When most of us consider the Greek alphabet it takes us back to schooldays where strange symbols used to crop up in Mathematics and Science lessons! Here we will take a look at the Greek alphabet, the sounds of the letters and then move on to reading and understanding a typical taverna menu. Hopefully, after this brief introduction you will be able to read, write and speak your first few words of the Greek language.
Facebook is purging its site of people it thinks have made up names. However the outfit is finding that people really do have daft names and it is killing off real customers whose only sin has been parents who had a similar problem.
The press has focused on the case of Alicia Istanbul who was locked out from her 330 friends, including many she had no other way of contacting. Ironically if she was called Constantinople or Byzantine, which was what the city used to be called she would have got away with it. While some names, like Batman, you would think would be obvious.
President of the Republic of Cyprus Demetris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat have concluded their 29th meeting in the framework of the UN-led direct negotiations, currently underway with a view to reach a negotiated settlement. President Christofias said he was ''disappointed'' because ''every time he [Talat] submits new terms, which of course cannot be accepted.'' Noting that ''they cannot be accepted and it appears that Talat is dynamiting the whole effort... I think the Turkish army does not want to open Limnitis. This is my overall conclusion. I am saddened by this. I expected a different behaviour on behalf of Mr. Talat. However, it seems, despite the fact he does not acknowledge it, that many things may not depend on him,'' the President pointed out. Asked if the situation could be reversed, President Christofias said this was the reason he would not refer to the terms. ''I want another last effort to be made."
Georgia has cancelled its traditional Independence Day military parade next week to avoid confrontation with protesters camped out on the parade route to demand the president resign. Analysts question the appetite of the Georgian military to parade with full pomp through Tbilisi, nine months after it was humbled in five days by a devastating Russian counter-strike after Georgia launched an assault on the breakaway region of South Ossetia. A brief, bloodless mutiny at a tank base outside Tbilisi on May 5 has cast doubt over the loyalty of the military. The turmoil has overshadowed NATO military exercises running through May in Georgia, which have angered Russia.
We, the undersigned scholars of Graeco-Roman antiquity, respectfully request that you intervene to clean up some of the historical debris left in southeast Europe by the previous U.S. administration. On November 4, 2004, two days after the re-election of President George W. Bush, his administration unilaterally recognized the “Republic of Macedonia.” This action not only abrogated geographic and historic fact, but it also has unleashed a dangerous epidemic of historical revisionism, of which the most obvious symptom is the misappropriation by the government in Skopje of the most famous of Macedonians, Alexander the Great.
Does this "common ground" idea really work? On peripheral issues, yes. On life-and-death issues, no. Plus, I wondered, to what other audience has the president lectured as to needing to find "common ground" with their opponents? When he goes to Egypt in a few days, will he lecture his Muslim listeners on finding common ground with Jews? Did he tell the mostly Muslim Turks in April they need to find common ground with the Orthodox Christian Armenians? It seems that one side of the debate is always told it needs to move to the center on a given issue, while the other side is told it needs to stand firm.
Tennessean Nonna Bannister’s secret past nearly went to the grave with her, but Chattanooga native Denise George is helping to tell the story of the woman’s survival in a World War II German concentration camp. Mrs. Bannister, a Russian Orthodox Christian, lost 35 members of her family either as prisoners of war in the family’s native Russia or in the Holocaust. She didn’t reveal her life to her husband until shortly before her death in 2004 and never told her children. During the war, the teenage Mrs. Bannister was taken prisoner and used as an interpreter in a hospital in Kassel, Germany, where she was witness to horrific medical experiments by her Nazi captors. Despite all she saw and experienced, the late Memphis resident forgave her tormentors, Mrs. George said. “One thing about the whole story that touched me,” she said, “(was) that she could forgive monsters like Hitler and the Nazis and live a wonderful family life.” Mrs. George said Mrs. Bannister was able to chronicle all that happened to her by tucking away diary pages in a small, black and white striped pillow her Ukrainian grandmother made for her that she kept tied around her waist and held onto throughout the war.