The Chicago Tribune reports:
The death toll from Greece's deadliest wildfires in decades climbed to 74 Tuesday as rescue crews searched on land and sea for those who sought to escape the blazes that engulfed popular summer resort spots near Athens.
The number of victims appeared set to go even higher, with crews checking charred homes and vehicles and the coast guard scouring beaches and deeper waters. There was no definitive count of the missing.
Meanwhile, in a later story, The Guardian reports:
The number of deaths from the worst forest fires in Greece for more than a decade has risen to 80 as rescue workers intensified efforts to locate those who had gone missing.
Officials said crews were going from house to house and car to car in seaside communities ravaged by the wildfires near Athens on Wednesday.
The death of an 84-year-old, who had been one of an estimated 187 people injured, pushed the count up from 79 officially pronounced dead by the fire service.
At least nine people were in intensive care and 11 children had been taken to hospital, authorities said.
[...] Constantine Michalos, who heads the Athens chamber of commerce and industry, said the dead fires were spread by gale-force winds of up to 77mph and were “changing direction on a minute-by-minute basis”, making rescue operations particularly difficult.
The story also provides a link to a map of the fires.
Also at The Washington Post.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Thursday July 26 2018, @07:33AM (24 children)
So why was the aristarchus submission on this ignored? It was marked as breaking news. It contained notice of evacuation orders. Was it only because the headline was in Ελληνικά? Do you eds of SoylentNews have any idea of how many you may have killed? I a sick and tired of the anti-Greek bias here.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @07:47AM (7 children)
Fugling SN eds, monolingual at best, only TMB is any good at the cunnilingus. Lives could have been saved, now it is on the eds. My Theo have mercy on your psyches.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:01AM
Strange how guilt, as the TMB pointed out in his Journal, results in down-mods. Our Eds have killed Greeks. They are not sorry. So I really, really, hope the re-vote on Brexit goes the right way, and the Scotland succeeds from the UK, that Nothern Ireland is just another name for the Northern part of Ireland, and that the Damn Queen has to have tea with Donald Trump!!! Oh, and return the Elgin Marbles. It is about time. Bloody Poms.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:48AM (5 children)
I'll defer the judgement on this to a better prepared to appreciate Soylentil.
If none volunteers for it willingly, I reckon it is understandable and this matter will remain a mystery.
(back to you, Azuma)
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 26 2018, @10:29AM (4 children)
I'm 5'6", overweight, over 40, not way above average in the package dept, and still never go without sex when I deciide it's worth the bother. You're welcome to try coming up with alternative explanations for all the repeat business I get.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:01PM (3 children)
As a part of the... ummm... enquiry, your word cannot be objectively taken into account - even more so after we established you can't tell the difference between objective and subjective.
I'll wait for an independent party with no vested interest, thank you.
(large grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:27PM
Not possible. Anyone who's got the experience to provide data isn't going to be any more objective than any other kind of junkie. It's a burden at times to make sure I only use my powers in a responsible manner.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:29PM (1 child)
Do you mean that you're about to take off your vest?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:48PM
ha... ha... bravó.
That was a "good" one.
(Score: 2, Informative) by aristarchus on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:06AM
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=28039 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by Veyrdite on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:16AM (3 children)
There are regularly bushfires in my country that lead to deaths. They are also not reported here. Neither are most natural disasters. I do not think there is an anti-Greek bias.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Thursday July 26 2018, @09:51AM (2 children)
That is unlike Greece, for that reason the story was remarkable (as in 'out of the ordinary').
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday July 26 2018, @03:02PM (1 child)
Lots of articles in this one. And possibly you didn't read the first one, Chicago Tribune. Because it says fires are common in Greece in the summer. Which, by the way, right now it's summer in Greece. They're on the other side of the world, this is their summer. And at the very very end of that article they say "more than 60 people" died in 2007. In fires in 2007. RIP!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @10:48PM
Is it coincidence that the WaPo article forgot to mention that these fires were started by a lit cigarette dropped by a major democratic party contributor?
(Score: 3, Touché) by martyb on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:14PM (6 children)
Here is the title of the mentioned submission:
I looked at the title and it was all Greek to me.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:55PM (1 child)
Boo! Get off the stage.
Actually I agree with this. I get it might have been nice to have a warning the natives could read, but chances are they already aren't reading here if they can't read english. Further more, I know I would not publish a title if I didn't know what it said. For all I know it could say
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:57PM
Heck! I wasn't logged in.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:48PM (3 children)
Maybe you're telling us, you rejected his Sub because you don't do Greek. That would be a lie. Because you, @martyb, ran the story about the Fake Vaccine. And you put Greek into that one. The Sub had NO GREEK, you put it in. So you write in Greek. And probably you read Greek. You expect us to read it -- so long as it's something YOU wrote. If it's something @aristarchus wrote or it came from the Greek newspaper, it's a problem for you. And by the way, the Fake Vaccine is from China, that was a story about China. Where so many folks speak Chinese. But not many speak Greek. This one is about Greece. Where it's the opposite!!!
(Score: 2) by martyb on Thursday July 26 2018, @04:34PM (2 children)
Whoooosh! Nope. Not even close. It's called a sense of humor; the story submission title was entirely in Greek. I responded with:
Which saying [wikipedia.org] dates way back to the time of William Shakespeare:
As for the use of Greek in the 'dept' line of Fake Vaccine Scandal at Chinese Drugmaker Changsheng Biotechnology Co [soylentnews.org]? It was copied, verbatim, from this page on Wikipedia: Primum non nocere [wikipedia.org]. I found THAT page when I searched for the phrase "First, do no harm."
Here is that dept line in its entirety:
A search on Google for that phrase returned, as its first entry, the Wikipedia page on the Hippocratic Oath [wikipedia.org].
So, quite simply, I can actually cut-and-paste Greek. Sorry it's not very impressive, but it is what it is.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday July 26 2018, @05:56PM (1 child)
I think you'd do very well in politics. Because @aristarchus asked a question, he asked why his Sub was rejected. And you answered very clearly. You said the title was all Greek to you. Meaning you didn't understand it. It's in Greek, it was Greek to you. Which we say when we don't understand something -- in whatever language. Except this was in Greek language. So funny. So very funny. I get it, believe me. But now you say, oh, that's not the reason. Not a real answer. That you were just being funny. Not answering. You said a lot, you didn't answer the question. Like when I asked about the Robot!
(Score: 2) by Fluffeh on Friday July 27 2018, @03:09AM
I seriously wonder what will happen when you are halfway through a post - and the wind changes. Will you be stuck speaking in DJTrump-esque manners for the rest of all time?
Still makes me laugh most of the time though =)
(Score: 3, Touché) by martyb on Friday July 27 2018, @01:18PM (2 children)
Here is the original submission [soylentnews.org] in question:
realDonaldTrump actually pointed out something interesting [soylentnews.org]; I'll quote it here:
At the time I first saw the story, my thoughts ran along the lines of: "What's with the story title? Hell if I know what that means. Google translate helpfully provides: 'Fire ring. Emergency East and West Attica'. Sense. No. Makes. Not gonna run a story with a title I don't understand. Well, I'll take a look at the story, anyway. Hmm, that's sad, yes. But there are lots of fires around the world. I don't think we even carried a story about that big fire in California... is this a big enough fire to warrant our carrying it on the front page? Well, if we carry this one, then there'll be complaints about not carrying THAT one, and then this other one... we could end up with *daily* fire stories. Well, probably not that bad, but does this rise to the level where all other similar fires warrant inclusion. Judgement call time. I guess not. We'll see what happens with the fire. I don't know what the magic cutoff line is, exactly, but my gut tells me this is not it, yet. I'll pass."
NOTE: There are other editors here. Any other editor was free to select the story and promote it to the main page. No other editor chose to run the story, either. And even rDT seemed to agree that it was not THAT unusual for Greece.
As follow up on this, I did a bit of searching around and found this site: National Interagency Fire Center [nifc.gov]. Okay, it's US-centric, but let's see what they have. Comments are not allowed to use html table elements, so I had to cut-n-paste;
When I chose to run THIS story, I was looking at a nearly-empty story queue at ~8 PM, it was nearly 90F in my apartment, and I was struggling to just stay awake. Had I it to do over, I would have included a reference to your submission in this one. I'll keep this in mind in the future.
Please be aware that I am just waking up as I write this and it is, again, nearly 90F in my apartment with high humidity, and it is all starting to look like "word soup". IOW, this might not be the most coherent thing I've written.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Saturday July 28 2018, @11:03AM (1 child)
I don't blame you, Marty B. But we could use a few more languages here on SoylentNews, if only to keep Runaway5619 from understanding the flash fire warnings.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Sunday July 29 2018, @04:12PM
I LOL'd on that one; please accept a "+1 Funny" from me!
Es ist sehr schwehr für mich, aber ich wisse klein Deutsch. Ist das gut genug? =)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2018, @08:54PM
WSWS published coverage of this 7/28: The social and political background to the forest fire disaster in Greece [wsws.org].
Emphasis mine.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:12PM
Seems to be a thing going on all across the top of the world. Massive fires in Greece and Sweden (it's odd tho that there are so many deaths in Greece but in Sweden as far as I know there are zero deaths relating to the fires), Large fires in other countries around here, Japan is so warm it's labeled a "natural disaster" as people drop dead from heat strokes and what not.
I think the last time it actually rained here now was in April or the beginning of May. They say it's going to rain tomorrow and this weekend. I really hope it does. There is no green grass or anything anymore.