1 Greek bailout-II: $170bn (BBC) Eurozone finance ministers have reached agreement on a vital second bailout for heavily indebted Greece. The deal, which came after more than 13 hours of talks in Brussels, will provide Athens with loans worth more than 130bn euros ($170bn). Greece needs the funds to avoid bankruptcy on 20 March, when maturing loans must be repaid. In return, Greece will undertake to reduce its debts to no more than 120.5% of its GDP by 2020. After five straight years of recession, Greece's debts currently amounts to more than 160% of its GDP. The agreement could resolve Greece's immediate financing needs, analysts say, but seems unlikely to revive the country's shattered economy.
2 Ice-Age plant revived (The New York Times) Living plants have been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, a team of Russian scientists reports. The fruit was stored by an arctic ground squirrel in its burrow on the tundra of north-eastern Siberia and lay permanently frozen until excavated by scientists a few years ago. This would be the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue. The present record is held by a date palm grown from a seed some 2,000 years old that was recovered from the ancient fortress of Masada in Israel.
Seeds and certain cells can last a long term under the right conditions, but many claims of extreme longevity have failed on closer examination. Eske Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, said the finding was “plausible in principle,” given the conditions in permafrost. But the claim depends on the radiocarbon date being correct: “It’s all resting on that — if there’s something wrong there it can all fall part.”
3 ‘Upcycling’ is buzzword in London (The New York Time) “Upcycling” is the buzzword in eco-conscious London. This season, Estethica, the display of reclaimed and sustainable clothes at London Fashion Week, included colorful work from students at the Central Saint Martins school, who created clothes from the ends of thread spools, fabric remnants and fluff from the bottom of factory machines. “They are designs from a younger generation,” said Orsola de Castro, creative director of the display’s eco section, sponsored by Mulberry. It has gone from “yummy mummies” to something much more contemporary, she added. Christopher Raeburn was a founding member of Estethica, but has grown his sporty, outerwear brand of sustainable and reclaimed clothes to encompass genuine fashion style.
4 In Syria, hospitals are killing fields (The Guardian) In Bashar al-Asad’s Syria, it is not just forbidden to speak, demonstrate and protest: it is also forbidden both to give medical treatment, and to receive treatment yourself. The regime has been waging a merciless war against any individual or institution capable of bringing medical aid to the victims of repression. "It's very dangerous to be a doctor or a pharmacist," a pharmacist from the Baba Amro neighbourhood of Homs says. Medical personnel are imprisoned – like the nurse in the nearby district of al-Qusayr, arrested the day after he showed around his hidden emergency-care centre, its carpets covered with plastic tarpaulins to protect them from blood – or killed, like Abdur Rahim Amir, the only doctor in that centre, murdered in cold blood in November by military security, while he sought to treat civilians wounded during the army's assault on Rastan to the north. Or tortured.
In Baba Amro, a nurse from the Homs National Hospital, imprisoned in September, describes the tortures he was subjected to by miming them: he was beaten with a club, blindfolded, whipped, suffered electric shocks, and hanged from the wall by a single wrist, on tiptoe, for four or five hours – a common practice that has its own name, ash-shabah. "I was lucky, they didn't treat me so badly," he insists. "They didn't break my bones." Sometimes, the regime's forces just insult them. A Red Crescent nurse, in her ambulance, was stopped at a checkpoint: "We shoot them, and you save them!" the soldiers berated them.
5 Britain has a drinking problem (The Johannesburg Times) Up to 210,000 people in England and Wales will be killed prematurely by alcohol over the next 20 years, with a third of those preventable deaths due to liver disease alone, health experts warned. Other alcohol-related deaths will be due to accidents, violence and suicide, or from chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, strokes, heart disease and cancer, the experts warned in a projection study in the Lancet medical journal. The warning comes after British Prime Minister David Cameron promised last week to crack down on excessive drinking, calling it a “scandal” that costs the taxpayer-funded National Health System an estimated 2.7 billion pounds ($4.3 billion) a year.
A study last week found that 7.5 million children in the US – more than 10% of child population – live with an alcoholic parent and are at increased risk of developing a host of health problems of their own. Steps to curb alcohol use feature three times in the WHO’s top 10 “best buys” for public health policies to reduce the burden of chronic diseases, which kill 36 million people a year worldwide.
6 Terminally talented (The Johannesburg Times) Melancholy is very choosy. Mostly, it prefers great company. It loves the exceptionally talented. It thrives in the artistically endowed. It torments the gifted. It haunts genius. Interestingly, it is the same gloomy emotion that inspires great music. Think of the songs of the biggest winner at this year's Grammy awards, Adele.
Many people might think that melancholy should be the affliction of those who don't know where their next meal is coming from - the sick, the unloved, the elderly, the unlucky in love, the forgotten, the homeless, the landless, the oppressed. Oh, no. Melancholy finds pleasure in those whose life seems to have purpose. But history shows us that, for the super-talented, melancholy lingers on, long after it has inspired a great song, created a moment in history or changed the world.
Melancholy remains, the superstars, sadly, go. When she couldn't bear the sadness that consumed her, English writer Virginia Woolf, before putting stones in the pockets of her jacket and drowning herself, wrote: "I feel certain that I'm going mad again; I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time." It was depression, a never-ending melancholy, that drove another writer, American Sylvia Plath, to swallow 40 sleeping pills. Who can forget that day, the eve of StValentine's Day, 11 years ago, when we heard the devastating news that piano genius Moses Taiwa Molelekwa had been found hanging next to the body of his wife, Florence, in their office in the Johannesburg cultural precinct Newtown. Whitney Houston, who had a long history of drug abuse, was found dead in her hotel room on February11. What exactly caused her death is not known, but the police said they had found alcohol and prescription drugs in the room. Then there were Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Ike Turner, Heath Ledger, Alexander McQueen, Jim Morrison. There isn't enough space to name them all.
7 Empty talk on Tahrir (Tim Sebastian in The Khaleej Times) Big Egypt, which creaked and trundled about its business for decades, is crying out for some certainty, some normality. The poor want to eat; the business community wants and needs to earn money; one in seven people, employed by the tourist industry, are desperate for the holiday makers to come back. And no one can understand why the dying goes on incessantly in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere.
I don’t hear too many predictions about Egypt’s future. But let me cite a couple of strong impressions: Egyptians have tasted revolution and will likely want to do so again. And no leader here can ever again count on a compliant, docile population. For now, though, the share-out of spoils from last year’s revolt is more or less complete. Real power has gone back to the military; a Parliament of new faces gets to do the talking; a president is due to be elected later this year. The only people who don’t seem to know that this uprising is over still argue and dream and make speeches in Tahrir Square.
8 Modi and the mobs (Manu Joseph in Khaleej Times) He is a talented Indian, who lives in the United States with his talented wife. He is an engineer with an MBA and works in a credit ratings agency. He is a law-abiding man, a good father and a good husband. Ten years ago it might have been unthinkable that such a person would admire a man whom some have accused of responsibility for the violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of people, who were stabbed, beaten or burned alive. But the talented Indian does, even as the 10th anniversary of the carnage falls this month.
That is the achievement of Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of the prosperous state of Gujarat, the most popular face among the leaders of the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party, and the man who the talented Indian believes will one day become the prime minister of India. Modi has managed to endear himself to a vast section of India’s economically powerful urban middle class and business community, at home and abroad, by resurrecting Hindu pride as a form of patriotism.Modi has grown in stature. He has portrayed himself as a man who can get things done fast for the people in his care — a man who could be prime minister. More than ever, the talented Indian sees a modern leader in Modi — an efficient man who can build roads and industries with great speed, even though, somehow, 10 years ago he was not efficient enough to save hundreds of Muslims from the “spontaneous reaction of the Hindus.”
9 India’s destiny not caste in stone (Andre Beteille in The Hindu) The association between caste and occupation is now more flexible than it was in the traditional economy of land and grain. Rapid economic growth and the expansion of the middle class are accompanied by new opportunities for individual mobility which further loosens the association between caste and occupation. Private television channels have created a whole world in which their anchors and the experts who are regularly at their disposal vie with each other to bring out the significance of the “caste factor,” meaning the rivalries and alliances among castes, sub-castes and groups of castes by commentators who, for the most part, have little understanding of, or interest in, long-term trends of change in the country. These discussions create the illusion that caste is an unalterable feature of Indian society. It will be a pity if we allow what goes on in the media to reinforce the consciousness of caste and to persuade us that caste is India's destiny.
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