Daily Archives: January 16, 2015

Ουρές έξω από τον ΟΑΕΔ. Η μακροχρόνια ανεργία αυξήθηκε στην Ελλάδα από 3,7% το 2008 σε 18,6% το 2013 (Φωτογραφία: Reuters

Η Ελλάδα, η Ιρλανδία, η Ισπανία, η Ιταλία και η Ουγγαρία είναι οι χώρες-μέλη της ΕΕ όπου η φτώχεια και ο κοινωνικός αποκλεισμός εμφάνισαν τη μεγαλύτερη αύξηση στη διάρκεια της κρίσης.

Αυτό αναφέρεται, μεταξύ άλλων, στην έκθεση της Ευρωπαϊκής Επιτροπής για την απασχόληση και τις κοινωνικές εξελίξεις το 2014, στην οποία επισημαίνεται ότι στις χώρες αυτές τα ποσοστά φτώχειας και κοινωνικού αποκλεισμού ήταν ήδη υψηλά πριν από την κρίση.

Ειδικότερα για την Ελλάδα, το ποσοστό του πληθυσμού που βρίσκεται στα όρια της φτώχειας ή του κοινωνικού αποκλεισμού αυξήθηκε από το 28,1% το 2008 σε 35,7% το 2013, ενώ η σοβαρή στέρηση βασικών αγαθών αυξήθηκε στη χώρα από το 11,2% το 2008, σε 20,3% το 2013.

Η μακροχρόνια ανεργία αυξήθηκε στην Ελλάδα από 3,7% το 2008 σε 18,6% το 2013 και το ποσοστό απασχόλησης στον οικονομικά ενεργά πληθυσμό (25-64 ετών) μειώθηκε την ίδια περίοδο από 61,9% σε 49,3%.

Σύμφωνα με την έκθεση της Κομισιόν, στην Ελλάδα, την Ισπανία, τη Γαλλία και την Ιταλία τα ποσοστά μετάβασης από τη μερική απασχόληση σε μόνιμες θέσεις εργασίας ήταν από τα χαμηλότερα στην ΕΕ στη διάρκεια της κρίσης, ενώ στην Ελλάδα και την Πορτογαλία το 25% των απασχολούμενων που εργάζονταν με καθεστώς μερικής απασχόλησης βρέθηκαν άνεργοι ή ανενεργοί τον επόμενο χρόνο.

Επίσης, η Κομισιόν τονίζει ότι στην Ιταλία, την Ισπανία και την Ελλάδα παρατηρούνται τα υψηλότερα ποσοστά πολιτών που δεν καταφέρνουν να διατηρούν τη σωστή αναλογία μεταξύ της εργασίας και μιας ισορροπημένης ζωής.

Θύμα της κρίσης, σύμφωνα με την Επιτροπή, ήταν και η συμμετοχή στην Παιδεία, η οποία σε ορισμένες χώρες είτε παρέμεινε αμετάβλητη στη διάρκεια της κρίσης (Ελλάδα, Ιταλία, Ρουμανία Τσεχία και Σλοβακία) είτε μειώθηκε (Πολωνία και Ουγγαρία).

Η επιδείνωση της ανεργίας από το 2008 είχε ακόμη ως αποτέλεσμα να αυξηθούν τα ποσοστά των νοικοκυριών χωρίς εισόδημα από την εργασία, κυρίως στην Ελλάδα, την Ισπανία, τη Λιθουανία και την Ιρλανδία.

Εξάλλου, στην Ιρλανδία, την Ισπανία και την Ελλάδα σημειώθηκαν τα υψηλότερα ποσοστά νέων που είτε παρέμειναν, είτε επέστρεψαν για να μείνουν με τους γονείς τους λόγω οικονομικών δυσχερειών, καθώς συχνά «δεν υπήρχε άλλη επιλογή από την οικογενειακή αλληλεγγύη».

Από την έκθεση προκύπτει ότι οι μειώσεις των επενδύσεων στην Παιδεία ήταν μεγάλες στη Ρουμανία (κατά 40%), την Ουγγαρία (πάνω από 30%) αλλά και στην Ελλάδα, τη Μεγάλη Βρετανία, τη Λετονία, την Ιταλία και την Πορτογαλία (περίπου 20%).

Από το 2008, το ποσοστό των Ευρωπαίων εργαζομένων που καλύπτονται από συλλογικές συμβάσεις μειώθηκε από 66% το 2007, σε 60% το 2012, ενώ ιδιαίτερα σημαντικές ήταν οι μειώσεις στην Πορτογαλία, την Ελλάδα και την Ισπανία, σημειώνει η Επιτροπή.

Σε γενικές γραμμές, για τις κοινωνικές εξελίξεις στην ΕΕ η Κομισιόν επισημαίνει ότι οι χώρες που παρέχουν υψηλής ποιότητας απασχόληση, αποτελεσματική κοινωνική προστασία και επενδύουν στο ανθρώπινο κεφάλαιο αποδεικνύονται περισσότερο ανθεκτικές στην οικονομική κρίση.

Η έκθεση επισημαίνει την ανάγκη επένδυσης στην ανάπτυξη και τη διατήρηση των κατάλληλων δεξιοτήτων για το ανθρώπινο δυναμικό, ώστε να υποστηριχθεί η παραγωγικότητα, καθώς και την πρόκληση αποκατάστασης της σύγκλισης μεταξύ των κρατών μελών.

Σύμφωνα με την Κομισιόν, στα βασικά διδάγματα από την κρίση θα πρέπει να σημειωθεί το γεγονός ότι οι αρνητικές συνέπειες στην απασχόληση και τα εισοδήματα ήταν μικρότερες για χώρες με ανοιχτές και λιγότερο κατακερματισμένες αγορές εργασίας και μεγαλύτερες επενδύσεις στη διά βίου μάθηση.

Πηγή: in.gr

Holiday bookings from the United States and Britain for this season are pointing toward an increase which has been boosted by the decline of the euro against the US dollar and the British pound. Similarly the rise of the Swiss franc against the euro is creating expectations of an increase in the flow of tourism from Switzerland, too.

More than 3 million tourists travel to Greece from these three markets every year. It therefore appears that the appeal of Greece as a destination for visitors from certain foreign markets is overriding concerns regarding the political uncertainty for now.

Citing figures from US tour operators Globus, Trafalgar and American Express, the Hellenic American Tourism Chamber announced that bookings this month from the US to Greece for 2015 are showing a year-on-year increase of 23 percent.

Data released on Thursday by the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA) showed Greece among the most popular destinations for Britons making early bookings for this year. ABTA noted that early bookings have been soaring as, depending on the tour operator, growth in January looks set to come in at between 30 and 50 percent.

The Bank of Greece issued on Thursday last year’s nine-month figures on tourism, showing that the forecast for 24 million arrivals from abroad for the whole of 2014 will be achieved. In the January-September 2014 period arrivals reached 20.7 million, 20 percent up from a year earlier, while arrivals in the 12 months of 2013 had amounted to 20.1 million. The comparison of the first nine months of 2014 with those in 2012 is even more staggering, as there was an increase of 6 million arrivals last year.

The central bank also announced that tourism receipts in the first nine months of last year amounted to more than 12 billion euros, posting a 10.9 percent annual increase. The biggest rise in revenues as well as arrivals was from the US and French markets.

The jump in new airlines traveling to Greek airports in 2014 helped fuel the growth in arrivals, which reached record levels according to data released on Thursday by the Civil Aviation Authority. The country’s airports served 45 million passengers last year, up by 17 percent from 38.45 million in 2013.

While international traffic unsurprisingly expanded by 15.2 percent on a yearly basis, domestic traffic, which had been hit hard during the previous years of the financial crisis, recorded a 21.5 percent year-on-year increase in 2014, rising by 2.15 million passengers.

source: ekathimerini.com

To Potami leader Stavros Theodorakis suggested on Thursday that he would go all out to prevent Greece needing a second election by working to form a coalition if no party receives a parliamentary majority on January 25.

“It is not my intention to go to a second election,” he said. “We are not going to destroy the country just so the election winner can increase his share of the vote from 33 percent to 35. Anyone that takes this risk will pay the price.”

Theodorakis’s message was clearly aimed at SYRIZA, which is leading opinion polls but has displayed a reluctance to consider the possibility of working with To Potami after the elections.

The leader of the centrist party also criticized SYRIZA for the confused statements being made by its candidates, arguing they are giving the impression of “complete chaos.”

“One guy is saying that they will find 3 billion euros from tax evasion, another guy is saying they will abolish the property tax in January, another that we do not need the pending bailout tranche of 7.5 billion euros,” he said before adding that former Independent Greeks MP Rachil Makri, who joined SYRIZA as a candidate last week, had “put the cherry on the cake” by claiming that the Bank of Greece could “print” 100 billion euros.

Makri made the comments while speaking on a TV station in Kozani, northern Greece, where she will be standing as a candidate.

“The emergency liquidity assistance (ELA) will be activated and we will be able to print 100 billion euros on our own at the Bank of Greece,” she said in response to a question about what a SYRIZA government would do if the European Central Bank cuts off funding to Greek banks.

source: ekathimerini.com

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras on Thursday cast New Democracy as a Europe-oriented party, following leftist SYRIZA’s overture toward the Communist Party (KKE), as the conservative pre-election campaign shifts its focus to the center ground and undecided voters.

On a visit to Peristeri, a working-class district in western Athens, Samaras hailed two late statesman – conservative Constantine Karamanlis and Socialist Andreas Papandreou – for securing Greece’s position in Europe and pointed to ND’s recent coalition with PASOK and Democratic Left which he called “an unprecedented alliance for Greece which was realized precisely due to that common denominator called Europe.”

The conservatives hope to capitalize on the fact that cadres of leftist SYRIZA, which is still leading in opinion polls, have been inconsistent on key issues including taxation and potential alliances. One encouraging detail for ND, according to sources, is that polls show most undecided voters wavering between a choice of ND, centrist To Potami and PASOK, not between ND and SYRIZA.

Samaras said the choice for voters was not one of parties. “On January 25, we are not choosing which party we want, we are deciding which Greece we want us and our children to live in.” Samaras, who was jeered by residents in Peristeri, said he understood people’s anger. “But I know that people who have gotten wet don’t also want to drown.”

In PASOK’s camp a row between leader Evangelos Venizelos and former Premier George Papandreou continued to simmer. Venizelos expressed surprise at Papandreou’s claim that he was unseated as PASOK leader in 2011. Venizelos said Papandreou had intended to propose him as a candidate for interim premier, a role eventually assumed by Lucas Papademos. “Between Petsalnikos and Papademos, he phoned me and said he would propose me as prime minister,” Venizelos said, referring to former Parliament Speaker Filippos Petsalnikos. “Would he propose as PM the person who unseated him?” he said.

source: ekathimerini.com

Human activities are “destabilising the global environment”, scientists are warning. Photo: Jonathan Carroll

At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings.

That is the conclusion of a new paper published in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world.

The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries”.

Cleared land in Ecuador: the deforestation “boundary” has been crossed, scientists say. Photo: Bloomberg

They include the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertiliser) into the ocean.

“What the science has shown is that human activities – economic growth, technology, consumption – are destabilising the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds joint appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and is the lead author of the paper.

These are not future problems, but rather urgent matters, according to Professor Steffen, who said that the economic boom since 1950 and the globalised economy have accelerated the transgression of the boundaries.

No one knows exactly when push will come to shove, but he said the possible destabilisation of the “Earth system” as a whole could occur in a time frame of “decades out to a century”.

The researchers focused on nine separate planetary boundaries first identified by scientists in a 2009 paper. These boundaries set theoretical limits on changes to the environment, and include ozone depletion, freshwater use, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution and the introduction of exotic chemicals and modified organisms.

Beyond each planetary boundary is a “zone of uncertainty”.

This zone is meant to acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in the calculations, and to offer decision-makers a bit of a buffer, so that they can potentially take action before it’s too late to make a difference.

Beyond that zone of uncertainty is the unknown – planetary conditions unfamiliar to us.

“The boundary is not like the edge of the cliff,” said Ray Pierrehumbert, an expert on Earth systems at the University of Chicago. “They’re a little bit more like danger warnings, like high temperature gauges on your car.”

Professor Pierrehumbert, who was not involved in the paper published in Science, added that a planetary boundary “is like an avalanche warning tape on a ski slope”.

The scientists say there is no certainty that catastrophe will follow the transgression of these boundaries. Rather, the scientists cite the precautionary principle: We know that human civilisation has risen and flourished in the past 10,000 years – an epoch known as the Holocene – under relatively stable environmental conditions.

No one knows what will happen to civilisation if planetary conditions continue to change. But the authors of the Science paper write that the planet “is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies”.

The authors make clear that their goal is not to offer solutions, but simply to provide information. This is a kind of report card, exploiting new data from the past five years.

It’s not just a list of Fs. The ozone boundary is the best example of world leaders responding swiftly to a looming environmental disaster. After the discovery of an expanding ozone hole caused by man-made chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, the nations of the world banned CFCs in the 1980s.

This young field of research draws from such disciplines as ecology, geology, chemistry, atmospheric science, marine biology and economics. It’s known generally as Earth Systems Science. The researchers acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in what they’re doing. Some planetary boundaries, such as “introduction of novel entities” – CFCs would be an example of such things – remain enigmatic and not easily quantified.

Better understood is the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The safe-operating-zone boundary for CO2 had previously been estimated at levels up to 350 parts per million (ppm).

That’s the boundary – and we’re already past that, with the current levels close to 400 ppm, according to the paper. That puts the planet in the carbon dioxide zone of uncertainty that the authors say extends from 350 to 450 ppm.

At the rate CO2 is rising – about 2 ppm per year – we will surpass 450 ppm in just a couple of decades, said Katherine Richardson, a professor of biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a co-author of the new paper.

Humanity may have run into trouble with planetary boundaries even in prehistoric times, said Richard Alley, a Penn State geoscientist who was not part of this latest research. The invention of agriculture may have been a response to food scarcity as hunting and gathering cultures spread around, and filled up, the planet, he said.

“It’s pretty clear we were lowering the carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago,” Professor Alley said.

There are today more than 7 billion people, using an increasing quantity of resources, turning forest into farmland, boosting the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and driving other species to extinction. The relatively sudden efflorescence of humanity has led many researchers to declare that this is a new geological era, the human age, often referred to as the Anthropocene.

The Earth has faced shocks before, and the biosphere has always recovered. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the planet apparently froze over – becoming “Snowball Earth”.

About 66 million years ago, it was jolted by a mountain-sized rock from space that killed half the species on the planet, including the non-avian dinosaurs. Life on Earth always bounced back from these shocks.

“The planet is going to take care of itself. It’s going to be here,” Professor Richardson said.

Technology can potentially provide solutions to many of the environmental problems we face today. But technological innovations often come with unforeseen consequences. Professor Pierrehumbert said we should be wary of becoming too dependent on technological fixes for global challenges.

“The trends are toward layering on more and more technology so that we are more and more dependent on our technological systems to live outside these boundaries,” he said.

“It becomes more and more like living on a spaceship than living on a planet.”

source: smh.com.au

Organisers hope singer Anja Nissen will be joined by 23 million people around the country in singing the national anthem on Australia Day. Photo: Daniel Munoz

Please be upstanding, all 23 million of you, for the newest addition to Australia Day celebrations: the “Salute to Australia”. 

A nationwide rendition of the national anthem and an overt display of military muscle are among new features on the January 26 line-up, unveiled aboard the HMAS Canberra on Thursday morning.

Before a performance by children from the NSW Public Schools Aboriginal Dance Ensemble, Australia Day Council of NSW chairman Angelos Frangopoulos revealed a packed schedule of Sydney Harbour races, Aboriginal ceremonies, concerts, sports events and military displays touting the biggest day of celebrations the city has seen since 1988.

But perhaps the most ambitious element of the day is the council’s hope that Australians far and wide will down barbecue tools and cold stubbies at noon and stand shoulder-to-shoulder in song for a mass rendition of Advance Australia Fair.

Mr Frangopoulos said organisers had pushed hard to design a moment in the festivities that will unite all Australians and bring the diverse country together, settling upon synchronised choirs around the harbour, which will lead spectators in song before a 21-gun salute as part of the “ceremonial display of respect”.

“We encourage people from all over Australia to stop what they are doing and join us in singing the national anthem at midday,” said Australia Day 2015 creative director, former Australian Idol music director, John Foreman.

Taking centre stage in the salute and amid the flotilla of vessels large and small on the harbour this year will be the Royal Australian Navy’s newest and largest warship, HMAS Canberra, which will be berthed between the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge.

Mr Foreman has also overseen the introduction of two free Opera House forecourt concerts – a morning session for children and a twilight show featuring Jessica Mauboy, Sheppard and Justice Crew – and a “Cruising Concert” helmed by singer Darren Percival, that will deliver music to beachgoers, park picnickers and boaties wherever the floating stage travels.

As a “counterfoil” to the pomp of the Salute to Australia, Mr Foreman said the new Tug and Yacht Ballet will tap into Australian larrikinism while in the city, a tract of astroturf will convert a section of George Street into an urban croquet lawn.

The Salute to Australia, which also involves a flyover of RAAF jets and efforts by the Army, signals heightened military involvement on the day, which commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet to Port Jackson in 1788.

HMAS Canberra was commissioned in November and is the star vessel in the Navy’s relatively modest fleet. The logistical challenge of moving the 230-metre long ship into position on one of the harbour’s busiest days comes at the end of a long process, said Mr Frangopoulos as he admitted it has taken years for organisers to persuade the Navy to be involved in the celebrations on such a grand scale.

“This is by far the biggest and most ambitious Australia Day we’ve staged,” said Mr Frangopoulos.

Those of us who struggle to remember lyrics beyond the first verse of the anthem’s “joyful strains” might well agree.

Sydney’s Australia Day events

WugulOra Indigenous Ceremony: 7.30am, Opera House Northern Boardwalk

Great Sydney Swim: 8.30am, Farm Cove

The Wiggles Australia Day Concert: 10am, Opera House forecourt

Ferrython: 11am, Sydney Harbour

Nickelodeon Australia Day Summer Playground: 9am-5pm, Hyde Park North

Salute to Australia: 12noon, Sydney Harbour

Tug and Yacht Ballet: 12.05pm, between the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House

Cruising Concert: 11am-4pm then 6pm-7pm, Central Harbour, Athol Bay and Darling Harbour

The Australia Day Concert at the Opera House: 7pm, Opera House forecourt

Darling Harbour Fireworks Spectacular: 8.45pm, Darling Harbour

Full information online at ww.australiaday.com.au

source: smh.com.au