past (until 1989) they could afford up to 17. The VAN team claimed that they were able to predict earthquakes of magnitude larger than 5, with an uncertainty of 0.7 units of magnitude, within a radius of 100 km, and in time window ranging from several hours to a few weeks. Several papers confirmed this success rate, leading to statistically significant conclusion. For example, there were eight M ≥ 5.5 earthquakes in Greece from January 1, 1984 through September 10, 1995, and the VAN network forecast six of these. The VAN method has also been used in Japan, but in early attempts success comparable to that achieved in Greece was "difficult" to attain. A preliminary investigation of seismic electric signals in France led to encouraging results. Earthquake prediction using "natural time" analysis Since 2001 the VAN team has attempted to improve the accuracy of the estimation of the time of the forthcoming earthquake. To that end, they introduced the concept of natural time, a time series analysis technique which puts weight on a process based on the ordering of events. Two terms characterize each event, the "natural time" , and the energy . is defined as , where k is an integer (the -th event) and is the total number of events in the time sequence of data. A related term, , is the ratio , which describes the fractional energy released. They introduce a critical term , the "variance in natural time", which puts extra weight on the energy term : where and Their current method deems SES valid when = 0.070. Once the SES are deemed valid, a second analysis is started in which the subsequent seismic (rather than electric) events are noted, and the region is divided up as a Venn diagram with at least two seismic events per overlapping rectangle. When the distribution of for the rectangular regions has its maximum at = 0.070, a critical seismic event is imminent, i.e. it will occur in a few days to one week or so, and a report is issued. Results The VAN team claim that out of seven mainshocks with magnitude Mw>=6.0 from 2001 through 2010 in the region of latitude N 36° to N 41° and longitude E 19° to E 27°, all but one could be classified with relevant SES activity identified and reported in advance through natural time analysis. Additionally, they assert that the