Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Gotta say that I feel really sorry for Laura Bassett this morning.

Agreed.

The Lionesses are a truly magnificent team. In fact, more so because lady's soccer at this level is pretty phenominal, IMHO.

I do think we are witnessing a watershed moment.

Did i miss something ?

Yes. The English women's football team saved us from mass national furvour and hysteria by scoring an own goal and booting themselves out of the world semi finals.

Women playing football ? is it something like this ?

Soon , they will be demanding "fair" competition with male teams.

j B

That's the way to bring the spectators in!

I hate football but i might go to the womans game .Maybe i'm on to something here i might start promoting !!

From the Guardian just now

Greek debt crisis: Yanis Varoufakis says he'll resign if Greece votes Yes - live updates

yes, but Varoufakis is the only one stating the bleeding obvious...they cant pay it as it stands, and no amount of posturing will change that fact.


http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/jul/02/greek-debt-crisis-athens-creditors-referendum-yes-no-live

More women footballers:

Well done Exec , i think the game could really take off !!

MaxK

The Greeks will get debt relief, but only if they sign up to the bailout conditions. The Greek government's problem is that they came to power offering to end austerity, which was a fantasy. It would be like believing that your credit card bill would get smaller and more manageable without reigning in your spending and working to a more conservative budget. It is even worse than the analogy because the Greeks are asking for the limit on their credit card to be raised. Under those circumstances, you would expect to be cooperative in balancing your budget.

Depending whether the loan was in order for the Greeks to buy a key to open thetsafe where the gold is stored and enough food enough to give them strength to the key in the lock.

A starving population is not very productive.

Here's a post from a Greek person on a Forex blog I use. Says it all really!

"we have an ancient saying: "Only the dead "see" the end of war". We consider life a never-ending war. That's what keeping us around for so long. Don't worry. Everything's cool here. Panic and chaos are both greek words and we know how to handle.
But I do see some anxiety on the other side....
If they have already seen the end, then THEY are dead."

One might just suppose, that the Greek economy is just about totally 'black'....

This article, taken from back in 2011, should give you just a bit of an idea as to how the Greeks cheat their own country and why they don't deserve much sympathy for any of their peoples' hardship:

The Big Fat Greek Gravy Train: A special investigation into the EU-funded culture of greed, tax evasion and scandalous waste
By ANDREW MALONE FOR THE DAILY MAIL
CREATED: 23:42, 24 June 2011

This, together with 243 comments, is taken from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2007949/The-Big-Fat-Greek-Gravy-Train-A-special-investigation-EU-funded-culture-greed-tax-evasion-scandalous-waste.html

Even on a stiflingly hot summer's day, the Athens underground is a pleasure. It is air-conditioned, with plasma screens to entertain passengers relaxing in cool, cavernous departure halls - and the trains even run on time.

There is another bonus for users of this state-of-the-art rapid transport system: it is, in effect, free for the five million people of the Greek capital.

With no barriers to prevent free entry or exit to this impressive tube network, the good citizens of Athens are instead asked to 'validate' their tickets at honesty machines before boarding. Few bother.

Cracking up: The Euro is at risk of collapse because of the Greek financial crisis

This is not surprising: fiddling on a Herculean scale — from the owner of the smallest shop to the most powerful figures in business and politics — has become as much a part of Greek life as ouzo and olives.

Indeed, as well as not paying for their metro tickets, the people of Greece barely paid a penny of the underground’s £1.5 billion cost — a ‘sweetener’ from Brussels (and, therefore, the UK taxpayer) to help the country put on an impressive 2004 Olympics free of the city’s notorious traffic jams.

The transport perks are not confined to the customers. Incredibly, the average salary on Greece’s railways is £60,000, which includes cleaners and track workers - treble the earnings of the average private sector employee here.

The overground rail network is as big a racket as the EU-funded underground. While its annual income is only £80 million from ticket sales, the wage bill is more than £500m a year — prompting one Greek politician to famously remark that it would be cheaper to put all the commuters into private taxis.

‘We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,’ says Stefans Manos, a former Greek finance minister. ‘And yet, there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.’

Significantly, since entering Europe as part of an ill-fated dream by politicians of creating a European super-state, the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled in a decade. At the same time, perks and fiddles reminiscent of Britain in the union-controlled 1970s have flourished.


Greek farce: Living it up in swanky harbour-side restaurants

Ridiculously, Greek pastry chefs, radio announcers, hairdressers and masseurs in steam baths are among more than 600 professions allowed to retire at 50 (with a state pension of 95 per cent of their last working year’s earnings) — on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work.

This week, it was reported that every family in Britain could face a £14,000 bill to pay for Greece’s self-inflicted financial crisis. Such fears were denied yesterday after Brussels voted a massive new £100bn rescue package which, it insisted, would not need a contribution from Britain.

After running battles with riot police, who used tear gas to disperse protesters, thousands are still camped out in the square ahead of a vote by Greek politicians next week on whether to accept Europe-imposed austerity measures.

Even if this is true — and many British MPs have their doubts — we will still have to stump up £1billion to the bailout through the International Monetary Fund.

In return for this loan, European leaders want the Greeks’ free-spending ways to end immediately if the country is to be prevented from ‘infecting’ the world’s financial system. Naturally, the Greek people are not happy about this.

In Constitution Square this week, opposite the parliament, I witnessed thousands gathering to campaign against government cuts designed to save the country from bankruptcy.

After running battles with riot police, who used tear gas to disperse protesters, thousands are still camped out in the square ahead of a vote by Greek politicians next week on whether to accept Europe-imposed austerity measures.

Yet these protesters should direct their anger closer to home — to those Greeks who have for many years done their damndest to deny their country the dues they owe it.


Clash: Protesters continue to riot in Athens

Take a short trip on the metro to the city’s cooler northern suburbs, and you will find an enclave of staggering opulence.

Here, in the suburb of Kifissia, amid clean, tree-lined streets full of designer boutiques and car showrooms selling luxury marques such as Porsche and Ferrari, live some of the richest men and women in the world.

With its streets paved with marble, and dotted with charming parks and cafes, this suburb is home to shipping tycoons such as Spiros Latsis, a billionaire and friend of Prince Charles, as well as countless other wealthy industrialists and politicians.

One of the reasons they are so rich is that rather than paying millions in tax to the Greek state, as they rightfully should, many of these residents are living entirely tax-free.

Along street after street of opulent mansions and villas, surrounded by high walls and with their own pools, most of the millionaires living here are, officially, virtually paupers.

How so? Simple: they are allowed to state their own earnings for tax purposes, figures which are rarely challenged. And rich Greeks take full advantage.

Astonishingly, only 5,000 people in a country of 12 million admit to earning more than £90,000 a year — a salary that would not be enough to buy a garden shed in Kifissia.

Yet studies have shown that more than 60,000 Greek homes each have investments worth more than £1m, let alone unknown quantities in overseas banks, prompting one economist to describe Greece as a ‘poor country full of rich people’.


Running battles: The riots are threatening to destabilise the Euro

Manipulating a corrupt tax system, many of the residents simply say that they earn below the basic tax threshold of around £10,000 a year, even though they own boats, second homes on Greek islands and properties overseas.

And, should the taxman rumble this common ruse, it can be dealt with using a ‘fakelaki’ — an envelope stuffed with cash. There is even a semi-official rate for bribes: passing a false tax return requires a payment of up to 10,000 euros (the average Greek family is reckoned to pay out £2,000 a year in fakelaki.)

Even more incredibly, Greek shipping magnates — the king of kings among the wealthy of Kifissia — are automatically exempt from tax, supposedly on account of the great benefits they bring the country.

Yet the shipyards are empty; once employing 15,000, they now have less than 500 to service the once-mighty Greek shipping lines which, like the rest of the country, are in terminal decline.

With Greek President George Papandreou calling for a crackdown on these tax dodgers — who are believed to cost the economy as much as £40bn a year — he is now resorting to bizarre means to identify the cheats. After issuing warnings last year, government officials say he is set to deploy helicopter snoopers, along with scrutiny of Google Earth satellite pictures, to show who has a swimming pool in the northern suburbs — an indicator, officials say, of the owner’s wealth.

Officially, just over 300 Kifissia residents admitted to having a pool. The true figure is believed to be 20,000. There is even a boom in sales of tarpaulins to cover pools and make them invisible to the aerial tax inspectors.

But faced with the threat of a crackdown, money is now pouring out of the country into overseas tax havens such as Liechtenstein, the Bahamas and Cyprus.


Parliament: It could be all over for Greece, which is effectively bust from relying on EU cash from richer northern European countries

‘Other popular alternatives include setting up offshore companies in Cyprus or the British Virgin Islands, or the purchase of real estate abroad,’ says one doctor, who declares an income of less than £90,000 yet earns five times that amount.

There has also been a boom in London property purchases by Athens-based Greeks in an attempt to hide their true worth from their domestic tax authorities.

‘These anti-tax evasion measures by the government force us to resort to even more detailed tax evasion ploys,’ admits Petros Iliopoulos, a civil engineer.

Hotlines have been set up offering rewards for people who inform on tax dodgers. Last month, to show the government is serious, it named and shamed 68 high-earning doctors found guilty of tax evasion.

‘We will spare no effort to collect what is due to the state,’ said Evangelos Venizelos, the new Greek finance minister of the socialist ruling party. ‘We promise to draft and apply a new and honest tax system, one that has been needed for decades, so that taxes are duly paid by those who should pay.’

Yet, already, it is too late. Greece is effectively bust — relying on EU cash from richer northern European countries, but this has been the case ever since the country finally joined the euro in 2001.

Two years earlier, the country was barred from entering because it did not meet the financial criteria.

No matter: the Greeks simply cooked the books. Two years later, having falsely claimed to have met standards relating to manufacturing and industrial production and low inflation, the Greeks were allowed in.

Funds poured into the country from across Europe and the Greeks started spending like there was no tomorrow.

Money flowed into all areas of public life. As a result, for example, the Greek school system is now an over-staffed shambles, employing four times more teachers per pupil than Finland, the country with the highest-rated education system in Europe. ‘But we still have to pay for tutors for our two children,’ says Helena, an Athens mother. ‘The teachers are hopeless — they seem to spend their time off sick.’

Although Brussels has now agreed to provide the next stage of its debt payment programme to safeguard the count ry’s immediate economic future, the Greek media still carries ominous warnings that the military may be forced to step in should the country’s foray into Europe end in ignominy, bankruptcy and rising violence.

For now, the crisis has simply been delayed. With European taxpayers facing the prospect of saving Greece from bankruptcy for the second year in a row, some say even the £100bn on offer will pay off only the interest on the country’s debts — meaning it will be broke again within two years.

Meanwhile, there are doom-laden warnings that the collapse of the Greek economy could be the catalyst for another global recession.

Perhaps if the Greeks themselves had shown more willingness to tighten their belts and pay taxes due to the state, voters across Europe might not now be feeling such anger towards them.

But having strolled the streets of Kifissia, and watched the Greek hordes stream past the honesty boxes on the underground, it does not take a degree in European economics to know when somebody is taking advantage — at our expense.

"Perhaps if the Greeks themselves had shown more willingness to tighten their belts and pay taxes due to the state, voters across Europe might not now be feeling such anger towards them."Which groups were the biggest tax evaders?


-=-====

From the BBC web site:

How I was de-radicalised
By Tim Mansel
BBC World Service, Aarhus
2 July 2015
From the section Magazine

It's become known as the Aarhus Model, a programme designed in Denmark's second city to dissuade young people from going to fight for al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Thirty travelled to Syria in 2013 but only two so far this year - and only one in 2014. Ahmed is one young man who was convinced, a few years ago, to draw back from the first step on a path that could have ended in jihad.
We meet in a large, loud, busy Turkish restaurant on the edge of the city, but we don't stay long. There are two of them - we'll call them Ahmed and Mahmoud - and what we have to talk about demands a measure of privacy. Mahmoud drives us to a large hotel, where we sit down in a quiet room.
Ahmed is 25, he says, born in Somalia, although he's lived in Denmark since he was six.
Ahmed then tells his story, describing an unexceptional childhood - he was a "normal kid" growing up in the Aarhus suburbs, who liked playing football, doing well in school, learning Danish fast. "Everything was good for me at that time," he says.
Then, when he was in his teens, his father announced that he was taking him on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.
They call me a terrorist? I will give them a terrorist if they want that
"It was important for my father to get me more religious," he says.
"I didn't know much about my religion. It was like I had left it in Somalia. But my father said, you are a Muslim, you have a Muslim name. You have to know your history, your background and your religion."
So the family went to Mecca and Ahmed remembered returning to Denmark with a sense of relief.
"When we came back I was happy and I was a new person with a religious identity. I saw the world differently. I saw that it was important for a person to have a connection with his god, I saw that there was an afterlife."
But Ahmed's new faith got him into trouble at school. He abandoned jeans and T-shirts and took to wearing traditional Islamic dress. He became defensive and argumentative when the subject of religion came up. He acknowledges today that he could have handled things better, but at the time, he said, he responded aggressively because he felt he had a duty to defend his religion when he was being baited by his Danish classmates.
null
The suburbs of Aarhus include some of Denmark's poorest neighbourhoods
"They would say things like, 'You stone your women, you lash people who speak freely,' and I felt I had to defend my religion, but I didn't know how to debate properly and it went out not correctly."
Ahmed was shortly to discover exactly how "not correctly" it had come out.
He was out one evening when his father rang. "Where are you?" he demanded. "What have you done?" His father said the police had just knocked on the door and were looking for him.
"When I got home, he was shocked and angry. He told me that I had to go straight to the police station the following morning, and ask them what they wanted."
So Ahmed went to see the police and was amazed to discover that he'd been turned in by the principal of the school.
"The reason you are here," he was told, "is that your classmates are afraid, they think you are extremist and that you are capable of dangerous things. They think you have been radicalised in Saudi Arabia."
Ahmed grins as he remembers all this. But it wasn't funny at the time - he had a vision of being put on the next flight to Guantanamo. "I was shocked," he says "and I had no words to defend myself."
The police then told him they would need to search his home and that they would need the password to his email account and any other social media that he used.
"I gave them everything and they searched my house and it was very humiliating to watch. When they left I was shocked and I was angry," he says.
It got worse. All this had happened during the last week of school, and he had missed the end of year exams. The school, he told me, refused to allow him to sit them late.
"That gave me a punch in the face, and gave me the feeling this society is total racist," he says. "They call me a terrorist? I will give them a terrorist if they want that."
Ahmed smiles again as he recounts the story. It sounds foolish all these years later.
Ahmed then told everything to his friends at the mosque. They were sympathetic, he says, and invited him home. There were long discussions about the hypocrisy of the West in its dealings with Muslims and Muslim countries. They watched a lot of jihadi videos online. Ahmed remembers in particular those that featured Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American cleric of Yemeni descent, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011.
"He would say things like, 'We are at war with the West, the West will kill all the Muslims around the world if we don't stand up to them,' and I was like, OK, and my friends were saying, 'Yeah, he's totally right.'"
Finally someone drew Ahmed aside and suggested that if he wanted to learn more about Islam and be respected as a Muslim, he should go to Pakistan. "He told me about a school there, where they have good teachers and where they teach Islam in the best way."
European militants who have gone to Syria/Iraq (estimates)
Country Per 1m inhabitants Total
Belgium 40 440
Denmark 27 100-150
Sweden 19 150-180
France 18 1200
Austria 17 100-150
Netherlands 14.5 200-250
Finland 13 50-70
Norway 12 60
UK 9.5 500-600
Germany 7.5 500-600
Source: ICSR (Jan 2015)
Ahmed says he told his father what he was planning. His father said he wouldn't try to stop him but advised him to finish high school first. Then the telephone rang.
It was the police and they wanted to invite Ahmed out for a cup of coffee.
He went, reluctantly.
"Something inside me said these people are never going to leave you alone, so why don't you see them face-to-face and just say your opinion. So I went to the meeting and they gave me some coffee and we talked and I was angry and I said, 'You know what, I'm going to Pakistan. It's not illegal. I can do what I want. When I get the money, when I've finished high school, that's where I'm going. Sayonara. See you later.'"
But the police had an offer. They wanted him to meet someone, another Muslim, they said, who could talk to him about his feelings and his anger in a way that they, the police could not.
Ahmed smiles again as he remembers his indignant reaction. What kind of Muslim could this be? Clearly a traitor.
This is how he met Mahmoud. And this is how he was introduced to what the world has now come to call the Aarhus Model.

The Aarhus Model
The model involves both prevention and cure. In some cases it offers young people returning from Syria the opportunity to reintegrate into Danish society, provided they've committed no offence abroad. In others, it provides mentoring for those intent on going to Syria, to persuade them not to travel.
Efforts to prevent radicalisation have been running since 2007. Preparations for dealing with events in Syria started in mid-2013.
An extensive network including parents, social workers, teachers, youth club workers, outreach workers and the police may raise the alarm about a young person who is being radicalised.
Individual counselling is provided for people who intend to travel to Syria, and in some cases a mentor is assigned. Parents of these people take part in self-help groups.
null
Ahmed says it took several months for him to relax. In the beginning he would frisk Mahmoud every time they met, because he wanted to check he wasn't wearing a microphone. He says their arguments were intense and he was frustrated that Mahmoud seemed to have a quiet, logical answer to everything. Ahmed says he asked his friends at the mosque for help, for arguments to defeat this "traitor who's working with the police".
"But then I started to take my hands down - you know in boxing you have your fists up high - and I said I have to listen to this guy, this guy never gives up.
"And he discussed with me in a logical way, in a way that I could understand that where I was going actually was dangerous.
"Mahmoud said, 'Yes, you were treated wrong, that's correct, but what you are doing is you are ruining your own life if you go to Pakistan.'"
This, said Ahmed, made sense to him. He wasn't being told that he couldn't be a Muslim. He was being told simply to be a good Muslim who doesn't hurt innocent people.
"You can still be a Muslim and have a prosperous future in Denmark. You can be an asset to society, not a liability," he remembers Mahmoud telling him.
Mahmoud is listening and nodding.
"Actually Ahmed has told me that a lot of times, that if we hadn't had those conversations, he thinks that he would be in Pakistan now," he says.
Ahmed graduated from high school and instead of going to Pakistan he went to university. He is about to graduate. He has also got married.
"I'm happy right now. I see my future in Denmark. I couldn't see that before because it was all dark," he says.
"And now that I'm actually finished with the programme. I hope that personally I'm going to be a mentor some day and help other people who have been in my situation."

.

Exec,

For Manuel's sake, would you put a little more detailed in your postings.

Perhaps a cartoon or two.