occurrence time of four of these mainshocks with magnitude Mw>=6.4 were identified to within "a narrow range, a few days to around one week or so." These reports are inserted in papers housed in arXiv, and new reports are made and uploaded there. For example, a report preceding the strongest earthquake in Greece during the period 1983-2011, which occurred on February 14, 2008, with magnitude (Mw) 6.9, was publicized in arXiv almost two weeks before, on February 1, 2008. A description of the updated VAN method was collected in a book published by Springer in 2011, titled "Natural Time Analysis: The New View of Time." Natural time analysis also claims that the physical connection of SES activities with earthquakes is as follows: Taking the view that the earthquake occurrence is a phase-change (critical phenomenon), where the new phase is the mainshock occurrence, the above-mentioned variance term κ is the corresponding order parameter. The κ value calculated for a window comprising a number of seismic events comparable to the average number of earthquakes occurring within a few months, fluctuates when the window is sliding through a seismic catalogue. The VAN team claims that these κ fluctuations exhibit a minimum a few months before a mainshock occurrence and in addition this minimum occurs simultaneously with the initiation of the corresponding SES activity, and that this is the first time in the literature that such a simultaneous appearance of two precursory phenomena in independent datasets of different geophysical observables (electrical measurements, seismicity) has been observed. Furthermore, the VAN team claims that their natural time analysis of the seismic catalogue of Japan during the period from January 1, 1984 until the occurrence of the magnitude 9.0 Tohoku earthquake on March 11, 2011, revealed that such clear minima of the κ fluctuations appeared before all major earthquakes with magnitude 7.6 or larger. The deepest of these minima was said to occur on January 5, 2011, i.e., almost two months before the Tohoku earthquake occurrence. Finally, by dividing the Japanese region into small areas, the VAN team states that some small areas show minimum of the κ fluctuations almost simultaneously with the large area covering the whole Japan and such small areas clustered within a few hundred kilometers from the actual epicenter of the impending major earthquake. Criticisms of VAN Historically, the usefulness of the VAN method for prediction of earthquakes had been a matter of