Culture: Saint Patrick's day

Saint Patrick's Day: The story behind it

St Patrick  is the patron saint of Ireland (and Nigeria). He was a Briton living during the time when Britain was a colony of the Roman Empire. He grew up in a Christian home and the family lived in Wales. When he was sixteen he was captured by pirates from across the Irish Sea and taken to Ireland. While working as a shepherd, he had a great spiritual experience and decided that he had to serve God in some special way. He returned to his native land and became a priest, travelling to Gaul (France) for some of his studies. Eventually, he returned to Ireland as a missionary.

St. Patrick's work in Ireland transformed the country. The legend says that he drove all the snakes out of Ireland and they all went into the sea and drowned. The snake was a revered pagan symbol, and perhaps this is a metaphor for the fact that he drove paganism out of Ireland. He is said to have converted the country's druids. And he taught people about the mystery of the Trinity by using a shamrock leaf and made the shamrock the symbol of Ireland.

In Ireland, March 17th is a public holiday in celebration of his life and death. It is also a day when most people attend church. Shamrocks are sold on the preceding days and sent along with greeting cards to friends and family abroad. The day is usually regarded in Ireland as announcing the coming of spring. Dances and parties are held. The traditional dish is boiled bacon and cabbage.

The feast day of St. Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, is celebrated all over the world wherever Irish exiles gather. Many wear a shamrock or a little favour showing a golden harp on a bit of green ribbon.

Culture: Tourism

Barcelona cracks down on tourist numbers with accommodation law

The city of Barcelona passed a law on Friday to curb tourism as visitors have begun to overwhelm the cityand anger local residents.

Last year the city’s 1.6 million residents were heavily outnumbered by an estimated 32 million visitors, about half of them day-trippers.

The new law comes after more than 25 years of relentless promotion of the city as a tourist destination, and coincides with a planned “occupation” on Saturday of La Rambla, a street that has come to symbolise what many view as the excessive and unsustainable number of tourists.

The occupation has been organised by the Barcelona Urban Neighbourhood Association, along with more than 40 residents and community associations.

 Mass tourism can kill a city – just ask Barcelona’s residents

Ada Colau

 

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Under the slogan “Barcelona isn’t for sale” the protesters are calling for an end to property speculation, which is pricing residents out of the city, and to low-wage jobs in tourist service industries.

“The tourist and restaurant sector is the worst paid in Barcelona,” says Martí Cusó, a member of one of the community groups, the Neighbourhood Assembly for Sustainable Tourism. “They earn half the average salary.”

The new law, known as the special urban plan for tourist accommodation, seeks to limit the number of beds on offer from hotels and tourist apartments. It imposes a moratorium on building new hotels and a halt in issuing licences for tourist apartments.

However, as a number of projects are already in the pipeline, the plan is not expected to have an impact before 2019.

There are currently 75,000 hotel beds in the city and about 50,000 beds in legal tourist apartments, plus an estimated 50,000 illegal ones. Residents’ associations calculate that some 17,000 flats are now tourist apartments and that the resulting shortage has driven up rents that are now the highest in Spain.

The proposal has met fierce opposition from the tourism industry, which claims the law demonises tourists and says that limiting growth can only hurt an already weak economy in a city where tourism accounts for about 12% of the city’s €72bn (£61bn) GDP, according to figures for 2014.

“The focus of the plan is wrong,” insists Manel Casals, director general of the Barcelona hoteliers association. “Of the 32 million people who visited Barcelona last year, only 8 million stayed in hotels. Twenty-three million were day-trippers who spend very little money in the city. You’re not going to regulate tourism by limiting the number of beds. They’re not regulating tourism, they’re only regulating where people sleep.”

Daniel Pardo, a member of the Neighbourhood Assembly for Sustainable Tourism who describes the group’s negotiations with the city over the plan as “frustrating”, says that while it doesn’t go far enough, it’s a start. “What’s positive is there’s a plan to tackle this problem, however flawed that plan is. No one has even considered doing this until now. Before the only plan was more, more, more.”

In a survey carried out by the city council in October on what residents perceived the city’s biggest problems, tourism was second only to unemployment.

Jordi Ferrer, an economist who specialises in the hotel sector, estimates that the city will face a claim of €400m in compensation for projects paralysed by the moratorium.

Source: The guardian

Culture: The world's most important awards of film and televison

In this segment, you will get to know some culture about cinema and televisión: you will learn a brief history of the world's most important and prestigious awards of the industry: The Academy Awards, the Golden Globes Awards and the Emmy Awards.

The Academy Awards

The Academy Awards, also called the Oscars, is a formal awards ceremony to honor the best achievements in filmmaking from the previous year. The Academy Awards, from the nomination and voting processes to the ceremony itself, are overseen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Academy has about 6,000 members and is a professional honorary society of people involved in all aspects of making movies.

One of the more prestigious award ceremonies in the world, The Academy Awards ceremony is televised in over 100 countries. Those who love cinema tune in to see how their favorite movies and performers fare. Those who love fashion watch to see what the celebrities are wearing — which is often the latest in couture with astronomically expensive jewelry.

Culture

SPORT AND EXTREMISM

When I ask Tom Flachett, founder of the Brussels Boxing Academy, how many of his former students have travelled to Syria to join Isis, he gets a little exasperated.

“They always ask the number,” he says, referring, I assume, to journalists. He picks up a book of pictures of academy alumni and points to someone in a group photo. “This guy is there now, he’s very young, you see?”

The main aim of Flachett’s club, set up in 2003, has always been to reach out to youngsters in some of Brussels’ poorest neighbourhoods, including Molenbeek, a small district in the north of Brussels. Boxing is a popular sport among this demographic, and it’s easy to organise and motivating for people with little else in their lives. Plus, having built up a relationship over years, many students turn to their trainers when they’re in trouble.

Brussels has been in the spotlight as a hotbed for terrorism since the Paris and Brussels attacks in late 2015 and early 2016, which involved terrorists from Molenbeek. At least 47 people have left Molenbeek for Syria since 2011. In September of this year, the Brussels security services announced that it had deemed 57 residents of the district radicalised and put them under surveillance.

Healing rifts

Molenbeek is one of 19 municipalities in a city that has 19 mayors and six different police forces. These factions have a reputation for failing to collaborate. Belgium lacks a national framework for preventing radicalisation, so responsibility falls mostly on local authorities to draw up plans. But the approach of former Molenbeek mayor Philippe Moureaux, who presided over the district for 18 years until 2012, was laissez-faire, to say the least.

Thanksgiving Day at School

What is Thanksgiving?

The Puritans were a group of English Protestants emerging around the mid-16thcentury who sought “to purify” the Church of England (Anglican Church) from the influence of the Catholic Church. They were persecuted by different English monarchies for criticizing the religious corruption of the Church of England. When King James I established that it was a crime not to belong to the Church of England, a group of Separatists fled from England to Holland in 1607. Later, they came to America aboard the Mayflower and founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620. This particular group of Separatists are also known as “Pilgrims” or “Pilgrim Fathers".

After signing the Compact, the Mayflower passengers explored the Cape Cod area and decided to settle down in a location they named Plymouth after the harbour in England from where they left. The historic landing took place on December 21, 1620. During the first year the Pilgrims went through all kinds of problems. The diseases, the lack of food, and the harsh winter conditions killed many of them. The Wampanoag Indians teach the Pilgrims good fishing spots and farming techniques which they soon begin to employ.

In the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest inviting the Wampanoag tribe to three days of feasting. The President of the United States, George Washington proclaimed “Thanksgiving Day” a nationwide holiday on November 26, 1789. Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States “the fourth Thursday of November” to honour the memory of the Pilgrims.

Culture

Three Headaches for the Recycling Industry

The most advanced recycling operations in the world divert 75 percent or more of community waste away from landfills. In their efforts to achieve 100 percent recycling, or so-called Zero Waste, three products have proved particularly stubborn:

Diapers

The trouble is twofold: Diapers tend to be made of composite materials, including more than one type of plastic, and there is, of course, the organic waste.

Gary Liss, a recycling consultant in Northern California who sits on the board of several nonprofit recycling groups, including Zero Waste USA, said he knew of one model for recycling diapers, still in the trial stage in Santa Clarita, Calif., that involves separate curbside pickup for used diapers and then the pulling apart and cleaning of the constituent parts. But it’s expensive, Mr. Liss said, and economics are a big part of any recycling equation.

One way to pay for an approach like this would be for diaper manufacturers to include in the diaper’s sales price the cost of picking up used diapers and peeling them apart. But that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

Mr. Liss said the diaper problem might get worse before it gets better. The reason: baby boomers. “It’s going to be an increasing amount of material as we use adult diapers,” he said. “We’re all headed that way.”

Plastic Bags

They are inexpensive and great for lugging light loads. But they are a nightmare for recycling plants, because they are so diaphanous that they float and cling and wrap and gum up multimillion-dollar machinery.They’re such a problem at Recology, an advanced recycling operation in San Francisco, that it used to shut down twice a day so that workers with box knives could cut the plastic bags out of the spinning discs that help separate paper from cans and bottles.

In 2012, San Francisco banned plastic bags at retail stores, but they still show up at the recycling plant and force workers to do regular cleanings — “like clearing your lungs,” said Robert Reed, Recology’s spokesman.

A growing number of cities require retailers to charge for bags at checkout, discouraging their use. And Patty Moore, president of Moore Recycling Associates, in Sonoma, Calif., which does recycling consulting and research, says there are roughly 18,000 plastic-bag drop-off sites in the United States, many of them at grocery stores.

From there, the bags — and other plastic “film,” like the plastic used to wrap toilet paper or paper towel rolls — are shipped to recyclers. The material is made into new bags or used for composite decking or other plastic products. (Bags are not alone among the plastic products that present recycling challenges; packing foam peanuts, for example, are also problematic.)

Juice Boxes

They are a perfect example of composites, a vexing category for recyclers that includes a wide range of items, like furniture or consumer packaging that binds different materials together, such as plastics and metal and paper fibers. See, too: diapers. (The juice-box industry says a typical non refrigerated carton, as it’s called, includes 74 percent paper, 22 percent polyethylene and 4 percent aluminum.) Those layers help preserve drinks, but also make the boxes extremely difficult to pull apart.

And to recycle, you must first sort. “It’s like separating an egg yolk from an egg,” Mr. Liss said of the composites problem. “It’s much easier to do before you stir it up.”

One possible solution is to create packaging that allows the materials to be more easily separated. Mr. Liss said an industry recycling group, The Carton Council, had been created to address the problem by developing additional sorting equipment. “The good news is that the industry is trying to figure it out,” Mr. Liss said. “They saw the problem, and they’re stepping up to address it.”

Source: The New York Times