"ALEXIS WAS KILLED" POETRY BY YIANNIS RITSOS, "DECEMBER RIOTS"

SHE DISAPPEARED ON DECEMBER 8, 2008....

...On December 8, 2008, around 10:35 pm rock radio 
DJ LIGHTDUST disappeared in a subterranean arthouse movie theater in Athens, Greece, never to return... 
Can you help? More info to follow...

FIDEL CASTRO:JEWS SUFFERED MORE THAN ANYBODY ELSE....

BEWARE OF GREEKS BEARING BONDS: THE ROBBER BARONS OF GREECE...

As Wall Street hangs on the question “Will Greece default?,” the author heads for riot-stricken Athens, and for the mysterious Vatopaidi monastery, which brought down the last government, laying bare the country’s economic insanity. But beyond a $1.2 trillion debt (roughly a quarter-million dollars for each working adult), there is a more frightening deficit. After systematically looting their own treasury, in a breathtaking binge of tax evasion, bribery, and creative accounting spurred on by Goldman Sachs, Greeks are sure of one thing: they can’t trust their fellow Greeks.

TUESDAY MARKS THE END OF WAR IN IRAQ.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Iraq on Monday as U.S. troops prepared to end combat operations on Tuesday.

Biden was expected to hold talks with Iraqi leaders during a period of political deadlock, almost six months after an inconclusive election in March, over forming the country's next government.
His visit comes at a time when Iraq is on high alert for attacks by insurgents after a series of bombings that killed dozens of people and underscored the fragility of Iraq's recent security gains.
(Reporting by Thaier al-Sudani; Editing by Michael Christie)

"OKEANOS EXPLORER" ROBOTIC VEHICLE DISCOVERS NEW SPECIES...

Scientists using cutting-edge technology to explore waters off Indonesia were wowed by colorful and diverse images of marine life on the ocean floor – including plate-sized sea spiders and flower-like sponges that appear to be carnivorous.

They predicted Thursday that as many as 50 new plant and animal species may have been discovered during the three-week expedition that ended Aug. 14.
More than 100 hours of video and 100,000 photographs, captured using a robotic vehicle with high-definition cameras, were piped to shore in real-time by satellite and high-speed Internet.
Verena Tunnicliffe, a professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, said the images provided an extraordinary glimpse into one of the globe's most complex and little-known marine ecosystems.

RECOVERY IN VERY SLOW MOTION!

The American economy could experience painfully slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment for a decade or longer as a result of the 2007 collapse of the housing market and the economic turmoil that followed, according to an authority on the history of financial crises.

That finding, contained in a new paper by Carmen M. Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland, generated considerable debate during an annual policy symposium here, organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, which concluded on Saturday.
The gathering, at a historic lodge in Grand Teton National Park, brought together about 110 central bankers and economists, including most of the Federal Reserve’s top officials. In 2008, the symposium occurred weeks before the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy nearly shut down the financial markets. At the symposium last year, officials congratulated themselves on weathering the worst of the crisis.
But the recent slowing of the recovery cast a pall on this year’s gathering. As economists (some wearing jeans and cowboy boots) conferred on a terrace with a sweeping view of the 13,770-foot peak of Mount Teton, or watched a horse trainer tame an unruly colt at a nearby ranch, they anxiously discussed research like Ms. Reinhart’s. (Participants pay to attend the event, which is not financed by taxpayers, a Kansas City Fed spokeswoman emphasized.)
“I’m more worried than I have ever been about the future of the U.S. economy,” said Allen Sinai, co-founder of the consulting firm Decision Economics and a longtime participant in the symposium.

CALIFORNIA TOPS ANTI-SEMITISM ATTACKS....

LOS ANGELES — California had the country's highest number of anti-Semitic assaults, harassment and vandalism incidents last year, the Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday.


In its annual survey, the ADL identified 275 events in the country's most populous state in 2009, up 22 percent from the year before. The incidents included a Jewish student in Buena Park getting beaten up after confronting a classmate drawing swastikas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/27/california-antisemitism-o_n_661283.html

THE COLLAPSE OF GREECE'S SOVEREIGN DEBT WAS PLANNED?

So said the media, but note that Greece and Portugal were doing remarkably well only three months earlier. Then, "suddenly and without warning," global investors furiously dumped their bonds. Why? Weiss and other commentators blamed a sudden "contagion of fear about sovereign debt." But as Bill Murphy, another prolific newsletter writer, reiterates, "Price action makes market commentary." The pundits look at what just happened in the market and then dream up some plausible theory to explain it. What President Franklin Roosevelt said of politics, however, may also be true of markets: "Nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way."


That the collapse of Greece's sovereign debt may actually have been planned was suggested in a Wall Street Journal article in February, in which Susan Pullian and co-authors reported:

Some heavyweight hedge funds have launched large bearish bets against the euro in moves that are reminiscent of the trading action at the height of the U.S. financial crisis.

The big bets are emerging amid gatherings such as an exclusive 'idea dinner' earlier this month that included hedge-fund titans SAC Capital Advisors LP and Soros Fund Management LLC.

There is nothing improper about hedge funds jumping on the same trade unless it is deemed by regulators to be collusion. Regulators haven't suggested that any trading has been improper.

NATALIE PORTMAN IN "BLACK SWAN"...

Natalie Portman in Darren Aronofsky's "BLACK SWAN" that opens the Venice Film Festival September 1, 2010....

REST IN PEACE SOCRATES GIOLIAS: THANK YOU FOR TRYING TO MAKE...

...GREECE  A MORE DEMOCRATIC COUNTRY, A BETTER PLACE!
DON'T WORRY. MANY OF US LEFT BEHIND  DON'T SUFFER FROM AMNESIA.
WE SHALL OVERCOME. WE SHALL PREVAIL. 

BLOGGER-JOURNALIST SOCRATES GIOLIAS GUNNED DOWN IN ATHENS...

Socrates Giolias, 37, an investigative journalist, was gunned down by professional executioners with 17 bullets in one of the most crowded avenues of Athens.
Giolias was in a multi-year court fighting with his former boss Makis Triantafyllopoulos who insisted that Giolias was the mastermind behind TROKTIKO (THE RODENT) a megasuccessful blogspot with tremendous influence that exposed corrupted politicians, money-laundering and corruption.
Only in Moscow, or the lawless city of Athens this murder could take place.

JULY GLOOM IN LOS ANGLES-SUDDENLY IT GOT WORSE THAN NYC...

ALLEGED RUSSIAN SPY METSOS SKIPS BAIL. MAJOR GAFFE FROM CYPRIOT JUSTICE...

Christopher Metsos, the "money man" behind the Russian espionage ring- infiltrating the US,  uncovered a few days ago, by the Feds- skipped bail in Cyprus and probably has escaped to "no-man's-land", the ocuppied by Turks Northern Cyprus, where he can't be extradited, some reports indicate.

CONCERTS FOR THE GULF:THE OIL SPILL SAGA

COME SEE THE PARADISE....

BP would like to cordially invite you for a long weekend of oil surfing and contaminated beaches.

HOLLYWOOD NEEDS A REVOLUTION...(AND PEOPLE WHO CAN READ)!

JULIE GRAY IN HUFFINGTON POST:

Hollywood has become a corporate wasteland and the results are so plainly obvious that it's painful. It is time for a new generation of visionary writers and directors in Hollywood. Those driven by raw creativity. (...)

(...) Don't even try to go there and deny that a terrible fog of mediocrity is hanging over Hollywood. And it's choking the art form of cinema to death. The worst part is that the mediocrity is self-generated because I tell you right now that I see some great scripts and really fresh ideas come from aspiring writers from all over the world. But these scripts don't make it into the right hands. There is an industry around keeping them out and unfortunately that industry is in part fueled by the millions of scripts that pour into Hollywood each day that were written hastily by dabblers and pretenders who haven't bothered to learn a goddamn thing about the industry they flippantly think will pay them loads of money (...)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-gray/hollywood-needs-a-revolut_b_616934.html

ALEXANDRA COUSTEAU: BP IS INVESTIGATING ITSELF! WE HAVE TO INVESTIGATE THEM...

(....) Right now the corporate liability cap is $75 million. You have proposed raising it substantially.


Yes, to $10 billion. But we also need to take a closer look at how we regulate the oil industry. The low cap is representative of how involved the industry has been in determining its own regulations. I think there should be an independent commission with industry leaders hired to clean this up. Gather together the best minds, the best talent, and the most experienced people to fix this and send B.P. the tab. As part of the environmental crimes that they are being investigated for, B.P. is being asked to gather a lot of the evidence. I don’t get it. Shouldn’t we be investigating them? Shouldn’t the communities that they have harmed be allowed to investigate them as well?
It’s like letting the fox into the hen house only to wake up and find that half your chickens are dead, and then asking the fox to fix it. That’s sort of what’s happening right now. The government didn’t fail on the day of this disaster. It failed by putting regulations in place that allowed the fox inside the hen house.

Read More
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/with-the-gulf-oil-spill.html#ixzz0r7DCuA2j

STRAIGHT TALK FROM HENRY ROLLINS IN VF: SCRUDE!

(...)When the president said that we need to pursue alternative sources of energy, it sounded nice but the words fell gently to the ground like feathers unsullied by crude. I think president Obama is finding out that it’s a corporate world and he’s only getting his lunch taken in it...


Read More http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/06/scrude.html#ixzz0r5H86hbY

FROM BP WITH LOVE!

The biggest ecological disaster of the last 200 years...

BP SPILL:AMERICAN TAXPAYERS WILL FOOT THE BILL...

CLIPS OF AN INTERVIEW WITH GREEK HOLLYWOOD REPORTER...

Photo by Spyros Tsakiris ....

How did you get the idea to turn the riots into a movie?

I was trapped in "ASTY" (which means in ancient hellenic language The City) movie theater, in Athens downtown, on December 8, 2008, along with well-known in the international circut arthouse distributors and theater owners George Stergiakis and Antonis Stergiakis. And the filmgoers that were trying to return to their homes. I was supposed to go to the premiere of BANK BANG in the north suburbs, produced by my friend Yiannis Iakovides, and never made it. We were a group representing our nation...a public employee, a housewife, young couples on a date, demonstrators entering to find shelter etc.
(...)My offices were next to the Polytechnic school, on Mavromataion Street... I inhaled a lot of teargas and my vision of the world has been altered since then (laughs). I still remember the pain in the eyes. The agony to breath. We were walking in the area and it was like a city hit by a force majeure, natural disaster. I wanted to make a movie back then but nobody wanted to finance it. They prefered to do bottom line farce comedies, an alltime low. Or state subsidized trash that nobody wanted to see. I never wanted to be part of this system. One month later I left Greece.

Which parts of the movie are based on real facts and which are fiction?
It's based on a real incident. There's pure reality, the riots, and reality extended to fiction.
Like everybody else I was outraged. I was angry. The media couldn't explain the phenomenon. How kids from the ritzy suburbs united with working class people and immigrants...And how secret agents and provocateurs entered the mix to distract the public opinion.
We had the most corrupted government in the world, ala Banana Republic. They destroyed Greece.
I'm already getting warnings, through Facebook and emails, "you can't do that...it's too early", "this is a dangerous script", "you're going to be in trouble". I don't give a euro!
I want to make a statement about the current situation and the shape of things to come. This is a metaphor: If people don't learn to work together, to live together, they are going to be terminated. It's a safe road to extinction. But this is also a movie with a beggining, a middle and an unexpected finale. So you see in the movie Americans and Europeans, putting culture clashes aside, trying to survive. It's an intense claustrophobic, fast-paced thriller/drama but there's also a subplot. It's an oxymoron though:Hellas had to go through the bottom of the cup in order for certain people to understand basic things. Everybody was laughing. Now they are sorry... Sometimes it's too late for excuses.


Do you think we are rebels as a nation? Is this Democracy or does it cross the border according to your opinion?
I'm quoting Iphicrates on the film poster:"The story of my generation begins with me. Yours ends with you"... Maybe I should quote the Sex Pistols also:"There's no future in Greece's dreams".
Hellenic population became controllable and pathetic because of television. Now they discovered what happened and they are very angry.
Going against the flow is part of our DNA. We invented democracy but also hubris and vindication. Hellenic culture shaped cosmos in a unique way. But that was then. This is now: "The horror, the horror"...In the heart of darkness. And no Joseph Conrad to be the captain.
We have to rescue ourselves. Nobody is going to rescue us.
When the water is boiling the byproduct is steam. So in December of 2008 we had peaceful demonstrations, sit-downs with candles that the super-smart and extremely reasonable SWAT teams cracked down, and extreme violence-mostly caused by provocateurs mixing with the demonstrators. We had an indifferent prime minister who loved playing Playstation and a gang of crooked rats used to run the country. There's no democracy when you murder in cold-blood a 16 year-old sitting at a cafe. That's hubris. And there's no democracy when four people die in a bank branch. That's a murderous act and hubris too.
The so-called generation of Polytechneion destroyed everything for the next generations (moral values, dignity, judicial system, financial system). They looted Greece. Effectively they killed slowly their own children and grandchildren. You see 16-24 year-olds they don't know where to go, where to hide, what to believe, or not to believe.They are running around hopeless, desperate, confused, pathetic. Well I'm not! And there's also a 5% of the population who are fighters too.
I'm talking also about the Hellenism of diaspora. We are going to come back with a vengeance and reclaim our country...Sooner than later.

Vandals desecrate Jewish cemetery in Greece...New episode of antisemitism in Thessaloniki.

Three youths arrested for attack in northern city of Thessaloniki. Greece's Jewish Council says perpetrators are Neo-Nazis who spray painted anti-Semitic slogans, swastikas on cemetery walls, destroyed graves
Vandals desecrated a Jewish cemetery in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki late on Thursday and three youths were arrested for the attack, authorities said on Friday.
The assailants smeared graffiti in the cemetery, police said. Greece's Jewish Council said the perpetrators were Neo-Nazis who spray painted anti-Semitic slogans and swastikas on the cemetery walls and destroyed graves.

Jewish cemeteries and synagogues have been the target of recent attacks in Greece. In January, arsonists attacked a synagogue on the Aegean island of Crete, alarming Greece's 8,000-strong Jewish community.

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL: DIMITRI EIPIDES NAMED HEAD OF THESSALONIKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

http://www.screendaily.com/5013597.article

“Land of the Angels” Finds Support from Prominent Organizations

Los Angeles, CA — A number of prominent, international organizations have made statements supporting the production “Land of the Angels,” a film depicting the termination of Salonica, Greece’s Sephardic Jewish population and the Sonderkommando uprising at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Production on the film, produced by Metaphor Entertainment LLC, is set to begin filming in Spring 2011 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Among the organizations that sent letters of support are the American Jewish Committee and the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. “The story of this onetime center of Sephardic Jewish life as well as the heroic episode of Greek Jewish concentration camp inmates to lead a genuine revolt at Auschwitz deserves to be told to a wide, international audience. We commend the plans of Dimitri Vorris to direct the film, ‘Land of the Angels,’ which will do just this,” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, Director of International Jewish Affairs at the American Jewish Committee.

Said Ari C. Zev, Director of Administration at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, “the USC Shoah Foundation Institute strongly supports the concept and goals of the film project ‘Land of the Angels,’ which will tell the story of the Salonican Jewish community, as well as the general Greek Jewish community, and the tragedy of the devastating loss of the community during the Holocaust.”

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute has an archive of nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, from 56 countries and in 32 languages.

The “Land of the Angels” filmmakers are planning to utilize the Institute’s vast archive of video testimony while conducting research for the film.

“The existence of Shoah Foundation Institute’s video archives is assisting us tremendously to make a better film,” said producer-director Dimitri Vorris.

Other organizations supporting the film include Central Board of Jewish Communities of Greece, Jewish Greek Heritage Society of Southern California, American Hellenic Council of California and others.

VIDEO WITH THE MARFIN ARSONISTS THAT CAUSED THE DEATH OF 4 PEOPLE...

ATHENS NOW: PHOTOS BY SPYROS TSAKIRIS....

PREZA TV BLOGSPOT:SWAT TEAM ATTACKING PEACEFUL PROTESTERS OUTSIDE THE PARLIAMENT (TONIGHT)...

ALEX JONES PART 2 (GREEK SUBS): THEN THE REST OF THE WORLD...

ALEX JONES PART 1 (GREEK SUBS): FIRST THEY'LL TAKE GREECE (THEN THE REST OF EU)...