Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Austerity Is Hurting Our Health

April 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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LONDON (Reuters) - Austerity is having a devastating effect on health in Europe and North America, driving suicide, depression, and infectious diseases and reducing access to medicines and care, researchers said on Monday. Detailing a decade of research, Oxford University political economist David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist at Stanford University, said their findings show austerity is seriously bad for health. In a book to be published this week, the researchers say more than 10,000 suicides and up to a million cases of depression ... Read More

More like this: Health
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That Red Juice From Strawberries Might Be Blood

April 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Adding real blood to the saga of blood strawberries, a farm foreman in Greece’s Peloponnese is accused of shooting protesting migrant workers, sending 29 or 30 of them (accounts vary) to the hospital yesterday. Lots of threads here: GUN VIOLENCE OUTSIDE THE UNITED STATES It’s worth noting this was in a rural area, and the assailant used a shotgun—Joe Biden’s suggested home defense weapon—which certainly can be a deadly weapon but in this case left no one critically injured. According to GunPolicy.org (which is hosted by the Sydney School of Public Health and gets some funding ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Golden Dawn Doing Irony Now

December 11, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3hCtJC_ZmI Among the new breed of politicians with a sense of humor, go ahead and add, reluctantly, Greek Nazis. According to Madrid's El Pais newspaper, the nativist Golden Dawn party is setting up what amounts to a parallel economy in Greece, including its own taxi guild, welfare system, police services and food distribution. The services are only available to ethnically native (read: multi-generationally-rooted, white) Greeks. The most ambitious part of the system is a Golden Dawn-sponsored health service to be called, according to the Spanish ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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Greece, North Africa Promote Their Solar Projects

September 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

If you listen to solar advocates in Europe, the upheavals on this side of the globe — revolutions in North Africa, debt misery in Greece — have only brightened the prospects for solar power. German plans to phase out nuclear power have put at least one large nation in the market for new sources of power, and two would-be providers have sworn that global crises won't hurt their ambitions. On the contrary — they'll help! (Just watch out for those other solar salesmen.) First there's Greece. Germany's perennial project to both aid Greece and save the euro might include a deal to buy ... Read More

More like this: Environment, European Dispatch
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Greek Economic Collapse: Pulling Europe and U.S. Down?

July 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

From Ireland to Italy, governments all across Europe are grappling with sky-high deficits, soaring unemployment, and economies that are stuck in first gear. Nowhere are the problems worse than in Greece, which has an unemployment rate over 15 percent and a government debt load that is well over 150 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Which kinda puts the U.S. debt ceiling crisis in perspective ... Greece's debts are so high that the entire European financial system stands at the brink of collapse, with even the future of the Euro in doubt. In the podcast, Benjamin J. Cohen — ... Read More

More like this: Curiouser
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Betting Against the Euro

June 29, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The destruction of Greek credit on international markets this year has been framed as a drama between laissez-faire instincts in Britain and the United States on the one hand, and slower, cud-chewing, pseudo-socialist European tendencies on the other. "There is a part of the Anglo-Saxon press that no longer bothers to hide its desire to see the euro zone disappear," Jean Quatremer wrote in Libération in February, referring to Anglo-American economic areas by the traditional misleading term. Europeans like to talk about a conspiracy against the euro. But was there really some kind of ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, European Dispatch, July-August 2010
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