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Greece

Greece Faces Massive Strikes As EU Summit Begins

REUTERS,KATHIMERINI (Greece)

Worldcrunch

ATHENS – For the second time in three weeks, crowds are gathering in central Athens today for marches against a new wave of spending and pension cuts.

Trade union leaders says they hope to show EU leaders meeting in Brussels that a new round of austerity measures will only worsen the plight of the Greek people.

According to the Greek daily newspaper Kathimerini, the strikes are expected to disrupt public services, banks, schools, hospitals, airports, and disrupt public transportation, bringing much of the country to a standstill.

#Greece Communist union PAME gathering in Omonia sq, A. Papariga giving speech now, march to #Syntagma next.#rbnews twitter.com/MakisSinodinos…

— Theodora Oikonomides (@IrateGreek) October 18, 2012

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’ coalition government is holding delicate negotiations with Greece's "troika" of creditors -- the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. The country is preparing 11.5 billion euros of cuts to satisfy the troika and secure the next installment of its 130-billion-euro bailout.

"Just once, the government ought to reject the troika's absurd demands," Yannis Panagopoulos, head of the GSEE private sector union, told Reuters.

European Union leaders are meeting in Brussels for a two-day summit to try and bridge their differences over plans for a banking union, although no substantial decisions are expected, reviving concerns about complacency in tackling the debt crisis which exploded three years ago in Greece.

Greece is in its fifth consecutive year of recession and more than a quarter of its workforce is unemployed.

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Society

How Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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