Thursday, November 13, 2008 Printer Friendly Version
Despite BRT, commuters suffer and smile in public buses
By John Ameh
JUST when Nigerians started thinking that the Abami Eda, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, evergreen track, Shuffering and Shmiling is losing its steam, a vintage forty-four sitting, ninety-nine standing molue situation surfaces in the nation's capital, Abuja.
File
Passengers inside a crowded Abuja Urban Mass Transport.
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The forlorn look on the commuters' faces and the thick sweat dripping down their bodies seem to summarise their story- it's not a jolly good ride! The number standing, stamping at each other's feet and clutching the aluminum rail attached to the vehicle's roof, far outweighs the number sitting.
On their way to the city centre daily, they face this accustomed experience, which is regularly replayed during the scary evening "rush hour."
That is what most commuters (civil servants, private sector workers, traders, artisans and others) using the Abuja Urban Mass Transport buses face in their daily struggles to place food on their tables.
In Abuja? One would probably wonder because such scenario is typical Lagos situation where 'molue' buses dictate the pace of city transportation.
Incidentally, the bus scheme, a replica of Bus Rapid Transit, was launched for Abuja, a better-planned city, in 2006 to provide a decent method of transporting commuters to and fro the city centre from satellite communities.
But, gradually, the Lagos scenario has caught up with Abuja in less than three years of having the buses in operation. The buses are not only overloaded, but there is also the ugly scrambling to catch a place to hang at the loading points!
The Federal Capital Territory has a population of 1.4 million, according to the 2006 census, the majority of whom look up to Abuja daily to earn a living.
On the average, commuters pay between N60 and N100 per drop from the satellite towns to the city centre in privately-run small buses, depending on the distance.
Privately-run cabs (otherwise known as 'drop' or 'Kabukabu') charge even higher. The third category of players in the transportation business is the car hire or charter services provided for the affluent by the Abuja Leasing Company. The famous Abuja Green Taxi Scheme is still neither here not there.
But, with its ticket price of N50 per drop, the Abuja Urban Mass buses are arguably commuters' first choice; yet the relief that comes with the lower cost is frittered away by the harrowing experience they go through every day.
Mrs. Angela Onu, a civil servant and mother of four, who lives in Nyanya, says that government has a lot of work to do to make the bus scheme a success. She recounts her experience, "Which one do I begin with? Is it that the buses are few or that they don't come on time?
"Everyday, people wait for hours and they don't get to ride in the buses because when they become fed up, they opt for other vehicles. When a bus comes at all, it is already overloaded; of course, you do not blame people when they scramble for a particular bus because another one may not come on time."
Mr. Francis Audu, a construction worker, says that the evening rush hours are the "worse times."
"On some days, they may bring only three buses, which at most have about 207 combined sitting capacity. Meanwhile, there may be between 1,000 and 2,000 people waiting to be conveyed to a particular location, say Kubwa."
"What do we do? It becomes the survival of the fittest; that is why you see many buses overloaded and yet many commuters still want to stand just to get home", he explains.
Overloading has its consequences; a common one involving the urban mass buses is the loss of control by drivers, resulting in accidents.
"These drivers love to speed on the smooth Abuja roads; but when driving a bus that is loaded with about 150 people as against the prescribed 69, there is little a driver can do to stop an accident.
"I remember that a particular bus somersaulted at the sharp bend along the Aya-Nyanya Expressway early this year, after the driver lost control, leaving many passengers injured," another regular commuter, Olufe Daniels, tells this reporter.
A driver, who gives his first name as Emma, however, blames "most of the wahala we face" on passengers' alleged impatience.
"A lot of them are just stubborn; if you tell them to be patient and wait for the next bus, they shout at you," he claims.
By their designated route policy, the buses are expected to commute passengers to their destinations on time. For instance, a bus assigned to Karimu is expected to convey commuters to and fro Abuja from the satellite town, without branching elsewhere; by so doing, the passengers will arrive early.This has not worked as intended; the buses are very slow, arriving late and most times, they are forced to stop at points not included in their original schedules.
According to an Abuja-based transportation analyst, Dr. Godwin Okpobla, the Abuja bus scheme is facing difficulties largely because the authorities did not provide designated lanes for them.
"This was envisaged to be a kind of BRT; so, we should have special lanes for them to facilitate easy movement and efficient service delivery. But, what do we find here? These big buses are competing with cars and other smaller vehicles in the same chaotic Abuja traffic.
"The least we can have is to create special lanes for them at some points, even if they have to use the general lanes along the line", Okpobla advises.
Studies have shown that in countries with the "ideal" BRT in place, buses are completely separated from general traffic lanes.
In New Zealand for instance, the Auckland Northern Busway, is segregated from other traffic to enhance service delivery and save time.
One study argues that "in order for BRT to have greatest effect, it must have its own right-of-way, requiring space and often construction costs.
"A regular bus service would share the road with cars; a BRT service operating in mixed traffic would be subject to the same congestion, delays, and jarring and swaying rides as do ordinary city buses.
"Furthermore, signal priority systems, which are often the sole factor differentiating BRT from regular limited-stop bus service might cause severe disruptions to traffic flow on major cross streets."
However, in New Delhi, which launched its BRT in April 2008, segregated lanes for buses have only compounded the traffic problem, especially at intersections.
Officials at the Abuja Urban Mass Transport Company in the FCT, the operators of the buses, deny that inadequate number of buses is a major factor working against the progress of the system.
"We are talking of hundreds of buses, and more are coming; people have to appreciate that it takes a lot of time and re-strategising for us to get to where we want to be. There are times when you find empty buses driving about without passengers.
"During rush hours in the mornings and in the evenings, while some buses going to a particular direction are overloaded, those returning in the opposite direction are empty.
"People are just impatient; when you set rules, they prefer to break them than let them work", one official at the Maitama headquarters of the company, tells this reporter.
All attempts to get the Acting Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of AUMTCO, Abdulrazak Oniyigi, to comment on the issue failed as two visits to the premises of the organisation yielded no results.
During the first visit, which was in the morning of Monday, November 10, a member of staff on duty at his office said that the MD/CEO was out of Abuja to Lagos, but added that he was already on his way back.
"Come back in the afternoon; he has already sent for someone to come to the airport and pick him", the officer said.
When the reporter called back in the afternoon, Oniyigi was in the office, but directed the officer to take the reporter to his "second in command," Mr. Ajom.
"But, you cannot even see Ajom because he is very busy; he is in a meeting discussing the ongoing interview for fresh applicants", the staff stated.
On his part, the Public Relations Officer of the FCT, Mr. Suleiman Hazat, directed the reporter to the same Oniyigi and a certain Secretary, Transportation, who could also not be reached.
Findings, however, show that AUMTCO and some banks as well as mobile telecommunications service providers are partnering to improve the services of the buses.
As they wait for that partnership to transform to reality, Abuja commuters are "suffering and smiling", to quote one of the lines of a popular track by the late Fela.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Gaza Blackouts
Blackouts in Gaza after Israel cuts fuel
By AP AND JPOST.COM STAFF
Gaza residents were experiencing sporadic electricity blackouts, and Palestinian officials were blaming Israel for cutting off fuel shipments to their power plant.
Palestinians use a propane light in a restaurant after the electricity was cut in Gaza City [archive].
Photo: AP [file]
SLIDESHOW: Pictures of the week
The IDF military administration in Gaza spokesman Peter Lerner said the Palestinians warned their Gaza City electricity plant would run out of fuel Monday if shipments aren't resumed. He said the shipments were stopped last Wednesday because of Palestinian rocket attacks.
The Defense Ministry said Sunday no decision has been made about renewing the fuel supplies.
The Gaza City plant provides about a quarter of Gaza's electricity. Most of the rest comes directly over lines from Israel. Egypt also provides a small amount.
The fuel cuts came as a response a recent renewal in rocket fire. Five Kassam rockets were fired at at western Negev neighborhoods on Sunday, landing in the Sderot, Eshkol and Sha'ar Hanegev regions. No one was wounded and no damage was reported.
One of the Kassams landed near a kibbutz reservoir, while a second hit the fence surrounding another western Negev kibbutz. The other rockets hit open areas.
The Islamic Jihad's armed wing claimed responsibility for the attacks.
By AP AND JPOST.COM STAFF
Gaza residents were experiencing sporadic electricity blackouts, and Palestinian officials were blaming Israel for cutting off fuel shipments to their power plant.
Palestinians use a propane light in a restaurant after the electricity was cut in Gaza City [archive].
Photo: AP [file]
SLIDESHOW: Pictures of the week
The IDF military administration in Gaza spokesman Peter Lerner said the Palestinians warned their Gaza City electricity plant would run out of fuel Monday if shipments aren't resumed. He said the shipments were stopped last Wednesday because of Palestinian rocket attacks.
The Defense Ministry said Sunday no decision has been made about renewing the fuel supplies.
The Gaza City plant provides about a quarter of Gaza's electricity. Most of the rest comes directly over lines from Israel. Egypt also provides a small amount.
The fuel cuts came as a response a recent renewal in rocket fire. Five Kassam rockets were fired at at western Negev neighborhoods on Sunday, landing in the Sderot, Eshkol and Sha'ar Hanegev regions. No one was wounded and no damage was reported.
One of the Kassams landed near a kibbutz reservoir, while a second hit the fence surrounding another western Negev kibbutz. The other rockets hit open areas.
The Islamic Jihad's armed wing claimed responsibility for the attacks.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Argentinian Soccer
What Does Maradona Mean for Argentina?
By DANIEL ALTMAN
TAGS: ARGENTINA, MARADONA
The enduring affection in Argentina for Diego Maradona dates back to the 1986 World Cup triumph. (Getty Images)
Maradona was in Beijing last summer to support the Argentina Olympic soccer team, who went on to win the gold medal for the second straight time. (Getty Images)
Lobby for something long enough, and you just might get it. For years, Diego Maradona said what an honor it would be to coach Argentina’s national team, going so far as to present the position as the logical capstone to his career in soccer. Few Argentines thought the opportunity would arrive so soon.
Though a genius on the pitch – he still shows off his skills in a made-for-television five-a-side league that pits famous veterans of South American national squads against each other – Maradona has little experience as a coach. In his only stint with a major team, he led Racing Club to a record of two wins, three losses and six draws before abandoning the post.
Yet even more worrying to some Argentines is Maradona’s roller-coaster lifestyle, punctuated by frequent medical problems and political pronouncements. If he is indeed confirmed as coach of the national team, in Argentina the decision will seem both controversial and inevitable. Here is what some participants in my weekly pick-up game in Buenos Aires had to say about his potential selection:
“I love Diego, and without having experienced Diego I wouldn’t love the national team as much. But, come on man…”
“Why lie? I knew he wasn’t prepared, that out of 23 matches as a coach he won three, that anyone else would have been better, except Simeone… I don’t care about the result, I believe that the greatest creator of magic should have an opportunity.”
“If you want to give him an opportunity, start him with the under-17s and then move him up.”
“He did a noble and honest job when he was a player. His work as coach will come from the gut, not from the head, and maybe that will be good for the team.”
“Well now, what is the transitive property that means a good player has to be a good coach?”
“Yes, we Argentines have a great confusion with past ‘glory’ (Perón! Perón!).”
“Actually I’d rather see Maradona as president than as coach.”
“Enough beatifying Maradona. My mother is the person I love the most in the world, but that’s no reason to make her coach of the national team or president of the republic.”
“If it goes badly for Maradona, we will have entered – as a society – a dilemma which, if not insoluble, will at least be an intolerable stigma for a long time. How can you hate the one you love?”
“I have officially lost all hope that someday Argentina will be a better country than Uganda. If people who drank milk every day before they were one year old think this way, we’re really in for it.”
“I just bought the Trinidad and Tobago jersey! Come on, Trinidad, we’re going to the World Cup!”
The discussion then broke down into an argument about whether soccer was the most forceful embodiment of all society’s awfulness, or whether it was a game in which 22 people kicked a ball around.
By DANIEL ALTMAN
TAGS: ARGENTINA, MARADONA
The enduring affection in Argentina for Diego Maradona dates back to the 1986 World Cup triumph. (Getty Images)
Maradona was in Beijing last summer to support the Argentina Olympic soccer team, who went on to win the gold medal for the second straight time. (Getty Images)
Lobby for something long enough, and you just might get it. For years, Diego Maradona said what an honor it would be to coach Argentina’s national team, going so far as to present the position as the logical capstone to his career in soccer. Few Argentines thought the opportunity would arrive so soon.
Though a genius on the pitch – he still shows off his skills in a made-for-television five-a-side league that pits famous veterans of South American national squads against each other – Maradona has little experience as a coach. In his only stint with a major team, he led Racing Club to a record of two wins, three losses and six draws before abandoning the post.
Yet even more worrying to some Argentines is Maradona’s roller-coaster lifestyle, punctuated by frequent medical problems and political pronouncements. If he is indeed confirmed as coach of the national team, in Argentina the decision will seem both controversial and inevitable. Here is what some participants in my weekly pick-up game in Buenos Aires had to say about his potential selection:
“I love Diego, and without having experienced Diego I wouldn’t love the national team as much. But, come on man…”
“Why lie? I knew he wasn’t prepared, that out of 23 matches as a coach he won three, that anyone else would have been better, except Simeone… I don’t care about the result, I believe that the greatest creator of magic should have an opportunity.”
“If you want to give him an opportunity, start him with the under-17s and then move him up.”
“He did a noble and honest job when he was a player. His work as coach will come from the gut, not from the head, and maybe that will be good for the team.”
“Well now, what is the transitive property that means a good player has to be a good coach?”
“Yes, we Argentines have a great confusion with past ‘glory’ (Perón! Perón!).”
“Actually I’d rather see Maradona as president than as coach.”
“Enough beatifying Maradona. My mother is the person I love the most in the world, but that’s no reason to make her coach of the national team or president of the republic.”
“If it goes badly for Maradona, we will have entered – as a society – a dilemma which, if not insoluble, will at least be an intolerable stigma for a long time. How can you hate the one you love?”
“I have officially lost all hope that someday Argentina will be a better country than Uganda. If people who drank milk every day before they were one year old think this way, we’re really in for it.”
“I just bought the Trinidad and Tobago jersey! Come on, Trinidad, we’re going to the World Cup!”
The discussion then broke down into an argument about whether soccer was the most forceful embodiment of all society’s awfulness, or whether it was a game in which 22 people kicked a ball around.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Piano Music Flourishes in Nicaragua
International Piano Contest Kicks Off Monday
By Elizabeth Goodwin
Tico Times Staff | editorial@ticotimes.net
They'll Be the Judges: Fany Solter, top, and Baruch Meir, bottom, are among the premier international pianists on the judges' panel of the María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition.
Photos courtesy of María Clara Vargas
About 50 young pianists from all over Latin America will arrive in San José this week to compete in the fifth annual María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition. The musicians will face a prestigious group of judges as they compete in one of two levels in two rounds.
The intermediate-level competition, for pianists 14 to 20 years old, begins Oct. 20, while the superior level, for pianists up to 27, holds its first round the following day. The finals for each round are set for Oct. 22 and 23. On Oct. 25 at 7 p.m., the winners will hold a concert at the National Auditorium in San José's Children's Museum.
All participants must play some pieces by Costa Rican composers, including “Forest Echoes” by Juan de Dios Páez (1878-1937), and “Tlanéhuatl” by Alejandro Cardona.
The competition's judges consist of premier international musicians with an interest in the next generation of pianists, including Maria Asteriadou of Greece, Brazilian-born Fany Solter, Israeli Baruch Meir and Brian Ganz of the United States.
The competition is named after María Clara Cullell, a Costa Rican pianist who has worked to spread her music and knowledge of music throughout the world. An association in her name, together with the University of Costa Rica and the National University's schools of music, funds the competition.
–Elizabeth Goodwin
By Elizabeth Goodwin
Tico Times Staff | editorial@ticotimes.net
They'll Be the Judges: Fany Solter, top, and Baruch Meir, bottom, are among the premier international pianists on the judges' panel of the María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition.
Photos courtesy of María Clara Vargas
About 50 young pianists from all over Latin America will arrive in San José this week to compete in the fifth annual María Clara Cullell International Piano Competition. The musicians will face a prestigious group of judges as they compete in one of two levels in two rounds.
The intermediate-level competition, for pianists 14 to 20 years old, begins Oct. 20, while the superior level, for pianists up to 27, holds its first round the following day. The finals for each round are set for Oct. 22 and 23. On Oct. 25 at 7 p.m., the winners will hold a concert at the National Auditorium in San José's Children's Museum.
All participants must play some pieces by Costa Rican composers, including “Forest Echoes” by Juan de Dios Páez (1878-1937), and “Tlanéhuatl” by Alejandro Cardona.
The competition's judges consist of premier international musicians with an interest in the next generation of pianists, including Maria Asteriadou of Greece, Brazilian-born Fany Solter, Israeli Baruch Meir and Brian Ganz of the United States.
The competition is named after María Clara Cullell, a Costa Rican pianist who has worked to spread her music and knowledge of music throughout the world. An association in her name, together with the University of Costa Rica and the National University's schools of music, funds the competition.
–Elizabeth Goodwin
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Belfast Regains Its Voice
(New York Times)
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Published: October 19, 2008
THE Friday night session was just getting started on the second floor of Maddens, a dimly lighted pub in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast. Six musicians — a young woman fiddle player; a pony-tailed, grizzled uilleann piper; a pair of guitarists; a tin-whistler; and a bodhran, or Irish tambourine, player — sat in a circle jamming, gazing at one another, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. The music had an improvisational feel to it — sprightly and hypnotic, the vigorous melody of the fiddles skittering above the sweet, mellow tones of the bagpipes.
Midway through the set, I heard an unfamiliar language being spoken and turned to face a bearded, stringy-haired young man clad in baggy sweatshirt and jeans sitting beside me at the bar. He introduced himself as Caomhin (pronounced KEE-vin) Mac Giolla Caehain, a fiddler and devotee of Gaelic, which, like Irish folk music, has been enjoying a revival in Belfast the last few years.
Many of the people in the room, Caomhin (the name means gentle offspring) told me, were regulars — traditionalists who showed up at Maddens on Friday nights to pay homage to both the ancient language and Ireland’s rich musical heritage. “This is the real thing,” Mr. Mac Giolla Caehain said of the music.
Some 10 years after the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Belfast is in the midst of a transformation. A wave of investment — mostly from other parts of Britain — has turned this once war-torn, economically depressed city into one of Europe’s liveliest towns.
Hotels, clubs and restaurants seem to be springing up in every neighborhood; a new riverside promenade winds past acres of commercial and residential development to a giant entertainment complex in the making, the Titanic Quarter, named for the doomed luxury liner built in Belfast’s now-moribund shipyards in 1911. But perhaps nowhere is the peace dividend more pronounced than in the revival of the city’s music scene. Back in the 1960s, before the outbreak of the Troubles, Belfast was one of Europe’s most musical cities. Van Morrison, born in East Belfast, got his start playing folk tunes at a sailor’s hostel called the Maritime Hotel. (From there he landed a recording contract with Decca Records in London, and a career was born.) The city has also nurtured performers like Derek Bell and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and Henry McCullough, who started a folk band called Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s, later joined Joe Cocker’s band and then became the lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings.
“When I grew up in the ’60s there were 80 clubs in and around Belfast where bands could go and play. And that went down to one,” said Terri Hooley, a Belfast impresario who brought the Clash to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles in 1977. (After fighting broke out between fired-up fans of the Clash and the police and British soldiers — a riot that became known as the Battle of Bedford Street — the promoters canceled the concert at Ulster Hall two hours before it was scheduled to begin.)
Now, however, there are at least 40 clubs around the city, including a dozen where Irish musicians go back to their roots — playing the traditional folk tunes that have formed the backdrop of Irish life for centuries. “You can hear ‘trad’ every night of the week these days,” Mr. Hooley told me.
Debate abounds about how far back the origins of traditional Irish music go; some of the songs played in the pubs of Belfast, I was told, date back more than 1,000 years, passed down from generation to generation. And it was only in the last couple of centuries that the music was written down and collected. Bands or small ensembles have probably been a part of Irish music since the early 19th century, when instruments like the fiddle and the uilleann pipes were pulled out for Irish dancing — reels, hornpipes and jigs — at weddings and saints’ days. These days perhaps the greatest display of Irish traditional music in the world takes place at the annual Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann festival, which begins with a series of competitions at the village and county level, and attracts as many as 20,000 participants.
I recently spent five nights in Belfast, venturing out every evening to sample the flowering trad scene. I started my tour on a Monday night, the slowest of the week, at a bar called Fibber Magee, around the corner from Belfast’s City Hall. It was a touristy place where a duet called Finnegans Wake played familiar Irish tunes to a crowd almost exclusively made up of Americans, Canadians and Britons.
But it didn’t take long before I found my way to more authentic hangouts — pubs frequented by, among others, former paramilitary fighters from both sides of the sectarian divide. Nearly all of these establishments can be found in the Cathedral Quarter, a slum only five years ago but now the epicenter of Belfast’s cultural and architectural renaissance. In most of them, the musicians gather once or twice a week for sessions — relaxed, informal gatherings at which the music is played as much for the benefit of the artists as for that of the audience.
On Tuesday night, a fairly quiet one in Belfast, I left my hotel and wandered past a boisterous group spilling out the door of the Spaniard, one of Cathedral’s oldest taverns. Then I turned down a narrow street lined with darkened office buildings and came upon a small, unobtrusive pub called the John Hewitt.
Opened nine years ago by the nonprofit Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, whose managers hoped to bridge the city’s sectarian divide, the John Hewitt (named for a Belfast poet) stands blocks from a no man’s land once ruled by paramilitary gangs. The neighborhood is still dicey: across the street stands a burned-out office block.
When I arrived at the Hewitt, a trad quartet — fiddler, guitarist, drummer and uilleann piper — had just started its evening session. I met John McSherry, one of Northern Ireland’s best known players of the uilleann pipe — the Irish national bagpipe — who tours with a band called At First Light.
“There’s been a lot more vibrancy to the Belfast scene nowadays, and it just keeps getting livelier,” Mr. McSherry told me during a cigarette break in the street. He sat in a chair on the stage, wedged the uilleann pipe bellows beneath his right elbow, manipulating it to keep air flowing into the pipe bag. With his fingers dancing lightly over a series of holes on the stemlike chanter, he produced a haunting, vibratory sound with high-pitched, reedy notes skipping over a low monotone.
The Hewitt occasionally sponsors contemporary art exhibitions in tandem with the weekly sessions, and on this Tuesday evening the walls were covered with stark surrealistic paintings — prisoners squeezed into concrete cells, courtyards overlooked by watchtowers. The works were done by Raymond Watson, a former Irish Republican Army man who served eight years at Maze Prison outside Belfast. As it happened, Mr. Watson was at the pub that night. As the session players kicked off into a lively reel, he invited me to sit down at a round table packed with Hewitt regulars: poets and politicians, Protestant and Catholic ex-fighters, artists and ex-Communists, aging hippies and a few business types.
By JOSHUA HAMMER
Published: October 19, 2008
THE Friday night session was just getting started on the second floor of Maddens, a dimly lighted pub in the Cathedral Quarter of Belfast. Six musicians — a young woman fiddle player; a pony-tailed, grizzled uilleann piper; a pair of guitarists; a tin-whistler; and a bodhran, or Irish tambourine, player — sat in a circle jamming, gazing at one another, seemingly oblivious to the crowd. The music had an improvisational feel to it — sprightly and hypnotic, the vigorous melody of the fiddles skittering above the sweet, mellow tones of the bagpipes.
Midway through the set, I heard an unfamiliar language being spoken and turned to face a bearded, stringy-haired young man clad in baggy sweatshirt and jeans sitting beside me at the bar. He introduced himself as Caomhin (pronounced KEE-vin) Mac Giolla Caehain, a fiddler and devotee of Gaelic, which, like Irish folk music, has been enjoying a revival in Belfast the last few years.
Many of the people in the room, Caomhin (the name means gentle offspring) told me, were regulars — traditionalists who showed up at Maddens on Friday nights to pay homage to both the ancient language and Ireland’s rich musical heritage. “This is the real thing,” Mr. Mac Giolla Caehain said of the music.
Some 10 years after the Northern Ireland peace agreement, Belfast is in the midst of a transformation. A wave of investment — mostly from other parts of Britain — has turned this once war-torn, economically depressed city into one of Europe’s liveliest towns.
Hotels, clubs and restaurants seem to be springing up in every neighborhood; a new riverside promenade winds past acres of commercial and residential development to a giant entertainment complex in the making, the Titanic Quarter, named for the doomed luxury liner built in Belfast’s now-moribund shipyards in 1911. But perhaps nowhere is the peace dividend more pronounced than in the revival of the city’s music scene. Back in the 1960s, before the outbreak of the Troubles, Belfast was one of Europe’s most musical cities. Van Morrison, born in East Belfast, got his start playing folk tunes at a sailor’s hostel called the Maritime Hotel. (From there he landed a recording contract with Decca Records in London, and a career was born.) The city has also nurtured performers like Derek Bell and Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains and Henry McCullough, who started a folk band called Sweeney’s Men in the 1960s, later joined Joe Cocker’s band and then became the lead guitarist for Paul McCartney’s Wings.
“When I grew up in the ’60s there were 80 clubs in and around Belfast where bands could go and play. And that went down to one,” said Terri Hooley, a Belfast impresario who brought the Clash to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles in 1977. (After fighting broke out between fired-up fans of the Clash and the police and British soldiers — a riot that became known as the Battle of Bedford Street — the promoters canceled the concert at Ulster Hall two hours before it was scheduled to begin.)
Now, however, there are at least 40 clubs around the city, including a dozen where Irish musicians go back to their roots — playing the traditional folk tunes that have formed the backdrop of Irish life for centuries. “You can hear ‘trad’ every night of the week these days,” Mr. Hooley told me.
Debate abounds about how far back the origins of traditional Irish music go; some of the songs played in the pubs of Belfast, I was told, date back more than 1,000 years, passed down from generation to generation. And it was only in the last couple of centuries that the music was written down and collected. Bands or small ensembles have probably been a part of Irish music since the early 19th century, when instruments like the fiddle and the uilleann pipes were pulled out for Irish dancing — reels, hornpipes and jigs — at weddings and saints’ days. These days perhaps the greatest display of Irish traditional music in the world takes place at the annual Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann festival, which begins with a series of competitions at the village and county level, and attracts as many as 20,000 participants.
I recently spent five nights in Belfast, venturing out every evening to sample the flowering trad scene. I started my tour on a Monday night, the slowest of the week, at a bar called Fibber Magee, around the corner from Belfast’s City Hall. It was a touristy place where a duet called Finnegans Wake played familiar Irish tunes to a crowd almost exclusively made up of Americans, Canadians and Britons.
But it didn’t take long before I found my way to more authentic hangouts — pubs frequented by, among others, former paramilitary fighters from both sides of the sectarian divide. Nearly all of these establishments can be found in the Cathedral Quarter, a slum only five years ago but now the epicenter of Belfast’s cultural and architectural renaissance. In most of them, the musicians gather once or twice a week for sessions — relaxed, informal gatherings at which the music is played as much for the benefit of the artists as for that of the audience.
On Tuesday night, a fairly quiet one in Belfast, I left my hotel and wandered past a boisterous group spilling out the door of the Spaniard, one of Cathedral’s oldest taverns. Then I turned down a narrow street lined with darkened office buildings and came upon a small, unobtrusive pub called the John Hewitt.
Opened nine years ago by the nonprofit Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, whose managers hoped to bridge the city’s sectarian divide, the John Hewitt (named for a Belfast poet) stands blocks from a no man’s land once ruled by paramilitary gangs. The neighborhood is still dicey: across the street stands a burned-out office block.
When I arrived at the Hewitt, a trad quartet — fiddler, guitarist, drummer and uilleann piper — had just started its evening session. I met John McSherry, one of Northern Ireland’s best known players of the uilleann pipe — the Irish national bagpipe — who tours with a band called At First Light.
“There’s been a lot more vibrancy to the Belfast scene nowadays, and it just keeps getting livelier,” Mr. McSherry told me during a cigarette break in the street. He sat in a chair on the stage, wedged the uilleann pipe bellows beneath his right elbow, manipulating it to keep air flowing into the pipe bag. With his fingers dancing lightly over a series of holes on the stemlike chanter, he produced a haunting, vibratory sound with high-pitched, reedy notes skipping over a low monotone.
The Hewitt occasionally sponsors contemporary art exhibitions in tandem with the weekly sessions, and on this Tuesday evening the walls were covered with stark surrealistic paintings — prisoners squeezed into concrete cells, courtyards overlooked by watchtowers. The works were done by Raymond Watson, a former Irish Republican Army man who served eight years at Maze Prison outside Belfast. As it happened, Mr. Watson was at the pub that night. As the session players kicked off into a lively reel, he invited me to sit down at a round table packed with Hewitt regulars: poets and politicians, Protestant and Catholic ex-fighters, artists and ex-Communists, aging hippies and a few business types.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Austria's Banks
Austrian government guarantees safety for all bank savings (10/9/08)
Chanecellor Gusenbauer promised in the course of international financial crises the unlimited safety for savings at Austrian banks. The new law is retroacting valid since 1st October.
If it’s necessary the government holds out a nationalized responsibility for banks as well. Banks which have surplus liquidity should dispose their financial means in a clearing station of the Austrian control bank to help other banks, says financial minister Wilhelm Molterer.
Austrian banks are not in danger, is the conventional wisdom. All those new decisions are just arrangements to guarantee cover and protection. The government has also banned short selling from Austrias stock exchange market.
Faymann and Gusenbauer are trying to calm down Austrias population. “Everything is in control. Our banks are solid. Austria is in a very good situation. Nobody in Austria has to fear about his bank savings”, they say.
Chanecellor Gusenbauer promised in the course of international financial crises the unlimited safety for savings at Austrian banks. The new law is retroacting valid since 1st October.
If it’s necessary the government holds out a nationalized responsibility for banks as well. Banks which have surplus liquidity should dispose their financial means in a clearing station of the Austrian control bank to help other banks, says financial minister Wilhelm Molterer.
Austrian banks are not in danger, is the conventional wisdom. All those new decisions are just arrangements to guarantee cover and protection. The government has also banned short selling from Austrias stock exchange market.
Faymann and Gusenbauer are trying to calm down Austrias population. “Everything is in control. Our banks are solid. Austria is in a very good situation. Nobody in Austria has to fear about his bank savings”, they say.
Friday, October 3, 2008
Russia's Position in the World
Article
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Front page / World / Former USSR
03.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru
Pages: 12
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko conducted negotiations with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on October 2. Tymoshenko arrived in Moscow to discuss the question with the price on natural gas, which Ukraine buys from Russia.
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Experts say that Tymoshenko may take an advantage over her political rivals in Ukraine in the event the problem is solved positively for Kiev.
Tymoshenko’s trip to Moscow was quite an adventure. Her flight on board the presidential jetliner was canceled shortly before the departure. It was said that President Yushchenko supposedly needed to use the plane too for a flight to Lvov. As a result, Tymoshenko had to board a charter plane. Spokespeople for the Ukrainian prime minister in Kiev said that the incident with the plane had been plotted by Yushchenko’s camp.
Putin reminded Tymoshenko during their meeting in the Moscow region that Ukraine was making arms shipments to Georgia.
“It is a great pity that Ukraine considered it possible to deliver arms to the conflict zone,” Interfax quoted Putin as saying. “There could not be a bigger crime committed to the people of Ukraine and Russia than making arms shipments to the conflict zone,” he added after the talks.
“It was impossible to imagine several years ago that Russians and Ukrainians will be fighting each other,” Putin said. The prime minister emphasized that the shipments per se were not that significant since it was a commercial matter. “But there were military systems and people used to kill soldiers – Russian people, which is an alarming signal for us,” Putin stated.
“Has it been done for the sake of the Ukrainian nation? What are the interests of the Ukrainian people there? This is a political intrigue, an irresponsible and harmful crime, the crime, when the Russian and the Ukrainian nations clash,” Putin said.
Yulia Tymoshenko was not so emphatic in her remarks. She stated that all the accusations need to be proved first. “I do not think that the facts will be confirmed,” she said.
Vladimir Putin pointed out that the unstable political situation in Ukraine may eventually question the effectiveness of the signed agreements between Moscow and Kiev. “But I hope that they won’t be revised,” he added.
“Unfortunately, our meeting is taking place under very complicated conditions. It is connected with the uncertainty in the decisions linked with the political situation in Ukraine. One question arises in connection with the agreements that we are discussing today – what is going to happen with them tomorrow?” Putin told Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko stated that Ukraine considers Russia as an absolute strategic partner.
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Front page / World / Former USSR
03.10.2008 Source: Pravda.Ru
Pages: 12
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko conducted negotiations with her Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on October 2. Tymoshenko arrived in Moscow to discuss the question with the price on natural gas, which Ukraine buys from Russia.
Putin to Ukraine: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you
Experts say that Tymoshenko may take an advantage over her political rivals in Ukraine in the event the problem is solved positively for Kiev.
Tymoshenko’s trip to Moscow was quite an adventure. Her flight on board the presidential jetliner was canceled shortly before the departure. It was said that President Yushchenko supposedly needed to use the plane too for a flight to Lvov. As a result, Tymoshenko had to board a charter plane. Spokespeople for the Ukrainian prime minister in Kiev said that the incident with the plane had been plotted by Yushchenko’s camp.
Putin reminded Tymoshenko during their meeting in the Moscow region that Ukraine was making arms shipments to Georgia.
“It is a great pity that Ukraine considered it possible to deliver arms to the conflict zone,” Interfax quoted Putin as saying. “There could not be a bigger crime committed to the people of Ukraine and Russia than making arms shipments to the conflict zone,” he added after the talks.
“It was impossible to imagine several years ago that Russians and Ukrainians will be fighting each other,” Putin said. The prime minister emphasized that the shipments per se were not that significant since it was a commercial matter. “But there were military systems and people used to kill soldiers – Russian people, which is an alarming signal for us,” Putin stated.
“Has it been done for the sake of the Ukrainian nation? What are the interests of the Ukrainian people there? This is a political intrigue, an irresponsible and harmful crime, the crime, when the Russian and the Ukrainian nations clash,” Putin said.
Yulia Tymoshenko was not so emphatic in her remarks. She stated that all the accusations need to be proved first. “I do not think that the facts will be confirmed,” she said.
Vladimir Putin pointed out that the unstable political situation in Ukraine may eventually question the effectiveness of the signed agreements between Moscow and Kiev. “But I hope that they won’t be revised,” he added.
“Unfortunately, our meeting is taking place under very complicated conditions. It is connected with the uncertainty in the decisions linked with the political situation in Ukraine. One question arises in connection with the agreements that we are discussing today – what is going to happen with them tomorrow?” Putin told Tymoshenko.
Tymoshenko stated that Ukraine considers Russia as an absolute strategic partner.
Friday, September 26, 2008
India's Nuclear Program
India open for $80 billion in nuclear business
By ERIKA KINETZ – 8 hours ago
MUMBAI, India (AP) — Indian nuclear energy officials say they would like to do business with GE and other U.S. firms. But if they can't, there's always France and Russia.
Even as a landmark U.S.-India nuclear accord hangs in limbo in the U.S. Congress, the global gates of nuclear trade with India are now open.
Whether or not U.S. companies get the go-ahead to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India, the country's nuclear officials are confident they will get their uranium.
"If a deal with Congress doesn't happen, we will have business with other countries. So simple," said SK Malhotra, a spokesman for India's Department of Atomic Energy.
India reached nuclear trade agreements with Russia and France in January, though the government has held out on implementing them until a U.S. deal goes forward, said Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of India's state-run Nuclear Power Corp. Ltd., which runs all 17 of the nation's nuclear reactors.
The agreement before Congress would overturn three decades of U.S. policy by allowing nuclear trade with India, even though India has not signed a global treaty against the spread of nuclear weapons.
The deal enjoys broad support among leaders of both American political parties but, with other priorities on lawmakers' plates, there's no certainty it will get the nod before Congress adjourns this month ahead of November elections.
What would happen then is unclear.
Meeting Thursday in Washington, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and U.S. President George W. Bush expressed hope that Congress will approve the agreement.
Singh was to go on to France, where he was expected to ink India's nuclear agreement with that country.
American companies worry they could be shut out of the Indian market. General Electric Co. helped build India's first nuclear reactor in the 1960s, and GE would love to rekindle that relationship.
"It's a $30 billion-plus market in India. There's a huge opportunity for a company like GE," said Kishore Jayaraman, regional head of GE operations in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. "We have been pushing for it."
Today, India gets just 3 percent of its energy_about 4,100 megawatts_ from nuclear power. By 2032 the government plans to quadruple total generating capacity, to 700 gigawatts, with nuclear accounting for 63,000 megawatts.
That adds up to about 40 new nuclear reactors, worth some $80 billion, according to Jain.
A key limiting factor on India's nuclear expansion has been access to uranium. Despite an aggressive hunt in basins, thrusts, and folds across the country, known domestic deposits will support only 10,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity.
"All reactors are going to be sourced from foreign vendors and tied to fuel supply agreements," Jain said.
Previously, India was largely unable to buy nuclear fuel and technology from abroad, because of its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its testing of atomic weapons.
On Sept. 6, under heavy lobbying by the United States, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group made a historic exception for India. That opens the door for nuclear sales to India — but, in the U.S. case, Congress must approve.
Jain says Nuclear Power Corp. hopes to finalize contracts with GE, Westinghouse Electric Co., France's Areva group, and Russia's Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corp. to build a first round of eight reactors starting in 2009.
The government, he added, plans to take a 30 percent equity stake in the new reactors, and borrow to raise the rest.
Rosatom is already helping India build two nuclear reactors, under an agreement that predates Russia joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
Areva has been active in pursuing business, with CEO Anne Lauvergeon joining French President Nicolas Sarkozy on his January state visit, according to three Indian officials.
If the deal doesn't go through Congress, said Ron Somers, president of U.S.-India Business Council, "we'll be the only one shut out."
"It's like sitting on our hands watching a football game, not being able to play," he added.
GE has been in close talks with the Indian government, Jayaraman said, but the company cannot, by law, enter into advanced discussions absent a green light from Congress.
"We have not had any detailed discussions," he said.
A lot of Indian companies are also hopeful.
Currently, private companies cannot operate nuclear reactors, but India is separating its civilian and military nuclear programs as part of the U.S.-India nuclear deal. That could pave the way for deeper private sector involvement on the civilian side, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a top official in India's Planning Commission, said in a recent interview.
Jain, of the Nuclear Power Corp., said a raft of companies, including the Tata Group, Reliance Power Ltd., GMR Infrastructure Ltd., GVK Industries Ltd., the Essar Group, and the state-run National Thermal Power Corp. have expressed interest in running nuclear power plants in the future.
Parts suppliers and builders, like Hindustan Construction Co., Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., Larsen &Toubro Ltd., Gammon India Ltd. and Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. could also benefit from India's nuclear build-out.
Deepak Morada, a spokesman for Larsen & Toubro, India's largest builder, said he thinks the capital and manufacturing requirements needed to help 400 million Indians who now live by candlelight switch on the lights, are simply too massive for the government to handle alone.
"We are ready to participate," he said.
By ERIKA KINETZ – 8 hours ago
MUMBAI, India (AP) — Indian nuclear energy officials say they would like to do business with GE and other U.S. firms. But if they can't, there's always France and Russia.
Even as a landmark U.S.-India nuclear accord hangs in limbo in the U.S. Congress, the global gates of nuclear trade with India are now open.
Whether or not U.S. companies get the go-ahead to sell nuclear fuel and technology to India, the country's nuclear officials are confident they will get their uranium.
"If a deal with Congress doesn't happen, we will have business with other countries. So simple," said SK Malhotra, a spokesman for India's Department of Atomic Energy.
India reached nuclear trade agreements with Russia and France in January, though the government has held out on implementing them until a U.S. deal goes forward, said Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of India's state-run Nuclear Power Corp. Ltd., which runs all 17 of the nation's nuclear reactors.
The agreement before Congress would overturn three decades of U.S. policy by allowing nuclear trade with India, even though India has not signed a global treaty against the spread of nuclear weapons.
The deal enjoys broad support among leaders of both American political parties but, with other priorities on lawmakers' plates, there's no certainty it will get the nod before Congress adjourns this month ahead of November elections.
What would happen then is unclear.
Meeting Thursday in Washington, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and U.S. President George W. Bush expressed hope that Congress will approve the agreement.
Singh was to go on to France, where he was expected to ink India's nuclear agreement with that country.
American companies worry they could be shut out of the Indian market. General Electric Co. helped build India's first nuclear reactor in the 1960s, and GE would love to rekindle that relationship.
"It's a $30 billion-plus market in India. There's a huge opportunity for a company like GE," said Kishore Jayaraman, regional head of GE operations in India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. "We have been pushing for it."
Today, India gets just 3 percent of its energy_about 4,100 megawatts_ from nuclear power. By 2032 the government plans to quadruple total generating capacity, to 700 gigawatts, with nuclear accounting for 63,000 megawatts.
That adds up to about 40 new nuclear reactors, worth some $80 billion, according to Jain.
A key limiting factor on India's nuclear expansion has been access to uranium. Despite an aggressive hunt in basins, thrusts, and folds across the country, known domestic deposits will support only 10,000 megawatts of nuclear capacity.
"All reactors are going to be sourced from foreign vendors and tied to fuel supply agreements," Jain said.
Previously, India was largely unable to buy nuclear fuel and technology from abroad, because of its refusal to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and its testing of atomic weapons.
On Sept. 6, under heavy lobbying by the United States, the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group made a historic exception for India. That opens the door for nuclear sales to India — but, in the U.S. case, Congress must approve.
Jain says Nuclear Power Corp. hopes to finalize contracts with GE, Westinghouse Electric Co., France's Areva group, and Russia's Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corp. to build a first round of eight reactors starting in 2009.
The government, he added, plans to take a 30 percent equity stake in the new reactors, and borrow to raise the rest.
Rosatom is already helping India build two nuclear reactors, under an agreement that predates Russia joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
Areva has been active in pursuing business, with CEO Anne Lauvergeon joining French President Nicolas Sarkozy on his January state visit, according to three Indian officials.
If the deal doesn't go through Congress, said Ron Somers, president of U.S.-India Business Council, "we'll be the only one shut out."
"It's like sitting on our hands watching a football game, not being able to play," he added.
GE has been in close talks with the Indian government, Jayaraman said, but the company cannot, by law, enter into advanced discussions absent a green light from Congress.
"We have not had any detailed discussions," he said.
A lot of Indian companies are also hopeful.
Currently, private companies cannot operate nuclear reactors, but India is separating its civilian and military nuclear programs as part of the U.S.-India nuclear deal. That could pave the way for deeper private sector involvement on the civilian side, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, a top official in India's Planning Commission, said in a recent interview.
Jain, of the Nuclear Power Corp., said a raft of companies, including the Tata Group, Reliance Power Ltd., GMR Infrastructure Ltd., GVK Industries Ltd., the Essar Group, and the state-run National Thermal Power Corp. have expressed interest in running nuclear power plants in the future.
Parts suppliers and builders, like Hindustan Construction Co., Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., Larsen &Toubro Ltd., Gammon India Ltd. and Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd. could also benefit from India's nuclear build-out.
Deepak Morada, a spokesman for Larsen & Toubro, India's largest builder, said he thinks the capital and manufacturing requirements needed to help 400 million Indians who now live by candlelight switch on the lights, are simply too massive for the government to handle alone.
"We are ready to participate," he said.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Christmas Traditions in Spain
Christmas traditions in Spain
It is the middle of November, and while walking through the streets of any Spanish town, chances are the scene will be quite the same as it is most everyday. Shop windows will display the typical merchandise, and people will come and go following their regular daily routine, just as they always do. But very soon, changes will begin to happen. The streets will be beautifully lit, store windows will display all kinds of holiday merchandise and curious and interesting gifts, and friends and family will gather in city centers dressed in thick winter coats, hats and scarves, to combat the chilly December nights. In Spain, there will be an extra dose of good spirit felt in the streets, and all of this can only mean one thing, that Christmas is just around the corner.
Spain’s traditions during the Christmas season revolve around many of the same activities as in the rest of the world. Just like anywhere else, families in Spain gather together to enjoy and celebrate. Whatever the case the goal is to enjoy a few moments and share in the spirit of giving, kindness, and goodwill. The elements of this exchange are very similar among all cultures: food, drink, song, dance, the exchanging of gifts, and other acts of generosity. But in Spain, Christmas is also a very unique holiday, with beautiful traditions and customs that reflect the true character of the Spanish people.
One symbol of Christmas that still maintains much importance throughout Spain is the Nativity scene. These scenes occupy plazas in cities and small towns throughout the country, and can also be seen in the doorways and entrances of many Spanish homes, as well in storefront windows, and they can be quite elaborate. In many small towns, during the nights just before Christmas, plazas might even have a live Nativity scene, with actors and actresses playing the parts of Mary and Joseph and the three wise men as well as live animals that are often associated with the birth of Christ, like lambs, sheep, and donkeys.
Also during the days leading up to Christmas, one might hear the voices of children singing in the streets, especially in the villages and small towns of rural Spain, where they still participate in the age old tradition called the "aguinaldo". Even though not as popular in recent times, in years past one could hear children singing Christmas carols in their neighborhoods, outside the homes of their neighbors or next to a Nativity scene. In exchange the neighbors typically give the children a piece of candy or a few coins.
December 22, Christmas Lottery Winners are Announced
On December 22, two important events take place. Students are released from school for their winter vacations, and perhaps more importantly, they announce the winning number of the famous Christmas Lottery in Spain. This lottery, by far the biggest in Spain, is a tradition practiced by many people who long to win the grand prize, which would make them instantly rich. This tradition is deeply embedded in these holidays, dating back to 1763, when Carlos III initiated it. Since then, not one year has passed without it, and it now is the symbolic moment in which Spaniards begin to celebrate the Christmas holidays.
December 24, Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve in Spain, called “Nochebuena”, just like in many parts of the world, is celebrated with two very important traditions, eating an enormous and decadent meal, and going to Christmas mass. There is a wide variety of typical foods one might find on plates across Spain on this night. Each region has its own distinct specialties. Among typical dishes served on Christmas Eve and during the days that follow are roast lamb and suckling pig (typically served in the regions of Castilla León, Castilla la Mancha, and Madrid), foul like turkey or duck (commonly prepared in Andalucía), and an enormous variety of seafood, including shrimp, lobster, crab, and various types of fish like hake, trout, sea bream, sea bass, and salmon (common in many regions, but mostly on the costs). For dessert, there is quite a spread of delicacies, among them are turrón and marzapan, desserts made of honey, egg and almonds that are Arabic in origin, as well as polvorones, a sweet bread kind of like elephant ears, and a variety of nuts and dried fruits. To drink, one must have a glass of cava, the Spanish equivalent of champagne, although the Spanish say that cava is much better. After the meal, many Spaniards get their second wind and go to midnight mass, known as “La misa del Gallo”, or “Rooster Mass”, named such because the Rooster is known as the first to announce the birth of Christ.
December 25, Christmas Day
Christmas day is more or less a continuation of what began the day before. People spend time with their families, they eat another large meal, although not as big as the one the day before, and in many families, children enjoy the gifts that they have received from “Papa Noel”, the Spanish equivalent of Santa Claus. The custom of giving gifts on this date is not as popular as it is in many countries, as Spaniards traditionally wait until Three King’s Day to exchange gifts.
December 28, Day of the Innocents
December 28 marks a day of celebration exclusively Spanish called the Day of the Innocents. Although the roots of this day are bloody, in modern times, the customs practiced on this day are very jovial and fun. The anniversary of the murder of many children committed by Herod in Judea, ironically many laughs are had on this day, especially by the natives. Many foreigners who are in Spain become very confused as absurd or incredible news appears in the papers, municipal governments stage baffling practical jokes on their citizens, and friends and acquaintances cannot be trusted for their word.
December 31, New Year's Eve
Of course, the celebrations that take place on New Year’s Eve, or Nochevieja, in Spain, are quite an impressive spectacle. In all plazas of Spanish cities big and small, one can see a similar scene, and it will undoubtedly include church bells and grapes. When the clock strikes 12, the church bells sound 12 times, and at this moment, all Spaniards eat 12 grapes, one for each toll of the bell. According to tradition, those who eat the grapes will have 12 months of prosperity in the new year. Families and friends stay together for this celebration which marks the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, and in the case of most Spaniards this means a lively celebration will be had until the wee hours of the morning.
January 6, Three King's Day
While most of the world has already begun packing up the Christmas ornaments, throwing out the tree, and finding a place for all of their gifts, Spaniards are continuing the celebration. January 6, Three King’s Day, is the long awaited day in which the three Kings bring their gifts. On January 5, children go to a parade where they see the three kings arrive to their city, and take the opportunity to ask them for gifts. Later, before going to bed, children leave their shoes out in a visible spot in the house or on their balcony, y go to bed hoping that when they wake up they will find gifts left by Mechior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. For breakfast or after lunch, families often have the typical dessert of the day, the “Roscón de los Reyes”, a large ring shaped cake that is decorated with candied fruits, symbolic of the emeralds and rubies that adorned the robes of the three kings. Somewhere inside the cake there is a surprise, and the person to find it will be crowned King or Queen of the house for the remainder of the day.
It is the middle of November, and while walking through the streets of any Spanish town, chances are the scene will be quite the same as it is most everyday. Shop windows will display the typical merchandise, and people will come and go following their regular daily routine, just as they always do. But very soon, changes will begin to happen. The streets will be beautifully lit, store windows will display all kinds of holiday merchandise and curious and interesting gifts, and friends and family will gather in city centers dressed in thick winter coats, hats and scarves, to combat the chilly December nights. In Spain, there will be an extra dose of good spirit felt in the streets, and all of this can only mean one thing, that Christmas is just around the corner.
Spain’s traditions during the Christmas season revolve around many of the same activities as in the rest of the world. Just like anywhere else, families in Spain gather together to enjoy and celebrate. Whatever the case the goal is to enjoy a few moments and share in the spirit of giving, kindness, and goodwill. The elements of this exchange are very similar among all cultures: food, drink, song, dance, the exchanging of gifts, and other acts of generosity. But in Spain, Christmas is also a very unique holiday, with beautiful traditions and customs that reflect the true character of the Spanish people.
One symbol of Christmas that still maintains much importance throughout Spain is the Nativity scene. These scenes occupy plazas in cities and small towns throughout the country, and can also be seen in the doorways and entrances of many Spanish homes, as well in storefront windows, and they can be quite elaborate. In many small towns, during the nights just before Christmas, plazas might even have a live Nativity scene, with actors and actresses playing the parts of Mary and Joseph and the three wise men as well as live animals that are often associated with the birth of Christ, like lambs, sheep, and donkeys.
Also during the days leading up to Christmas, one might hear the voices of children singing in the streets, especially in the villages and small towns of rural Spain, where they still participate in the age old tradition called the "aguinaldo". Even though not as popular in recent times, in years past one could hear children singing Christmas carols in their neighborhoods, outside the homes of their neighbors or next to a Nativity scene. In exchange the neighbors typically give the children a piece of candy or a few coins.
December 22, Christmas Lottery Winners are Announced
On December 22, two important events take place. Students are released from school for their winter vacations, and perhaps more importantly, they announce the winning number of the famous Christmas Lottery in Spain. This lottery, by far the biggest in Spain, is a tradition practiced by many people who long to win the grand prize, which would make them instantly rich. This tradition is deeply embedded in these holidays, dating back to 1763, when Carlos III initiated it. Since then, not one year has passed without it, and it now is the symbolic moment in which Spaniards begin to celebrate the Christmas holidays.
December 24, Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve in Spain, called “Nochebuena”, just like in many parts of the world, is celebrated with two very important traditions, eating an enormous and decadent meal, and going to Christmas mass. There is a wide variety of typical foods one might find on plates across Spain on this night. Each region has its own distinct specialties. Among typical dishes served on Christmas Eve and during the days that follow are roast lamb and suckling pig (typically served in the regions of Castilla León, Castilla la Mancha, and Madrid), foul like turkey or duck (commonly prepared in Andalucía), and an enormous variety of seafood, including shrimp, lobster, crab, and various types of fish like hake, trout, sea bream, sea bass, and salmon (common in many regions, but mostly on the costs). For dessert, there is quite a spread of delicacies, among them are turrón and marzapan, desserts made of honey, egg and almonds that are Arabic in origin, as well as polvorones, a sweet bread kind of like elephant ears, and a variety of nuts and dried fruits. To drink, one must have a glass of cava, the Spanish equivalent of champagne, although the Spanish say that cava is much better. After the meal, many Spaniards get their second wind and go to midnight mass, known as “La misa del Gallo”, or “Rooster Mass”, named such because the Rooster is known as the first to announce the birth of Christ.
December 25, Christmas Day
Christmas day is more or less a continuation of what began the day before. People spend time with their families, they eat another large meal, although not as big as the one the day before, and in many families, children enjoy the gifts that they have received from “Papa Noel”, the Spanish equivalent of Santa Claus. The custom of giving gifts on this date is not as popular as it is in many countries, as Spaniards traditionally wait until Three King’s Day to exchange gifts.
December 28, Day of the Innocents
December 28 marks a day of celebration exclusively Spanish called the Day of the Innocents. Although the roots of this day are bloody, in modern times, the customs practiced on this day are very jovial and fun. The anniversary of the murder of many children committed by Herod in Judea, ironically many laughs are had on this day, especially by the natives. Many foreigners who are in Spain become very confused as absurd or incredible news appears in the papers, municipal governments stage baffling practical jokes on their citizens, and friends and acquaintances cannot be trusted for their word.
December 31, New Year's Eve
Of course, the celebrations that take place on New Year’s Eve, or Nochevieja, in Spain, are quite an impressive spectacle. In all plazas of Spanish cities big and small, one can see a similar scene, and it will undoubtedly include church bells and grapes. When the clock strikes 12, the church bells sound 12 times, and at this moment, all Spaniards eat 12 grapes, one for each toll of the bell. According to tradition, those who eat the grapes will have 12 months of prosperity in the new year. Families and friends stay together for this celebration which marks the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, and in the case of most Spaniards this means a lively celebration will be had until the wee hours of the morning.
January 6, Three King's Day
While most of the world has already begun packing up the Christmas ornaments, throwing out the tree, and finding a place for all of their gifts, Spaniards are continuing the celebration. January 6, Three King’s Day, is the long awaited day in which the three Kings bring their gifts. On January 5, children go to a parade where they see the three kings arrive to their city, and take the opportunity to ask them for gifts. Later, before going to bed, children leave their shoes out in a visible spot in the house or on their balcony, y go to bed hoping that when they wake up they will find gifts left by Mechior, Gaspar, and Balthasar. For breakfast or after lunch, families often have the typical dessert of the day, the “Roscón de los Reyes”, a large ring shaped cake that is decorated with candied fruits, symbolic of the emeralds and rubies that adorned the robes of the three kings. Somewhere inside the cake there is a surprise, and the person to find it will be crowned King or Queen of the house for the remainder of the day.
Friday, September 12, 2008
British Housing Crash 2008
Crash: The housing crisis is just beginning
Iain Macwhirter
Published 05 June 2008 in The New Statesman
79 comments Print version Listen RSS As Britain wakes up to the nightmare of negative equity, we are facing a housing recession far worse than that of the early 1990s. Iain Macwhirter has a warning: don't buy a house now, at any price. Just say no. You have been warned
Kingston Quay in Glasgow is one of the smart dockside developments that were supposed to help regenerate Britain's older industrial cities. The blocks don't look bad, with generous balconies and double-height penthouses. But the truth is that you can hardly give these flats away. A two-bedroom flat, bought for £215,000 in September 2005, recently sold at auction for £79,000; another went for £86,000. Nine others did not sell at all. "Live the dream," said the promotion for these developments; wake up to the nightmare of negative equity.
This story is being replicated in every city in the country as the housing crash gathers momentum. In areas of Manchester and Leeds, and even parts of London, thousands of new-build flats are being offloaded at auction for 30 per cent less than they cost to buy, according to the auctioneers Allsop. The paradox of Britain's slump is that it isn't being led by a sub-prime underclass in run-down areas - although repossessions are rising fast everywhere - but by the "luxury" end of the market. The biggest falls are for the dinky flats bought by urban professionals as "starter homes", or by well-off parents, such as the Blairs, for their children and as pensions. If you have had the misfortune to invest in any of these, look away now, because what follows could seriously damage your wealth.
Let's get the numbers out of the way first. There is no longer a scintilla of doubt that there is a major, national housing correction under way. Nationwide registered a record 2.5 per cent fall in May alone. Analysts such as Morgan Stanley think there could be a 25 per cent decline in two years. The International Monetary Fund estimates that British house prices are overvalued by 30 per cent. A crash is defined as a 20 per cent fall over two years, so fasten your seat belts. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) says a million people face losing their homes over the next 18 months. Northern Rock was the first banking casualty; the buy-to-let flat specialist Bradford & Bingley is the second; others will follow as this second mortgage-related financial shock shreds banking balance sheets and undermines confidence in the financial system.
Even the government accepts that prices will fall by between 5 and 10 per cent this year alone, as the housing minister Caroline Flint's see-through cabinet briefing papers revealed recently (although, curiously, she didn't see fit to tell the country the news herself). Indeed, the government is still actively encouraging first-time buyers into a market that it knows is collapsing. Ministers should be doing precisely the reverse: warning young families not to take on mortgages for flats that will assuredly land them in negative equity.
But the government still believes that, as the property porn queen Kirstie Allsopp puts it, "house prices always go up". In other words, it believes in fairies, and that money grows on trees. Now comes the big bad wolf to the door, and the last thing anyone should think of doing right now is buying a house. At any price. Just say no. You have been warned.
Tens of thousands of relatively high-income homeowners in south-east England have placed their futures in jeopardy by taking on unsustainable jumbo mortgages. You need only look at estate agents' windows to see that the sums don't add up - London prices average £320,000 and are out of all proportion to ability to pay. Gross median full-time earnings in London last year were only £587 a week, according to government statistics. Many young families took out self-certification "liar loans" at five or six times their income as the only way to get on to the housing ladder. Now the banks are forcing them to remortgage at a higher rate and demanding large deposits. Real fear is stalking the capital's nappy valleys.
This is going to be far, far worse than the housing recession of 1990-92. Fuelled by irresponsible bank lending, UK house prices nearly tripled in the decade to 2007 - a more lunatic rise even than in America. British prices have been running at nearly eight times average earnings against a historic average of 3.5. This was never going to be sustainable. But right at the moment the bubble burst, in August 2007, a combination of related events conspired to turn this boom into an epic bust that is likely to consume the British economy and lead to a depression. You may think the credit crisis is over, but the real crisis is just beginning.
First, the banks found that because of the US sub-prime mess they couldn't borrow cheap money on the international markets any more, so they cut back on lending and increased rates. Banks such as Northern Rock, which had been offering "suicide loans" of up to 120 per cent loan-to-value, stopped lending altogether. Not surprisingly, people stopped buying. The number of first-time buyers in March was the lowest ever recorded, fewer than 18,000 in the whole of the UK.
Apoplexy in No 10
Even before the housing slump, buy-to-let investors were losing money because of low rents; now many are being forced to sell, as the banks require them to remortgage at rates of up to 9 per cent. Overall, mortgage lending this year is expected to fall by nearly half, to £60bn, an unprecedented contraction of the market. Estate agents across the land are shutting shop - not that many tears will be shed at their plight. Nor at the loss of the hard-sell property club Inside Track, which promised to make you a millionaire overnight and has now gone bust, leaving many of its clients with huge losses.
The FSA and the police are now investigating 70 separate valuation scams across Britain whereby surveyors fraudulently overestimated the value of thousands of new-build homes. In cities such as Manchester, organised criminals had recycled drug money into property to such good effect that some of them gave up the narcotics trade and turned to property speculation. Now they are regretting it.
What can the government do? Well, Gordon Brown thought he could revive the market by in effect handing £50bn of public money to the banks through the Special Liquidity Scheme and by leaning on the Bank of England to cut interest rates. Not so. The banks took the £50bn in Treasury swaps in April and promptly put mortgage rates up even further. Then in May, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, announced that there were likely to be no more cuts in interest rates this year because of rising inflation.
This caused apoplexy in No 10. Brown wanted King to emulate Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve, who slashed rates from more than 5.25 to just 2 per cent in eight months. But King stood his ground, and is right to do so. As anyone who goes to the shops knows only too well, the cost of living is rising faster than at any time in the past two decades. Cutting interest rates now could start 1970s-style hyperinflation.
There has been much debate about the causes of the recent global inflation in commodities, but in the end, in the circular world of economics, it all comes back to housing. It was the attempt by the Federal Reserve to revive the US housing market that ignited the current commodities boom. It hoped that slashing interest rates below inflation would encourage people to put their money back into houses. It didn't. Instead, the big investment houses, the pension funds and thousands of in dividuals ploughed their cash into oil, food - anything that looked as if it might become scarce. Roughly 60 per cent of the recent increase in the cost of oil is down to speculation.
In the US, cutting interest rates has actually made house prices fall faster. The increase in gas and food costs has made consumers tighten their belts and avoid mortgages like the plague. US residential property prices fell 14.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 - the fastest drop ever recorded by the benchmark Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index. Ten million face negative equity. To top it all, the inflation explosion has forced the Fed to admit that the next movement in US rates will probably be up, though not before the presidential election. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Increasing interest rates in a downturn is what turns recession into depression.
How long will the slump last? Certain demographic factors may prolong the housing depression. The baby-boom generation has now reached retirement age and many couples are relying on their homes as pensions and legacies. If they want to keep their wealth intact, they will have to sell soon. This could lead to an unprecedented number of larger houses coming on the market just at the moment when younger families can't borrow the money to buy them.
Pyramid of credit
The recent house-price boom in Britain has also been fuelled by immigration, much of it from Poland. With the British economy weakening and the pound falling in value, however, many eastern European migrants are returning home. There is still a shortage of houses in Britain, but we are about to find that the shortage is not as great as we thought.
Are falling house prices a bad thing? All things being equal, a return to sanity in the housing market is good for everyone, even estate agents. But we are facing a serious economic dis location here, not just a correction.
It was brought about by the astonishing short-sightedness of central bankers and politicians in Britain and the US who kept interest rates artificially low for more than a decade. A huge inverted pyramid of credit was built on top of the expectation of yields from British and US mortgages. Believing that house prices would rise for ever, and that even if they faltered the Bank of England would cut interest rates to reinflate the bubble, the banks began to lose any sense of financial risk, and started to relax credit standards and lend irresponsibly. Private-equity firms were allowed to borrow huge multiples of their real assets. Banks started to hide their lending in off-balance-sheet devices such as structured investment vehicles.
As house prices fall, this all turns into reverse. Loans de-leverage, derivatives degrade, margin calls are missed. The total value of British residential property is about £3trn. Nearly £1trn of this will now disappear over the next few years if prices fall by 30 per cent. This will have a profoundly deflationary effect, leading to falling high-street sales, business closures, personal bankruptcies and rising unemployment. Mortgage bonds will default, causing further bank crises. Britain depends heavily on the financial services for jobs and 40,000 are about to go in the City alone, according to J P Morgan.
In Britain, homeowners are seeing the value of their properties fall at about £2,000 a month at the same time as the cost of living is rising and their wages and salaries are stagnant. Deluded by house prices, British consumers borrowed and spent like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow has arrived and consumers are sitting on £1.4trn of debt, the highest for any country in the world. People can no longer defer their loans by remortgaging their properties, and the banks are demanding cash upfront. In the past two months, many consumers have taken out huge one-off credit-card loans, which explains the paradox of recent unsecured lending going up as spending goes down. Shelter has reported that at least a million people are putting mortgage payments on their credit cards - the height of economic madness.
The government is already overdrawn and unable to spend its way out of impending recession. Treasury finances will shrivel after a fall in stamp duty and tax receipts from the collapsing financial services sector. The nationalised Northern Rock has signalled that it won't be able to repay the £26bn it was lent by the government if house prices continue to fall.
No wonder Gordon Brown is looking gloomy. He once joked that there are two kinds of chancellors: failures and those who get out in time. He is no longer chancellor, but as First Lord of the Treasury, the Prime Minister is still in the firing line. The great housing bust of 2008, and the recession that follows it, will be Brown's lasting monument. And poor old prudence never got a look-in.
Iain Macwhirter is an award-winning political columnist for the Glasgow Herald
Iain Macwhirter
Published 05 June 2008 in The New Statesman
79 comments Print version Listen RSS As Britain wakes up to the nightmare of negative equity, we are facing a housing recession far worse than that of the early 1990s. Iain Macwhirter has a warning: don't buy a house now, at any price. Just say no. You have been warned
Kingston Quay in Glasgow is one of the smart dockside developments that were supposed to help regenerate Britain's older industrial cities. The blocks don't look bad, with generous balconies and double-height penthouses. But the truth is that you can hardly give these flats away. A two-bedroom flat, bought for £215,000 in September 2005, recently sold at auction for £79,000; another went for £86,000. Nine others did not sell at all. "Live the dream," said the promotion for these developments; wake up to the nightmare of negative equity.
This story is being replicated in every city in the country as the housing crash gathers momentum. In areas of Manchester and Leeds, and even parts of London, thousands of new-build flats are being offloaded at auction for 30 per cent less than they cost to buy, according to the auctioneers Allsop. The paradox of Britain's slump is that it isn't being led by a sub-prime underclass in run-down areas - although repossessions are rising fast everywhere - but by the "luxury" end of the market. The biggest falls are for the dinky flats bought by urban professionals as "starter homes", or by well-off parents, such as the Blairs, for their children and as pensions. If you have had the misfortune to invest in any of these, look away now, because what follows could seriously damage your wealth.
Let's get the numbers out of the way first. There is no longer a scintilla of doubt that there is a major, national housing correction under way. Nationwide registered a record 2.5 per cent fall in May alone. Analysts such as Morgan Stanley think there could be a 25 per cent decline in two years. The International Monetary Fund estimates that British house prices are overvalued by 30 per cent. A crash is defined as a 20 per cent fall over two years, so fasten your seat belts. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) says a million people face losing their homes over the next 18 months. Northern Rock was the first banking casualty; the buy-to-let flat specialist Bradford & Bingley is the second; others will follow as this second mortgage-related financial shock shreds banking balance sheets and undermines confidence in the financial system.
Even the government accepts that prices will fall by between 5 and 10 per cent this year alone, as the housing minister Caroline Flint's see-through cabinet briefing papers revealed recently (although, curiously, she didn't see fit to tell the country the news herself). Indeed, the government is still actively encouraging first-time buyers into a market that it knows is collapsing. Ministers should be doing precisely the reverse: warning young families not to take on mortgages for flats that will assuredly land them in negative equity.
But the government still believes that, as the property porn queen Kirstie Allsopp puts it, "house prices always go up". In other words, it believes in fairies, and that money grows on trees. Now comes the big bad wolf to the door, and the last thing anyone should think of doing right now is buying a house. At any price. Just say no. You have been warned.
Tens of thousands of relatively high-income homeowners in south-east England have placed their futures in jeopardy by taking on unsustainable jumbo mortgages. You need only look at estate agents' windows to see that the sums don't add up - London prices average £320,000 and are out of all proportion to ability to pay. Gross median full-time earnings in London last year were only £587 a week, according to government statistics. Many young families took out self-certification "liar loans" at five or six times their income as the only way to get on to the housing ladder. Now the banks are forcing them to remortgage at a higher rate and demanding large deposits. Real fear is stalking the capital's nappy valleys.
This is going to be far, far worse than the housing recession of 1990-92. Fuelled by irresponsible bank lending, UK house prices nearly tripled in the decade to 2007 - a more lunatic rise even than in America. British prices have been running at nearly eight times average earnings against a historic average of 3.5. This was never going to be sustainable. But right at the moment the bubble burst, in August 2007, a combination of related events conspired to turn this boom into an epic bust that is likely to consume the British economy and lead to a depression. You may think the credit crisis is over, but the real crisis is just beginning.
First, the banks found that because of the US sub-prime mess they couldn't borrow cheap money on the international markets any more, so they cut back on lending and increased rates. Banks such as Northern Rock, which had been offering "suicide loans" of up to 120 per cent loan-to-value, stopped lending altogether. Not surprisingly, people stopped buying. The number of first-time buyers in March was the lowest ever recorded, fewer than 18,000 in the whole of the UK.
Apoplexy in No 10
Even before the housing slump, buy-to-let investors were losing money because of low rents; now many are being forced to sell, as the banks require them to remortgage at rates of up to 9 per cent. Overall, mortgage lending this year is expected to fall by nearly half, to £60bn, an unprecedented contraction of the market. Estate agents across the land are shutting shop - not that many tears will be shed at their plight. Nor at the loss of the hard-sell property club Inside Track, which promised to make you a millionaire overnight and has now gone bust, leaving many of its clients with huge losses.
The FSA and the police are now investigating 70 separate valuation scams across Britain whereby surveyors fraudulently overestimated the value of thousands of new-build homes. In cities such as Manchester, organised criminals had recycled drug money into property to such good effect that some of them gave up the narcotics trade and turned to property speculation. Now they are regretting it.
What can the government do? Well, Gordon Brown thought he could revive the market by in effect handing £50bn of public money to the banks through the Special Liquidity Scheme and by leaning on the Bank of England to cut interest rates. Not so. The banks took the £50bn in Treasury swaps in April and promptly put mortgage rates up even further. Then in May, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, announced that there were likely to be no more cuts in interest rates this year because of rising inflation.
This caused apoplexy in No 10. Brown wanted King to emulate Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve, who slashed rates from more than 5.25 to just 2 per cent in eight months. But King stood his ground, and is right to do so. As anyone who goes to the shops knows only too well, the cost of living is rising faster than at any time in the past two decades. Cutting interest rates now could start 1970s-style hyperinflation.
There has been much debate about the causes of the recent global inflation in commodities, but in the end, in the circular world of economics, it all comes back to housing. It was the attempt by the Federal Reserve to revive the US housing market that ignited the current commodities boom. It hoped that slashing interest rates below inflation would encourage people to put their money back into houses. It didn't. Instead, the big investment houses, the pension funds and thousands of in dividuals ploughed their cash into oil, food - anything that looked as if it might become scarce. Roughly 60 per cent of the recent increase in the cost of oil is down to speculation.
In the US, cutting interest rates has actually made house prices fall faster. The increase in gas and food costs has made consumers tighten their belts and avoid mortgages like the plague. US residential property prices fell 14.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 - the fastest drop ever recorded by the benchmark Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index. Ten million face negative equity. To top it all, the inflation explosion has forced the Fed to admit that the next movement in US rates will probably be up, though not before the presidential election. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Increasing interest rates in a downturn is what turns recession into depression.
How long will the slump last? Certain demographic factors may prolong the housing depression. The baby-boom generation has now reached retirement age and many couples are relying on their homes as pensions and legacies. If they want to keep their wealth intact, they will have to sell soon. This could lead to an unprecedented number of larger houses coming on the market just at the moment when younger families can't borrow the money to buy them.
Pyramid of credit
The recent house-price boom in Britain has also been fuelled by immigration, much of it from Poland. With the British economy weakening and the pound falling in value, however, many eastern European migrants are returning home. There is still a shortage of houses in Britain, but we are about to find that the shortage is not as great as we thought.
Are falling house prices a bad thing? All things being equal, a return to sanity in the housing market is good for everyone, even estate agents. But we are facing a serious economic dis location here, not just a correction.
It was brought about by the astonishing short-sightedness of central bankers and politicians in Britain and the US who kept interest rates artificially low for more than a decade. A huge inverted pyramid of credit was built on top of the expectation of yields from British and US mortgages. Believing that house prices would rise for ever, and that even if they faltered the Bank of England would cut interest rates to reinflate the bubble, the banks began to lose any sense of financial risk, and started to relax credit standards and lend irresponsibly. Private-equity firms were allowed to borrow huge multiples of their real assets. Banks started to hide their lending in off-balance-sheet devices such as structured investment vehicles.
As house prices fall, this all turns into reverse. Loans de-leverage, derivatives degrade, margin calls are missed. The total value of British residential property is about £3trn. Nearly £1trn of this will now disappear over the next few years if prices fall by 30 per cent. This will have a profoundly deflationary effect, leading to falling high-street sales, business closures, personal bankruptcies and rising unemployment. Mortgage bonds will default, causing further bank crises. Britain depends heavily on the financial services for jobs and 40,000 are about to go in the City alone, according to J P Morgan.
In Britain, homeowners are seeing the value of their properties fall at about £2,000 a month at the same time as the cost of living is rising and their wages and salaries are stagnant. Deluded by house prices, British consumers borrowed and spent like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow has arrived and consumers are sitting on £1.4trn of debt, the highest for any country in the world. People can no longer defer their loans by remortgaging their properties, and the banks are demanding cash upfront. In the past two months, many consumers have taken out huge one-off credit-card loans, which explains the paradox of recent unsecured lending going up as spending goes down. Shelter has reported that at least a million people are putting mortgage payments on their credit cards - the height of economic madness.
The government is already overdrawn and unable to spend its way out of impending recession. Treasury finances will shrivel after a fall in stamp duty and tax receipts from the collapsing financial services sector. The nationalised Northern Rock has signalled that it won't be able to repay the £26bn it was lent by the government if house prices continue to fall.
No wonder Gordon Brown is looking gloomy. He once joked that there are two kinds of chancellors: failures and those who get out in time. He is no longer chancellor, but as First Lord of the Treasury, the Prime Minister is still in the firing line. The great housing bust of 2008, and the recession that follows it, will be Brown's lasting monument. And poor old prudence never got a look-in.
Iain Macwhirter is an award-winning political columnist for the Glasgow Herald
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Urawaza: Secret Japanese Tricks
Urawaza — quirky, everyday Japanese tips — head West
By LISA KATAYAMA
Special to The Japan Times
Two years ago, a mysterious 20-second video clip triggered some unexpected buzz on the Web site YouTube. In the segment, an ordinary-looking housewife draws an invisible line across the chest of a shirt with her finger. Then she pinches the shirt under the armpit and at the shoulder, does a quick flipping motion, and then presents the audience with a perfectly folded shirt. People were baffled.
News photo
Ninja homemaker: A viral Youtube video introduced the world to a classic Japanese urazawa, or secret trick.
Commenters raved about the so-called "revolutionary" ninja trick, and viewers starting making copycat videos showing the "Japanese way of folding a T-shirt" in English. The video was so simple — one woman, one shirt, one swift move — but what it accomplished was profound. For many of the millions who viewed that video, it was their first time seeing an urawaza in action.
Urawaza means "secret trick" in Japanese, and the display was a glimpse into the treasure trove of household hints and life "hacks" that are an integral part of Japanese culture.
The term was made popular by video game hackers in the 1980s after developers accidentally left shortcuts from when they were testing the software in the game, and hardcore players shared notes about how and where to find them. Flimsy magazines with titles such as The Complete Super Mario Urawaza Guide were sold side by side with the actual cartridges at toy stores. But the concept of using neat little tricks that make a specific aspect of life just a bit easier dates back to the beginning of time.
Saving money by using everyday objects for cooking and cleaning was especially relevant in the post-World War II era. Most Japanese cities were burned to a crisp in repeated air raids and the war stripped the economy of all its resources, so basic provisions such as food and cleaning supplies were hard to come by. When the United States mandated that Japan become a peace-loving, nonaggressive, economically motivated nation, everyone got to work trying to figure out what they could contribute to save money and add growth.
Engineers and researchers in newly formed companies such as Sony and Sanyo experimented with electronics. Housewives tried to figure out how to do the most number of things possible with the least amount of supplies and money. Fictional characters such as Astro Boy rocked television sets and bookshelves with his friendly nuclear superpowers, inspiring everyone to keep on moving toward a bright and challenging future.
Even today, urban Japanese families often live in small homes with no room for bulky appliances or pantries full of cleaning supplies. Services such as dry cleaning and beauty maintenance are expensive. These realities, teamed with a penchant for innovation nurtured by Japanese society, has resulted in an urawaza culture.
When Hiroshi Murao is not at work, he runs a Tokyo-based nonprofit called Obachan no Chiebukuro no Kai (The Association of Grandma's Bag of Wisdom). The group was started 15 years ago by three housewives, a salaryman and a freelance writer, determined to preserve spoken urawaza traditions that they feared may be lost with time.
"It would be a waste to lose these nuggets of wisdom that have been passed down from a long time ago," says Murao, who was brought in later to create the group's Web site, www.chiebukuro -net.com . "So they said, 'Let's continue to tell these stories to the next generation.' "
News photo
Magazines such as 'Make' contain inventive solutions to household problems.
For centuries, urawaza were shared by word of mouth. Many Japanese live with their parents and grandparents even into adulthood and, as a result, passing down useful household tricks happens much more frequently and organically. Today, there are dozens of books, magazines and Web sites dedicated to lifestyle urawaza.
Lifestyle urawaza first became a pop-culture phenomenon when Nippon Television launched "Ito-ke no Shokutaku (The Ito Family Dinner Table)," a weekly series showcasing tips and tricks submitted by viewers nationwide. "Ito-ke" aired for 10 consecutive years before closing it doors; at its peak it had 29 percent viewership nationwide. The tricks featured on the show were quirky and inventive — blowing up a beach float using a trash bag and a drinking straw, for example, or using the tip of an iron to perfect a bowling throw (see sidebar).
"It was great that these wisdoms were communicated through the mass media this way," says Murao.
The 52-year-old businessman roughly divides conventional urawaza into five categories: cleaning, health, cooking, kitchen and beauty. He also points out that the urawaza don't all have to be so fancy. Tricks such as putting seven herbs in rice porridge to make nanakusagayu (a New Year's dish eaten on Jan. 7) and stuffing newspaper inside shoes to absorb moisture and prevent them from stinking up are simple but effective.
"These tricks are intended to rejuvenate our lives," he says.
Of course, urawaza are by no means strictly a Japanese thing. It's common knowledge in every culture that vinegar and baking soda get rid of bad smells, and that herbs such as echinacea and zinc can boost your immune system. In the United States, Texas-born media personality Heloise has spread the word about useful household hints. Her daily column is published in more than 500 newspapers worldwide, and she has authored 11 books over nearly three decades, including "Help! From Heloise" and "Heloise Conquers Stinks and Stains."
Lifestyle shortcuts don't just pertain to analog household uses. With technology taking the place of many things we used to do manually, a whole new genre of tricks has become relevant. O'Reilly Media's Make and Craft magazines in the United Statesteach do-it-yourself types how to make everything from taffy machines to LED bracelets. The DIY Network is a U.S. cable show that teaches viewers everything from how to make your own gifts to how to build a tool shed. These days, it's not just economical to do things yourself without buying expensive products and goods — it's trendy.
In the computer age, people are encountering new kinds of problems — how to make e-mail more efficient, for example, or how to avoid annoying pop-up ads on Web browsers.
Gina Trapani started Lifehacker.com, an online collection of tips and tricks for the tech-savvy in 2005. The site now has more than 24-million page views a month and was voted the Best Computer Technology blog at the 2008 Weblog Awards in Austin, Texas.
"Lifehacker encourages readers to examine their habits, figure out places where they can save time, set up systems to get or do what they need in a better way," says Trapani. "We all want to know how to do things better.
"Our readers are software connoisseurs, so they love posts on how to do more with their favorite Web applications or desktop software, like integrating their Google Calendar into their Gmail inbox."
Urawaza change with the times, yet the human inclination to do things better and faster is timeless. It's this innovative, creative way of thinking that makes us human and makes our lives a little bit more interesting.
Helpful tips from Lisa's list of urawaza
Dilemma — You are at the beach for your kid's birthday, and there are a gazillion little beach balls and floats waiting to be blown up. You have to think of a way to do this without passing out from lack of oxygen.
Solution — Hold a medium-size garbage bag open and wave it around to fill it with air. Stick one end of a drinking straw into the tube tip of the float and wrap the opening of the garbage bag around the other end, then slowly deflate the garbage bag.
Dilemma — The company bowling tournament is coming up, and the winner gets an extra grand in his or her bonus this year. You want it — bad — but right now you can barely keep the ball out of the gutter.
Solution — Take an iron — yep, the one you use to press your shirts — to the bowling alley and practice pointing the end of it at the second arrow from the right on the lane as you make your approach.
Why this works — This angle positions you perfectly for a dead-center throw. When you repeat this motion with the ball, you get the angle down pat before you factor in the weight and awkwardness of the ball.
Dilemma — The roads are slippery with rain, but you want to wear Prada pumps to work.
Solution — Apply two Band-Aids to the sole of each shoe — one on the ball and one on the heel — and your fancy kicks will be as sure footed as rubber boots.
Why this works — Rainy-day slipperiness happens when water gets between the soles of your shoes and the ground's surface. The gauze patches of a bandage absorb water and greatly improve traction.
Lisa Katayama is the author of Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan (Chronicle Books; 2008; 143 pp.; ¥1,903).
By LISA KATAYAMA
Special to The Japan Times
Two years ago, a mysterious 20-second video clip triggered some unexpected buzz on the Web site YouTube. In the segment, an ordinary-looking housewife draws an invisible line across the chest of a shirt with her finger. Then she pinches the shirt under the armpit and at the shoulder, does a quick flipping motion, and then presents the audience with a perfectly folded shirt. People were baffled.
News photo
Ninja homemaker: A viral Youtube video introduced the world to a classic Japanese urazawa, or secret trick.
Commenters raved about the so-called "revolutionary" ninja trick, and viewers starting making copycat videos showing the "Japanese way of folding a T-shirt" in English. The video was so simple — one woman, one shirt, one swift move — but what it accomplished was profound. For many of the millions who viewed that video, it was their first time seeing an urawaza in action.
Urawaza means "secret trick" in Japanese, and the display was a glimpse into the treasure trove of household hints and life "hacks" that are an integral part of Japanese culture.
The term was made popular by video game hackers in the 1980s after developers accidentally left shortcuts from when they were testing the software in the game, and hardcore players shared notes about how and where to find them. Flimsy magazines with titles such as The Complete Super Mario Urawaza Guide were sold side by side with the actual cartridges at toy stores. But the concept of using neat little tricks that make a specific aspect of life just a bit easier dates back to the beginning of time.
Saving money by using everyday objects for cooking and cleaning was especially relevant in the post-World War II era. Most Japanese cities were burned to a crisp in repeated air raids and the war stripped the economy of all its resources, so basic provisions such as food and cleaning supplies were hard to come by. When the United States mandated that Japan become a peace-loving, nonaggressive, economically motivated nation, everyone got to work trying to figure out what they could contribute to save money and add growth.
Engineers and researchers in newly formed companies such as Sony and Sanyo experimented with electronics. Housewives tried to figure out how to do the most number of things possible with the least amount of supplies and money. Fictional characters such as Astro Boy rocked television sets and bookshelves with his friendly nuclear superpowers, inspiring everyone to keep on moving toward a bright and challenging future.
Even today, urban Japanese families often live in small homes with no room for bulky appliances or pantries full of cleaning supplies. Services such as dry cleaning and beauty maintenance are expensive. These realities, teamed with a penchant for innovation nurtured by Japanese society, has resulted in an urawaza culture.
When Hiroshi Murao is not at work, he runs a Tokyo-based nonprofit called Obachan no Chiebukuro no Kai (The Association of Grandma's Bag of Wisdom). The group was started 15 years ago by three housewives, a salaryman and a freelance writer, determined to preserve spoken urawaza traditions that they feared may be lost with time.
"It would be a waste to lose these nuggets of wisdom that have been passed down from a long time ago," says Murao, who was brought in later to create the group's Web site, www.chiebukuro -net.com . "So they said, 'Let's continue to tell these stories to the next generation.' "
News photo
Magazines such as 'Make' contain inventive solutions to household problems.
For centuries, urawaza were shared by word of mouth. Many Japanese live with their parents and grandparents even into adulthood and, as a result, passing down useful household tricks happens much more frequently and organically. Today, there are dozens of books, magazines and Web sites dedicated to lifestyle urawaza.
Lifestyle urawaza first became a pop-culture phenomenon when Nippon Television launched "Ito-ke no Shokutaku (The Ito Family Dinner Table)," a weekly series showcasing tips and tricks submitted by viewers nationwide. "Ito-ke" aired for 10 consecutive years before closing it doors; at its peak it had 29 percent viewership nationwide. The tricks featured on the show were quirky and inventive — blowing up a beach float using a trash bag and a drinking straw, for example, or using the tip of an iron to perfect a bowling throw (see sidebar).
"It was great that these wisdoms were communicated through the mass media this way," says Murao.
The 52-year-old businessman roughly divides conventional urawaza into five categories: cleaning, health, cooking, kitchen and beauty. He also points out that the urawaza don't all have to be so fancy. Tricks such as putting seven herbs in rice porridge to make nanakusagayu (a New Year's dish eaten on Jan. 7) and stuffing newspaper inside shoes to absorb moisture and prevent them from stinking up are simple but effective.
"These tricks are intended to rejuvenate our lives," he says.
Of course, urawaza are by no means strictly a Japanese thing. It's common knowledge in every culture that vinegar and baking soda get rid of bad smells, and that herbs such as echinacea and zinc can boost your immune system. In the United States, Texas-born media personality Heloise has spread the word about useful household hints. Her daily column is published in more than 500 newspapers worldwide, and she has authored 11 books over nearly three decades, including "Help! From Heloise" and "Heloise Conquers Stinks and Stains."
Lifestyle shortcuts don't just pertain to analog household uses. With technology taking the place of many things we used to do manually, a whole new genre of tricks has become relevant. O'Reilly Media's Make and Craft magazines in the United Statesteach do-it-yourself types how to make everything from taffy machines to LED bracelets. The DIY Network is a U.S. cable show that teaches viewers everything from how to make your own gifts to how to build a tool shed. These days, it's not just economical to do things yourself without buying expensive products and goods — it's trendy.
In the computer age, people are encountering new kinds of problems — how to make e-mail more efficient, for example, or how to avoid annoying pop-up ads on Web browsers.
Gina Trapani started Lifehacker.com, an online collection of tips and tricks for the tech-savvy in 2005. The site now has more than 24-million page views a month and was voted the Best Computer Technology blog at the 2008 Weblog Awards in Austin, Texas.
"Lifehacker encourages readers to examine their habits, figure out places where they can save time, set up systems to get or do what they need in a better way," says Trapani. "We all want to know how to do things better.
"Our readers are software connoisseurs, so they love posts on how to do more with their favorite Web applications or desktop software, like integrating their Google Calendar into their Gmail inbox."
Urawaza change with the times, yet the human inclination to do things better and faster is timeless. It's this innovative, creative way of thinking that makes us human and makes our lives a little bit more interesting.
Helpful tips from Lisa's list of urawaza
Dilemma — You are at the beach for your kid's birthday, and there are a gazillion little beach balls and floats waiting to be blown up. You have to think of a way to do this without passing out from lack of oxygen.
Solution — Hold a medium-size garbage bag open and wave it around to fill it with air. Stick one end of a drinking straw into the tube tip of the float and wrap the opening of the garbage bag around the other end, then slowly deflate the garbage bag.
Dilemma — The company bowling tournament is coming up, and the winner gets an extra grand in his or her bonus this year. You want it — bad — but right now you can barely keep the ball out of the gutter.
Solution — Take an iron — yep, the one you use to press your shirts — to the bowling alley and practice pointing the end of it at the second arrow from the right on the lane as you make your approach.
Why this works — This angle positions you perfectly for a dead-center throw. When you repeat this motion with the ball, you get the angle down pat before you factor in the weight and awkwardness of the ball.
Dilemma — The roads are slippery with rain, but you want to wear Prada pumps to work.
Solution — Apply two Band-Aids to the sole of each shoe — one on the ball and one on the heel — and your fancy kicks will be as sure footed as rubber boots.
Why this works — Rainy-day slipperiness happens when water gets between the soles of your shoes and the ground's surface. The gauze patches of a bandage absorb water and greatly improve traction.
Lisa Katayama is the author of Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan (Chronicle Books; 2008; 143 pp.; ¥1,903).
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Mexico-U.S. Border Fence
Dear class:
Below is a section of the Department of Homeland Security's webpage about the border fence. Below it, you will find the poem written on the Statue of Liberty. Comment on your thoughts upon reading the two quotations:
Southwest Border Fence
As part of our southwest border security strategy, the Department is committed to completing a total of 670 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fence along the Southwest border by the end of 2008.
Miles of Fencing
Fence completed as of August 13, 2008:
* 184.2 miles of pedestrian fence
* 153.8 miles of vehicle fence
Proposed fence to be completed by December 31, 2008:
* 370 miles of pedestrian fence
* 300 miles of vehicle fence
Vehicle and pedestrian fencing are not the only methods used to secure our southwest border. Natural geographic barriers and technological solutions can also be effective deterrents to illegal entry.
STATUE OF LIBERTY POEM: "THE NEW COLOSSUS" by Emma Lazarus
“"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Below is a section of the Department of Homeland Security's webpage about the border fence. Below it, you will find the poem written on the Statue of Liberty. Comment on your thoughts upon reading the two quotations:
Southwest Border Fence
As part of our southwest border security strategy, the Department is committed to completing a total of 670 miles of pedestrian and vehicle fence along the Southwest border by the end of 2008.
Miles of Fencing
Fence completed as of August 13, 2008:
* 184.2 miles of pedestrian fence
* 153.8 miles of vehicle fence
Proposed fence to be completed by December 31, 2008:
* 370 miles of pedestrian fence
* 300 miles of vehicle fence
Vehicle and pedestrian fencing are not the only methods used to secure our southwest border. Natural geographic barriers and technological solutions can also be effective deterrents to illegal entry.
STATUE OF LIBERTY POEM: "THE NEW COLOSSUS" by Emma Lazarus
“"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Monday, August 18, 2008
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