Who Owns This Land? In Greece, Who Knows?
By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: May 26, 2013
ATHENS — Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings — some fields, a scattering of buildings and a massive stone tower — in Mani, a rural region in southern Greece.
But property ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the property.
In this age of satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.
Korean unification: dreams of unity fade into past for young South Koreans
South Koreans questioning goal of union with poor neighbours reared on different values as even the shared language diverges
Unified Korea is a desperate, dystopian country, beset by police tyranny, ravaged by organised crime and roamed by a growing underclass of destitute northerners.
Lee Eung-jun paints a chilling portrait of 2016 for readers in prosperous, ordered South Korea. But perhaps the most striking aspect of his novelThe Private Life of a Nation is its rarity: portrayals of a unified Korea are unusual enough – never mind such a bleak challenge to the rosy official image of the future.
Periodic crises and North Korean sabre-rattling frequently fix the world's attention on the divided peninsula, yet scant consideration is given to what might one day emerge from such tensions – an oversight, said Lee, that impelled him to write the book.
Postcard from... Milan
Even the mighty Scala is bowing to the effects of the recession. The famous Milan opera house will produce three fewer operas than usual in the 2013-14 season owing to the economic crisis, the general manager Stéphane Lissner announced last week.
Ironically, the cutbacks come as Italy, the birthplace of opera, prepares for the bicentennial celebrations of its greatest composer of opera, Giuseppe Verdi.
Mr Lissner said he chose to reduce the number of productions in response to declining revenues, rather than raising ticket prices or cutting back on rehearsals.
'Black' PR in China buys internet invisibility
May 27, 2013 - 1:53PM
Malcolm Moore
Beijing: In the middle of the biggest anti-corruption campaign for years, crooked Chinese politicians are paying to vanish from sight, with all negative stories about them scrubbed from the internet.
"It does not matter how big or sensitive the story is, we can make it disappear," promised a manager at Yage Times, China's largest and most notorious "black" public relations firm.
Dozens of Chinese officials have been put under investigation in recent months, and Communist Party members at every level are worried. In particular, they fear the internet, where stories about corrupt officials often go viral, putting pressure on the Communist Party to launch a high-profile investigation.
In almost 42 per cent of this year's corruption cases, the public has provided a tip-off, often on the web, according to Zhang Shaolong, an official at the party's discipline unit.
Equatorial Guinea votes in 'sham' polls
Citizens of Equatorial Guinea have voted in local and legislation elections that have been denounced as a sham by the opposition.
The Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE), headed by Africa's longest serving leader, is expected to clinch an overwhelming victory.
The small central west African nation, the continent's third-largest oil producer, has been under the iron-fisted rule of Teodoro Obiang Nguema for 34 years and successive elections have been widely seen as flawed.
"These are sham elections, just like the other elections organised by the Obiang dictatorship," said Placido Mico, the lone opposition lawmaker in a Parliament where Obiang's PDGE holds 99 of the 100 seats.
Land reform deal a breakthrough in Colombian peace talks
By , E-mail the writer
BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia’s U.S.-backed government and the FARC rebel group, which have been in peace negotiations to end a half-century of conflict, announced on Sunday that they had made an important breakthrough on the nettlesome issue of land reform.
Both sides characterized the agreement as a significant advance after six months of talks in Havana between a team of negotiators from President Juan Manuel Santos’s government and the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The news buoyed this country’s 47 million people, who have been cautiously hopeful that peace can be achieved even as other negotiations in years past have collapsed in recriminations and violence.
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