European Archives | Restoring Liberty

European Crisis: Half of HIV Infections in Greece Are Self-Inflicted

November 26, 2013/2 Comments/in Featured, International /by Matt Egan

Photo Credit: REUTERSA recent World Health Organization report paints an alarming picture regarding the health implications of Europe’s economic crisis, including how some Greek citizens are infecting themselves with HIV in order to receive 700 euros in government benefits.

The findings highlight how startling levels of unemployment and severe, mandated government cutbacks are trickling down to European citizens.

The September WHO report concludes that the economic crisis that began in 2008 has “exacerbated” health problems in Europe and “exposed stark social and economic inequities within and between countries.”

Greece has been among Europe’s hardest-hit, with its debt crisis causing the country’s economy to shrink and nearly knocking it out of the euro zone entirely.

According to the WHO report, suicides soared by 17% in Greece between 2007 and 2009 and then another 25% in 2010. As the crisis deepened in the first half of 2011, suicide attempts surged 40%.

European Satellites Launched to Eye Earth’s Magnetic Field

November 25, 2013/2 Comments/in Featured, International /by Maria Sheahan; editing by Ron Askew/Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters The European Space Agency on Friday launched three satellites it hopes will help understand why the magnetic field that makes human life possible on Earth appears to be weakening.

The satellites, comprising ESA’s Swarm project, were launched from Russia’s Plesetsk Cosmodrome on a Rockot vehicle at 7.02 a.m. EST and were placed in near-polar orbit at an altitude of 490 kilometers (304 miles) about 91 minutes later.

Data that Swarm is due to collect for the next four years will help improve scientists’ relatively blurry understanding of the magnetic field that shields life on Earth from deadly solar radiation and helps some animals migrate.

Scientists say the magnetosphere is weakening and could all but disappear in as little as 500 years as a precursor to flipping upside down.

European far right flirts with Norwegian mass murderer Breivik’s ideas

August 27, 2012/0 Comments/in International /by William Maclean and Catherine Hornby

Photo credit: Oslo politidistrikt

Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik may have failed to ignite a race war with Muslims, but he succeeded in stoking anxieties about the stability of Europe’s increasingly diverse societies.

Though his talk of an international underground of killers – latter-day Crusaders he called the Knights Templar – seemed to be mere fantasy, and while his methods place him far beyond the pale of mainstream politics, many of his beliefs are to be found within the fold of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant populists.

“His ideological `manifesto’ is a distilled representation of a cultural crisis that pervades the European continent and finds expression in an increasingly xenophobic populism,” Kirsten Simonsen, a professor at Denmark’s Roskilde University, wrote in “Bloodlands”, a 2012 series of essays about Breivik.

Some notions – that Europe and its indigenous cultures are being weakened by immigration and multiculturalism – have been helping reshape the continent’s right-wing politics for years.

These beliefs occasionally find an echo on the margins of centre-right parties, among politicians seeking support from communities plagued by rising unemployment.

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