Dorset County Hospital Cuts

Dorset County Hospital £7.6m cuts target 'challenging', BBC News

"Dorset County Hospital is struggling to hit its cuts target of £7.6m this financial year, according to a report. The hospital in Dorchester needs to save 4.3% of its turnover but is yet to identify where £1.7m of the cuts will come from, the internal report says".

Greece and China

From Greek Reporter - Greek, Chinese FMs Commit to Expand Cooperation


See also, African Trade with China

From BBC News:

Patrick White on the Aegean Islands of Greece

Of all the writings of Patrick White, those I enjoy most are about his journeys with Manoly Lascaris in Greece, as contained in the autobiographical self-portrait “Flaws in the Glass” (1981).

I couldn't help chuckling while re-reading his two sections about some of the Aegean islands. They are full of his extremely frank and forthright perceptions, his occasionally cruel, provocative but wittily satirical observations:

“Difficult to remember in which order we visited the Greek islands. I see them as a patchwork, or collage, or progressive disillusionment, not only with Greece but with post-War life”.

“Who, among the Greeks, as time goes on, has not collaborated with Germans?”

“In Greece, the enchanted distance is often destroyed by close acquaintance”.

On Chios:

“In the evening as we sat on the quay, drinking ouzo or a coffee….the bourgeoisie strolled up and down, island style, the ladies armed with handbags, no doubt planning next season’s Athenian handbag and their costume for the evening stroll”.

“Much of Chios looks extinct. Apathy has settled where passions erupted in the past; blood flowed without acting as a fertiliser”.

On Samos:

“The word ‘ennui’ might have been coined in connection with the evening stroll in island ports and the provincial towns of mainland Greece”.

On Patmos:

“If it seemed probable that the Prophet Elias haunted his chapel, nobody would climb the peak to find out. On the saint’s feast day a priest was reputed to pay his respects, but from what I had seen of Orthodox priests, I doubted”.

They thought seriously about buying a house on Patmos (pages 181-182):

“The house was too large by practical standards, but ideal for one who likes to walk from room to room while stuck for a word”.

“It was a relief when our dream of Patmos petered out finally. If we had forced our fantasies as far as actuality, schizophrenia and bankruptcy would have got us as we jetted between the hemispheres”.

 On Lesbos:

“I don’t remember coming across either a lesbian or a bugger during our stay in the flat, characterless town of Mytilene, though the olives were large, black, and juicy”.

“Molyvos, a pretty village perched above the sea on the north coast, has become the victim of international intellectuals and artists. They return year after year, to paint, write, and discuss the reasons why their marriages should break up, even type poems to the marriage which has broken that morning. We ran away from Molyvos”.

On Santorini:

“Tightened girths made the mules arch their backs, inflate their bellies, and fart like machine guns at the jab from a knee.”

On Skiathos:

“Skiathos has been developed as a retirement village for the well-to-do British middle-class, who discuss passionately in buses the difficulties they have found in what had been represented as a geriatric’s paradise. Plumbing of course enters into the conversation…You wondered how long they would accept exile from their natural neo-Tudor world, and hoped for their sakes that Papdiamantis and Greek plumbing would send them packing before complete senility set in”.

Ouch!

Buy "Flaws in the Glass" on Amazon.co.uk

Patrick White, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973

Patrick White Biographical Note (Nobel Prize)

"I was born on May 28th 1912 in Knightsbridge, London, to Australian parents. Victor White was then forty-two, his wife, Ruth Withycombe, ten years younger. When I was six months old my parents returned to Australia and settled in Sydney, principally because my mother could not face the prospect of too many sisters-in-law on the property, in which my father had an interest, with three older brothers. Both my father’s and my mother’s families were yeoman-farmer stock from Somerset, England. My great-grandfather White had emigrated to New South Wales in 1826, as a flockmaster, and received a grant of crown land in the Upper Hunter Valley. None of my ancestors was distinguished enough to be remembered, though there is a pleasing legend that a Withycombe was fool to Edward II..."

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. 

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Lesbos, Greece: Moria Refugee Camp

From BBC TV  - 14 minutes

Catrin Nye, the Victoria Derbyshire programme

"Children ‘attempting suicide’ at Greek refugee camp - At Moria camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, there is deadly violence, overcrowding, appalling sanitary conditions and now a charity says children as young as 10 are attempting suicide. Catrin Nye has been given rare access inside".

See also:

Rare look at life inside Lesbos' Moria refugee camp- Images capture living conditions the Greek island's largest camp, home to thousands of refugees and migrants, Kevin McElvaney, Aljazeera


Situation at 'boiling point' at refugee centre on Greek island - U.N.(from Reuters) 


UNHCR urges Greece to address overcrowded reception centres on Aegean islands, UNHCR


Residents at Moria refugee camp live in fear, new survey shows, eKathimerini


An Island in Despair (pdf), Refugee Rights Europe


'We have found hell': trauma runs deep for children at dire Lesbos camp, The Guardian

Mary Anning and Fossil Hunting

From BBC World Service Science Stories

"Mary Anning lived in Lyme Regis on what is now known as the Jurassic Coast in the first half of the 19th century. Knowing the shore from childhood and with a remarkable eye for detection she was extremely successful in finding fossils. In 1812 she unearthed parts of an Icthyosaur and in 1823 she discovered the first skeleton of what became known as a Plesiosaurus – a long-necked, flippered creature with a tiny head. It looked a bit like an elongated turtle with no shell.

Naomi Alderman tells the science story of how Mary Anning, a poor and relatively uneducated young woman, became the supplier of the best fossils to the gentlemen geologists who were beginning to understand that the earth was very old and had been inhabited by strange extinct creatures. Naomi talks to Tracy Chevalier, author of Remarkable Creatures, a novel about Mary Anning, about her life and relationship with the geologists of the time, and to Dr Susannah Maidment, Curator of Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, about fossil hunting today".

China: Air Pollution and Cognitive Performance

The impact of exposure to air pollution on cognitive performance, PNAS

"We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive performance in verbal and math tests".

The impact of air pollution is apparently the equivalent to the loss of one year of education (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172w4dxll4ygr3).


Air pollution causes ‘huge’ reduction in intelligence, study reveals - Impact of high levels of toxic air ‘is equivalent to having lost a year of education’, The Guardian

"It found that high pollution levels led to significant drops in test scores in language and arithmetic, with the average impact equivalent to having lost a year of the person’s education. “Polluted air can cause everyone to reduce their level of education by one year, which is huge,” said Xi Chen at Yale School of Public Health in the US, a member of the research team".

Air pollution may harm cognitive intelligence, study says, BBC News


Newsday, World Service. from c. 5.15 point


Too dirty to breathe: can London clean up its toxic air?The Guardian