Brussels is slowly beeting the life out of our sugar industry

Posted on 20th February 2012 in The monuments of world

Now this superb business faces a threat from Brussels, and the imposition of an unnecessary and badly thought-out regulation. For 134 years, the company has sourced its sugar cane from around the world — not unnaturally, since the crop doesn’t grow in the UK. Week in, week out, huge boatloads of brown crystals come up the Thames to be treated. The plant has the capacity to produce 1.1 million tonnes of refined sugar a year; and yet the company is prevented, by the EU commission, from importing the raw materials in the quantities it needs. Their current output is now down to 60 per cent of capacity — and the result is that jobs are being lost in a part of London that already faces the highest levels of unemployment in the city and indeed in the whole of the country.

And while a great London business is unable to fulfil its potential, the price of sugar is pushed up — by the EU — far higher than necessary, and that price hike is felt by every hard-pressed consumer who eats anything in which sugar is an ingredient. That is a long list of foods, in tough times, whose prices are being pushed up by the Common Agricultural Policy. It is utter madness, and it derives from the ruthless determination of the Commission to protect the sugar beet producers of continental Europe.

For decades they have been artificially shielded, by high tariff walls around the EU, which mean that sugar prices in Europe are more than double the world market price. And those sugar beet producers have been given huge sums of taxpayers’ money, in export refunds, to dump their produce overseas. In 2006 the Commission reluctantly bowed to outrage from Oxfam and others, and agreed to a programme of “reform”. Of the total EU sugar market of about 17 million tonnes, 13.5 million would be reserved for the European sugar beet barons. The other 3.5 million tonnes could be supplied by sugar cane producers around the world.

The trouble is that these countries — in Africa, the Caribbean or Pacific regions — have not been able to fill the gap. To find enough cane sugar, Tate & Lyle need to be able to bring in boatfuls from places like Brazil or Central America: and that Brussels forbids. They face swingeing tariffs to bring more in — while the sugar beet producers are given a licence to produce more. At every turn the British refinery finds the system skewed in favour of the beet producers, mainly in France and Germany. But they can’t use beet in the London plants; and you can’t use beet to make golden syrup.

Already 30 jobs are going — high-skilled jobs held by long-serving staff; and it is surely a disgrace that a natural source of employment is being choked at a critical time for the economy. London firms need to be given every incentive and confidence to hire more staff and expand, from tax breaks to the apprenticeship schemes we have been helping to lead from City Hall. And we are lobbying Brussels to drop its crazy prohibition, and allow Tate and Lyle to get cane sugar from wherever in the world it can find the stuff. It is time for common sense on the sugar regime — in the name of jobs for London and cheaper food all round.

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Springtime in the Gulf

Posted on 20th February 2012 in The monuments of world

(MENAFN – Arab News) This is springtime in the Middle East once again. And I haven’t seen such glorious, reinvigorating weather during my nearly decade of living in the region. This year appears to be really special. Temperatures have dropped to single digits in many parts of the UAE – it even snowed for a bit in the picturesque mountains of Ras Al Khaimah – and the Gulf. With a pleasant, cold snap in the air – it was minus something in Kuwait this month – everyone seems to have brought out their woolens and leathers that are rarely found of any use in our part of the world.

This is perhaps the best time to be in the Gulf right now. And coming from a warm region, the colder it is the better for me. I just can’t have enough of this magical, absolutely rejuvenating weather, forever talking about it with anyone who cares to listen. The air is incredibly sweet and pure. And to live it and breathe in it all seems like the greatest blessing nature could offer one. I am not very religious but right now I feel like bowing my head in total submission and thank Him for all His bounty.

But not everyone appears to enjoy the nature in its full glory and breathtaking splendor. Some can still manage to come up with enough excuses to endlessly grumble and whine about the ways of the world in general and the weather in particular. They huff and puff and sniffle as they complain of cold weather conditions, fog and even the divine breeze flowing from up north and across the Gulf. They almost long for the humid and oppressive weather conditions of an Arabian summer as they go on and on about their wretched flu and all sorts of allergies and diseases that the Arab spring conspires to bring them every year.

And I feel nothing but pity for them. Do they realize what they are missing? Okay, it is a bit chilly perhaps for the thin-skinned and overly sensitive. But it’s not cold-cold as in a depressing English or European winter with overcast, gloomy skies. These low temperatures in the Middle East go with a warm and bright sunlight. This morning when I went down to pick up my phone, forgotten as usual in my car, the burst of sunshine outside took my breath away. It was another clear and bright day with a light breeze caressing those fortunate enough to be up and about, instead of being chained to their desks.

The Khalid Lagoon had turned almost white amid a feeding frenzy of thousands of seagulls and other migratory birds that traverse the distance of thousands of miles to be here this time of the year. I desperately wished I had my camera with me although I have tried to capture this incredible scene before in my own clumsy ways. I watch it all the time from the window of my 9th floor office in Sharjah’s Buheirah Corniche, mesmerized by its awe-inspiring beauty. Maybe this is what Keats had in mind when he wrote: A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Every time I need a break or simply get bored, I stand near the window and try to drink in the breathtaking beauty of Khalid Lagoon and the whole of Buheirah Corniche. The pearl-shaped lake that joins the Sharjah Creek and further ahead the warm waters of the Gulf is encircled and embraced on all sides by the emerald green landscape and by the tall trees that seem to defy the high-rises all around.

Birds are everywhere, from the ubiquitous seagulls to kingfishers to crows even, perpetually playing, chirping, twittering and feeding. Even the pigeons and doves are there, side by side, happily chipping away at grains or whatever they could spot. There’s something about the winged creatures, especially pigeons with all their noise and fun and games that could bring even the sleepiest and most deserted of places alive. This is my favorite spot in the whole of UAE.

Who would have ever thought you could create such a miracle in the heart of the desert? But then Sharjah and Dubai, and to a great extent, the UAE defy all received notions about the Gulf. While green landscaping, done at a formidable cost, is a common feature and encouraged all across the emirates, Sharjah stands out for its endless greenery and great public parks, not to mention the open grand vistas and magnificent mosques and monuments.

The emirate is not just home to more than 600 mosques; it is also known for its art galleries, museums, world-class universities, libraries and cultural events held throughout the year. No wonder the UNESCO named Sharjah the Cultural Capital of the Arab and Islamic world in 1996.

Interestingly, this preoccupation with the art, culture, knowledge and good things of life goes with a quest for material progress. More than half of the UAE’s thriving manufacturing sector and industries are based in Sharjah.

More important, Sharjah has resisted the reckless, blind development and growth that came with the dawn of the oil era in most Gulf countries.

In its quest for a balanced growth, it has remained faithful to its Islamic identity and Arab traditions even as it has actively encouraged the pursuit of knowledge and arts and culture.

Perhaps, it is because Sharjah’s ruler is himself an accomplished poet, historian and holder of a PhD from a distinguished British university. Perhaps it’s a stretch but I find in the contemporary Sharjah – and the UAE to some extent – the echoes of the 8th century Baghdad under the legendary Abbasid Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, the land of the thousand and one tales and the land of Scheherazade.

Those were the times when the Muslim civilization was at its peak and Baghdad had been the greatest city on earth, not just the capital of the most powerful and richest empire of the time but also a great center of scientific learning and knowledge, home to Dar Al Hikmah, the House of Wisdom founded by Harun Al-Rashid that functioned as a research center and library, in addition to translating the best and brightest minds from around the world, including from ancient Greece and India, into Arabic.

That treasure trove of learning played a critical role in both the Islamic Golden Age and the European Renaissance. Whatever happened to that craving for knowledge that drove the Arabs to far corners of the world? There are lessons to be drawn from Baghdad’s past and Sharjah’s present.

- Aijaz Zaka Syed is a Gulf-based writer. Write him at aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ruin lust: our love affair with decaying buildings

Posted on 20th February 2012 in The monuments of world

  • Brian Dillon

    • Photograph of dilapidated interior of Michigan Station in Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
    Waiting Hall Michigan Station, Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.

    Early in May 1941, the novelist and essayist Rose Macaulay was staying at the Hampshire village of Liss, attending to family arrangements following the death of her sister Margaret. On the 13th she returned to London – since the start of the war she had lived in a flat at Luxborough House, Marylebone, and worked as a voluntary ambulance driver – and discovered that her home and all her possessions had been destroyed in the bombing a few nights before. In a letter to a friend and literary collaborator, Daniel George, she wrote: “I came up last night … to find Lux House no more – bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with … It would have been less trouble to have been bombed myself.”

    1. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

    2. The Ruins of Detroit

    3. Wilmotte Gallery, Lichfield Studios,

    4. London

    5. W10 6NE

    1. Starts

      24 February 2012

    2. Until

      5 April 2012

    3. Venue website

    The loss of her flat, and especially the destruction of her library, had a profound effect on Macaulay: it was a decade before she completed another novel. In 1949, she lamented: “I am still haunted and troubled by ghosts, and I can still smell those acrid drifts of smouldering ashes that once were live books.” But her memory of the blitz also nurtured a fascination with destruction, decay and the ambiguous emotions conjured by the sight of buildings and entire cities reduced to rubble. In 1953 Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, a lively and eccentric history of the “ruin lust” that gripped European art and literature in the 18th century, reached its height in the romantic period, and had apparently declined in the first half of the 20th century in the face of wreckage that could not be turned to aesthetic or nostalgic advantage.

    The story that Macaulay tells in Pleasure of Ruins is essentially a modern one: it is still alive today in photographs of post-industrial Detroit and recent responses by the likes of Iain Sinclair and Laura Oldfield Ford to the demolitions wrought in the name of the London Olympics. The taste for heroic destruction or picturesque decay cannot thrive without a sense of progress for which it fulfils the role of brooding, sometimes gleeful, unconscious. There were few if any classical or medieval enthusiasts of ruination. Even in renaissance painting, which is littered with mouldered remnants of Greco-Roman statuary and architecture, ruins are ancillary to the main pictorial event, providing a fractured backdrop to a serene madonna, or a handy bit of broken column to support a wilting St Sebastian. But by the 16th and 17th centuries, Macaulay wrote, something like the later literary and artistic obsession with ruins is in the air: Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit “a ruined and ruinous world” of blasted heaths and crumbling castles, and there are resonant examples in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi: “I do love these ancient ruins: / We never tread upon them but we set / Our foot upon some reverend history.”

    It was in the 18th century, however, that the ruin arrived centre-stage in European art, poetry, fiction, garden design and architecture itself. A cult of melancholy collapse and picturesque rot took hold, especially of the English aristocracy, for whom no estate was complete without its mock-dilapidated classical temple, executed in stone, plastered brick or even (as the garden designer Batty Langley advised in 1728) cut-price painted canvas. The craze inspired some well-known architectural absurdities: in Westmeath in 1740 Lord Belvedere built a ruined abbey to block the view of a house where his ex-wife had taken up with his brother, and in 1796 William Beckford first contrived his fantastical Fonthill Abbey, “a sort of habitable ruin”, according to Macaulay – “sort of’” because the thing kept falling down.

    Alongside such follies there flourished a literature of pleasing desuetude, encompassing aesthetic theory, romantic poetry’s rubble-strewn excursions and the dank precincts of the gothic novel. In his Elements of Criticism of 1762, Lord Kames had approved ruins, real or confected, for their embodying “the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought”. And the English romantics took to ruination with a paradoxical energy, Wordsworth uncovering his poetic self among the remnants of Tintern Abbey, Coleridge in the unfinished “Kubla Khan” deriving a whole aesthetic of the literary fragment out of his botched architectural fantasia.

    If all of this seems like so much picturesque maundering, it was also evidence of a fretful modernity. It was in painting that the vexing timescale of the ruin was most accurately broached – ruins, it seemed, spoke as much of the future as of the classical or more recent past. For sure, romantic art is dominated by the sublime vistas of Caspar David Friedrich, whose lone figures look dolefully on the vacant arches of medieval abbeys. But the gaze might as easily be turned on catastrophes to come: in 1830 Sir John Soane commissioned the painter Joseph Gandy to depict his recently completed Bank of England in ruins. In France, Hubert Robert had already painted the Louvre in a state of collapse, prompting Diderot to write: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.”

    This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing. But it’s historically bound up with more pressing worries about the fate of one’s own civilisation: nowhere more so than in the literary and artistic afterlife of a ruinous motif conjured by Rose Macaulay’s grand-uncle Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1840. Reviewing Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay speculates that in the distant future Catholicism “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul’s”. Macaulay’s New Zealander, gazing at the wreckage of the metropolis (and by extension on the fall of the British empire), was for decades a popular image of London’s future ruin – its most notable avatar is Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander.

    Images of the modern city in ruins proliferated in the Victorian period – Richard Jefferies’s 1885 novel After London is the best-known example, with its vision of a city reverting to nature following some unnamed calamity – but the following century had another perspective on the now venerable and even hackneyed trope of ruin: for modernism the city, even (or especially) as it pretended to progress or novelty, was already in ruins. The Waste Land is an obvious instance, with its fragmentary vision of the unreal city. But consider too the photographs of Eugène Atget, which capture a Paris being demolished and rebuilt at the same time, or Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: a critical-historical phantasmagoria conjured from the already decaying Parisian shopping arcades of just a few decades earlier. In architectural terms, the most thoroughgoing visions of the city of the future were haunted too by ruination: Le Corbusier’s projected Ville Radieuse depended on the wholesale ruin of the existing city, and the classical kitsch that Albert Speer planned for Hitler’s future Germania was designed with its potential “ruin value” in mind.

    The second world war tested the taste for ruins to its limits – such wholesale destruction was surely unsuited to melancholy thoughts of an aesthetic cast. Rose Macaulay worries at the problem in the “Note on New Ruins” that she appended to Pleasure of Ruins: the bomb sites of London, she fears, are still too jagged and raw in the memory to qualify as ruins. And yet many of the most affecting images of the depredations of total war and, especially, of the bombing of cities are clearly indebted to romantic precursors. Macaulay herself was not immune to their pleasures: in 1949 her novel The World My Wilderness hymned the Eliotic wasteland that London had become, her feral teenage protagonists running wild among gaping cellars and ruderal meadows. One thinks, too, of Cecil Beaton’s blitz photographs, or Paul Nash’s 1941 painting Totes Meer and its rhyming of wrecked aircraft with Friedrich’s Sea of Ice. In the immediate postwar period, it was cinema that frankly embraced the visual allure and import of the ruin. In Germany, an entire genre of “ruin films” arose out of the devastation caused by Allied carpet-bombing, though the signature film in terms of capturing the plight of Berlin’s orphaned Trümmerkinder, or children of the ruins, was by an Italian director: Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero of 1948.

    Postwar culture is littered with images of ruins past and potentially to come, the levelled cities of Europe becoming mixed up with photographs and footage of real or anticipated nuclear destruction, the whole apocalyptic imaginary hardly alleviated by a sense that urban reconstruction was in itself a form of ruin lust: cities rising into wreckage and the earth poisoned by new industries. Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) begins with views of post-apocalyptic Paris that are clearly mocked-up from photographs of real cities in ruin in the 1940s; Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) shows the factory districts of Ravenna as a lurid, smoky hell that already looks post-industrial and decayed. And in the same decade JG Ballard began to formulate a view of ex-urban modernity — the concrete non-places of motorway flyovers and airport environs — as the landscape of a decidedly post-romantic sublime.

    If Ballard is the English laureate of late-modern ruins, his influence still palpable in the writings of Iain Sinclair or the poetic dross-scape of Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley’s recent book Edgelands, the figure around whom the artistic fascination with ruins has crystallised in recent years is the artist Robert Smithson. In the years before his death in 1973 Smithson, who had certainly been reading Eliot and Ballard, combined ambitious land-art projects (his Spiral Jetty of 1970 is the best known) with a series of inventive and wry essays on the ruinous condition of the modern American landscape. Writing of his native New Jersey in 1967, in an essay titled “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic”, Smithson affected to have found, on the outskirts of a declining industrial town, the contemporary “eternal city”: an agglomeration of half-built highways and rusting factory relics to rival the architectural and artistic treasures of ancient Rome. New Jersey, writes Smithson memorably, is “a utopia minus a bottom, a place where the machines are idle, and the sun has turned to glass”.

    Smithson’s influence – and especially his notion of “ruins in reverse”, in which construction and dissolution cannot be told apart – is all over the ruinous turn that many artists and writers took in the last decade or so. Tacita Dean’s films are a case in point, with their frequent focus on defunct technology or architecture. Jane and Louise Wilson followed Ballard and the French urban theorist Paul Virilio in exploring the derelict remains of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall fortifications. Younger artists such as Cyprien Gaillard and collaborators Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry have continued to explore the idea of modern ruins, while Owen Hatherley’s 2011 book A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain essayed a critique of the ruinous effects of recent urban planning in the UK. (Later this year Hatherley’s sequel, A New Kind of Bleak will show that process nearing its endgame, from Aberdeen to Plymouth, Croydon to Belfast.)

    An obsession with ruins can risk a fall into mere sentiment or nostalgia: ruin lust was already a cliché in the 18th century, and its periodic revivals may put one in mind of Gilbert and Sullivan: “There’s a fascination frantic / In a ruin that’s romantic.” The great interest in the remarkable images of decayed Detroit – in the photographs, for example, of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, on show at the Wilmotte Gallery in London from this week – is easily understandable but seems oddly detached from analyses of the political forces that brought the city to its present sorry pass. It may be that as a cultural touchstone the idea of ruin needs to slump into the undergrowth again. But the history of ruin aesthetics tells us that it would likely resurface in time, charged again with artistic and political energy, and we’d find ourselves looking once more at blasted or burned cities with a visionary or melancholy eye, just as Rose Macaulay did in 1941, ambiguously lamenting a bombed-out house where “the stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky”.

    • In pictures: Detroit in ruins

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , ,

    Gunmen raid museum at Ancient Olympia, as guards say cutbacks threaten Greek heritage

    Posted on 17th February 2012 in The monuments of world

    ATHENS, Greece – Two masked gunmen stormed into a small museum at the birthplace of the ancient Olympics in southern Greece on Friday, smashing display cases with hammers and making off with dozens of antiquities up to 3,200 years old, authorities said.

    It was the second major museum theft in as many months in debt-crippled Greece, and a culture ministry unionist said spending cuts have compromised security at hundreds of museums and ancient sites across the country. With unemployment at 21 per cent and Greece’s economy in its fifth year of recession, crime, poverty and homeless rates also have been increasing.

    Friday’s robbers targeted the museum of the ancient Games at Olympia, a few hundred yards (meters) away from the world heritage site’s main museum, which contains priceless statues and bronze artifacts excavated at the holiest sanctuary of ancient Greece.

    Police said about 60 artifacts were stolen by the robbers, who tied up the only site guard, a 48-year-old woman.

    Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos submitted his resignation after the morning robbery, but it was unclear whether it had been accepted by Prime Minister Lucas Papademos. Geroulanos travelled on Friday to ancient Olympia, some 210 miles (340 kilometres) southwest of Athens.

    “This is a very sad day … a tragedy,” ministry Secretary-General Lina Mendoni said.

    Police in Olympia and neighbouring areas set up roadblocks, while special investigators were rushed in from Athens.

    “According to the results of the investigation so far, unknown persons, this morning, at about 07:34 a.m., immobilized the guard of the museum and removed bronze and clay objects from the displays, as well as a gold ring,” a police statement said.

    A culture ministry official said the stolen antiquities dated from the 9th to the 4th centuries B.C., apart from the seal-ring which dates to Late Bronze Age Mycenaean times and was found in another part of southern Greece.

    “They took small objects made of bronze and pottery — figurines, vases and lamps — and the ring,” the official said. “The artifacts were behind reinforced glass panels which fracture like a car windscreen, and the thieves grabbed whatever small objects they could reach through the holes they opened.”

    A spokesman for museum guards urged emergency government action to protect historic sites and museums, warning that spending cuts taken to save the country from bankruptcy have eroded security.

    “The cutbacks imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have hurt our cultural heritage, which is also the world’s heritage” said Yiannis Mavrikopoulos, head of the culture ministry museum and site guards’ union.

    “There are no funds for new guard hirings,” he said. “There are 2,000 of us, and there should be 4,000, while many have been forced to take early retirement ahead of the new program of layoffs. We face terrible staff shortages. As a result, our monuments and sites don’t have optimum protection — even though guards are doing their very best to protect our heritage.

    Officials said the robbers seemed to have poor information on the museum, asking the guard where they could get golden wreaths and a valuable stamp collection — which are not part of the display.

    “They seem to have operated more as if they were carrying out a holdup” rather than a professional museum heist, the ministry official told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.

    The ancient Olympics were the most important sporting festival in ancient Greece, held every four years and lasting up to five days. They started in 776 B.C. and lasted until A.D. 394 when Roman emperor Theodosius abolished the festival, deeming it pagan. The site hosted an Olympic event during the Athens 2004 Games, when the shot-put was held in the ancient stadium.

    The flame for each modern Olympics is lit in a special ceremony at ancient Olympia — and the ceremony for the London Games will be held there on May 10.

    Olympia Mayor Efthimios Kotzas urged authorities to improve security.

    “The level of security is indeed lacking,” Kotzas told state-run NET television. “These are treasures. A piece of world heritage has been lost, thanks to these thieves. … I think (authorities) should have been more mindful and the security should have been more serious.”

    Friday’s robbery is the second major museum theft in the past two months in Greece. In January, thieves made off with art works by 20th-century masters Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian from the National Gallery in one of the best-guarded areas of central Athens.

    In that pre-dawn heist, the burglars also took a pen and ink drawing of a religious scene by Italian 16th-century painter Guglielmo Caccia. As they fled, thieves abandoned a fourth work by Mondrian. No arrests have been made.

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Museum robbed at Greece's Ancient Olympia

    Posted on 17th February 2012 in The monuments of world

    ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Two masked gunmen stormed into a small museum at the birthplace of the ancient Olympics in southern Greece on Friday, smashing display cases with hammers and making off with dozens of antiquities up to 3,200 years old, authorities said.

    It was the second major museum theft in as many months in debt-crippled Greece, and a culture ministry unionist said spending cuts have compromised security at hundreds of museums and ancient sites across the country. With unemployment at 21 percent and Greece’s economy in its fifth year of recession, crime, poverty and homeless rates also have been increasing.

    Friday’s robbers targeted the museum of the ancient Games at Olympia, a few hundred yards (meters) away from the world heritage site’s main museum, which contains priceless statues and bronze artifacts excavated at the holiest sanctuary of ancient Greece.

    Police said about 60 artifacts were stolen by the robbers, who tied up the only site guard, a 48-year-old woman.

    Culture Minister Pavlos Geroulanos submitted his resignation after the morning robbery, but it was unclear whether it had been accepted by Prime Minister Lucas Papademos. Geroulanos traveled on Friday to ancient Olympia, some 210 miles (340 kilometers) southwest of Athens.

    “This is a very sad day … a tragedy,” ministry Secretary-General Lina Mendoni said.

    Police in Olympia and neighboring areas set up roadblocks, while special investigators were rushed in from Athens.

    “According to the results of the investigation so far, unknown persons, this morning, at about 07:34 a.m., immobilized the guard of the museum and removed bronze and clay objects from the displays, as well as a gold ring,” a police statement said.

    A culture ministry official said the stolen antiquities dated from the 9th to the 4th centuries B.C., apart from the seal-ring which dates to Late Bronze Age Mycenaean times and was found in another part of southern Greece.

    “They took small objects made of bronze and pottery — figurines, vases and lamps — and the ring,” the official said. “The artifacts were behind reinforced glass panels which fracture like a car windscreen, and the thieves grabbed whatever small objects they could reach through the holes they opened.”

    A spokesman for museum guards urged emergency government action to protect historic sites and museums, warning that spending cuts taken to save the country from bankruptcy have eroded security.

    “The cutbacks imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have hurt our cultural heritage, which is also the world’s heritage” said Yiannis Mavrikopoulos, head of the culture ministry museum and site guards’ union.

    “There are no funds for new guard hirings,” he said. “There are 2,000 of us, and there should be 4,000, while many have been forced to take early retirement ahead of the new program of layoffs. We face terrible staff shortages. As a result, our monuments and sites don’t have optimum protection — even though guards are doing their very best to protect our heritage.

    Officials said the robbers seemed to have poor information on the museum, asking the guard where they could get golden wreaths and a valuable stamp collection — which are not part of the display.

    “They seem to have operated more as if they were carrying out a holdup” rather than a professional museum heist, the ministry official told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing investigation.

    The ancient Olympics were the most important sporting festival in ancient Greece, held every four years and lasting up to five days. They started in 776 B.C. and lasted until A.D. 394 when Roman emperor Theodosius abolished the festival, deeming it pagan. The site hosted an Olympic event during the Athens 2004 Games, when the shot-put was held in the ancient stadium.

    The flame for each modern Olympics is lit in a special ceremony at ancient Olympia — and the ceremony for the London Games will be held there on May 10.

    Olympia Mayor Efthimios Kotzas urged authorities to improve security.

    “The level of security is indeed lacking,” Kotzas told state-run NET television. “These are treasures. A piece of world heritage has been lost, thanks to these thieves. … I think (authorities) should have been more mindful and the security should have been more serious.”

    Friday’s robbery is the second major museum theft in the past two months in Greece. In January, thieves made off with art works by 20th-century masters Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian from the National Gallery in one of the best-guarded areas of central Athens.

    In that pre-dawn heist, the burglars also took a pen and ink drawing of a religious scene by Italian 16th-century painter Guglielmo Caccia. As they fled, thieves abandoned a fourth work by Mondrian. No arrests have been made.

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Bulgaria's EconMin Vows BGN 26 M for Tourism Advertising in 2012

    Posted on 16th February 2012 in The monuments of world

    Bulgaria’s investment in tourism advertising grew by 121% in 2011 compared with 2009, Minister of Economy, Energy, and Tourism Traicho Traikov has announced.

    Speaking at the opening of the 29th Vacation and Spa Expo in Sofia – Bulgaria’s oldest international tourism forum – Traikov said the total 2012 investment for advertising Bulgaria’s tourism products will reach BGN 26 M, which is an increase by BGN 4 M year-on-year.

    The total funding comes from both Bulgaria’s national budget and EU Operational Program “Regional Development.”

    According to Traikov, “Bulgaria is emerging as one of the most competitive winter tourism destinations against the backdrop of the general downturn in Europe.”

    He reminded that four World Ski Cup contests are set to take place in Bulgaria’s Bansko over the next two weeks.

    “This is happening for the first time, and it is a great recognition for Bulgaria after the success of the World Ski Cup in 2011 in the same resort,” stated the Bulgarian Economy Minister who is known as an ardent skier himself.

    He also said that Bulgaria’s Pamporovo, which hosted a European Ski Cup contest last week, is seeing up to 20% more foreign tourists year-on-year.

    Traikov expects a good season for Bulgaria’s summer tourism as well, stressing the rising number of charter flights to the Bulgarian summer resorts as well as Bulgaria’s recent decision to waive visa requirements for the holders of Schengen visas.

    On Thursday, he also emphasized Bulgaria’s rich cultural heritage – consisting of over 40 000 cultural monuments and 7 historical periods.

    “We are already present in European and global rankings as an emerging golf tourism destination,” he added.

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Flying inside London's Shard, the EU's tallest tower

    Posted on 16th February 2012 in The monuments of world

    Gazing over London from the top of the Shard, the European Union‘s tallest building, “will feel like flying”, world-renowned architect Renzo Piano told AFP on a tour of the near-completed skyscraper.

    “It’s always a surprise when you come on site,” the Italian shouted over a cacophony of hammering on one of the middle floors of the tower, which will eventually loom 310 metres (1,017 feet) over southeast London.

    “You spend years drawing and making models, making mock-ups, and then this,” he said, as his eyes took in the unplastered walls and the wires dangling from the ceiling, 12 years after he first started sketching the Shard’s jagged tips.

    The enormous glass-clad structure, which will comprise a total of 95 floors, is already winning critical acclaim for 74-year-old Piano.

    But the Shard’s futuristic silhouette has angered traditionalists who say it will ruin London’s skyline when the external structure is finished in May, dwarfing landmarks such as St Paul’s Cathedral and the Houses of Parliament.

    English Heritage, the national body responsible for protecting historic sites, says the skyscraper has tainted a view of St Paul’s, one of Britain‘s best-loved monuments.

    But Piano, renowned for his work on the distinctive Centre Pompidou arts centre in Paris with its mesh of colourful external pipes, dismissed the criticism with an elegant wave of the hand.

    “St Paul’s is the icon of London and will remain the icon of London,” he said, even though the Shard’s website describes it as “an icon for London”.

    “This building is not arrogant,” he insisted. The skyscraper will be “like a spire”, its glinting walls reflecting its neighbours and the capricious London skies.

    “It’s always a bit difficult to accept new buildings,” he added. “But St Paul’s was modern at the time.”

    In any case, he pointed out, though the Shard has shot upwards at a speed that has startled Londoners, construction only started after a lengthy public inquiry by Britain‘s then Labour government.

    “When you’re making a building like this, that’s so important for the city, you have to be absolutely sure that it’s the right thing to do,” said Piano.

    He added wryly: “As an architect, if you make a mistake it stays there for a long time.”

    The unfinished Shard is already the European Union’s tallest building, having overtaken Frankfurt’s 300-metre Commerzbank Tower in December as it edges up, but it is still some way behind the world’s tallest tower — the 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

    But as construction began on the Shard in 2009, just across the River Thames a crisis was gripping one of the world’s top financial hubs.

    The architect conceded that seeing through the £450 million ($706 million, 536 million euro) project amid the economic slump “was not easy”.

    And as Britain teeters again on the brink of recession, many wonder whether the Shard will stand over a city in long-term decline. Piano, however, hopes the skyscraper will provide a much-needed lift to London’s economy.

    “Sometimes buildings have been built in a recession and become a symbol of energy,” he says. “I think this will happen like that.”

    The Shard will house Britain’s first Shangri-La hotel as well as luxury flats, restaurants, office space and a viewing observatory on floors 68 to 72 that will give 360-degree panoramas of the British capital.

    The idea, said Piano, is to build a “vertical city” within a city, operating “24 hours a day — offices, a hotel, public spaces like restaurants.

    “And you’ll have the viewing gallery up there, which will receive one million visitors a year.”

    The Shard’s wealthy inhabitants, he admits, will need a strong head for heights. But Piano says those who move in to floors 53 to 65 — Britain’s highest residential properties — will enjoy unparalleled views of the city.

    “It will feel like flying. It’s a constant aspiration, the idea of taking off, of breathing fresh air,” he beamed. “I think that will be lovely.”

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    Deadline soon for Italy trip

    Posted on 7th February 2012 in The monuments of world

    The clock is ticking for the opportunity to get what program organizers say is a college experience with some international flair.

    In the heart of Italy, situated among historical monuments and classical architecture in the medium-sized Tuscan city, is an OU campus that has been there only four years, classics professor Peggy Chambers said.

    The deadline to apply for OU’s study abroad program in Arezzo, Italy, is Feb. 24, according to the Education Abroad website. Students can study abroad for a summer, a semester or a full academic year.

    “In 1981, there was no study abroad program,” Chambers said. “I was the chair of Latin studies, and I decided it would be a good thing to do a program to see the Mediterranean world — either in Greece or in Italy.”

    Finding the destination for the program was harder than expected, Chambers said.

    “The bigger cities were not interested in OU — all the East Coast universities were already there,” Chambers said. “My thought was, ‘There’s got to be a place.’”

    Italian literature professor Jason Houston, who will serve as OU’s Faculty in Residence for the program next year, discovered Arezzo before he worked for OU and incorporated the town into the program.

    “There were no Americans,” Houston said. “It was a welcoming town to open a program. I said, ‘Let’s give Arezzo a try.’”

    In 2006, Houston and Chambers did give it a try.

    OU hired Kirk Duclaux, who worked for OU in Florence, and he began building something bigger in Arezzo, Houston said. Duclaux now serves as director of Italian programs in Arezzo.

    In 2007, OU and the University of Siena, the main campus in Arezzo, agreed to create an exchange, Houston said.

    There is no language requirement to study there, Houston said. Professors teach classes in English, and all the courses are OU courses, which means students receive full credit.

    “The goal of this study abroad program is not language proficiency; the goal is to give American students an opportunity to have an international experience,” he said.

    Italian is not left out completely — students are required to take Italian language classes, and all of them are taught by Italian professors, Houston said. Students also have the chance to take classes in Italian at the University of Siena.

    “What’s unique about this program is that when students come here, people find housing for them; they have people to take them to a doctor if needed; they have a computer lab; they’re taught by OU professors,” Graduate Resident Director Leanna Payton said. “They kind of get the best of both worlds.”

    Misha Goosheh, international area studies senior, is in Arezzo this semester. She said the program’s design makes being abroad easier.

    “It makes me feel more comfortable to know that if I get sick in the middle of the night, I’m not on my own,” Goosheh said. “It provides a really great support and eases the transition a lot.”

    Because of the close ties with the Arezzo community, the campus has internships available in museums, businesses, city governments, non-governmental organizations and more, Houston said.

    This type of experience is what attracted Goosheh to Arezzo, she said.

    “The reason I chose to come to Arezzo is because I get to have an international work experience, and that doesn’t happen for a lot of college kids,” she said. “It’s an incredible opportunity.”

    The Italian city also is close to other European countries, allowing students the opportunity to travel.

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

    European chill moves west, 122 die in Ukraine

    Posted on 5th February 2012 in The monuments of world

    Published: 3:55PM Sunday February 05, 2012 Source: Reuters

    • European chill moves west, 122 die in Ukraine (Source: Reuters)

      The ancient Colosseum is seen during an heavy snowfalls early morning in Rome. – Source: Reuters

    • Watch Video

    • Related

    Bitterly cold weather that has claimed hundreds of lives in eastern Europe swept westwards over the continent, blanketing Rome’s Colosseum with snow for the first time in three decades and disrupting air and rail traffic.

    Russian gas exporter Gazprom said it was unable to meet increased European demand as it battles its own deep freeze, and had reduced supplies “for a few days” before returning them to normal levels.

    In Bwelgrade, soldiers were deployed to clear the central boulevard.

    Hundreds of unemployed responded to an offer of 10 euros (NZD$16) pay to join snow clearing efforts.

    “I haven’t worked for months and I have a family to feed,” said Zoran Djidovac, a 30-year-old former metal worker.

    “The authorities said we’ll be working for several days so this money will make a change for a while.”

    Near Moscow, a couple and seven of their children died in a blaze at their makeshift home overnight, apparently victims of a badly rigged-up stove which burned out of control.

    A nine-year-old girl was the sole survivor, Russian state TV said.

    To the west, hundreds of passengers spent the night at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport – one of the busiest in Europe – as their flights were delayed or cancelled.

    London’s Heathrow Airport warned it would operate a much reduced service on Sunday with snow and freezing temperatures predicted to hit much of England over the weekend.

    In Rome, snow blanketed ancient monuments for the first time in 27 years.

    Power supplies were interrupted.

    About 160,000 people in central and southern Italy were without electricity.

    The ex-Soviet republic of Ukraine, where night temperatures have been as low as minus 33C in the past eight days, registered the highest death toll as bodies continued to be found, some buried in snow in outlying parts of the country.

    Stations become sanctuaries 

    Metro stations in the capital, Kiev, have become sanctuaries of warmth for the homeless.

    Emergency authorities have set up hundreds of heated tents around the country to provide food, drink and shelter.

    The Emergencies Ministry said of the 122 people who have died over the past eight days from hypothermia and frostbite, 78 were found dead on the streets.

    In neighbouring Poland the story was similar with the dead mainly among the homeless.

    Several had been overcome by fumes from primitive stoves in poorly-ventilated premises. Others died by drinking too much and falling down, unnoticed, in the snow.

    World News Video

    Copyright © 2012, Television New Zealand Limited. Breaking and Daily News, Sport & Weather | TV ONE, TV2 | Ondemand

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Cycling Breakaway League: A Brave New World

    Posted on 3rd February 2012 in The monuments of world

    What would cycling look like if top teams broke away from the UCI to form a world cycling series?

    Two 20-year-olds called Luke Armstrong and Charlie Vaughters step out of their team buses, ensure the tiny cameras fitted into their stems are not obscured and then pedal their bikes through the polite fans in the paddock – sorry, village départ. although French remains the official language of cycling, in India in 2020 this now seems like an affectation. in Delhi, the buses are actually in the exclusive area with the VIPs and paying customers. These people have access to the riders, those outside do not.

    As they stop for photos and autographs, up-and-coming stars Armstrong and Vaughters maintain an old feud between their fathers, Lance and Jonathan, by avoiding each other. Today’s stage is a flat one that should favour the sprinter Rick Zabel, though Mark Cavendish in his final season could push him close. The previous evening saw a time trial that was won by the experienced Taylor Phinney.

    Tomorrow there’s a team time trial in the morning and a circuit race in the afternoon. The day after, a Himalayan mountain stage concludes the four-day classic.

    None of these riders represent what cycling fans used to call ‘trade teams’. They ride for franchises with generic names – slipstream, la Vitesse, strada alta (an Italian outfit whose name is a clear rip-off of the old, much-lamented Highroad team). Sponsors come and go but franchises remain. and the riders are better off, at least financially. in the 14-team World Series Cycling (WSC) there’s a minimum wage, a reserve fund to ensure that teams are more stable than in the old days when they were wholly dependent on a title sponsor, and the travel opportunities are unsurpassed.

    The European race season

    The sport is truly global. But there has been a cost. The three grand tours – of France, Italy and Spain – remain, as do the five Monuments: Milan-San Remo, Ronde van Vlaanderen, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Giro di Lombardia.

    Other old races have withered on the vine. The European calendar has been decimated. Classics such as Gent-Wevelgem and San Sebastián survive only thanks to the efforts of local organisers and sponsors but they have a decidedly local feel. Of the stage races in spring, only Paris-Nice is still a major event. WSC teams and riders are more likely to be in India, China or Brazil than in Tuscany, Catalonia or Romandy.

    And what of the UCI world road race championships? It remains but it has suffered a similar fate to football’s FA Cup in England when faced with the riches offered by its big rivals the Premiership and Champions League in the 1990s, the FA Cup’s prestige steadily declined. Since the advent of WSC, the rainbow jersey has come, like the FA cup, to represent history and tradition rather than hard currency. And in the new cycling world it’s money that speaks loudest.

    Is this what our sport would look like in the era of World Series Cycling – or whatever the so-called breakaway league might be called?

    Listening to Jonathan Vaughters, the general manager of Garmin-Barracuda and president of riders’ organisation AIGCP, as he outlines what he sees when he gazes into his crystal ball, you might well come up with a picture similar to that described above.

    RadioShack-Nissan’s Johan Bruyneel is another team director pushing for changes that seem designed to give the teams far more power – and money. Comparisons have been made to English Premier league football and Formula One motor racing. Both are run as self-managed and highly lucrative businesses and enjoy a certain independence from the sports’ traditional governing bodies.

    So it’s no wonder that cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, is scared. When news of plans for a proposed breakaway league first emerged in March 2011 it prompted a furious reaction from UCI president Pat McQuaid. He penned an open letter that was ostensibly about another controversy concerning race radios but he added that he and the UCI, “fully believes that this is not a fight about radios but rather a fight for power and control”.

    It went on: “UCI is aware of steps being taken to set up a private league, world cycling Tour, outside UCI, by certain team managers. I wonder will the financial benefits they are chasing benefit you, the riders. Somehow I think not! I quote Johan Bruyneel: ‘I’ve been laying the framework for something great…’”

    During the 2010 spring classics, Bob Stapleton spoke of the desirability of major changes to the way professional cycling is structured. As with Bruyneel, the way Stapleton spoke, a revolution didn’t seem a distant possibility – it was coming.

    Eighteen months later Stapleton has gone, his hugely successful HTC-Highroad team folding at the end of 2011. But perhaps that only illustrated the point that he, Vaughters and Bruyneel have been making that the current ‘model’ for professional cycling is too fickle, too dependent on the whims of sponsors and ultimately unsustainable.

    WSC and Rothschild

    Eight months after the first news of a breakaway by the top teams, flesh was added to the bones when Procycling’s sister website Cyclingnews.com published details of a proposed world series cycling (WSC), plans for which had been drawn up in early 2011.

    WSC would be a joint venture between 14 leading teams, the Rothschild group and the London-based Gifted Group and would see the “formation of a new, truly global racing competition… bringing together 14 cycling teams, or franchises, in 10 newly created racing events”.

    WSC would “put teams at the heart of the event”. In addition to the three grand tours, five Monuments and another eight events in Europe, there would be 10 new four-day events elsewhere in cycling’s ‘new markets’. Ambitiously, the proposal identified 2013 as the first year of WSC.

    The world governing body again reacted angrily, and McQuaid described the new proposals as “unworkable”. However, the UCI thought them workable enough that they were moved to buy up several domain names (worldseriescycling.com, worldseriescycling.net and worldseriescycling.org) that might have been attractive to the new joint venture. but it will surely take rather more than that to foil Vaughters, Bruyneel, Rothschild and Jonathan Price and Thomas Kurth of the London-based Gifted Group, who specialise in taking on sporting bodies. Kurth is the former head of G14, which comprised the world’s richest football clubs.

    Vaughters seems unperturbed by the UCI’s resistance. “The critical mass needed to direct some positive change is there,” he tells Procycling.

    “There have been enough incidents to inflame and incite enough parties over the last couple of years that I think people want positive change. They want the sport to be managed in a more professional way.”

    But it isn’t just the UCI who have criticised the proposed breakaway. Many fans appear suspicious of the motives of those behind it – the teams. Vaughters, who is less accustomed to negative press than Bruyneel, nonetheless seems unruffled.

    But he agrees it will take time: “it’s a very long-term process and has to be worked through very carefully.” In any talk of a breakaway the involvement of the major race organisers must be critical. But why would ASO, who own the Tour de France and enjoy healthy profits, vote for change – especially agreeing to share out revenues such as those from TV rights?

    For Vaughters a “more professionally run sport as opposed to the current model where it’s essentially run as an amateur sport with a professional aspect to it” would benefit everybody. but he admits that ASO will take a lot of convincing.

    “ASO make a lot of profit from the Tour de France,” he says. “Is it in their interests to go down this road? I think it is. But do I think
    they’re going to need a lot of encouragement and a lot of convincing? Absolutely. Right now, they’re not seeing that if they become business partners with the teams and give greater fan access and work on new events together, then they’ll help grow the whole sport and end up with more than before.”

    “Instead, they’re thinking, ‘wait a minute, you guys want some of our money?’ The short-term view is they are not going to be overly receptive. but my long-term hope is that they will be convinced that it is in their best interests.” One benefit for all, says Vaughters, will be “more stability in the parties you’re working with”.

    It means teams will not be so vulnerable to the vagaries of the economic climate and whims of sponsors. and it also means teams will no longer be solely reliant on a title sponsor but funded by a range of “stable sources: TV rights, merchandising, ticket sales, sponsorship”. Vaughters also wants a reserve fund of at least 30 million euros to be set up and independently managed in order to guard against, for example, the overnight disappearance of the sport’s most successful team, HTC-Highroad.

    As for the comparisons with the English Premier League and Formula One, Vaughters prefers to look west for inspiration.

    “I see the English Premier league as something to avoid,” he says. “All it does is get bigger and bigger but it’s not an example of a responsible business model because the teams are carrying huge amounts of debt.

    “I look more at the American sports and their revenue models, where ticket sales are important but they’re not the big thing: the biggest piece of revenue is TV rights.”

    It is for other reasons that some fear cycling going the way of Formula One, which seems to exist in a bubble of wealth and exclusivity. When the first Indian Grand Prix was held last year it was criticised for failing to engage with the local population, regardless of the high ‘official’ attendance figure.

    “Cycling is going to be played out on public roads no matter what,” says Vaughters. “Maybe certain sections of the road could be ticketed but I don’t think that’s the thing cycling needs to stabilise its economic platform. we want the sport to be open to anyone who wants to watch – that’s something everyone agrees on.”

    Another criticism of the proposed breakaway is its emphasis on teams. The WSC want a future in which fans turn out to support their favourite squad rather than rider – an idea that strikes many as unrealistic.

    Here a solution needs to be found to an inherent problem – namely that cycling is that rare and awkward creature, an ‘individual team sport’.

    “As long as we’re focused on the individual, the sponsors are going to say, ‘why do i want to sponsor a team?” says Vaughters, and he sounds like a man who is speaking from experience.

    He adds: “The way for cycling to truly become a team sport is budget caps and more wage parity. Stars are paid more, of course, but people realise the value of the worker bees. In order to build a team as opposed to focusing on individuals, there has to be more emphasis on the team brand and team image. That’s the only way to get more sponsorship dollars in.”

    So looking ahead to when Charlie Vaughters will be old enough to (theoretically) ride as a professional in the all-singing, all-dancing ‘World Series Cycling’, what would his father like to see?

    “If I have my ideal there’s a 30 to 40 million Euro reserve fund that’s independently managed,” says Vaughters.

    “The revenue model of teams has changed so around 40 to 50 per cent of their budget is from sponsorship with 50 to 60 per cent from other sources: TV rights, merchandising, co-operative marketing efforts, revenue from new events in new places.

    “The teams racing in the top events are established and stable so they can build solid fan bases. it’s no longer a year-to-year scramble to get a licence. Then there’s a greater anti-doping effort in terms of technology and execution. And finally there’s a budget cap for the teams, a minimum wage and more wage parity so the sport truly becomes a team sport.”

    Then there are long-overdue innovations in broadcasting such as cameras on bikes. Vaughters suggests the problem is a lack of incentives for teams. he says: “If someone wants to put a camera on a bike and only the broadcaster and organiser benefit, the reaction is: ‘no, you can’t put a camera on my bike’.” 

    And he’d like to see more made of the village départ, with privileges for ticket-holders. It’s a concept that will make some people uncomfortable although he insists on the principle of road racing as a free sport.

    The vision may be long-term and hazy in places but there is a clear outline. it seems certain that the UCI will continue to resist any breakaway and a bloody battle could ensue. but that could be of little consequence: the big decisive question is whose side ASO will take.

    If they do then in less than a decade, in India, china or brazil, the focus might be back on the sport and on whether Charlie Vaughters can beat Luke Armstrong or if Rick Zabel can hold off his father’s old protégé, the grizzled veteran Mark Cavendish.
     

    Back to top

    comments: 0 » tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
    « Previous