Tourism incentives, Water cuts?, Madeiran Olympians, No money for poverty, etc.
TODAY’S PHOTO : Cows grazing on Porto Santo Island. If you are getting fed up of looking at Porto Santo photos, please feel free to send in some fresh material … thanks!
Front Page News : source : Diário de Notícias 26/7/2008
(President) Jardim promises to talk “moderately” at the festival of “Chão da Lagoa” today. “The Region should show a face of moderation to a State that abuses power and is becoming a police State against the rights, liberties and individual security”. If that second sentence is moderated, I think he has already exceeded his ambition in the first sentence. What a charmer …!
The police will be particularly attentive to alcohol and drink driving, mentioning the 4 road deaths in the space of a week, and to disorder at the festival.
The Regional Government is to create a new system of incentives exclusively to boost the islands main economic activity … tourism. Full details are not being revealed until September, but the Diario headlines the article SPECIFIC PROGRAMS ARE GOING TO GUARANTEE EXCELLENCE IN TOURISM and mentions the sum involved of €40 million up until 2013, courtesy of Brussels.
A very low rainfall this year is threatening water supplies. First to be cut as non essential use will be supplies to agriculture and for watering gardens. The water authority maintains that if everyone makes a big effort to save water, then maybe we can get through the summer without water cuts. “In the last 15 years, the rain between October to May was limited to 1,380 mm annually, reducing to 1,237 mm annually over 10 years, and 1,146 mm annually over the last 5 years. The rain, especially in the two last years, has been scarcer. The traditionally humid months of December and of January have became dry”. With the increasing pressure of urban consumption, it is easy to see that the situation with Madeira is worrying.
With the Peking Olympics almost here, 6 Madeiran athletes are on their way. Here they are :
Alberto Paulo (22) – Athletics, specialising in 3,000 metres hurdles
Ana Moura (22) – Badminton, specialising in singles
Helena Rodrigues (23) – Canoeing, specialising in K2 500 metres
Marcos Freitas (20) – Table tennis
Marco Vasconcelos (36) – Badminton, specialising in singles
Joao Rodrigues (36) – Sailing RS X M
The Diario names them as the ‘great Atlantic pearls’.
It certainly would be nice to put Madeira on the sporting map for reasons other than Cristiano Ronaldo, but I don’t think expectations are too high. And if not, at least they will be over there drinking Chinese water supplies rather than ours.
Other News :
So far 2,460 youngsters have been identified to start school for the first time in the new term, but that leaves around 1,000 vacancies unfilled in the public schools.
“It is easy to speak about poverty” as President Jardim answers the critics that “go home and sleep easy”. “Poverty has always existed, that is not the reason that we did not eliminate it. We should fight poverty. But it is an action of selfishness when is said ‘that responsibility is with the politicians’ and we are going to sleep very well”. Jardim says there is no money, and therefore the priority is the construction of a new hospital. Well, nothing forthcoming there then, just a few more roads, municipal golf courses, hospitals, fire stations, sports centres, beach conversions, football bungs, white elephants and whale museums, to go, and maybe then there will be some money left to help the poor.
A paedophile was released to freedom by the court in Santa Cruz last week, after being detained since 2007 for abusing minors of 12 and 15 years of age. He received a 4 year prison sentence suspended for the same period. No mention of a register of sex offenders, so perhaps they just go back on the streets with the hope they won’t re-offend?
The Porto Santo ferry ‘Lobo Marinho’ has transported nearly 1.7 million passengers since it came into service just over 5 years ago, but like all passenger ships it has to do safety demonstrations and evacuation simulations periodically under whatever rules their jurisdiction dictates. I think that the ferry, being just a short trip, has particular problems in getting passengers to cooperate, especially with such a multilingual clientele. On Thursday morning the crew undertook such an exercise, with a lifeboat actually being lowered, but complained that hardly any passengers reacted or cooperated. I remember being lucky enough to go on a 10 day cruise once, and they did exactly the same thing, but it was on the day before the cruise finished.
The new Hiper Sá store in Santana opened as planned, providing work to 75 people, and brought with it the promise of further investment in the region. Work is now underway to build a store in Machico (Easter 2009) and thought is still being given to building a store on Porto Santo Island.
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a water leak outside our building has just been repaired–only took a month!!,however was LOOKED at a few times
1–Vic
As I blog to you this afternoon in England, the rain is p*****g down after a brilliantly sunny and very hot morning. Lunchtime down the pub was packed and the Pimm's tasted wonderful. Our summers are more wet than in the previous 10 years, but Cornwall in August during the fifties was always wet and cold. I'm sure the rain will return to normal soon in Madeira and them we'll all want a stop to it. Nature is never cooperative. What happened to the global cooling and impending ice age?. This was the forecast by the experts in the sixties and seventies?.
2–Martin
One tour guide told me that 90% of the water that lands on Madeira ends up back in the sea … the solution is there if desperate I think, after all the island is just a big hard sponge. You can keep the rain in England Martin as Vic's water leak is now fixed
3–Der
Ta!
4–Martin