immigrants,
news of the weird,
spain,
sports
6:07 PM
Paul the octopus set for sensational transfer to Madrid aquarium
Spanish zoo prepared to meet 'any demands' to sign German cephalopod that predicted team's World Cup final victory
In what may prove to be the biggest transfer story this summer, negotiations have begun to bring Paul the psychic octopus to Madrid after he correctly predicted Spain's World Cup final victory.
Madrid's Zoo Aquarium says it is prepared to trump any other offer Germany's Oberhausen Sea Life Centre receives for Paul, certain that the world's most famous cephalopod will attract thousands of visitors.
At present no cash is on the table, and the zoo says it is trying to negotiate an exchange of animals.
Sounding more like the president of Real Madrid than a zookeeper, a spokesman said he was confident that Paul would be in Madrid within a few days. Madrid was prepared to offer Oberhausen "whatever they demand" to complete the deal — suggesting that this will be a cash-plus-animal transfer.
He added that Paul, named after a German children's book by Boy Lornsen, would be treated "with tender loving care" because of his national treasure status in Spain.
Paul correctly predicted the outcome of all seven of Germany's World Cup matches, as well as the final between Spain and Holland. This was an improvement on his record for the 2008 Eurocopa, in which he correctly predicted four out of six of Germany's games.
During the World Cup, Paul became a media phenomenon, with his final predictions screened live on television. He also became the world's third most popular Twitter trend during the competition, out-doing both Shakira and Cristiano Ronaldo with 141 hours of trending.
A Brazilian company has developed an iPhone app based on Paul's performance, allowing users to consult the octopus to help them make decisions. The Ask the Octopus app lets users ask 50-50 questions, to which a cartoon of Paul chooses an answer.
book reviews,
immigrants,
morocco,
spain
12:15 PM
Picked this book up at the Virgin Store in the Beirut airport while I was waiting for a connection flight. It is an easy read and I got through the entire book on my long flight.
It deals with a brother and sister who emigrate from Morocco to Barcelona. The brother basically catches the eye of a gay Spaniard named Miguel who goes to Morocco often for leisure and business. He creates a pseudo-job for the brother, who I think is called Azel (?), provided he live with him in Barcelona, be his lover and basically be at his beck and call.
Meanwhile, the brother convinces Miguel to marry his sister so that she may also come to Spain, which Miguel does, although there are no romantic feelings between the sister and the Spaniard. In the end, what the story highlights on are how different people deal with emigration into a foreign land, who ruins themselves in the process and who paves out opportunities for themselves. I wished that the story had created more dialogue between the three characters to show their interaction in greater depth, but in the end it was a page turner.
children,
homelessness,
immigrants
6:04 PM
"On the edges of a Salvation Army soup line in Paris, a soft-spoken Afghan boy told the story recently of how he ended up in Europe, alone.
The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering the Internet. After his father suffered a back injury that made working difficult, the boy, who declined to give his name, headed west.
He spent two months working 11-hour days in a clothing sweatshop in Istanbul, he said. He was then smuggled into Greece, where he was forced to work on a potato and onion farm near Agros for nine months, finally escaping in the back of a truck. He reached Paris by train after nearly a year on the road.
“I want to go to school,” he said in English. “I would like it if I could be — it sounds like a lot to ask — an engineer of computing.” (click here for full link)
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