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Greece

Austerity? Not For Greece's Defense Budget

LE TEMPS (Switzerland), DER SPIEGEL (Germany)

Worldcrunch

As Greece remains under the watchful eye of Angela Merkel and the IMF to make sure it imposes strict austerity measures, there is one governmental budget that has largely escaped cuts: the defense department.

Alexandre Trauvers, writing in Le Temps, reported that Greece's defense budget amounts to around 3 percent of its GDP, which is twice the amount of the European average (1.7 percent).

However, this rising figure reflects Greece's appetite for acquiring weapons rather than a necessity to fund the armed forces, which remain quite modest, with only 139,000 soldiers and 251,000 reserves.

Der Spiegel reported that Greece spent 4.6 billion euros last year on new tanks, submarines and fighter jets, which are mostly imported from France and Germany. However, as the crisis continues, the Greek Defense Minister has vowed to cut the budget by 400 million euros.

Thanos Dokos, head of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, told the German newspaper: "There is an element of hypocrisy when Germany and, to a lesser degree, France blame Greece for being spendthrift without acknowledging at the same time that a lot of money that Greece spent ended up in German and French pockets for the purchase of consumer goods and weapon systems."

However, Vautravers observed that Greece puts so much importance on the military due to its historical implications: defeated and occupied by the Axis powers during World War II, it spent the following years threatened by communist Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, as well as its continuing conflict with Turkey since its invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

"Geographically," Vautravers writes "the mountainous nature of its northern border and the hundreds of islands make it necessary that there is a strong military presence to control the complex territory."

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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