Notorious Belfast prison reinvented as distillery
BELFAST |
BELFAST (Reuters) – A notorious Belfast prison that held Irish Republican Army inmates during the worst of the city’s sectarian strife is to be transformed into a Whiskey distillery as Northern Ireland tries to reinvent itself and its struggling economy.
A wing of the Victorian-era Crumlin Road prison, which closed in 1996, will house the first whiskey production in 75 years in a city that was once Ireland’s largest producer and will offer exhibitions and tasting facilities for visitors.
It aims to reinvent a building synonymous with Northern Ireland’s so-called “Troubles”, which held a young Gerry Adams before he became Sinn Fein President and the Rev Ian Paisley who went on to become First Minister of Northern Ireland.
After 14 years of relative calm since a 1998 peace deal that ended three decades of tit-for-tat killings between pro-British and Irish nationalist insurgents, Belfast is bidding to break its dependence on handouts from London by boosting tourism.
In recent months the city opened a 97-million pound ($155 million) museum at the shipyard that built the Titanic and a large new arts centre.
The government has awarded a lease to lottery millionaire Peter Lavery to establish a boutique distillery in a wing of the Victorian prison, a Grade A listed building built in 1845.
The former bus driver won 10.2 million pounds ($16 million)in 1996 and now heads the Belfast Distillery Company (BDC), a consortium of local businessmen who are pumping 5 million pounds into the project.
Lavery last year launched two whiskeys – under the Titanic and Danny Boy brands – which are currently produced for him across the Irish border in Co Louth at the Cooley Distillery.
“I’m delighted that we will be able to bring production of the whiskeys home to Belfast,” Lavery said at the project’s launch.
Irish whiskey, whose 19th century domination of global production collapsed in the early 20th century, has seen a revival in recent years. Exports from the Republic of Ireland increased by 60 percent since 2000, according to the government, although they remain a fraction of whisky exports from Scotland.
Jim Beam, the U.S. bourbon giant which recently bought the Cooley distillery [ID:nL1E7NG1TA], is to provide all the technical support for the new project, which will produce five and ten year old malt whiskey.
The Crumlin road prison once held Eamon de Valera, who later went on to become Ireland’s leader, after he was accused of entering Northern Ireland illegally shortly after the partition of Ireland in 1921.
In 1943 the IRA chief of staff and three of his men escaped over the walls and made it across the border to the Irish Republic before his absence was noticed.
There were numerous escapes and escape attempts by IRA members during the 1970s.
In the most audacious, nine inmates playing football in the prison yard kicked the ball over the perimeter wall, went after it and escaped in waiting cars – still in their football kit. ($1 = 0.6324 British pounds)
(Editing by Conor Humphries)
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Treasures of Italy’s Marche region on show at Vatican
VATICAN CITY |
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – If you wanted to admire masterpieces of religious art by Titian, Raphael, Lorenzo Lotto, Guido Reni, Carlo Crivelli and other masters in museums around Italy’s central Marche region, it could cost you a few weeks of time and a hefty hotel bill.
Now, 50 paintings from 15 museums in the region rich in natural beauty and artistic heritage are on exhibition at the Vatican.
Called “Meraviglie dalle Marche,” or Marvels from the Marche, the one-stop viewing for paintings from the region opened recently in the Braccio Carlo Magno exhibition space in St Peter’s Square.
It includes works such as a lesser-known version of Raphael’s “Saint Catherine of Alexandria,” (the most famous one is in the National Gallery in Washington), Titian’s “Resurrection”, and Guido Reni’s “Annunciation” and “Saint Sebastian”.
The paintings, spanning more than 400 years of Italian religious art, are on loan from public and Church-owned museums in Urbino, Ancona, Ascoli Piceno, Fabriano, Loreto, Jesi and six other cities and towns in the Marche region.
Although the exhibition includes only one painting by Raphael, he takes pride of place, if only because he is the Marche’s most famous artistic son, having been born in Urbino in 1483.
Believed to have been painted when Raphael was about 18 years old, “Saint Catherine of Alexandria” measures only 15 cm by 40 cm (6 inches by 15 inches), leading art historians to surmise that it was once part of a triptych whose other two pieces have gone missing.
It shows Saint Catherine in a reflective mood and standing on a wagon wheel and has a Latin inscription painted in gold on the back.
The small painting was once part of the private collection of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos and was bought by the National Gallery of the Marche after his death in 1989.
Also on exhibition is one version of Guido Reni’s “St. Sebastian,” the martyr depicted, according to tradition, tied to a tree and shot with an arrow in his left side.
The painting of the young, muscular saint, depicted with a only a loin cloth covering his middle, has become an icon of the gay community over the centuries.
In his 1929 speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, German writer Thomas Mann, who wrote about homosexuality in his novella “Death in Venice” and whose diaries released after his death revealed that he struggled with homosexuality throughout his life, said:
“I have a favorite saint. I will tell you his name. It is Saint Sebastian, that youth at the stake, who, pierced by swords and arrows from all sides, smiles amidst his agony. Grace in suffering: that is the heroism symbolized by Saint Sebastian.”
The exhibition is on display in the Braccio Carlo Magno, at the end of the left-hand colonnade of St Peter’s Square, until June 10.
From July 10 to September 30, it will be on display at the National Museum of Decorative Arts in Buenos Aires, in honor of the fact that more than 40 percent of immigrants who left the Marche region went to Argentina.
(Reporting By Philip Pullella)
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Virginia, Florida have most well-read cities in US: poll
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters) – New York and Boston may strike many as more intellectual but Alexandria, a small urban area in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C., is the most well-read city in the United States.
Alexandria was one of three Virginia cities on the Amazon.com list of the 20 most well-read cities. It topped Cambridge, Massachusetts, the home of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Berkeley, California to take the top spot.
Ann Arbor in Michigan and Boulder, Colorado rounded out the top five, while Miami, Florida, which is better known for its balmy climate, enticing beaches and nightlife came in sixth.
“It’s great to see that we are truly a nation of readers, with representation on this list from every region of the country,” Chris Schluep, senior editor of books for Amazon.com, said in a statement announcing the results.
The online retailer compiled the list of the 20 most read cities with populations of more than 100,000 residents using sales data on books, magazine and newspaper and eBooks since June last year.
Arlington and Richmond, both in Virginia, also made the ranking, along with Washington, D.C., which placed ninth on the list. Florida had two other bookish cities — Gainesville, which came in eighth and Orlando, which ranked 14th.
When Amazon took a closer look at the types of books people were reading it found that residents of Boulder were the most health conscious with an emphasis on health, fitness and diet books but people living in Berkeley ordered the most travel books.
Alexandria is a city of romantics and locals living in Cambridge were most interested in business and investing books.
(Reporting by Patricia Reaney, editing By Christine Kearney)
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English the preferred language for world business: poll
NEW YORK |
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Workers whose jobs require them to interact with people in foreign countries say that English is the dominant language of business, according to a new poll.
More than one quarter of employees in 26 countries around the world told an Ipsos poll that their jobs involve dealing with people in other countries. And of those, two-thirds said that English is the language they use most often.
Workers in India, Singapore and Saudi Arabia were the most likely to say their jobs involved interacting with people in other countries, with 59 percent, 55 percent and 50 percent saying so, respectively.
But only nine percent in Japan and 13 percent in Russia said their work required communication outside the country.
“The most revealing aspect of this survey is how English has emerged as the default language for business around the world,” said Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters.
The survey of 16,344 employed adults in 26 countries showed that 67 percent, or just over two-thirds, of workers who deal with people beyond their borders said English was the language used most often, with Spanish a very distant second at five percent.
Nearly as many, 61 percent, said the language used for such interactions was different from their native one.
Bricker said the findings suggest “that all those in the English-speaking world who suggested that our children should learn Mandarin or Japanese to have successful careers were beaten to the punch by the Chinese, in particular, learning English first.”
While more than three quarters of people in North America said they used English most often to communicate with those in other countries, 63 percent in China said the same thing. The same was true for France.
More than two thirds of workers in the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and Africa also defaulted to English.
In Latin America only one-third said English was most common when dealing with people in other countries. In Argentina and Mexico the choice was Spanish, in Brazil, Portuguese.
The survey showed that people with higher levels of income or education were among the most likely to say English was most commonly used for foreign business relationships.
Gender and age had no bearing on the dominant language for conducting business.
Countries surveyed included Indonesia, Turkey, the United States, Sweden, Great Britain, Spain, Canada and Italy among others.
(Editing by Patricia Reaney)
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Afghan woman pushes for rights from behind the wheel
KABUL |
KABUL (Reuters) – The morning after the Taliban fell Shakila Naderi shed her head-to-toe burqa, sat behind the wheel of a car for the first time and asked her husband to teach her how to drive.
Now Kabul’s only female driving instructor, she teaches women a rare skill that confronts harsh opposition in ultra-conservative, Muslim Afghanistan.
“It bothers men when women drive,” Naderi, 45, said from behind her desk in her four-room driving school near Kabul’s city centre, decorated with traffic signs and instructions in her native Dari.
“But I wasn’t scared of them then and I am not scared of them now,” she said, adjusting her green headscarf.
Naderi opened the school four years ago with her husband Iqbal Khan, who as a taxi driver took pity on women he saw struggling to find transportation in a country where many will not speak to men other than relatives.
Women have regained rights such as education, voting and work since the removal of the Taliban and their austere rule a decade ago, but they enjoy far less freedom than men.
Women complain of unwanted gazes and physical harassment on the cramped, crowded minibuses that are often the only method of urban public transport.
When Naderi Driving School opened, Naderi received verbal threats from the more conservative sectors of society, who decry driving as un-Islamic for women. Those have died down, she says, but male drivers often taunt her and try to chase her car off the road, sometimes causing her to swerve dangerously.
Families also bar daughters from driving, fearing it could lead them astray. Naderi’s own two daughters have been prohibited by their husbands’ families from learning to drive.
TAKING CONTROL OF ONE’S LIFE
A white headscarf wrapped around her wrinkled face, student Khanum Gul Obedi, 46, says she wants to take control of her life.
The mother of two teen daughters has a disabled husband and cannot afford to take taxis with fares of 300 Afghani ($5.50) per ride. She walks for hours around Kabul every day dropping her kids off at school and buying food.
“I never opened a book in my life besides the holy Koran, I never entered through the doors of a school,” said Obedi, who is illiterate like most Afghan women.
“I got married and felt imprisoned, but now I can control things and I feel like I’ve been set free.”
The school once mustered only one to five students for a 36-day course, a precursor to applying for a license.
Classes now number up to 80, and some students travel from nearby provinces. In a room filled with car parts and smeared with grease, Naderi also teaches women how to deal with breakdowns.
Naderi and her husband must read out driving manuals to students in a country where more than 80 percent of women cannot read or write, an illiteracy rate double that of men.
Their work has paid off.
Kabul issued a record 312 driving licenses to women last year, the traffic department said. Herat in the west and Mazar-e-Sharif in the north gave out 64 and 48 respectively to women taught mainly by other women but also by some men.
The government backs Naderi’s school and has encouraged female employees to attend. But the couple’s ads on billboards are often defaced or torn down.
“Boys tease me because I want to drive,” said college graduate Mersal Nawabi, 21. “But I am encouraged by my brothers and father.”
Student Obedi says she would never take driving lessons from a man. “This is Afghanistan. People talk and by having a woman instructor gossip is kept to a minimum”.
As Naderi leaves her school and walks towards her car, a group of men nearby scream: “Hey you! We can drive too”.
“I react to them as men would,” she says with a grimace.
“Once I got out of my car, yelled back and slapped one so hard he bled. Then I got back into the car to teach the girls”.
(Editing by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Ron Popeski)
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