SAO PAULO (AP) — Brazilian authorities detained the wife of former boxing champion Arturo Gatti and formally accused her Sunday of killing him at a posh seaside tourist resort in Brazil.
Police said 23-year-old Amanda Rodrigues was taken into custody after contradictions in her interrogation and presented a formal accusation against her. Prosecutors will later [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Brazil’
Arturo gatti wife picture
July 13th, 2009 |
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Man Utd move for ‘new Ronaldinho’
July 13th, 2009 |
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• Ferguson targets 18-year-old tipped as ‘new Ronaldinho’
• United offer financial package of £7m plus add-ons
Manchester United have re-established formal contact with the Brazilian club Gremio about trying to reach a compromise over a fee for Douglas Costa, the talented 18-year-old who has been hailed as “the new Ronaldinho” in his country.
Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, rates Costa as the brightest young talent currently playing in South America but the Premier League champions could not convince Gremio to allow him out on loan when negotiations began earlier this summer and believe the deal can happen only if the Porto Alegre club drastically lower their valuation.
Gremio have severe financial issues and are acutely aware that selling their most prized young asset could be the answer to those problems. With that in mind, they have informed prospective buyers they want £21m. United regard that as excessive for a player who has not yet played 20 senior games but they are hoping Gremio’s position is negotiable and have put together a financial package, with an initial outlay of £7m, plus a series of success-related add-ons if the player lives up to the promise that has brought him to the attention of Ferguson via John Calvert-Toulmin, the club’s principal scout in Brazil.
The transfer hinges on whether a compromise can be agreed and United are hoping the influential deal-maker Chris Nathaniel can help to convince Gremio that they risk getting nothing at all if they continue to play hardball. Nathaniel, whose extensive list of clients includes Rio Ferdinand and Robinho, is prominently involved with Costa and has spent the last few days in Brazil, in the process holding extensive talks with Gremio’s hierarchy.
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• Terry in Chelsea talks as Man City prepare bid
Manchester City are also aware of Costa’s burgeoning reputation but they, too, regard Gremio’s demands as exorbitant and would rather pay significant transfer fees for established players. United’s policy is different, targeting players below the age of 25 if large sums are involved, and Costa fits into their transfer strategy as a young, talented footballer whose value should feasibly go up in future years, just as happened with Cristiano Ronaldo, who was 18 when he signed from Sporting Lisbon.
Costa, a Brazil under-20 international, has other admirers in Spain and Italy but has indicated he would like to move to England and become United’s fourth signing of their summer, following Luis Antonio Valencia, Michael Owen and Gabriel Obertan to Old Trafford.
Carlos Alberto, Brazil’s outspoken World Cup-winning captain in 1970, recently accused United of “raping Brazilian football” and urged Fifa to intervene to prevent the country’s best young players from being lured away by Europe’s leading clubs.
United, however, are proud of their expansive operation in South America, having plucked three Brazilian players – Rafael and Fabio da Silva plus Rodrigo Possebon – from relative obscurity in the past two years.
Costa, who joined Gremio at the age of 11 and is contracted to the club until February 2013, helped Brazil to victory in the South American Youth Championship in January and February, scoring three goals in the process, but United’s interest in the player dates back more than a year before that. Gremio is the club where Ronaldinho made his breakthrough and Costa has obvious similarities in terms of his ability to run with the ball and beat opponents from his favoured role between midfield and attack, as well as being a free-kick specialist.
Any deal would be dependent on the player receiving a work permit but United have never had significant problems obtaining the necessary paperwork in the past.
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Arturo Gatti Dead; Wife Detained
July 12th, 2009 |
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SAO PAULO — The wife of former boxing champion Arturo Gatti was detained as a suspect by Brazilian authorities Sunday following his death at a posh seaside resort.
Police said 23-year-old Amanda Rodrigues was taken into custody after co…
Italy’s minimalist G8 summit
July 11th, 2009 |
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By Bridget Kendall
BBC diplomatic correspondent, L’Aquila
Switching the venue of this year’s G8 summit to an active earthquake zone sounded like a hostage to fortune.
Why invite the world’s most powerful leaders to perch on the same precarious spot of the Earth’s crust which in April killed 300 people and left 60,000 others homeless
Just think what global chaos would ensue if – mid session – the ground opened up and swallowed them all.
When the town of L’Aquila was rocked by a new – though less powerful – set of tremors last Friday, the summit’s prospects began to look decidedly dicey.
‘A good idea’
In the town centre many buildings were already cracked and cordoned off. On every corner caved-in roofs and ripped-out walls hinted at the prospect of new collapses to come. It felt as though at any minute it could all start to shake again.
I had visions of us journalists stuck, incommunicado and cowering under tables in the so-called media village. Reporters turned refugees, caught in a new disaster zone, while summit leaders were airlifted out to Rome.
But in the event, nothing happened. Not a tremble.
To my surprise earthquake survivors living in local tent camps thought the summit an excellent idea.
What better way to draw attention to the fact their lives had been reduced to rubble, than to pull in the likes of George Clooney and other celebrity hangers-on who tend to pitch up at major summits.
"At one formal function, the eyes of a weary Barack Obama glazed over and his shoulders slumped. Not just us hacks, it seems, were getting by on hard mattresses with very little sleep"
"My home won’t get repaired for another three or four years. The entire tower block fell on top of it. Any publicity is welcome," said one woman, Anna, sitting with her neighbours under a sun parasol outside her blue canvas home.
The pathway between the tents was lined with drying washing and children’s bicycles. A hand-painted notice, decorated in big childish crayon, announced it was Butterfly Row.
There was also Cat Alley, and Moon Street, all clearly marked. An air of semi-permanence had set in.
Roughing it
In keeping with the earthquake tragedy, the summit itself had an air of austerity. So different from the usual lavish attempts to promote a country at its best.
President Putin revamped an entire 18th Century palace in St Petersburg. Tony Blair took over one of Scotland’s grandest hotels.
But Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi commandeered the local barracks of the Finance Police and required world leaders and their delegations to sleep in dormitories on site.
"How is the accommodation for VIPs" I asked one UN official.
He sighed and replied wearily: "It’s not quite what we’re used to."
He was lucky. Some of the journalists unable to find places to stay locally were reduced to begging space among the tents of the earthquake refugees. Our BBC team drove back nightly over the mountains to a village two hours away.
Also minimalist and unpredictable were the communications facilities. It was almost impossible to find out schedules or contact numbers for delegations. The only truly reliable information was the time of the prime minister’s late afternoon press conference.
That you could not avoid. On large screens, beaming down at you would be the unmistakable jovial grin of Mr Berlusconi.
And if you did miss it, never mind. It was played over and over again.
Press conferences by those with critical views, like the so-called G5 group of emerging countries (India, Brazil, China, South Africa and Mexico)seemed to occur with almost no prior warning or publicity.
It was almost as though these Asian and Latin American giants were G8 dissidents, deliberately kept to the fringe.
The same world
One morning we arrived at the media centre to find the broadband connection we were using had been cut off. Local Italian technicians claimed it was on the orders of the Italian authorities.
A few hours later it was restored. But in situations like this, you soon start to get paranoid. Was this an attempt to control our output to what could be monitored
Probably not, but – instead of the usual eagerness for media coverage – it felt distinctly odd to be prevented from telling the world what was going on.
In some ways this new "bare bones" G8 style suits the mood of the moment.
For a change the journalists were not kept 50 miles away from the leaders, or worse – as has happened – sequestered on a separate island.
The summiteers were a short walk away. It felt as though we could keep them under our gaze.
At one formal function, the eyes of a weary Barack Obama glazed over and his shoulders slumped. Not just us hacks, it seems, were getting by on hard mattresses with very little sleep.
This year, in L’Aquila, we were all part of the same world.</p
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
US deports ‘minister for cocaine’
July 10th, 2009 |
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Former military despot faces 30 years in prison for crimes including genocide and political assassinations
In his pomp he was known as the “minister for cocaine”, a corrupt and ruthless military despot who collaborated with drug cartels and terrorised Bolivia.
Luis Arce-Gómez, interior minister in the Andean nation’s 1980-81 dictatorship, made an infamous warning to foes to “walk around with their wills under their arms”.
But when the former burly colonel returned home yesterday he was a shrivelled, white-haired figure too feeble to even walk into the prison where he is expected to end his days.
The United States has deported the 71-year-old to face justice in Bolivia after he spent almost 20 years in a Florida prison for drug trafficking.
Arce-Gómez, who once recruited the Nazi Klaus Barbie as an adviser, faces 30 years in La Paz’s Chonchocoro prison for at least eight crimes including genocide and political assassinations.
President Evo Morales thanked the US for deporting a figure whose name once inspired dread among leftists, trade unionists and journalists. “It is a historic day for human rights.”
FBI agents escorted Arce-Gómez on the flight from Miami to La Paz where upon arrival he was given oxygen to adjust to the 3,800-meter altitude, covered in a blanket and wooly hat and ferried past astonished onlookers in a wheelchair to a waiting ambulance and convoy of police vehicles.
It was an ignominious homecoming for a man who once typified the hubris and viciousness of South America’s right wing military regimes.
Arce-Gómez was an ambitious army officer when the 1980 “cocaine coup” financed by drug traffickers brought his ally General Luis GarcÃa Meza to power.
Appointed interior minister, he wasted no time arresting, torturing and murdering the regime’s real or imagined foes. Records show at least 93 dead, 26 disappeared and 4,000 detained, many of them leftists and union leaders. Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon” who fled to Bolivia after the second world war, gave tips on repression.
According to the US federal indictment, Arce-Gómez turned his impoverished Andean nation into a narco-state by giving drug cartels free rein to produce and ship cocaine in return for large payments. He reportedly charged up to $75,000 every two weeks.
Traffickers who balked had their drugs seized and had to pay even higher sums to retrieve them from government vaults.
After just 13 months the dictatorship collapsed in 1981 and Arce-Gómez fled. He was captured in 1989 and extradited to the US where he was sentenced to a two-decade stretch for drug trafficking.
Upon completing his sentence a US court rejected Arce-Gómez’s asylum request and ruled he should be returned to Bolivia where he was convicted in absentia in 1993 for genocide and human rights violations. He faces 30 years without parole.
It is hoped that Arce-Gómez will identify the location of the remains of his disappeared victims, including Marcelo Quiroga, a prominent politician and human rights advocate.
Awaiting him in Chonchocoro prison was his former boss, General Meza, 79, who was caught in Brazil in 1994 and is serving a 30-year sentence.
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At the high temple of fashion
July 10th, 2009 |
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Suspend your disbelief, take a deep breath, and dive into the extraordinary world of Paris haute couture fashion week … Because there’s nothing else quite like it. By Jess Cartner-Morley
In pictures: Haute couture, the greatest show on earth
On Tuesday afternoon I waited for the best part of an hour for a 10-minute catwalk show comprising of 24 dresses, none of which in all probability will ever be available for sale. This was the Christian Lacroix show, and neither I nor the other 279 people in the audience would have dreamed of missing it. This, the new collection from a designer whose 22-year-old company has never made a profit and is now on the verge of bankruptcy, was the hot ticket of the week, despite the fact that if no buyer appears to rescue the company, the atelier where these clothes are produced will be shuttered and locked before these dresses get a chance to go into production.
What Paris haute couture week lacks in logic, however, it makes up for in poetry. The dresses at Lacroix were dark and elegant and grand, in the kind of fabrics you seldom come across in the real world: guipure lace, swiss muslin, silk taffeta. Midway through the show, the gathering clouds let rip and the slender glass windows of the Museum of Decorative Arts rattled in the driving rain: appropriately theatrical, battlefield weather for Lacroix’s last stance.
One of the details that distinguishes haute couture from other clothes is that these are clothes designed and perfected from every angle. The front view is only one element of the look: the side profile will have been tweaked to dramatic perfection, and the back view is often a work of art in its own right. At Lacroix, a midnight blue crepe dress was caught with a creamy silk bow at the base of the spine, while an evening gown was suspended by a single fragment of the lightest black lace stretched from one clavicle and over the shoulder bone. It was as if Lacroix was as focused on exits as entrances: which, seeing as how this could be his label’s last show, would be understandable.
The trouble with haute couture is that pictures don’t really tell the story at all. Trying to convey the full experience of haute couture via a photograph in a newspaper is like trying to capture the taste sensations of a meal by Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adrià in a flavour of potato crisps. Watching it live is a full-on sensory experience: the angles, the ideas, the references, the colours, the texture of each outfit, not to mention the choreographed body language and painstaking hair and makeup of the models, or the ambience of the setting, every detail of which will have been meticulously planned, from the celebrities who have been invited to ornament the front row to the colour of the napkins handed out with the after-show canapes.
Now more than ever, attending haute couture requires a certain suspension of disbelief. To appreciate couture you have to leave your head-screwed-on, oh-for-goodness-sake-surely-no-one-buys-this-stuff attitude at the door and dive right in. Some people like to take deep lungfuls of air when they are by the sea, or in the mountains, in order to draw deeply on the good stuff: I do the same in Paris couture ateliers. I calculate that every lungful contains at least a tenner’s worth of Diptyque room fragrance, so I try to make the most of it, in the hope I will still have figuier or tuberose in my nostrils when I get off the Eurostar and back on the tube.
There are still people who have pots of money and the desire to spend it in ridiculous ways. If you doubt me, ask Nicolas Ouchenir, a calligrapher who is employed by designers including Miuccia Prada and Karl Lagerfeld to write the work-of-art, handwritten invitations that are a calling card of couture. He told Womenswear Daily this week that as well as fashion designers, his clients include wealthy Russians who pay him to transcribe love letters to their sweethearts, sometimes in ink laced with real gold.
But haute couture is in very real trouble, caught in a tug-of-war, between Paris and the rest of the world. There is a very real need to build a relationship with clients in emerging markets. The Russian and Middle Eastern clients who were a front-row novelty just a few years ago are now the old-timers; China, Brazil, Turkey, even Ukraine and Kazakhstan are where orders are coming from now. To seduce these customers, they need to be made to feel comfortable with what they are watching. Yet the value of couture is in its very Frenchness: every other city in the world has a fashion week, but only Paris has a week devoted to haute couture. That hoity-toity Parisian attitude is precisely what gives added value to the labels on the couture roster, and they tinker with it at their peril.
The dilemma can be seen in the contrast between the Chanel and Dior shows this week. At Chanel, Lagerfeld’s new look centred around long, column-shaped skirts and dresses slit at either side. It was reminiscent of the Chinese cheongsam shape – and, as such, may well succeed in grabbing the attention of the Chinese clients whom Chanel and Dior are currently battling to seduce. But on the Paris catwalk, the clothes looked a little tricksy, although the evening was staged with aplomb – an evening show in the Grand Palais, which merged seamlessly into a glamorous after-show soiree.
Dior took the polar opposite route, moving its show from the hangar-like, out-of-town venues it has favoured in recent seasons back into the iconic dove-grey rooms of Dior’s Avenue Montaigne headquarters. The setting, the clothes and the styling conspired to turn back the clock half a century to when Dior clients gathered in these very rooms to view classics such as the Bar peplum jacket and wasp-waisted suits, pieces that were revived this week. The makeup at a Dior show is always a work of art in its own right, and this season it conjured up memories of 1950s beauties. Dotted black net veils over the face recalled Irving Penn’s famous 1951 Vogue cover, in which the model’s face is closely wrapped in a black fishnet veil; the strong eyebrows and pale complexions artfully powdered and sculpted suggested Richard Avedon and the regal, arch allure of his 1955 portrait Dovima with Elephants.
The giant perfume bottles that dominated the Chanel catwalk made another important point about haute couture, which is that despite the tiny scale on which the actual dresses are produced, the economics only make sense on a giant scale. Couture is “a powerful tool to educate the customer about our brand”, as Chanel’s president of fashion, Bruno Pavlovsky, put it recently. The concept of a brand having a “DNA” has taken over from a colour being “the new black” as the fashion cliche of our time, and there is a very real danger of the creativity of couture being strangled by the obsession with bludgeoning home brand values. Death by brand-building: what a very 21st century way for couture to go.
The spirit of couture lives on, if nowhere else, in the studio of designer Bruno Frisoni, who twice a year creates a range of couture bags and shoes for the venerable Roger Vivier label and presents them in his gorgeous, pink-walled studio above the Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Here, this week, he showed me his treasures for autumn: a clutch bag with one side in gold vermeil, modelled on a turtle shell, and the other in gold-painted crocodile, soft as the underside of a turtle; and a chainmail bag encrusted with jet dragonflies and the softest feathers, which he likened to “the magical remains of a mermaid”. Moments after I had laid my coffee cup on Frisoni’s table, Inès de la Fressange, his full-time muse – I told you, this place is very, very couture – discreetly picked up a stray teaspoon and replaced it on the saucer, apparently bothered by the asymmetry. Moments later, I spotted Frisoni absentmindedly rubbing at an entirely invisible mark on a white leather chair. After all, as Pavlovsky of Chanel said recently, “in couture, the objective is to be perfect”.
On my way home, as I got off the train at St Pancras, I fell into step behind a petite lady in harem pants and gladiator sandals. I wouldn’t have looked twice, except it was nearly dark and she was wearing sunglasses. It was Kylie, who had changed out of the curvy black lace skirt she had been wearing at Jean Paul Gaultier earlier that day. Families and businessmen jostled past her on the platform, and in the evening rush, no one noticed a pop princess. Haute couture was over, and it was back to reality, even for Kylie.
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Now you’re talking …
July 4th, 2009 |
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Want to speak like a native but don’t fancy spending your entire trip in a classroom? These holidays combine lessons with activities and the chance to hang out with locals
French
Surfing: Biarritz
If only school could have been this relaxed. At a solar-powered surf camp in a 300-year-old farmhouse close to Les Casernes beach, near Biarritz, language lessons take the form of informal two-hour chats over beers in the afternoons. Mornings are spent riding the waves, and five days of surf lessons (for 1½ hours per day) are included. The camp has plenty of places for practising tenses in your free time – in the garden, hydro-pool, hammam, tree hut, canoe or hammock. Suitable for beginners and improvers.
• A week costs £606pp, including surfboard and wetsuit hire. 08445 020 445, golearnto.com.
Outdoor adventure: Verdon
Perhaps you’re more likely to remember new words if you learn them while scared out of your wits. A French immersion course in Moustiers, in the Parc Naturel Regional du Verdon, includes morning lessons (beginner to advanced available) in a converted hilltop monastery, plus afternoon exploration of the river Verdon by canoe, treks into the Garrigue with a forest guard, games of pétanque in the village square, dances at a bal populaire or viewings of French films, all accompanied by teachers to ensure French is spoken throughout. At the weekend, the adventuring ratchets up a gear with canyoning, rafting, kayaking and abseiling where no doubt you will learn the French for “Help!” and perfect your pronunciation of merde
• Course €1,670pp for 14 days, accommodation €458 per week, 0121 430 7660, experiencelanguage.co.uk.
Wine: Bordeaux
Many people’s language priority is being able to order food and drink. But imagine how impressive you’ll sound when you can not only stammer out “Un verre de vin, s’il vous plaît”, but are also capable of ordering a fine Bordeaux, commenting on its complexity of flavour and describing the time you visited the very vineyard where it was created. This seven-day French and Bordeaux wine course will set you well on the way to talking about terroir like a native, with four 45-minute sessions of French a day (there’s a test on day one to establish your level), three afternoon sessions on Bordeaux wines, including tastings at l’Ecole du Bordeaux, and excursions to Saint-Emilion and Médoc vineyards.
• Courses start 20 July, 17 August, 14 September, 12 October, £705pp. Homestay accommodation from £170 per week, flight from £115pp return. 0871 230 8512, statravel.co.uk.
Spanish
Walk the talk: Pyrenees
“When we visit my neighbour Hilaria’s vegetable garden, if you pick tomatoes, you’ll learn how to talk about them,” says Georgina Howard, who runs the Pyrenean Experience, a language course in the Baztan valley that teaches Spanish by living Spanish. Language tutors are always on hand to help guests in conversation practise while they ramble through the Pyrenean mountains, meet local farmers, visit bars and hamlets, have lunch with the neighbours or host parties at the seven-bedroom farmhouse, and generally live the Basque life. There are more formal morning lessons on a terrace, and weeks for beginners, intermediate and advanced speakers are run separately.
• Full board £850pp per week, 0121 711 3428, pyreneanexperience.com.
Surfing: Tenerife
Insted runs language courses in Austria, Spain and France that are combined with skiing or surfing. Its Tenerife course runs year-round from a central base in Puerto de la Cruz, a thriving town with busy bars and restaurants serving Latin American and African-influenced dishes. Minutes away from the classroom are the beaches, where the breaks have earned the Canaries the title “Hawaii of the Atlantic”. Accommodation is with a local family, or in an apartment sharing with other students from the course.
• Homestay with family from €165pp per week B&B in private room, €200 half board. Apartment from €165pp for private room. Two week minimum, €220 per week for the course. 00 33 450 530 366, insted.com.
Tango: Buenos Aires
“Bailamos?” is Spanish for “Shall we dance?” – as those returning from this trip will know. In the historic centre of Argentina’s capital, near the bohemian San Telmo district, pupils take a daily four-hour classroom lesson of Spanish, and Argentinian and Spanish culture, politics and history in groups of up to seven. Afterwards they don their dancing shoes to learn one of the world’s sexiest dances at a nearby milonga, or tango hall.
• Six nights including homestay with from £467pp, tango classes £4 per hour. Hotel accommodation available. Journey Latin America (020 8747 8315, journeylatinamerica.co.uk).
Portuguese
Capoeira: Brazil
Practise whirling your limbs to the moves of capoeira while learning to twirl your tongue around the Portuguese language on a two-week course combining the two in Salvador. Classes of eight study beginners’ Portuguese for 20 hours a week, then concentrate on the acrobatic Brazilian dance/martial art twice a week; both take place in a language centre. A samba lesson and cookery class are also included, and homestay accommodation is available so that you can practise over dinner (the language, not capoeira).
• Course £285 pp for 14 days, homestay accommodation from £89 per room per week. 08445 020 445, golearnto.com.
Italian
Food and cookery: Tuscany
For an indulgent foodie break with a side serving of language lessons, Sanctuary Villas puts up large groups of friends or two families in a luxurious converted farmhouse villa with an outdoor pool, sauna, steam room and Jacuzzi, near the medieval village of San Gimignano. The company can arrange extras including cookery classes with local chef Giuseppina and language lessons, taken in your villa, the garden which overlooks rolling, cypress-lined Chianti hills or wherever you prefer. Villa La Terme consists of two large houses, together sleeping 10 plus two children.
• From £5,824 per week (£69 pp per night) accommodation only, language lessons from £41 pp per hour with Sanctuary Villas (01242 547 902, sanctuary-villas.com).
Photography and cycling: Umbria
Northern Umbria is a very untouristy part of Italy, a bonus for language learners as locals are unlikely to revert to English when you chat, and because they have more time to do so. Guests at the Labbazia school in the Upper Tiber Valley will meet plenty of them on trips to local markets and bars in the nearby medieval villages, where they’ll put into practise all they learned that day in class (three levels available). There’s usually some sort of local pageant, dance or festival to attend, and many other activities are arranged on demand, from photography classes to tai chi, cycling or horse-riding.
• From €1,050pp per week, full-board at the agriturismo where lessons are held, including 20 x 45min lessons, transfers from Perugia and guided trips. 00 39 075 857 3004, labbaziaschool.com.
Greek
Beach and culture: Syros
On this two-week course at the OMILO centre on the Cycladic island of Syros, there are classes at the Pension Echo in Azolimnos (which is also one of the self-catering accommodation options) from 9.30am to 1.30pm each day. Then it’s time to hit the beaches right by the centre for swimming and sunbathing, before moving a short distance to the village’s lively tavernas. Excursions such as Greek dance lessons, museum visits, guided walks and local concerts are included and everyone goes along to a sociable first night meal. The island’s capital, Ermoupolis, an affluent harbour of neo-classical buildings, mansions, marble-paved streets and white houses, is 4km away.
• Catch a ferry from Athens. Next dates September, €590 for two weeks. Rooms from €35 per night. 00 30 210 612 2896, omilo.com.
German
Watersports: Bavaria
Lindau is a beautiful town on its own island in the eastern side of Lake Constance, with a historic medieval centre and pretty harbour. It’s a great base for learning German – after classes, pupils cool off by sailing and waterskiing on the lake, cycle around it or go on excursions to Meersburg, Salem Castle and Liechtenstein.
The Dialoge language school provides 20-25 lessons per week, and has a sports hall for basketball, volleyball and football games. Social evenings with barbecues, wine tastings and the cinema are arranged too.
• From €490 per week including accommodation with a host family or the school’s apartments, €330 without. 0808 234 8578, studytravel.com.
Arabic
Interaction: Cairo
Pupils of the Bridge Abroad programme will learn the Egyptian dialect (one of the easiest to pick up) as well as classical Arabic on a week’s beginners’ course in Cairo. The focus is on learning through interaction with some of the city’s 14.5million residents, after daily lessons in a school 15 minutes from the centre. Afternoons are spent among the throng, picking up more vocabulary in the souks, cafes and squares, and at lectures, concerts, cinemas and the famous sites.
• Three weeks (minimum) including accommodation costs from $878pp, $399 without accommodation, or from $711 per week private tuition, from $855 with accommodation. 0808 120 7613, bridgeabroad.com.
Japanese
Cooking and karaoke: Tokyo
Nowhere gives a culture shock like Japan, so throwing yourself into the local way of life is as important as learning the lingo if you are to have a hope of ever fitting in. Alongside a beginners’ course that also covers Japanese culture in a centrally-located school, pupils can take workshops on calligraphy, tea ceremonies, noodle cooking, judo and karate, and interact with native Japanese speakers on nights out bowling, to quizzes and, of course, singing karaoke.
• From $2900 for two weeks including accommodation with a host family, in student dorms or apartments with World Link Education (0046 5580 3720, wle-japan.com).
Mandarin
Live-in learning: Beijing
Moving in with your teacher would have been an abhorrent notion when you were a teenager, but now it could be the best way to develop your language skills. Instead of trawling through a textbook twice a day, you can chat to your tutors from breakfast to bedtime while staying in their home on Go Learn To’s “home language courses”. These suit all levels and give the option of staying with your teachers, couples and families around Beijing as well as informal tuition. Guests get a set of keys and are free to come and go as they please, but are usually invited to join in with their teacher’s life, to meet relatives and friends, go shopping and explore the nightlife.
• Seven days from £864pp per week full board, 08445 020 445, golearnto.com.
Russian
Culture: St Petersburg
Russia is one place where you’re unlikely to pick up much of the language without some serious tuition. A course that includes 20 lessons per week in St Petersburg is a good place to start. After class, it’s time to absorb the city’s rich culture at its many sites.
Bi-weekly group activities include visits to the theatre and ballet and to other places such as the riverside city of Novgorod. Go in the summer and you can join in many vercherinkas – small parties with caviar, vodka and Russian folk songs. Beginners’ and advanced courses are available, but everyone is asked to learn the Cyrillic alphabet before arriving.
• Two weeks from $2,170pp all inclusive, but excluding flights, languagesabroad.com.
• Don’t miss our free phrasebooks every day next week, plus Italian the week after
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Brazil’s new golden boy
July 3rd, 2009 |
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Kaka might steal all the headlines this summer, but Luis Fabiano has emerged from the Confederations Cup as one of the new stars of Brazilian football. The Sevilla striker was the tournament top scorer with five goals, including his crucial brace in the final on Sunday that helped Brazil recover
Air France plane came down intact
July 2nd, 2009 |
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• Investigators: Jet hit the sea belly first at high speed
• Without black box exact cause may never be found
The Air France plane that vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 228 people on board did not disintegrate in mid-air but plunged into the water intact and belly first, investigators said today.
Alain Bouillard, leading the preliminary inquiry on behalf of France’s BEA accident agency, said examination of wreckage indicated the A330 Airbus was still in one piece when it crashed, at high speed, into the ocean.
“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” he told a press conference near Paris. “It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration.” Appearing to rule out any question ofterrorism, Bouillard added that “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives” had been found.
Just over a month since Flight AF447 went down during a flightbetween Rio de Janeiro and Paris,, killing all passengers and crew, investigators said they were facing one of the most challenging and baffling cases in the history of air travel.
The pilots apparently sent no distress calls before the plane went missing, and a rescue team has been unable to find the flight recorders, or black boxes, in one of the remotest parts of the Atlantic, 930 miles off Brazil’s mainland. Investigators have warned that, without such crucial information, a full explanation into why the Airbus ran into difficulties will be hard to come by.
“Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident,” admitted Bouillard, adding that the blame for the crash could not be pinned entirely on a problem with the plane’s speed sensors, or pitot tubes. “[It] is one of the factors but not the only one,” he said. “It is an element but it is not the cause.”
The BEA said it was trying to piece together what went wrong from the automated messages, or Acars, sent in the final minutes before the plane hit the water, and from the debris in the Atlantic in the past month.
Around 640 items of furniture, machinery and other material has been examined for clues. Analysis of food trays and shelving in the galley indicated that they had crashed in a way that would suggest a strong vertical acceleration, he said. Part of the plane’s floor had been found misshapen to suggest a similar fate.
No inflated life jackets had been discovered, which “obviously shows the passengers were not prepared for a crash landing,” said Bouillard. But experts expressed doubt as to where the investigation, still in its early days, could lead without the recovery of the black boxes. Bouillard announced the search for the recorders had been extended for another 10 days in the hope that the equipment would continue to emit signals.
Airbus said it was exploring ways to “reinforce” flight data recovery, either by increasing the data sent from planes, or by developing technology such as black boxes that float or whose signals last longer.
“Without finding the black boxes it’s going to be phenomenally difficult, maybe impossible, to determine what happened,” Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence, told the Associated Press, adding there was a “horrendous lack of evidence”.
Initial rumours surrounding the plane’s airspeed sensors was partially corroborated by investigators yesterday, who confirmed that one of the messages transmitted minutes before the crash showed the pilots were trying to fly through a storm zone with faulty speed information.
Speculation that the monitoring instruments, located outside the plane, could have iced over led Air France to replace the monitors on all its Airbus 330s and A340s this month. But, though a symptom of something wrong, investigators stressed they were at a loss to explain the root cause of the crash. “Between the surface of the water and 35,000 feet, we don’t know what happened,” Bouillard said. “In the absence of the flight recorders, it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions.”
Aside from problems with the speed sensors, investigators are also focusing on why air traffic controllers in Brazil failed to pass over control of the flight to their colleagues in Senegal.
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Air France plane came down intact
July 2nd, 2009 |
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• Investigators: Jet hit the sea belly first at high speed
• Without black box exact cause may never be found
The Air France plane that vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 228 people on board did not disintegrate in mid-air but plunged into the water intact and belly first, investigators said today.
Alain Bouillard, leading the preliminary inquiry on behalf of France’s BEA accident agency, said examination of wreckage indicated the A330 Airbus was still in one piece when it crashed, at high speed, into the ocean.
“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” he told a press conference near Paris. “It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration.” Appearing to rule out any question ofterrorism, Bouillard added that “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives” had been found.
Just over a month since Flight AF447 went down during a flightbetween Rio de Janeiro and Paris,, killing all passengers and crew, investigators said they were facing one of the most challenging and baffling cases in the history of air travel.
The pilots apparently sent no distress calls before the plane went missing, and a rescue team has been unable to find the flight recorders, or black boxes, in one of the remotest parts of the Atlantic, 930 miles off Brazil’s mainland. Investigators have warned that, without such crucial information, a full explanation into why the Airbus ran into difficulties will be hard to come by.
“Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident,” admitted Bouillard, adding that the blame for the crash could not be pinned entirely on a problem with the plane’s speed sensors, or pitot tubes. “[It] is one of the factors but not the only one,” he said. “It is an element but it is not the cause.”
The BEA said it was trying to piece together what went wrong from the automated messages, or Acars, sent in the final minutes before the plane hit the water, and from the debris in the Atlantic in the past month.
Around 640 items of furniture, machinery and other material has been examined for clues. Analysis of food trays and shelving in the galley indicated that they had crashed in a way that would suggest a strong vertical acceleration, he said. Part of the plane’s floor had been found misshapen to suggest a similar fate.
No inflated life jackets had been discovered, which “obviously shows the passengers were not prepared for a crash landing,” said Bouillard. But experts expressed doubt as to where the investigation, still in its early days, could lead without the recovery of the black boxes. Bouillard announced the search for the recorders had been extended for another 10 days in the hope that the equipment would continue to emit signals.
Airbus said it was exploring ways to “reinforce” flight data recovery, either by increasing the data sent from planes, or by developing technology such as black boxes that float or whose signals last longer.
“Without finding the black boxes it’s going to be phenomenally difficult, maybe impossible, to determine what happened,” Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence, told the Associated Press, adding there was a “horrendous lack of evidence”.
Initial rumours surrounding the plane’s airspeed sensors was partially corroborated by investigators yesterday, who confirmed that one of the messages transmitted minutes before the crash showed the pilots were trying to fly through a storm zone with faulty speed information.
Speculation that the monitoring instruments, located outside the plane, could have iced over led Air France to replace the monitors on all its Airbus 330s and A340s this month. But, though a symptom of something wrong, investigators stressed they were at a loss to explain the root cause of the crash. “Between the surface of the water and 35,000 feet, we don’t know what happened,” Bouillard said. “In the absence of the flight recorders, it is extremely difficult to draw conclusions.”
Aside from problems with the speed sensors, investigators are also focusing on why air traffic controllers in Brazil failed to pass over control of the flight to their colleagues in Senegal.
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Air France plane crashed vertically
July 2nd, 2009 |
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Flight 447 went down so quickly that passengers had no time to react, says French head investigator
Air France flight 447 did not break up in the air but plunged vertically into the Atlantic Ocean, according to the French head investigator of last month’s crash, which killed all 228 people on board.
Alain Bouillard said life vests found among the wreckage were not inflated, indicating the accident happened so quickly that the passengers had no time to react.
Speed sensors on the Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were not to blame, he said, though “we are far from understanding the cause of the crash”.
“The plane seems to have hit the surface of the water on its flight trajectory with a strong vertical acceleration,” he said, adding that investigators have found “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives.”
One of the automatic messages emitted by the plane indicates it was receiving incorrect speed information from the external monitoring instruments, which could destabilise the control systems. Experts have suggested those external instruments might have iced over.
No information was being given out from autopsies of the bodies found, Bouillard told a news conference at the headquarters of the French air accident agency BEA in Le Bourget, outside Paris.
The chances of finding the flight recorders are falling as the signals they emit fade. Without them, the full causes of the accident may never be known. The automated messages sent by the plane before it fell gave rescuers only a vague location to begin their search. Bouillard said the search for the plane’s black boxes has been extended by 10 days and would continue untill 10 July.
Families of the victims had been briefed before the media on the findings so far of the BEA investigation.
Earlier, Christophe Guillot-Noel, head of an association for the crash victims’ families said they wanted all the facts, “above all to be able to avoid this eventually happening again”.
“We have just one demand: transparency. We have just one expectation: the truth,” he said.
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Mps Tackle Worries Over Food Price Rise
November 12th, 2007 |
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Govt doing its best to keep inflation low, assures minister
Nazry Bahrawi
nazry@mediacorp.com.sg
WITH groceries costing more by the day and consumers still getting used to
the four-month-old 2-per- cent hike in GST, it was inevitable that
inflation – and the Government’s handling of it – became one of the
talking points in Parliament yesterday.
Among the questions raised by several MPs: Is the Government monitoring
the increases in prices of food items such as flour and chicken? Are such
increases a cause of concern? What will be the impact of rising prices on
businesses? Should the Singapore dollar be allowed to appreciate further?
Madam Halimah Yaacob (Jurong GRC), wondered whether the Consumer Price
Index (CPI ) – which rose 2.7 per cent year-on-year in the third quarter
compared to 1 per cent in the second quarter and 0.5 per cent in the first
quarter – was an accurate reflection of inflationary trends in Singapore.
The CPI tracks the prices of a basket of goods and services, such as
housing, healthcare and transport, consumed by an average household.
Mr Inderjit Singh (Ang Mo Kio GRC) said he was concerned that higher
inflation would affect Singapore’s competitiveness in attracting foreign
investors. Non-Constituency MP Sylvia Lim of the opposition Workers’
Party, wanted to know how Singapore is diversifying its food sources in
order to stabilise prices.
In his response, Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang said that the
Government would try its best to keep inflation low even as he noted that
the “current uptick in inflation is a global phenomenon”.
For example, Mr Lim said, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) had
managed to strengthen the value of the Singapore dollar by maintaining an
exchange rate policy since April last year that allows the currency to
“appreciate gradually and modestly” rather than pegging it to the US
dollar. The latter move would have resulted in Singaporeans experiencing
higher inflation.
In reference to Mdm Halimah’s query about whether the CPI was an accurate
reflection of the state of inflation here, Mr Lim noted that the index had
been low for the first two quarters of this year. The CPI is expected to
rise slightly above 2.7 per cent in the fourth quarter.
Mr Lim attributed the lower CPI in the first two quarters of the year to
the “low transport CPI” because of some changes to the transport policies
as well as the low oil prices back then.
However, oil prices are now on the rise and the impact of the GST hike in
July will continue “to show up in higher CPI inflation figures” for 12
months until June next year.
Mr Lim added: “Unlike food import prices, the GST increase has had only a
limited impact on basic food prices as the major supermarket chains have
been absorbing the GST increase for basic food items.”
Mr Lim expects the CPI to hover around 3 per cent in the later part of
2008, higher than the last few years. The Government expects inflation to
peak at 4 to 5 per cent in the first half of next year.
On the issue of food diversification, Mr Lim said while Singapore can
explore the possibility of importing vegetables from Thailand and China,
there is only so much that the Government can do to mitigate a price hike
in consumer goods.
For example, if there is a worldwide increase in the prices of cornfeed,
than chicken prices will go up even if Singapore were to diversify its
sources of frozen chicken from countries such as Australia, the United
States and Brazil.
Allaying Mr Singh’s concern over the impact of rising prices on
businesses, Mr Lim said that Singapore is still in a “good position” to
attract foreign investments because inflation here is still comparatively
lower than other countries.
Singapore is competitive also because while wages had increased, so too
had our productivity, said Mr Lim.
“I don’t think we should begrudge our workers having a fair share of wage
increase in the last two years if we look at the last broader 5 to 7 year
time frame,” he said, explaining that wages was slow to climb during the
longer term period.
The Rise And Rise Of Robinho
November 12th, 2007 |
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After two seasons at Real, Brazil striker is finally showing he is
capable of great things
MADRID – He signed for Real Madrid in the summer of 2005 amid much
fanfare, with the likes of Pele himself hailing the youngster as Brazil’s
next great thing.
The last couple of seasons have been a steep learning curve for Robinho as
he only displayed occasional glimpses of his form and some Real fans began
to question the wisdom of the signing.
But after another five-star performance for the Spanish champions on
Sunday (yesterday morning, Singapore time), the 23-year-old is finally
beginning to realise his enormous potential.
The Brazilian international put on a mesmerising display, including two
goals, as Real downed Real Mallorca 4-3 to stay top of La Liga.
The youngster has already chalked up a double in one previous league clash
this season and Real coach Bernd Schuster acknowledged: “Robinho is in
great form at the moment and he has maintained a very high level for
several matches now. That is what we expect of him.
“At Real Madrid we need players such as Robinho, Raul, Ruud (van
Nistelrooy) and (Wesley) Sneijder to create problems for the opposition.”
Dutch international van Nistelrooy scored the 73rd minute winner for Real
in a see-saw game that underlined Real’s attacking prowess and their
defensive frailties.
Real’s nearest challengers are Villarreal, just a point adrift after their
sensational 3-2 win over 10-man Sevilla.
Sevilla had beaten Real last weekend and Mallorca looked set to follow in
their footsteps.
Robinho had headed the hosts ahead on 12 minutes but Fernando Varela
equalised two minutes later.
The Brazilian then grabbed his fourth goal of the season on 16 minutes,
dispatching with aplomb after a pass from Raul.
But Real were at sixes and sevens in defence and Varela matched Robinho by
scoring his second of the match with a ferocious 36th minute equaliser.
Guiza then put Mallorca ahead, but Real had too much for the islanders,
with Raul and van Nistelrooy gobbling up chances set up by Robinho to send
the locals into a frenzy.
Said the youngster, after the game: “When I see Ronaldinho once we all
join up for the Brazil games, I’m going to remind him it is Real Madrid
that are leaders.
“I’m very happy with the way I’m playing.
“I’m here to make my dreams come true – to win trophies with Real Madrid.
“We are in great form and I am very happy with the victory because the
three points were very important. We are gradually doing things better and
it means we can be even better.” – Agencies