Golden Dawn's 'Greeks Only' Soup Kitchen Ends In Chaos
An attempt by members of Greece's far-Right, anti-immigrant Golden Dawn political party to hand out emergency food rations to Greeks only was broken up by police firing tear gas on Thursday.

Read The Daily Telegraph article here | Nick Squires | Thursday, May 02, 2013

Knights of Malta to Open Soup Kitchens in Britain

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: They were once warrior monks who tended to fallen crusaders and sick Christian pilgrims amid the burning desert scrub of the Holy Land.

But nearly 1,000 years later, the Knights of Malta, once known as the Hospitallers, are opening soup kitchens and shelters across Britain and the rest of Europe in response to rising poverty and homelessness caused by the economic crisis.

The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem of Rhodes and Malta – as the chivalric order is officially known – is this week celebrating 900 years since it was given official recognition by the Vatican, with a 'bull' or decree issued by Pope Paschal II in 1113, in the midst of the crusades.

The order's 98,000 members and volunteers, who long ago swapped their chain mail and tunics for doctor's coats and emergency worker overalls.

They have traditionally provided humanitarian help in war zones, earthquakes and floods around the world, from Congo and Rwanda to Haiti and Afghanistan.

But they are now concentrating more and more on Europe, as austerity cuts and a deep recession swell the ranks of the jobless, the homeless and the drug-dependant. » | Nick Squires, Rome | Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Troubled Greece: Fears of 'First Domino' to Fall as Austerity Is Counted a Failure

THE GUARDIAN: Greek's leftist party Syriza says recovery depends on a renegotiated bail-out and access to European structural funds

The soup kitchen opens at noon but long before then the queues start to form in the hot Athens sun. A couple of streets away from where sardines, red mullet and squid are piled high in the fish market, those down on their luck line up. While elsewhere life goes on seemingly as normal, students, jobless people, single parents and pensioners swallow their pride and wait patiently. They get two meals a day, at midday and 5pm. This is what a depression looks like.

At first blush, Greece seems no different from any other developed country. People sit in the city centre cafes sipping their iced coffees; yellow taxis cruise the streets; the shops are open for business. But different it is, and it is not hard to spot the signs that this is an economy that has contracted by 20% since the downturn began three years ago and that it is still falling.

You don't need to know that spending in the shops is down by a sixth over the past year; it is obvious from the empty cabs and those shops open but with no customers. You don't need to know that the official unemployment rate is well above 20% and youth unemployment is nudging 50%: it's obvious from the young men idling on street corners and openly dealing drugs.

Greece is broke and close to being broken. It is a country where children are fainting in school because they are hungry, where 20,000 Athenians are scavenging through waste tips for food, and where the lifeblood of a modern economy – credit – is fast drying up.

It is a country where the fascists and the anarchists battle for control of the streets, where immigrants fear to go out at night and where a woman whispers "it's like the Weimar republic [sic]" as a motorcycle cavalcade from the Golden Dawn party, devotees of Adolf Hitler, cruises past the parliament building. Graffiti says: "Foreigners get out of Greece. Greece is for the Greeks. I will vote for Golden Dawn to remove the filth from the country." » | Larry Elliott, economics editor | Thursday, May 31, 2012

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