On Wednesday just after 9 in the morning a retired Greek pharmacist committed suicide with a bullet to his head in the Syntagma, the central square in the heart of Athens. He left an unsigned note in which he said his advanced age did not allow him to take dynamic action against the economic austerity being imposed on his country. Dimitris Christoulas also said, "if a Greek picked up a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him". He claimed the stringent economic measures left him without a pension for which he paid, so he wanted to end his life with dignity and not be forced to scavenge from garbage cans for his subsistence. His suicide has caused an outpouring of emotion in Greece. A
note posted to a cypress near where his body lay claimed Dimitris Christoulas death was, "not a suicide but a political assassination". Christoulas died only a day after an Italian woman threw herself off her balcony to her death in Sicily reportedly as protest against her montly pension being cut. Several studies have shown an increase in the rate of suicide in Greece due to the social dislocation caused by the on-going economic crisis. Still, the Greek suicide rate is lower than that of northern European countries. One in five Greeks are unemployed. The prospect that Europe will be able to whether the economic crisis received a blow from the FTSE ("footsie") when stock prices closed down 2.3%, the largest drop in four months, and a disappointing sovereign bond auction was held in Spain. Spain is widely seen by financial analysts as the next European domino to fall.
