Athens Macedonian News Agency: News in English, 16-07-22

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From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/>

CONTENTS

[01] EU Commission awards extra 82.6 mln euros in emergency funding to Greece

[02] Foreign TV programmes to promote tourism in Greece

[03] Greek public debt at 176.3 pct of GDP in Q1

[01] EU Commission awards extra 82.6 mln euros in emergency funding to Greece

Through AMIF, emergency funding of 24.2 million euros is awarded to the Greek Ministry of Health, for increasing the capacity to provide primary health care to migrants and refugees.

It aims to provide primary health care services (medical and psychosocial services) at refugee accommodation centres, and to strengthen the capacity of the public health system and epidemiological surveillance structures.

In addition, 58.4 million euros are awarded to the Greek Ministry of Defense to provide migrants with urgent shelter, accommodation, catering, health care and transportation. These activities are to be funded on the Greek mainland with 52.2 million euros provided by AMIF, while 6.2 million euros is awarded for support in the hotspots through the ISF.

These new emergency assistance grants follow similar awards made earlier in 2016 which covered the needs between February and July. With this extra funding, the emergency assistance awarded for activities in Greece reaches 345 million euros since the start of 2015, including support to Greek authorities, EU agencies, international organisations and NGOs. This emergency funding comes on top of the 509 million euros already allocated to Greece under the national programmes for 2014-2020.

[02] Foreign TV programmes to promote tourism in Greece

Other "filming trips" with the support of EOT are ongoing in Athens, Peloponnese and Crete by the Australian television travel programme "The Travel Bug TV Show" in Greek areas with very old olive trees, from a Greek team working on behalf of DES TV (web tv in Thessaloniki).

As the General Secretary of EOT Dimitris Trifonopoulos said "filming trips are organized by EOT and the local offices as part of Greece's national tourism strategy abroad." The shooting of BBC2 concerns the production of the new TV series of the famous British chef and TV presenter Rick Stein "Rick Stein's Long Weekends", which presents the city of Thessaloniki as an ideal urban tourism destination and place of gastronomic and cultural tourism. A similar presentation on Imathia will follow. Other European cities presented are: Copenhagen, Palermo, Bologna, Reykjavik, Berlin, Vienna, etc.

The show has six million viewers worldwide. It targets food lovers who are looking for short vacation ideas in European cities. It focuses on the culinary tradition of Thessaloniki and its neighboring regions, such as Imathia and in particular cultural and historical monuments and sights of these regions.

[03] Greek public debt at 176.3 pct of GDP in Q1

The EU statistics' service said that 137.9 pct of debt was in loans while another 35.1 pct other securities. The Greek debt eased to 309.2 billion euros in the first three months of 2016 from 311.4 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Eurostat said that Greece had the highest public debt in the EU, followed by Italy (135.4 pct) and Portugal (128.9 pct), while Estonia (9.6 pct), Luxembourg (21.8 pct) and Bulgaria (30.3 pct) recorded the lowest public debts. On a quarterly basis, in the EU, the public debt fell to 84.8 pct of GDP from 85.3 pct, while in the Eurozone it rose to 91.7 pct from 90.7 pct.

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