"Buy nothing day" and shopping guides

Today, the day after Thanksgiving in the US and traditionally the most important day for retailers there due to a lot of Christmas shopping by people on a long weekend, is also "buy nothing day" for those that deplore the excesses of materialism. You find more information here.

In contrast to that, on Spanish TV one starts to see a lot of perfume comercials these days and on the radio supermarkets encourage one to buy the traditional seafood early at a discount price to keep it in one's fridge until the holidays. The traditional holiday TV spot by champagne-maker Freixenet will star the Colombian pop star Shakira, supposedly clad in very little golden stuff. On newspaper websites appear shopping guides (the NY Times' here, the Financial Times' here) that tempt one to forget that the Spanish economy is in crisis and that a lot of people who already lost their jobs will also lose their homes as they cannot pay their mortgages any longer. Banks are now the biggest property holders in the country.

The Catalan Elections in the New York Times

The New York Times reports on the Catalan elections that will take place on Sunday, November 28. Regional watchgroups here consider the article balanced and fair as it does not take the typical point of view from Madrid where most of the foreign journalist are based.

The Problem of Aging Populations

Natasha Singer wrote a thought-provoking article on "How Aging Populations May Crimp the World's Finances". It should be read by all those who still doubt that radical reforms of public pension systems are necessary. With people living longer and populations shrinking in most developed (i.e. rich) countries, it's time to act if one wants to prevent grave intergenerational inequalities and the resulting conflicts; it does not mean to abandon public pensions but to share the costs between generations equitatively; as far as I have heard, in India there are already people killing their parents if they cannot afford to feed them any longer - and we do not want to get to such an extreme... The article published in the New York Times is here.

In memoriam Theodore C. Sorensen (1928-2010)

He was John F. Kennedy's legendary speech-writer and he died on October, 31 at the age of 82. You might not have heard of him but surely you have heard some of his masterful rhetoric.

If you want to know more (and see pictures and videos), read the Washington Post's obituary here, the New York Times' here, Vanity Fair's here, The Guardian's here, and a blog entry from the New Yorker here.

November 9 in German history

November 9 is a strangely important day in German history. Here are some examples of events that took place on this day:

1918 – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicates after the German Revolution, and Germany is proclaimed a Republic.

1923 – In Munich, Germany, police and government troops crush the Beer Hall Putsch in Bavaria. The failed coup is the work of the Nazis.

1938 – Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath dies from the fatal gunshot wounds of Jewish resistance fighter Herschel Grynszpan, an act which the Nazis used as an excuse to instigate the 1938 national pogrom, also known as Kristallnacht.

1989 – Cold War: Fall of the Berlin Wall. Communist-controlled East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall allowing its citizens to travel to West Germany. This key event led to the eventual reunification of East and West Germany.

For more details, consult the Wikipedia. The most specific article is the one in German.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

50th Anniversary of Kennedy Election as US President

On Muesday, 8th of November 1960, John F. Kennedy won the presidential elections in the US, defeating Richard M. Nixon. He was the first Catholic to do so and his victory was not overwhelming.

One finds a lot of information on JFK at the pages of the Presidential Library in Boston, MA, and at those of the museum dedicated to the Kennedy family in Berlin.

The German weekly Die Zeit offers this article by Susanne Kippenberger.

The Spanish daily El País had this article to commemorate the event.

The Boston Globe offers this article on the anniversary, the Boston Herald this one, as well as this one on a new exhibition at the JFK Hyannis Museum.