compression tools could do, then think again. Launched in March from Google, Guetzli (named after the Korean term for ‘cookie’) claims to lower the size of JPGs by a whopping 35 percent more than current procedures.

The newest source encoder will produce the size of images and web graphics smaller while still maintaining compatibility with also the JPEG standard, image processing programs as well as existing browsers. On the other hand, the tradeoff is the algorithms require to make images that are compressed than methods.  

You can learn more about Guetzli in this blog post.

02. iotaCSS

IotaCSS is a CSS framework with a difference

IotaCSS is a CSS framework that’s been purposely crafted to be design-agnostic. Advisor frontend architect Dimitris Psaropoulos, that found that CSS frameworks were imposing lots of limitations produced it with. This forced him request that the designer, or to either compose a good deal of code at the top. So he created his own framework, which functions somewhat differently.  

IotaCSS is a pair of modules that don’t rely on each other while CSS Frameworks act as a component. You may use one independently or you can join them to build more complex user interfaces.  

IotaCSS with quite a few early adopters using it to develop products that are high-scale been quietly for a couple of years. Now, however, it’s out of beta and confidently announcing itself on the entire world. You may learn more about the way that it functions in this blog post.

03. CodePen Projects 

A brand new tool allows you build sites directly within CodePen

Founded in 2012 from Alex Vazquez, Tim Sabat and Chris Coyier, CodePen has grown to be one of the web’s biggest and liveliest communities for testing and showcasing CSS HTML and JavaScript code snippets. For the last five years, it’s functioned as both an online code editor and an open source learning environment, in which programmers can make code snippets (“pens”), examine them and get comments.  

Currently CodePen has taken another major leap forward by establishing its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment), CodePen Projects, which lets you build sites within your browser.  

You arrange them to tabs can drag and drop your site files, and then preview your site as you assemble it. You will find built-in debugging tools, in addition to templates that will assist you create websites quickly if you select.  

Be aware that, even though it functions in a similar way CodePen Projects doesn’t replace the lattter but sits alongside it. You can learn more about CodePen Projects at this blog post.

04. Launchpad 

Launchpad turns Sketch to a fully fledged site builder

Launchpad is a tool from Anima that allows you publish sites from Sketch, without any programming required.  

The entire interface can be used to create landing pages and static sites, even though it doesn’t support dynamic web pages using JavaScript, and is incorporated into Sketch. However, it will enable you to add hyperlinks, add breakpoints that are responsive, set up types videos and integrate tools. So it might be an perfect tool for establishing a fast and simple promotional site, for example.  

You can learn more about Launchpad in this blog post.

05. React Sketch.app

Airbnb is sharing its bespoke tool together with the open source community

React Sketch.app provides a super-easy method to handle Sketch resources in a massive design system. Built from the team at Airbnb to help bridge the gap between designers and engineers, it’s essentially an open source library that permits React components that render to Sketch documents to be written by you.  

Because React Sketch.app utilizes Flexbox, its components can have the same rich design as your actual components. That means no longer yanking rectangles by hand; what works just like your target layout engine.  

React Sketch.app, then, makes it easy to draw and integrate data into your files that are archived. In addition, it provides a simple way to build your own custom design tools on top of Sketch. You may learn more about the way that it  functions in this article.

06. SVGito 

This free program saves you having to manually edit SVG files

SVGito is a internet app that cleans your SVG files up, to help save you the hassle of downloading them.  

Created by Peter Nowell, this little program optimises your own SVGs and also will normally decrease their size and complexity.  

You can learn more about SVGito in this blog post.

07. Sizzy 

Sizzy Permits You to preview multiple displays during program testing

Sizzy is a tool that Permits You to preview multiple displays at once while you’re testing your internet apps that are receptive out.    

Creator Kristijan Ristovski had been using react-storybook to change between the different variations of each component. However he has annoyed having to go forth and back between devices. He constructed Sizzy, which lets you see all of the changes simultaneously, making it much faster and easier to identify and fix design bugs.  

You can learn more about Sizzy in this blog post.  

The post <p>7 new Instruments making web design more easy in 2017</p> appeared first on Vista Icon Creator.

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