Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday is the Thursday before Easter. Christians remember it as the day of the Last Supper, when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples and established the ceremony known as the Eucharist.

The night of Maundy Thursday is the night on which Jesus was betrayed by Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The word maundy comes from the command given by Christ at the Last Supper, that we should love one another.

In Roman Catholic churches the anthem Mandatum novum do vobis (a new commandment I give to you) would be sung on Maundy Thursday.

In many other countries this day is known as Holy Thursday.

Maundy Thursday ceremonies

In Britain, the sovereign takes part in the Ceremony of the Royal Maundy.

This ceremony, held at a great cathedral, involves the distribution of Maundy money to deserving senior citizens (one man and one woman for each year of the sovereign's age), usually chosen for having done service to their community.

They receive ceremonial red and white purses which contain coins made especially for the occasion. The white purse contains one coin for each year of the monarch's reign.

The red purse contains money in place of other gifts that used to be given to the poor.
In the 17th century, and earlier, the King or Queen would wash the feet of the selected poor people as a gesture of humility, and in remembrance of Jesus' washing the feet of the disciples.

The last monarch to do this was James 2. The ceremony of the monarch giving money to the poor on this day dates back to Edward 1.

Pedilavium: the washing of the feet

Roman Catholic church services feature a ceremony in which the priest washes the feet of 12 people to commemorate Jesus' washing the feet of his disciples.

It was common in monasteries throughout history for the Abbot to wash the feet of the monks in a similar gesture.

Some other churches nowadays also have foot-washing ceremonies as part of their Maundy Thursday services.

The consecration of holy oil

In Roman Catholic churches, Maundy Thursday is usually the day on which the supply of anointing oil to be used in ceremonies during the year is consecrated.

This is done at a special Chrism Mass.

Source: BBC Religion & Ethics

As a child I remember rolling a painted egg (hard-boiled, of course) down a hill at Easter time. This represented the ressurection of Christ. Read more about Easter eggs here.

How is Easter celebrated around Spain?

Costa del Crime

Spanish police charged with bribery and embezzlement in Costa del Crime

Dubbed the "Costa del Crime", it was notorious as a haven for "retired" British gangsters who wanted to stay beyond the long arm of the law. But now it seems the Costa del Sol has proved as attractive for unscrupulous Spanish police officers as British criminals.

Four inspectors from an elite unit that combats organised crime in Malaga have been charged with bribery, embezzlement, dereliction of duty, ownership of illegal arms, and revealing confidential information.

Alfredo Marijuán and Carlos Farré have been detained in custody and Isaac Pacheco Suárez and Eusebio Vázquez Fernández were released on bail.

Forty officers have been questioned in connection with the case, which relates to alleged payments received by Inspector Marijuán from Russian nationals for reports on police surveillance operations.

The officer was also alleged to have delivered an envelope containing details about the girlfriend of a Russian who was arrested for cocaine smuggling in the US.

The Costa del Sol gained its nickname after British criminals took advantage of the ending of an extradition treaty in 1978 to escape Scotland Yard's reach.

The likes of Ronnie Knight and the drug dealer Clifford Saxe, both wanted in connection with a Security Express robbery in east London, set up home there. Kenneth Noye, who helped to launder the Brink's-Mat gold, fled to the Costa del Sol in 1996 while on the run for murder.

More recently, however, it has become the base for a more dangerous breed of gang, from the UK, Russia, Colombia and eastern Europe.

The Russian mafia are known to have a major presence on the Costa del Sol, exploiting lax property laws and lack of police resources to launder millions from arms dealing, drug dealing and prostitution.

A Spanish interior ministry report said nearly a third of organised crime in Spain is based in the area, with 102 known gangs.

Three years ago, Spain launched a major crackdown there, forming specialised units to combat the problem.

Source: Guardian

International Women's Day

You're fired!

Imagine you're one of the 13 men on this all-male board of a large company and are told five of you must go to be replaced by women. Unlikely? Not in Norway, where they're enforcing a law that 40% of directors must be female.

Rolf Dammann, the co-owner of a Norwegian bank, recently had his skiing holiday interrupted by some unwelcome news. The government had published a list of 12 companies accused of breaking the law by failing to appoint women to 40% of their non-executive board directorships. His company, Netfonds Holding ASA, was one of the dirty dozen - attracting international attention.

"I work in a man's world. I don't come across many women and that's the challenge," Dammann says. "The law says a non-executive director has to be experienced, and experience is difficult to find in women in my sector. People have had to sack board members they've worked with and trusted for 20 or 30 years, and replace them with someone unknown. That's hard."

This month, Norway set a new global record. It now has, at 40%, the highest proportion of female non-executive directors in the world, an achievement engineered by the introduction of a compulsory quota. Two years ago, after several years of voluntary compliance had failed to lead to a sufficient number of female board members, 463 "ASAs" - publicly listed companies over a certain size - were told to change the composition of their boards or risk dissolution.

"A woman comes in, a man goes out. That's how the quota works; that's the law," says Kjell Erik Øie, deputy minister of children and equality, in the centre-left "Red-Green" coalition government in Oslo. "Very seldom do men let go of power easily. But when you start using the half of the talent you have previously ignored, then everybody gains."

In 2002, only 7.1% of non-executive directors of ASAs were female. When they introduced the 40% quota, the government had expected a widespread rebellion, but by the final deadline for compliance - February 22 this year - only a handful of companies had failed to meet it. Most ASA boards have acquired between two and four new women in the past several months. It is not exactly an army on the march, but it is a step in the right direction and has allowed Norway to buck an international trend; in Britain, women fill only 14.5% of non-executive board positions and one in four of the FTSE 100 boards still has no women at all. The number of women holding executive directorships in FTSE 100 companies actually fell last year to the lowest level for nine years, according to research by Cranfield business school. And the picture is similar all over Europe. Only 2% of boardroom posts in Italy are held by women, and in Spain the figure is 4%.

According to the Norwegian government, the quota is not simply a strike for equality; it makes sound economic sense, too. Last year, Goldman Sachs, the global investment company, published a paper in which it outlined the economic reasons for reducing gender inequality and using female talent fully. Not only would this increase growth, the paper said, it would "play a key role in addressing the twin problems of population ageing and pension stability".

So what is stopping companies from appointing women to their boards? Catalyst, an influential New York thinktank, has published a list of the barriers to female advancement to board level. Top of the list is women's lack of management experience, closely followed by women's exclusion from informal networks; stereotypes about women's abilities; a lack of role models; a failure of male leadership; family responsibilities; and naivety when it comes to company politics.

Source: The Guardian

International Women's Day (IWD) is marked on March 8 every year. It is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Started as a political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries (primarily Russia and the countries of former Soviet bloc).In some celebrations, the day lost its political flavour, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love to the women around them in a way somewhat similar to Mother's Day and St Valentine's Day mixed together. In others, however, the political and human rights theme as designated by the United Nations runs strong, and political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner.

History

The first IWD was observed on 28 February 1909 in the United States following a declaration by the Socialist Party of America. Among other relevant historic events, it commemorates the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (New York, 1911), where over 140 women lost their lives. The idea of having an international women's day was first put forward at the turn of the 20th century amid rapid world industrialization and economic expansion that led to protests over working conditions. By urban legend,women from clothing and textile factories staged one such protest on 8 March 1857 in New York City.The garment workers were protesting against very poor working conditions and low wages. The protesters were attacked and dispersed by police. These women established their first labor union in the same month two years later.

More protests followed on 8 March in subsequent years, most notably in 1908 when 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights[citation needed]. In 1910 the first international women's conference was held in Copenhagen (in the labour-movement building located at Jagtvej 69, which until recently housed Ungdomshuset) by the Second International and an 'International Women's Day' was established, which was submitted by the important German Socialist Clara Zetkin, although no date was specified. The following year, IWD was marked by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland. However, soon thereafter, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City killed over 140 garment workers. A lack of safety measures was blamed for the high death toll. Furthermore, on the eve of World War I, women across Europe held peace rallies on 8 March 1913. In the West, International Women's Day was commemorated during the 1910s and 1920s, but dwindled. It was revived by the rise of feminism in the 1960s.

Demonstrations marking International Women's Day in Russia proved to be the first stage of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Following the October Revolution, the Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai persuaded Lenin to make it an official holiday in Russia, and it was established, but was a working day until 1965. On May 8, 1965 by the decree of the USSR Presidium of the Supreme Soviet International Women's Day was declared as a non working day in the USSR "in commemoration of outstanding merits of the Soviet women in communistic construction, in the defense of their Motherland during the Great Patriotic War, their heroism and selflessness at the front and in rear, and also marking the big contribution of women to strengthening friendship between peoples and struggle for the peace."

Source: Wikipedia

Spain v Italy

Trading places

In the first of a series of articles to mark upcoming elections on both sides of the Med, John Hooper compares life in Italy and Spain and finds that it is not only in GDP that the Iberians have the upper hand

'In Spain what is new tends to be seen as good, while in Italy the reverse is true': The new opera house in Valencia and the Colosseum in Rome.

Fate can be cruel in its timing.

General elections in Spain and Italy over the next few weeks will bring the differences between southern Europe's two biggest nations into painfully sharp contrast. The Spanish are going places while the Italians go round in circles. The very reasons for the two ballots are illuminating.

Spain goes to the polls on March 9 for the simple reason that its legislature is about to run its term. The Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, came to power unexpectedly after the Madrid bombings of 2004 as head of a minority government. Yet that seemingly fragile arrangement has endured for four years.

By contrast, his Italian counterpart and fellow centre-leftist, Romano Prodi, secured an overall - albeit razor-thin - parliamentary majority in 2006. The bickering among his coalition partners started almost immediately. Last month, after just 20 months in power, his unhappy alliance was brought down.

Spain's next administration will be its tenth since the 1978 constitution that set a seal on its transition to democracy. Italy's will be its 27th over the same period.

Spain's greater political stability is one key to its better economic performance. Over the past 12 years, its economic growth has been three times that of Italy's.

Even in areas where the Italians would seem to have a built-in advantage, they have slipped behind. Rome – the Colosseum, Forum and Vatican notwithstanding – gets fewer tourists nowadays than Barcelona. The same is true of industries in which Italians have centuries of experience. Today, the world's biggest fashion chain, Zara, is Spanish, as is Europe's largest bank, Santander.

Last December, Italians were appalled to learn that, in the previous year, Spain's real per capita gross domestic product had overtaken their own. For more than a century they had grown accustomed to regarding their Spanish 'cugini' or cousins with a sort of affectionate condescension. Yet here was the EU's statistics office telling them that their "poor relations" were actually richer.

The change has taken place with disconcerting speed. Wind back the clock just 27 years, to February 23 1981. Spain, still labouring to emerge from the shadow of General Francisco Franco's long dictatorship, is a country in deep trouble, gripped by economic recession and political crisis. The lower house of parliament is packed for a vote on the new prime minister when a man in a tri-corn hat and whiskers, like a character from a 19th century operetta, strides to the speaker's chair brandishing a pistol. Seconds later, one of the Civil Guards under his command opens fire, sending the MPs diving for cover.

The far right coup that Colonel Antonio Tejero spearheaded fell apart. But, for months afterwards, it was not unreasonable to fear that Spain - with its arch-conservative officer class and racked by Basque separatist violence - might become an enclave of Latin American-style turmoil in Europe.

It was, after all, pretty backward. The economy relied heavily on rustbelt industries. There were fewer library books per 100 inhabitants than in Morocco. And it was only three years since the repeal of a law that made adultery punishable by up to six years in prison. In practice, it applied only to women.

How different things were across the Mediterranean. In rich, cultured, fashionable Italy, terrorism was being overcome and the economy was surging towards the 'sorpasso' - the overtaking - that chest-swelling moment in 1987 when its official statisticians declared Italy's per capita GDP had outstripped Britain's (a claim that was subsequently discredited).

Perhaps because they are so keen to escape from their recent past, Spaniards crave to belong to the future. In Spain, what is new tends to be seen as good, be it a technological gadget or one of the many adventurous buildings commissioned in recent years like the Agbar Tower in Barcelona, the Valencia opera house or the Bilbao or Madrid airport terminals.

In Italy, where the recent past was a time of prosperity and continuity, when Italians walked tall in the world, the reverse is true. Look at any Roman newsstand and you will see what I mean: videos of the films of the comedian Toto, whose best work dates from the 1950s; posters made from stills of Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, made in 1960; gossip magazines packed with the doings of people like Al Bano, a 64 year-old showbiz veteran. The only structure of note to be built recently in the centre of the capital is Richard Meier's Ara Pacis museum. And most Romans loathe it.

But then Italy is a society in which old people – and thus old attitudes – have the upper hand. Silvio Berlusconi, who the polls suggest will be his country's next leader, is 71 years old. And to an extent outsiders find hard to credit, Italy remains a country in which decision-makers must operate within limits set by the Roman Catholic church.

Berlusconi's last government passed one of Europe's most restrictive in-vitro fertilisation laws. Prodi's tried, and spectacularly failed, to bring in legislation that would have given limited civil rights to unmarried couples, including gays.

The contrast with Zapatero's record could not be starker. His government legalised full-blown gay marriage ahead of even the Scandinavian nations and opened the way for "quickie divorces". Half the members of his original cabinet were women – a political gimmick, perhaps, but one that reflected a real and remarkable change in the status of women in a country whose language gave the world the word 'machismo'.

The surge of women into Spain's labour market over the past two decades is a key reason for its rapid economic growth. Its female employment rate has outstripped that of Italy and today there are proportionately more 'españolas' than 'italianas' at the highest levels in both politics and business.

Whereas the Italian language has remained unaffected by recent changes in the status of women (so a female lawyer, for example, is still an 'avvocato', Spanish has been revolutionised. Even gender-neutral words like 'jefe' - or manager - have acquired a specifically feminised version, so a woman boss is now a 'jefa'.

Spain's greater vibrancy is evident in the arts too. Pedro Almodóvar is now arguably the best-known director working in a language other than English. But he already has a younger, Spanish rival in Alejandro Amenabár, who carried off an Oscar three years ago at the age of only 34. Penelope Cruz, like Antonio Banderas and increasingly Javier Bardem, can lay claim to worldwide followings. The novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón's dark, ingenious literary thriller, the Shadow of the Wind, was a global blockbuster. The architect Santiago Calatrava has left his mark on city skylines across the planet.

Among the few areas in which Italy is clearly ahead is with its national football team, which triumphed in the World Cup in 2006.

The intriguing question is whether the imbalance between the two countries will last – and whether this year's elections might mark a turning point. One way of viewing Spain's own 'sorpasso' is as a reversion to the historical norm. For most of the past five centuries, it was Spain - not fractured Italy – that was dominant. The other possibility, though, is that Spain has merely been catching up with Italy, and that now the two are roughly on a par, its dynamism will wane.

Both countries experienced a rush of confidence after joining the European Union: Italy as a founding member in 1956; Spain 30 years later. Though Spain's revival has lasted longer than Italy's, there are signs it could be running to an end. The construction boom that fuelled much of Spain's recent growth is petering out, as are the subsidies that have been showered on it from Brussels. The Basque separatist movement Eta is still killing. And Spanish politics, though stable, are brittle. Right and left are disturbingly polarised.

At the same time, there are signs that recent events – the reverse 'sorpasso', the untidy fall of the Prodi government, and a garbage crisis that has left thousands of tonnes of refuse on the streets of Naples – are finally galvanising Italians into reaction. They may just be straws in the wind, but there a revolt underway on Sicily against the payment of protection money to the Mafia, Italy's employers' federation has just elected its first-ever woman president, and millions of television viewers have failed this year to tune in to an event that embodies outdated cultural values, the week-long San Remo song festival.

For the first time in decades, moreover, Italian voters have a chance to bring about real generational change. Berlusconi's rival, Walter Veltroni, is only 52 – younger than Zapatero's opponent, Mariano Rajoy. He is running under the slogan "Don't change government. Change Italy" and has chosen a 26-year-old woman to stand as a candidate in place of the centre-left's longest-serving parliamentarian.

But the time for change is shorter than many Italians believe. Greece too has been catching up. La Stampa estimated last year that, at the current rate, it could overtake Italy in 2012.

Source: The Guardian

Read more about the two nations.

Secret opinion polls

Poll puts Zapatero ahead (but don't tell the Spanish)

Spain's Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is set to clinch re-election on Sunday by a narrow margin, according to the results of a poll commissioned by The Times.

Conducted by the Spanish polling firm Sigma Dos, the latest survey shows Mr Zapatero's Socialist Party beating its conservative rivals by 3.8 percentage points. That result would give the Socialists enough seats in Parliament to form a Government, but short of an absolute majority.

Spanish media are barred from publishing opinion polls in the five days leading up to the election, but political parties and business groups continue to commission them. The results are traded widely among political and business elites but until now, have been kept from ordinary Spaniards.

Several Spanish media outlets, including the newspaper El Periódico de Catalunya, are now campaigning for an end to the “obsolete” law, introduced in the 1980s with the argument that polls could influence voters.

“The ban on publishing polls is a clear limitation on freedom of expression, unworthy of a solid democracy such as ours,” the newspaper said in a front page editorial today. The newspaper has decided to publish its own polls from a website in Andorra, just beyond the Spanish border, giving the Socialists a 3.4 point lead.

The Times poll was conducted yesterday after the second of two ill-tempered television debates between the Prime Minister and Mariano Rajoy of the right-wing Popular Party. In four hours of heated debate that drew record audiences, the candidates clashed over the worsening economy, rising immigration and anti-terrorism policy.

For the past four years, Mr Rajoy has excoriated the Spanish leader for his ill-fated efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Eta, the violent Basque separatist group, accusing him of “surrendering to terrorists”. The theme has played well with the Popular Party's supporters but failed to win over enough converts to win the election.

Mr Rajoy has changed tack during the campaign, focusing on Spain's stalling growth, rising prices and, above all, immigration. The Times poll suggests that at least one of Mr Rajoy's key proposals — to force immigrants to sign a contract stating that they will abide by Spanish laws and customs — has connected with voters in Spain. Sixty-two per cent of respondents said they would support such a proposal while just 26.4 per cent rejected it.

The Spanish Government has blasted Mr Rajoy's plan as xenophobic and redundant: immigrants must already abide by Spanish law, it points out, and even those born in the country would have a hard time agreeing what “Spanish customs” are. But in private, Socialist Party officials worry that the high rate of immigration in the past few years could cost it votes on Sunday.

With the influx of immigrants, Spain's once-dwindling population has jumped from 40 million to 45 million since 2000, boosting the economy but creating tensions in working-class, urban areas where many immigrants have settled.

The economy has been another source of worry for Socialist Party strategists after four years of strong growth. New unemployment figures showed this week that 53,000 Spaniards lost their jobs in February, taking the overall unemployment rate to 8.6 per cent. The Spanish manufacturing sector is also at its weakest in more than six years.

Mr Zapatero swept to power unexpectedly four years ago on a wave of public anger over the previous Government's handling of the Madrid train bombings, which killed 191 people and injured more than 1,800. The conservative Government of José María Aznar tried to pin the outrage on Eta, despite mounting evidence that it was the work of Islamic radicals. Analysts say it was punished by voters who would not normally have gone to the polls.

This time around, the challenge for the Socialists has been to motivate those voters again to support it at the polls. According to the Sigma Dos poll, they have managed to motivate supporters by playing-up fears of a Popular Party government. Turnout is projected to be about 75 per cent of the electorate, only slightly below the 77 per cent in 2004.

“The highly polarised campaign has succeeded in galvanising voters,” said Carlos Malo de Molina, head of Sigma Dos. “The uncertainty over the final result is also driving them to the polls.”

Source: The Times