Greek hospitals in crisis "Greek hospitals are in such dire straits that staff are failing to keep up basic disease controls such as using gloves and gowns, threatening a rise in multidrug-resistant infections ... Another health official said a senior Athens hospital worker had told him there was no budget left for supplies at that hospital, so all its drug purchases were on credit."
Europe's long shadow "The general public as a whole is as badly informed today about the dangers facing the eurozone as the populations of Britain and France were in the late summer of 1938 during the Czechoslovak crisis." (Antony Beevor)
The smartest girls in the room "The trial was the first in the world to examine the conduct of an investment bank in the creation and selling of the complex financial products known as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs). But a more impressive court victory for Banton was soon to follow — a triumph that would again startle the world's financial markets, rock the international rating agencies and bring a diffident, offbeat and crack Sydney judge to the attention of the world's financial press."
J.M. Coetzee on Gerald Murnane "With David Malouf and Thomas Keneally, Gerald Murnane belongs to the last generation of writers to come to maturity in an Australia that was still a cultural colony of England, repressed, puritanical, and suspicious of foreigners. Of that generation, Murnane has been the least obedient to received norms of realism, the most open to outside influence."
The elevator-rescue teams of Moscow "'You are lucky if you get stuck in our elevator,' said Titarenko, a jovial, energetic man who smelled like cigarettes... There is more to the art of elevator rescue than just sending a team out. 'We work with the whole person,' explained Valentine Kazakova, who has been a Moslift dispatcher for ten years. 'The most important thing is to use a kind voice.'"
