Daily Archives: July 16, 2014

Eric Abidal with Olympiakos colours. Photo: Olympiakos.org

The Reds have also extended the contracts of Greece internationals Andreas Samaris and Dimitris Siovas until 2018.

Greek champions Olympiakos have continued their summer rebuilding by signing Swiss midfielder Pajtim Kasami on a three-year deal from English side Fulham.

The 22-year-old international, who did not make Switzerland’s World Cup squad, signed for an undisclosed fee from the Londoners, who were relegated from the Premier League last season.

Kasami’s arrival follows that of Eric Abidal, the former France defender who joined from Monaco last week for an undisclosed fee.

Abidal joined his new teammates at Zeefeld, Austria for their pre-season training this week, after making 26 appearances in Ligue 1 last season, and was not called up by France coach Didier Deschamps for the World Cup.

Abidal, who played for Barcelona for six years from 2007, was first diagnosed with a liver tumor in March 2011 and a year later underwent a transplant.

The former Lille and Lyon player says he has fully recovered and he successfully completed medical checks with Olympiakos.

Another Frenchman, winger Mathieu Dossevi, 26, also joins Olympiakos from Ligue 1 side Valenciennes, the Greek club confirmed.

Olympiakos also announced the extension of the contracts of Greece internationals Andreas Samaris and Dimitris Siovas until 2018.

Source: AFP

Greek international option to replace outgoing Thomas Vermaelen.

English newspaper the Daily Mirror is reporting that English giant Arsenal is looking at Greece international Kostas Manolas as a replacement for club captain Thomas Vermaelen.

Vermaelen has been heavily linked with a move to Manchester United, since the completion of the 2013-14 English Premier League season.
If Vermaelen leaves it would leave Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger with a void to fill down back, and the 23-year-old Olympiakos defender could be available for 8 million pounds ($14.7 million).

Source: Daily Mirror

Twenty-two per cent of Australians would like to see a higher intake of immigrants, while most agree the intake should stay the same.

One-fifth of Australians favour a higher migration intake while more than half are happy with the current intake a Newspoll survey has uncovered.

Twenty-two per cent of those surveyed actually wanted to see Australia up their intake of immigrants, with European, African and Asian migrants having the most support from locals.

Twenty-six per cent of participants wanted to see more European migration, while African migration was closely behind, with 20 per cent and Asian migration at 18 per cent support.

In contrast, just 14 per cent of Australians want to see more Muslim migrants, and 37 per cent favour a cut.

Low income earners were most likely to agree that immigration intake was already too high, and 27 per cent of Australians wanted to see the whole program cut.

Although Australians might be increasing their tolerance to migrant intake, many still feel the country isn’t as open-minded as it should be.

One in five people felt that the world ‘racist’ described Australians “a lot”, while two-thirds believed Australians were ‘a little’ racist.

Middle income earners and older Australians were the only group to say they felt Australians were tolerant, while women were more likely to say that Australians were “very racist”

Australia has peacefully absorbed 7.5 million migrants since the end of the last World War, including 800,000 refugees according to the Minister of Social Services.

Source: The Australian

A council of appeals court judges on Tuesday ruled that Golden Dawn deputy Nikos Michos should serve his pretrial custody under house arrest after a dispute emerged last week between the two magistrates and the prosecutor investigating the far-right party’s alleged criminal activities.

Magistrates Ioanna Klapa and Maria Dimitrakopoulou last week ordered Michos to be placed in prison on additional charges of illegal weapons possession with the intent of supplying a criminal organization.

Their decision was challenged by prosecutor Isidoros Dogiakos, who argued that Michos should be released.

Tuesday’s decision sought to strike a compromise between the two sides.

The Evia MP has been ordered to remain at home throughout the pretrial period and is allowed to leave his residence only to attend Parliamentary proceedings.

source: ekathimerini.gr

The dispute between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) over the latter’s name is a “burden” on Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday as she called for a solution even if it would leave both sides disappointed.

“We can find a way to solve this problem,” Merkel said at the annual meeting of the Brdo-Brijuni Process between leaders of Southeastern European countries. “I have spent time on this issue and the names and possible combinations but sometimes I think there is nothing else to be proposed.”

This is her second major involvement in the name dispute. Last November she held talks with the United Nation’s mediator for the issue, Matthew Nimetz, in Berlin.

“In Germany we say that a compromise has been achieved when each side is equally unhappy,” said Merkel from the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, adding that a solution of the name issue would allow FYROM to progress with its efforts to join the European Union and NATO.

Greek diplomats were concerned recently that FYROM’s attempt to join NATO would be raised again at the organization’s next summit, in the Welsh city of Cardiff, in September but Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said that the enlargement of the alliance will not be on the agenda.

source: ekathimerini.gr

Ο Κλαούντιο Ρανιέρι αποδεσμεύτηκε από τη Μονακό και πλέον είναι ελεύθερος να αναλάβει την εθνική Ελλάδας.

Σύμφωνα με το «France Football», ο Ιταλός τεχνικός θα λάβει 4,5 εκατ. ευρώ σαν αποζημίωση για την απόλυσή του, αφού κανονικά είχε ένα χρόνο ακόμη συμβόλαιο.

Έτσι, σύντομα θα ανακοινωθεί η πρόσληψή του και θα αποτελέσει τον διάδοχο του Φερνάντο Σάντος στον πάγκο του αντιπροσωπευτικού μας συγκροτήματος.

Πηγή: Νέος Κόσμος

Rolf Harris’s most visible honour will be stripped from Perth in the latest move to expunge any memory of the convicted paedophile from his home turf.

The City of Perth council voted unanimously on Tuesday to remove the 1959 commemorative plaque on St Georges Terrace dedicated to the now-fallen entertainer.

Lord Mayor Lisa Scaffidi said the plaque would be removed due to community concern.Harris’ was among more than 150 notable West Australians whose names were inlaid in the footpath of Perth’s main business strip to commemorate their legacies.

But since being found guilty of indecently assaulting four girls in the UK between 1968 and 1986, people have been quick to sever any connection with the Boy from Bassendean.

So far Harris has lost his place in the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame and his British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Fellowship.He could also lose his Commander of the Order of the British Empire from the Queen and his Order of Australia.On his home turf in WA, Harris’s school Perth Modern has removed several of his artworks from the walls.

The town of Bassendean, where Harris was born, stripped him of his freemanship and removed paintings and a portrait from council chambers.The council also voted to dig up a footpath plaque outside Harris’s childhood home but it was stolen on the night of the vote.

Harris, 84, is serving a three-year jail sentence in Wandsworth prison in southwest

source: skynews.com.au

London. – See more at:

Evangelismos Hospital in Athens. Photo: Association of resident Doctors of Evangelismos.

German expert warns troika’s time frame for changes in Greek health system cannot be implemented.

Greece’s public health system is “catastrophic”, “scandalous and frightening” and is so bad it cannot be given a grade, a German health ministry representative has said.

Wolfgang Zoeller, a former German commissioner for patients’ issues, has also warned that the tight time frame imposed by the troika for health sector reform is “impossible to carry out”.

Zoeller, who oversees his ministry’s cooperation with its Greek counterpart, made the comments in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

In an earlier briefing of the Bundestag committee on health concerning his visit to Greece – including his talks with Health Minister Makis Voridis, the management of the primary healthcare network PEDY, non-governmental organisations and hospital doctors – Zoeller had called the situation “scandalous and frightening”.

A former safety engineer, Zoeller was an MP with Angela Merkel’s party from 1990 to 2013. From 2009 to 2013, he served as the federal government’s commissioner for patients’ issues.

According to Zoeller, the majority of people, including politicians, were unaware of how bad the situation really was in the Greek system.

He said that while there was an awareness of what needed be done at a ministerial level, “the problem is in the implementation, in coordinating the middle echelons in the implementation of the laws and reforms. I think the ministry bureaucracy must do its work,” he said.

From 2009 to 2011, the public hospital budget was reduced by over 25 per cent as a result of austerity cuts. Greece now spends less on public health than any of the other pre-2004 European Union members.

Zoeller said the way forward lay in increasing the use of generic medication in Greece to reduce costs, and he stressed that Germany currently used 80 per cent generic drugs compared with Greece’s 10 per cent.

“This should be possible in Greece. It is not at the expense of quality,” he underlined.

He also welcomed changes that will provide free health coverage for the unemployed without health insurance as of August this year, saying that this was an extremely important step forward. Now it had to be seen how the organisational conditions for use of the health services would be secured, he added, noting that the finance ministry needed to release some €340m in funds for this purpose.

He also proposed changes to the hospital funding system, suggesting a system closer to that used by German hospitals and said that the health ministry was favourably disposed to the idea.

Zoeller, who will act as the German government’s envoy for monitoring the implementation of reforms in the Greek health system, stressed that time was a major factor and expressed disagreement with the tight time frame imposed by the troika, suggesting that “it was realistically impossible to carry out”.

He stressed that urgent measures needed to be taken in the health sector, such as for the uninsured and for pharmaceutical spending, since they “concern matters of life and death”.

Regarding changes in hospital funding methods, he said this needed time because, in the end, the new system had to be functional with working hospitals that people could turn to.

Source: enetenglish, ana-mpa

Qantas: Airline to stay locally owned. Photo: Michele Mossop/Getty Images

Qantas will remain majority Australian owned after the federal government was forced by a hostile Senate to back down on its ambitious plan to open up the airline to foreign investment.

In an admission its plan to repeal section three of the Qantas Sale Act would not win support from Labor, the Greens or the crossbench, federal cabinet approved a compromise proposed by the ALP on Monday night.

The compromise deal was ticked off by the Coalition party room on Tuesday and comes despite Transport Minister Warren Truss declaring in March the government had ”no plan B” to help the airline if it failed to repeal the sale act.

In June, Labor announced it would allow the foreign ownership restrictions on Qantas contained in section three of the act, which limit an individual investor to 25 per cent ownership and a foreign-owned airline to 35 per cent, to both rise to 49 per cent.

That move is designed to trigger an inflow of investment but falls short of what the airline wanted.

A vote could go ahead in the Senate as soon as Wednesday in the Senate, with the bill then to be sent to the lower house for approval.

Other changes that could have flowed from repeal of the act, including requirements that two-thirds of the board are Australian citizens, its headquarters be in Australian and that maintenance, catering and other operations are conducted primarily in Australia, will not proceed.

The federal government’s original proposal

had sparked fears among Labor, the Greens and the union movement that thousands of Australian jobs could be sent overseas by the airline.

Labor transport spokesman Anthony Albanese welcomed the government’s decision to agree to the ALP’s proposal. ”This reform will ensure that Qantas will remain majority Australian owned and that Qantas will still call Australia home, while making minor changes in accordance with the aviation white paper I released in December 2009,” he said.

A spokesman for Qantas said it was a positive that there was general political agreement that Qantas was put at a disadvantage by the sale act and that change is needed. ”While removing all restrictions that apply only to Qantas remains our preference for levelling the playing field, changing the 25 and 35 per cent limits would represent an improvement on the status quo,” the spokesman said.

Qantas has been pushing for the Qantas Sale Act to be repealed, arguing it does not face a level playing field with its major competitor Virgin, which is majority foreign-owned and does much of its heavy maintenance overseas.

In February, Qantas announced a $252 million half-year underlying loss and plans to cut 5000 jobs and close routes.

Soon after in March, the government announced it would not give the airline a debt guarantee but would instead push to repeal section three, but Labor and Greens opposed that move.

Mr Truss said the government still backed its plan to repeal section three of the Qantas Sale Act.

However, he said it was clear that this would not be able to pass the Senate and so it had decided to accept Labor’s proposals.

”The amended bill will go some way to easing restrictive ownership provisions. Qantas will still operate under restrictions that do not apply to any other Australian airline, but will have greater capacity to attract new investment,” Mr Truss said.

source: smh.com.au