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Armada docudrama shows dark history of Normal People’s Sligo

by admin 10.07.2020

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Streedagh beach was the setting for young love in the TV drama Normal People, but its latest screen depiction reveals a dark history of plunder and slaughter on the golden sand.

Instead of romance among the dunes, viewers encounter drownings, stabbings and hangings on this bucolic stretch of Ireland’s Atlantic coast. And unlike the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel, it’s all true.

The docudrama Armada 1588: Shipwreck and Survival tells the story of Francisco de Cuéllar, a Spanish captain who was part of Spain’s ill-fated attempt to invade Elizabethan England and ended up a fugitive in the west of Ireland.

After surviving naval battles and storms he found himself marooned in a “land of savages” – known in the present day as County Sligo – where he was hunted by English soldiers and repeatedly attacked and robbed by hostile locals, the start of an epic journey home verging on Odyssean.

The film was made by Spanish Armada Ireland, a voluntary group based in Sligo that used €100,000 (£90,100) of community development funding to recruit an international cast and crew and make a swashbuckling half-hour film.

“It’s an incredible story of survival,” said Micheál Ó Domhnaill, a producer. “It had crept into lots of other stories, but it was surprising that no film had ever been done specifically about De Cuéllar.”

The screenplay was based on an account the Spaniard wrote in October 1589 after escaping Ireland and stopping in Amsterdam on his way back to Spain.

A Spanish actor, Fernando Corral, plays the lead, and other Spanish and mainly Irish actors play sailors, soldiers, robbers, good samaritans and chieftains. CGI recreates storms and doomed galleons tossed by waves. Artists’ drawings fill in other sequences.

RTÉ screened the film last month and for €4.99 (or £4.45) it is now available to stream or download, with proceeds going to an armada visitor centre in the village of Grange, a few miles from Streedagh beach.

So far there have been about 2,000 paid downloads. The English version has been viewed in 25 countries and the Spanish version in 29.

Armada 1588 will not rival Normal People

for audience size, but it does cast a different light on the strand where Rooney’s characters, Marianne and Connell, get to know one another.

“It’s strange that we should have two productions that are really different from each other on the same beach,” said Ó Domhnaill. “Normal People filmed on really sunny days when it was at its absolute best. We filmed in the worst time of year, which replicated conditions in 1588.”

10.07.2020 0 comment

Sport world

Micheál Martin becomes Irish taoiseach in historic coalition

by admin 30.06.2020

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The Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin has been elected as Ireland’s taoiseach – prime minister – after the formation of an historic coalition government.

The three-way coalition of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Green party is the first time the first two parties – former civil war rivals – have been in government together.

Martin won with 93 votes in favour and 63 against in Saturday’s special sitting of the Dáil, the Irish parliament. Due to social distancing rules, the sitting was held at the Convention Centre Dublin instead of Leinster House. Three TDs abstained.

Martin’s election is the culmination of months of coalition talks following February’s general election, in which no party secured a majority but Fianna Fáil won the most seats. The talks were disrupted by coronavirus, but the parties reached an agreement earlier on in June.

Fine Gael’s leader and former taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the coalition’s formation marked the end of civil war politics in the Dáil.

“I believe civil war politics ended a long time ago in our country, but today civil war politics ends in our parliament,” he said. “Two great parties coming together with another great party, the Green party, to offer what this country needs: a stable government for the betterment of our country and for the betterment of our world.”

He said serving in the government was a privilege, and that the coalition gave Fine Gael the opportunity to serve a third consecutive term in government.

“The chance to protect what has been achieved and secured over the past nine years and also a second chance, an opportunity to get right some of the things that we didn’t get right in the years gone by,” he said. “I’m up for that challenge.”

In his inaugural speech, Martin hailed his new role as “one of the greatest honours which anyone can receive” and paid tribute to health workers, and those who have died during the coronavirus pandemic.

“We are meeting away from our permanent chamber because of a historic pandemic which has struck Ireland and the rest of the world,” he said. “As of today, 2,278 people on this island have lost their lives. Many thousands more have fought a long struggle to recover. There is no community, no part of our country, which has escaped untouched.”

Martin said there had been “enormous progress” in controlling coronavirus over the last three months but emphasised that “the struggle against the virus is not over”.

30.06.2020 0 comment

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EU parliament leader: Boris Johnson seems unwilling to find compromise in Brexit talks

by admin 27.06.2020

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Boris Johnson appeared unwilling to compromise in order to secure a trade and security deal with Brussels when he joined EU leaders for a summit last week, one of the three who attended the meeting has told the Guardian.

David Sassoli, the president of the European parliament, punctured a recent outbreak of optimism over a potential deal by warning that the EU had been left concerned at the end of a video conference call by the lack of “enthusiasm” to find common ground on the most contentious issues.

After the discussions last Monday, the British prime minister insisted he could see no reason why an agreement could not be secured with Brussels by the end of July following intensified talks.

In a joint statement, Johnson, Sassoli and the presidents of the European commission and council, Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel, had said “new momentum was required”.

But in an interview with the Guardian, Sassoli warned that he had not been imbued with confidence the prime minister was ready to do what was necessary to secure agreement before the end of the transition period on 31 December.

“Together, we are very worried because we don’t see great enthusiasm from the British authorities and we don’t see a strong will to get to an agreement that satisfies all parties,” he said.

“Obviously as an agreement, it has to satisfy both parties that it cannot advantage one over the other. And this puts us in a situation in which at the moment we are frankly a little bit worried.”

The two sides are stuck on issues of access to British waters for European fishermen and dispute resolution in a future deal, as well as the so-called level playing field provisions, where the EU has been demanding common environmental, labour and social standards.

On Wednesday, Barnier reiterated that he was willing to work on “clever compromises” in the new rounds of talks scheduled in July and August, mentioning “regulatory equivalence” as an alternative to the UK incorporating EU state aid law into domestic legislation.

Sassoli said Barnier had been given the “maximum margin” of flexibility by the member states to find a compromise, but that it “takes two to tango”. “There cannot be one party that prevails,” Sassoli said.

“Basically, the fact that they don’t really want to build upon the political declaration, this really does disturb us greatly, because that has to be the basis for everything for the whole negotiation,” Sassoli said, in reference to the 27-page document agreed last year on the scope of a future deal.

“We reached an agreement, and it now must be respected. This really is something which concerns us at the moment.”

The UK has taken a minimalist approach to the agreement in the political declaration to incorporate level playing field provisions in a treaty ensuring neither side is able to undercut the other by downgrading their standards. The UK negotiator, David Frost, has rejected any deal that sets up EU law as the common standard to meet.

27.06.2020 0 comment

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Global economy will take $12tn hit from coronavirus, says IMF

by admin 26.06.2020

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The International Monetary Fund has said the global economy will take a $12tn (£9.6tn) hit from the Covid-19 pandemic after slashing its already gloomy growth projections for the UK and other developed countries in 2020.

The IMF said it would take two years for world output to return to levels at the end of 2019 and warned that governments should be cautious about removing financial support to their fragile economies.

In an update to forecasts published in April, the Washington-based IMF said it now expected the global economy to contract by 4.9% this year, compared with a 3% drop expected in the spring.

“The Covid-19 pandemic pushed economies into a Great Lockdown, which helped contain the virus and save lives but also triggered the worst recession since the Great Depression,” said the IMF’s economic counsellor, Gita Gopinath. She noted that the fall in output in 2020 would be half as bad as the 10% drop in the early 1930s, and said there would be a fall in living standards for 95% of countries this year.

The revised World Economic Outlook said the lockdown had dealt a “catastrophic hit” to the global labour market, adding that rising share prices were out of kilter with the deepest recession of the postwar era.

Every one of the G7 industrial nations and the leading developing nations has had its growth projection revised down, in what the IMF described as a “crisis like no other”.

The near-5% drop in global output this year would be much deeper than the drop of 0.1% recorded in 2009, after the near meltdown of the global banking system the previous autumn. The IMF had already envisaged 2020 as the worst year for global growth since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The UK economy was on course to shrink by 10.2% in 2020, the fund said. In April, using data collected before the severity of Britain’s lockdown was known, the IMF had thought the UK would contract by 6.5% this year. France and Italy are also expected to register double-digit falls in activity of 12.5% and 12.8% respectively.

It said the forecasts were subject to an even greater than usual amount of uncertainty and were based on some key assumptions about the fallout from the pandemic: physical distancing persisting into the second half of 2020, long-term scarring from the larger than anticipated damage caused by the lockdown and a hit to productivity as surviving businesses ramped up workplace safety and hygiene practices.

The IMF said it was also assuming that financial conditions, which have eased since the spring, remained broadly at current levels. “Alternative outcomes to those in the baseline are clearly possible, and not just because of how the pandemic is evolving.

“The extent of the recent rebound in financial market sentiment appears disconnected from shifts in underlying economic prospects, raising the possibility that financial conditions may tighten more than assumed in the baseline.”

The IMF advised all countries – including those that had seemingly passed infection peaks – to ensure their healthcare systems were adequately resourced and called on developed countries to ensure that poorer nations had access to adequate, affordable doses of vaccines when they became available.

26.06.2020 0 comment

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Global report: South Korea has Covid-19 second wave as Israel ponders new lockdown

by admin 25.06.2020

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Authorities in South Korea have said the country is experiencing a second wave of the coronavirus in and around Seoul, and warned that stronger physical-distancing measures will be reimposed if the daily increase in infections does not come down.

Confirmation of the new wave came as the Israeli government said a lockdown could be reintroduced amid a sharp rise in cases, and a team of contact tracing experts prepared to deploy to the Australian state of Victoria to tackle a new outbreak in Melbourne.

The new outbreaks once again highlight the difficulties of fully eradicating the virus, even in countries considered role models in their initial response to the pandemic.

They came as the pandemic continued its spread worldwide. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, on Monday warned it was still accelerating and while it had taken three months to reach the first one million cases, the last one million had come in just eight days. Known infections are now at more than 8.9m.

The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) on Monday said it had become clear that a holiday weekend in early May marked the beginning of a new wave of infections focused in the densely populated Seoul area.

“In the metropolitan area, we believe that the first wave was from March to April as well as February to March,” the KCDC director, Jeong Eun-kyeong, told reporters.

“Then we see that the second wave, which was triggered by the May holiday, has been going on.”

As of midnight on Sunday, South Korea had reported 17 new coronavirus cases – the first time in nearly a month that daily new cases had dropped below 20.

It was a drop from the 48 and 67 cases reported in the previous two days. South Korea has reported a total of 12,438 cases, with 280 deaths.

At the end of February, South Korea reported a peak of more than 900 cases in a day, in the first large outbreak of the coronavirus outside of China.

An intensive tracking and testing campaign reduced the numbers to single digits by late April.

But just as the country announced it would be easing physical-distancing guidelines in early May, new cases spiked, driven in part by infections among young people who visited nightclubs and bars in Seoul over the holiday weekend.

25.06.2020 0 comment

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Dutch football captains lead boycott of TV show over racist remarks

by admin 25.06.2020

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The captains of the Dutch men’s, women’s and youth national football teams are boycotting a leading sports TV programme over the racist comments of a longstanding pundit, warning: “Enough is enough.”

The Liverpool centre-back Virgil van Dijk, and the Atlético Madrid goalkeeper Sari van Veenendaal have led the way after years of the behaviour of Johan Derksen on the Veronica Inside show being explained away as straight-talking humour.

Advertisers have also threatened to join the players’ protest in response to a recent interjection from Derksen, 71, who had likened a man in the blackface makeup of the Zwarte Piet, or Black Pete, character from the festive Saint Nicholas celebrations, to that of a well-known Dutch activist and Black Lives Matter protester.

In a joint statement, supported by other past and present footballers, the national team captains wrote: “This is no longer on the brink. This has nothing to do with humour any more. This is not the language of football. This is over the line. Not for the first time. Not for the second time. Time and time again. Enough is enough.”

Derksen, a former professional footballer, has survived a number of previous controversies including comparing a Surinamese-born politician, Sylvana Simons, to a monkey, for which he later apologised, and claiming that the standard of amateur football has been threatened by the increase of players of Moroccan heritage. “I will be dismissed as a racist but I really don’t give a damn,” he said at the time.

The Veronica Inside show has a bar-room style in which Derksen’s provocative interventions have been excused in the past as the price to be paid for freedom of expression.

But in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the recent acknowledgement by the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, of “systemic racism” in the Netherlands, Derksen’s employers are under unprecedented pressure to act.

The former Dutch international Edgar Davids said: “It is not the first time that racist things have been said and normally it has always been brushed aside. Now everyone has had enough.

“Nobody wants to be insulted, right? There was a time when people said, ‘Well, don’t be so upset’… We often say now: athletes have an exemplary role. But of course that also applies to the media. They are responsible for what they feed the public in terms of information.”

The pundit denies being racist and has refused to apologise over the latest row, insisting that “the Netherlands is in very bad shape when internationals and advertisers determine the content of programmes”.

Maiko Valentijn, the chief executive of the media agency MediaCom, which purchases airtime on behalf of advertisers in the Netherlands, described the situation in an interview with the newspaper Algemeen Dagblad as being at “breaking point”.

He said: “Our advertisers deserve an explanation on how to prevent their advertising from ending up in an environment of ‘content’ that is diametrically opposed to what these brands stand for.”

25.06.2020 0 comment

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Visitors return to Spain as coronavirus state of emergency ends

by admin 24.06.2020

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Overseas visitors have begun arriving in Spain once more as the country reopens its borders and the three-month state of emergency declared in response to the coronavirus pandemic comes to an end.

As the second most-visited country in the world, Spain is desperate to reactivate its vital tourism sector as soon as possible. The government has launched a publicity campaign called Spain for Sure in an effort to reassure visitors and fire up the industry, which makes up about 12% of the country’s GDP.

Spain opened its borders to EU countries and others also in the Schengen area on Sunday. Visitors from so-called third countries will be allowed back to Spain from 1 July, and Portugal will open its land border with the country on the same day.

Much will depend on the return of UK tourists, who make up the largest national group among Spain’s foreign visitors.

The Spanish government announced on Saturday evening that British visitors would not need to undergo 14 days of quarantine on arrival, and called on the UK government to show reciprocity.

Madrid had previously said it was considering a two-week quarantine for UK visitors in response to Britain’s decision to require all international arrivals to self-isolate for 14 days, but the foreign minister said Britons would be welcomed back to Spain with no restrictions.

“We will allow British visitors to enter Spain just like the rest of the European Union as from 21 June, freely and without the need for a quarantine,” Arancha González Laya told BBC News.

“We’re discussing with the UK authorities to see if they would do the same on their side. We nevertheless are doing this out of respect for the 400,000 British citizens that have a second residence in Spain and are dying to benefit from their homes in our country.”

The foreign minister said she hoped the British authorities would also be “sensitive to the 250,000 Spaniards living in the UK and would like to enter the UK without a quarantine”. The Foreign Office, however, is still advising British nationals against all but essential international travel.

Until now, people visiting Spain from abroad have been obliged to undergo a 14-day quarantine, but the requirement lapsed at midnight on Saturday when the state of emergency ended. Now those arriving will have their temperatures taken at the airport, undergo a visual assessment and will be asked to provide their contact details.

The first groups of visitors began arriving at Madrid’s Adolfo Suárez airport in the district of Barajas on Sunday morning. The airport’s arrivals hall was decked in stickers to remind people to observe physical distancing measures. “It’s very strange, because we aren’t used to travelling anymore,” an Italian tourist on a flight from Bergamo told Reuters.

The government unveiled a €4.3bn (£3.9bn) plan earlier this week intended to restore confidence in Spain as a safe destination, improve its competitiveness and boost its image abroad. “Spain is opening up for tourism again,” the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said on Thursday.

“We are world leaders and that’s why every step we take will be a safe step. Through prudence and responsibility we will show that Spain is a safe and healthy destination.”

The Spanish hotel owners association, Cehat, has called on the socialist-led coalition government to help the country’s hospitality industry recover from the losses inflicted by the pandemic. “Spain’s tourist sector is an industry that brings nothing but joy to our country and our economy,” Cehat’s director, Jorge Marichal, told MPs on Monday.

24.06.2020 0 comment

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Lenin statue to be unveiled in Germany despite legal fight

by admin 23.06.2020

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While a global row rages over the controversial pasts of historical figures immortalised as statues, on Saturday a divisive new monument to the former Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin will be unveiled in Germany.

More than 30 years after the communist experiment on German soil that followed the second world war ended, the tiny Marxist-Leninist party of Germany (MLPD) will install Lenin’s likeness in the western city of Gelsenkirchen.

The MLPD says it is the first such statue ever to be erected on the territory of the former West Germany, decades after the eastern German Democratic Republic communist state collapsed.

“The time for monuments to racists, antisemites, fascists, anti-communists and other relics of the past has clearly passed,” said MLPD’s chair, Gabi Fechtner, in a statement.

“Lenin was an ahead-of-his-time thinker of world-historical importance, an early fighter for freedom and democracy,” she said.

Not everyone in Gelsenkirchen, a centre of the former industrial and mining powerhouse Ruhr region, has welcomed the 2.15 metre (7ft) likeness of the communist leader, which was made in the former Czechoslovakia in 1957.

“Lenin stands for violence, repression, terrorism and horrific human suffering,” representatives from mainstream parties on the Gelsenkirchen-West district council said in a resolution passed in early March.

The council “will not tolerate such an anti-democratic symbol in its district”, it added, urging that all legal means should be used to block its installation.

But later in March the upper state court in Münster rejected an argument that the statue would impact a historic building on the same site.

The MLPD has trumpeted interest in the statue from as far away as Russia, and is celebrating the unveiling with sausages and cake – while urging guests to maintain social distancing and wear nose and mouth coverings against coronavirus infection.

The worldwide Black Lives Matter movement has found some echo in Germany. Unknown people splattered red paint on a statue of Otto von Bismarck in Hamburg’s Altona district this week.

The “Iron Chancellor” behind Germany’s unification in 1871 is also known for hosting the Berlin Conference of 1884, which became a byword for the carving up of Africa between European colonial powers.

Berlin itself has been a hub of activism against public commemorations of colonialists, with much ire directed at street names honouring 19th-century figures in the so-called “African Quarter”.

But political decisions to rename roads named after figures like Adolf Lüderitz, a merchant who played a key role in colonising Namibia, or Carl Peters, a colonialist behind German expansion in eastern Africa, have met with resistance from locals.

Urte Evert, head of Berlin’s Spandau Citadel museum, where many old statues are on display, said that in decades of experience addressing the country’s Nazi and communist pasts, “things have always been done properly” with official applications to local authorities and orderly dismantling of monuments.

“We haven’t made so much progress with colonialism, something the USA, Britain and France too have been confronting for much longer,” Evert added.

While the US, Britain and Belgium have seen statues of Christopher Columbus, slave trader Edward Colston and King Leopold II, brutal ruler of the Congo, attacked or removed, in Germany, only a handful of monuments have been splattered by paint.

For Evert, how these objects are presented to the public could be a way for the country to reckon with its past.

23.06.2020 0 comment

Sport world

L’amour is in the air again as French kissing returns on-screen

by admin 22.06.2020

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Actors have started kissing again on French film shoots, the country’s culture minister has said.

Franck Riester said kissing had resumed on sets where the actors had been tested for coronavirus.

And he insisted l’amour was not completely dead despite the pandemic.

The minister told French radio that while shooting in Europe’s biggest film industry was allowed to restart earlier this month, “they waited a bit before doing that kiss that is so important in cinema”.

Reister did not say which film or which actors were the first to get back to on-screen smooching.

“No, the kiss is not over with,” the politician declared when asked if physical distancing was in danger of killing off love scenes altogether.

French cinemas are to reopen on Monday after a three-month closure but with drastic distancing measures that mean they can never be more than half-full.

22.06.2020 0 comment

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Medellín cartel co-founder transferred to Germany after prison sentence

by admin 21.06.2020

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The man who co-founded the notorious Colombian Medellín drug cartel alongside Pablo Escobar has been transferred to Germany from the United States, according to Spiegel Online.

Carlos Lehder Rivas, who has both German and Colombian citizenship, was escorted to Germany by two US officials on a regular passenger flight from New York to Frankfurt and handed over to German authorities, the report said.

Along with Escobar, Lehder ran the Medellín cartel that smuggled cocaine worth billions on the streets to the US in the 1970s and 80s. At his 1988 trial, prosecutors alleged that he was responsible for shipping 80% of the cocaine into the US.

At the centre of Lehder’s operation was Norman’s Caye, an island off the Bahamas, which he transformed into the hub of his smuggling operation with the help of corrupt local officials.

As the threat of extradition to the US grew, Lehder – a self-described admirer of Adolf Hitler –formed his own far-right political party, the Latino National party, in the hope of stirring nationalist anger over the idea of Colombians facing trial in a foreign court.

In a dramatic twist, Escobar tipped off authorities to Lehder’s whereabouts, leading to his arrest and extradition to the US in 1987.

The following year, Lehder was sentenced by a US court to life plus 135 years in prison but later cooperated with the authorities and was put in a witness protection programme.

As he has already served his time in the US, he would not be asked to answer again to the same charges before a German court.

Spiegel reported that 70-year-old Lehder, whose father is German, would be placed under the care of a charitable group in Germany.

Germany’s interior and foreign ministries were not immediately available for comment on the case when contacted by AFP.

21.06.2020 0 comment

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