‘It’s totally broken down’: tourism surge forcing Ibiza’s workers to live in car parks” by Sam Jones #TheGuardian
“In Ibiza – as in neighbouring Mallorca and in the Canary islands – it is increasingly obvious that neither the island nor its housing market can put up with the huge numbers of tourists that arrive each year.
“Over the past five years – but mainly since the pandemic – people have been feeling that everything’s oversaturated, that there are more and more tourists, and that leads to roads and public services becoming overloaded,” says Rafael Giménez, of Prou Eivissa (Enough Ibiza), a group that is campaigning for limits on the number of visitors and vehicles onthe island.
“Ibiza’s an island, so housing is limited by definition. The law of supply and demand has totally broken down.”
"‘Recipe for disaster’: Venice entry fee sparks confusion and protest on day one" by Angela Giuffrida #TheGuardian
"On the first day of what the mayor of Venice has hailed as a bold experiment in reducing over-tourism, day-trippers faced a €5 (£4.30) charge, which kicked in at 8.30am on Thursday and will apply on 29 peak days until 14 July as part of a trial.
The scheme is intended to help the city better manage the millions of tourists that visit every year, even if it only applies to those coming just for the day – and even if, as critics argue, the relatively low cost is unlikely to prove a deterrent."
"Most of the day-trippers arriving at Santa Lucia came prepared with a QR code proving they had paid the toll, but there was still confusion among people with hotel bookings who were unaware they still had to go through the process of confirming their exemption online."
Buried: how we choose to remember the transatlantic slave trade – documentary #TheGuardian
"The remote island of St Helena, a British overseas territory, is best known for Napoleon's tomb – the island's biggest tourist attraction. However, while overseeing the construction of a long-awaited airport on the island, Annina van Neel learns that the remains of thousands of formerly enslaved Africans have been uncovered, unearthing one of the most significant physical remaining traces of the transatlantic slave trade in the world."
"'We are dealing with fundamentalist rightwingers’: Berlin statues are latest battleground in Germany’s culture wars" by Philip Oltermann (#TheGuardian)
"Silently towering into the grey Berlin sky, the latest addition to the German capital’s skyline is easily missed by passengers passing along the Unter den Linden boulevard below. Eight statues of Old Testament prophets, each more than 3 metres tall and weighing 3 tonnes, were installed last week in a circular formation around the cupola of the palace in the centre of the metropolis."
“It appears that we are dealing with a targeted infiltration of the Berlin palace by fundamentalist rightwingers who want to turn it into symbol of a Christian and thereby ‘white’ ethnic Germany,” said Jürgen Zimmerer."
"‘Dust is everywhere’: rare glimpse of how Michelangelo’s David is kept clean" by Angela Giuffrida #TheGuardian
"Michelangelo’s David is recognised as one of the most sublime works in the history of sculpture, but according to the director of Florence’s Accademia Gallery, dusting it is much like cleaning a bathroom.
“You know when you clean a bathroom, you clean and clean and think you’ve done a great job but then you spot some dust and wonder ‘where did that come from?’,” Cecilie Hollberg said on Monday. “This is what it’s like. Dust is everywhere.”
Once every two months, the Accademia Gallery’s in-house restorer Eleonora Pucci clambers up the side of scaffolding assembled around the 5.17-metre-tall figure and gets to work on dusting David’s marble locks and perfectly toned muscles, using a vacuum and fine brushes and cloths."
This is an article published in 2021, but it is still relevant and important to understand the socio-political dynamics of UK and many other countries (US, Spain, etc.).
"The right is winning the culture war because its opponents don’t know the rules" by #NesrineMalik (#TheGuardian).
"But the right is creating its own new stories. Because culture war is not about winning a debate about what constitutes England through factual disputes about its character, its statues, its football team or its history of empire. It is not a peripheral indulgence, or a mere confection. Culture war is an aggressive political act with the purpose of creating new dividing lines and therefore new and bigger electoral majorities. It aims to create its own truth, and its own England, through what Nietzsche called a “mobile army of metaphors”."
"Why is the US far right finding its savior in Spanish dictator Francisco Franco?" by Jason Wilson (#TheGuardian)
"Some US far-right figures have made renewed attempts to rehabilitate the 20th century Spanish dictator Gen Francisco Franco in recent months, praising him as an avatar of religious authoritarianism, and praising his actions during and after the Spanish civil war as a model for confronting the left in the US."
"The critics of this flurry of neo-Francoism say that the real target of this revisionism is domestic attitudes to US democracy."
"For Faber, parts of the the American right are captured by “the dream of order, where social order is more important than democracy, and democracy is a threat to social order”."
THEFTS EXPOSE BRITISH MUSEUM’S ‘RIDICULOUS’ STANCE ON RETURN OF ARTEFACTS, SAYS MP by David Batty and Mark Brown
"Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Afrikan reparations, believes the 1963 law preventing the return of objects such as the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes should be changed.
The museum has been at the centre of an escalating storm that on Friday led to the resignation of its director, Hartwig Fischer. It followed the revelation that as many as 2,000 items from the museum collection had been found to be “missing, stolen or damaged” and that police were investigating."
👉 An interesting point of view from Dan Hicks (curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum): "'The last remaining argument against restitution has now been lost'