The Parthenon (photo: Samuel Lavoie/flickr)

The coffee’s freshly ground, there’s a wide variety of teas and the sticky buns are homemade.

  • “Greek officials launched a vociferous behind the scenes attack on European Union and International Monetary Fund negotiators as talks in Athens over the country’s mounting debts appeared to stall. Prime minister Lucas Papademos told aides that a crisis meeting of party leaders would be called as early as Thursday to thrash out a response to an increasingly intransigent negotiating team sent by Brussels, which is demanding severe austerity measures before sanctioning a further €130bn (£109bn) of bailout funds.”
  • “Unemployment in the eurozone has risen to the highest level since June 1998, before the euro was introduced, according to recent data. Joblessness among the bloc’s 17 countries rose to 10.4 per cent in December 2011, the EU’s statistics office Eurostat said in a statement. Economists say they expect the unemployment rate to increase further later in the coming months.”
  • “Occupy cornfields! Support is growing for a petition calling for the ouster of Michael Taylor, a senior adviser for the FDA who formerly served as vice president of Monsanto, the controversial agricultural multinational at the forefront of genetically modified foods, the Washington Post reports. President Obama took a lot of flak when he appointed Taylor to the position three years ago. As the second highest-ranking official at the FDA, Taylor is responsible for implementing the day-to-day policies that govern food safety laws in the U.S. ” (h/t to RoyalOak)
  • TEDxNextGenerationAsheville – Birke Baehr – “What’s Wrong With Our Food System” (h/t to RoyalOak)
  • “While some areas in Thailand are still reeling from last year’s floods, other areas are suffering from drought. Water management has long been a problem in the country.”
  • “Russia has declared its intention to scupper any attempt to force President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down, denouncing a push for a new United Nations security council resolution backed by the US and UK as “meddling” that could lead to conflict and military intervention.”
  • “And so it is. A year after Egyptians rose up in solidarity against their decades-long dictator, the two largest political mobilizing forces are now at each other’s throats — quite literally.”
  • “Thirty-five Ethiopian Christians face deportation from Saudi Arabia for “illicit mingling,” the global rights watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) says. Police reportedly raided a private prayer meeting in the second city of Jeddah over the run-up to Christmas, celebrated by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians on January 7, according to Al Jazeera.”
  • “A senior Communist party official has stepped up security in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and on major roads in the region, following the protests in the Sichuan province, the BBC reported. “Strive to realize the goal of ‘no big incidents, no medium incidents and not even a small incident,’ ” Qi Zhala, said in comments published on Tuesday in the state-owned Tibet Daily, The New York Times reported.”
  • “A new French law punishing denial of the “Armenian genocide” has been put on hold after politicians from across party lines opposed to the legislation demanded that its constitutionality be examined. Turkey reacted furiously last week when the Senate approved the law which threatens with jail anyone in France who denies that the 1915 to 1916 mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces amounted to genocide.”

The truth will set you free but first it will piss you off.