1 Greece embarks on firesale (The Guardian) When you hit
hard times, it is time to pawn or part with the family silver – and an
unprecedented clearout is now under way in Athens. Greece has announced it will
sell anything it can do without – and in the case of the debt-choked nation
that means letting go of islands, royal palaces, prime real estate, marinas,
airports, roads, the state-owned gas company, lottery and post office. Indeed
anything, really, that can be sold.
This week, the nation learned the downsizing would also
include diplomatic residences abroad – starting with the Victorian townhouse
that was once the Greek consul general's residence in London. The sell-off
emerged just a day after Athens's finance minister revealed what most Greeks
feared but had never been officially told – that with national income projected
to fall 25% by 2014 their economy is not just shrinking but slipping inexorably
into a 1930s-style Depression. And officials are now working frantically to get
the mother of all firesales off the ground.
For potential buyers of ambassadorial homes and consul's
quarters, the good news is that the foreign ministry is fully aware of what and
where the properties are – unlike the Greek state, which until recently was
still struggling to attain an inventory of what it actually owned given the
lack of a proper land registry.
Since the outbreak of Greece's great economic crisis in late
2009, the country's diplomatic presence abroad, like so much else, has been
dramatically scaled back as governments have sought to rake in expenditure. The
consulate in London, home to a thriving Greek community, was one such victim.
2 Nanny state & mollycoddling business (Zoe Williams in The
Guardian) The youth contract is one of those initiatives that made very little
impression until a select committee started worrying about it. In its report,
the committee concludes that it's well-intended but probably won't meet its own
targets – of 160,000 wage incentives and 250,000 additional work experience
places.
Both of those phrases make me think of money, either in the
form of a free person, or in the form of actual money going to the employer.
Sure enough, the "wage incentives" amount to a government grant of
£2,275 for employing someone aged 18-24 for more than 26 weeks.
It has been inexorable, this move to shift the cost of
training away from the employer on to the young person. As it becomes clear
that people at the start of their careers often cannot front this cost, the
government steps in; anything to keep the cost of training away from the
employer. Well, sure, in a kingdom of the unproductive, the half-arsed hirer is
king – but this new maths, where the under-24s are worth so little that even
taking them on unpaid amounts to a social service, has an attendant narrative.
The advice leaflet aimed at employers begins: "For some
young people a lack of understanding of the working world is a significant
barrier to finding and sustaining employment." It's interesting: when did
young people ever understand the working world? The subtle but persistent
message is that young people are getting steadily worse at the transition from
education to work; this is then amplified by "business leaders" who
deliver puzzling broadsides about how this generation looks scruffy and can't
spell.
The problem with business leaders, apart from the way they
overpay themselves and underpay everybody else, is that they rarely feel the
need to stand up their claims. The world is their golf club. They simply make a
statement about, say, grade inflation or "young people's attitudes",
and its very provenance makes it true.
Finally, we can't permanently write off the younger
generation as constitutionally useless and reframe the employer's need for
labour as civic generosity. This would be unjust and illogical – not all jobs
need experience, but they still need doing, and if they need doing, they
warrant paying.
3 French cartoons inflate film tension (San Francisco
Chronicle) France has stepped up security at its embassies across the Muslim
world after a French satirical weekly revived a formula that it has already
used to capture attention: Publishing crude, lewd caricatures of Islam's
Prophet Muhammad. Wednesday's issue of the provocative satirical weekly Charlie
Hebdo, whose offices were firebombed last year, raised concerns that France
could face violent protests like the ones targeting the US over an amateur
video produced in California that have left at least 30 people dead.
The drawings, some of which depicted Muhammad naked and in
demeaning or pornographic poses, were met with a swift rebuke by the French
government, which warned the magazine could be inflaming tensions, even as it
reiterated France's free speech protections. The principle of freedom of
expression "must not be infringed," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius
said.
Anger over the film "Innocence of Muslims" has
fueled violent protests from Asia to Africa. In the Lebanese port city of Tyre,
tens of thousands of people marched in the streets Wednesday, chanting
"Oh, America, you are God's enemy!" The controversy could prove
tricky for France, which has struggled to integrate its Muslim population,
Western Europe's largest. Many Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad should not
be depicted at all — even in a flattering way — because it might encourage
idolatry.
4 Arctic sea ice sets new low (The New York Times) The
drastic melting of Arctic sea ice has finally ended for the year, scientists
announced Wednesday, but not before demolishing the previous record — and
setting off new warnings about the rapid pace of change in the region. The
apparent low point for 2012 was reached Sunday, according to the National Snow
and Ice Data Center, which said that sea ice that day covered about 1.32
million square miles, or 24%, of the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The previous
low, set in 2007, was 29%.
When satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, sea ice at
its lowest point in the summer typically covered about half the Arctic Ocean,
but it has been declining in fits and starts over the decades. “The Arctic is
the earth’s air-conditioner,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow
and ice center, an agency sponsored by the government. “We’re losing that. It’s
not just that polar bears might go extinct, or that native communities might
have to adapt, which we’re already seeing — there are larger climate effects.”
Scientists consider the rapid warming of the region to be a
consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, and they see the melting
as an early warning of big changes to come in the rest of the world. Some of
them also think the collapse of Arctic sea ice has already started to alter
atmospheric patterns in the Northern Hemisphere, contributing to greater
extremes of weather in the United States and other countries, but that case is
not considered proven. 
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