Pope Francis on Saturday visited Medellin, the epicentre of Colombia’s narco-wars of the 1980s. In unscripted comments at the last event of the day, he said he could not leave without mentioning the “painful memory” of “so many young lives truncated, discarded, destroyed”.
He asked his listeners to ask god “for forgiveness for those who destroyed the dreams of so many young people. Ask the Lord to convert their hearts, ask for an end to this defeat of young humanity.”
The Medellin that Francis visited is a city transformed since his predecessor Pope John Paul came in 1986. It was then rife with violence among cartels, paramilitary groups and guerrillas that raged in the poor ‘comuna’ neighborhoods on its outskirts.
The city is now heralded as a model of urban development. It has installed cable cars up the steep Andean slopes that surround it to save working-class residents a punishing climb, and it has built libraries in sections that were once sites of gun battles.
Feared drug trafficker Escobar, Medellin’s most infamous resident, was gunned down in the city in a US-backed operation in 1993. He was recently resurrected as a character in the popular Netflix series Narcos.
At the start of the day, Francis said a mass where he urged Colombians to help their fellow citizens who hunger for food, dignity and god, pressing his appeal for the South American country to tackle social inequality.
Speaking in a homily to hundreds of thousands of people on muddied fields, Francis urged Colombians to “get involved” in helping each other and to embrace “acts of non-violence, reconciliation and peace.”
The leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics has brought a message of national reconciliation as the country tries to heal the wounds left by a 50-year civil war and bitter disagreements over last year’s peace deal with leftist guerrillas that some say lets them off too leniently.
On Friday in the tropical city of Villavicencio, the pontiff asked Colombians sceptical of the deal with the FARC guerrillas to be open to reconciliation with those who have repented, speaking hours after a top rebel leader asked the pontiff for forgiveness.
Francis has also used his trip to the predominantly Roman Catholic country to denounce the social inequality that still plagues Colombia, which has extreme poverty in some rural areas.
He has called for laws to tackle the structural causes of these problems, which he said spur violence.
Christians, he told the ecstatic crowd at the mass, “are called upon to be brave, to have that evangelical courage which springs from knowing that there are many who are hungry, who hunger for God - how many people hunger for God! - who hunger for dignity, because they have been deprived.”
He visits the city of Cartagena on Sunday before leaving for Rome that night.
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
Germany: PKK collectors typically bring in $18 million in cash a year – amount has trebled since 2010
Revolutionary tax: Investigators say about $2 million a year raised from ‘tax collection’ around Marseille
Extortion: Gunman convicted in 2023 of demanding $10,000 from Kurdish businessman in Stockholm
Drug trade: PKK income claimed by Turkish anti-drugs force in 2024 to be as high as $500 million a year
Denmark: PKK one of two terrorist groups along with Iranian separatists ASMLA to raise “two-digit million amounts”
Contributions: Hundreds of euros expected from typical Kurdish families and thousands from business owners
TV channel: Kurdish Roj TV accounts frozen and went bankrupt after Denmark fined it more than $1 million over PKK links in 2013
Dirham Stretcher tips for having a baby in the UAE
Selma Abdelhamid, the group's moderator, offers her guide to guide the cost of having a young family:
• Buy second hand stuff
They grow so fast. Don't get a second hand car seat though, unless you 100 per cent know it's not expired and hasn't been in an accident.
• Get a health card and vaccinate your child for free at government health centres
Ms Ma says she discovered this after spending thousands on vaccinations at private clinics.
• Join mum and baby coffee mornings provided by clinics, babysitting companies or nurseries.
Before joining baby classes ask for a free trial session. This way you will know if it's for you or not. You'll be surprised how great some classes are and how bad others are.
• Once baby is ready for solids, cook at home
Take the food with you in reusable pouches or jars. You'll save a fortune and you'll know exactly what you're feeding your child.
The specs
Engine: Four electric motors, one at each wheel
Power: 579hp
Torque: 859Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh825,900
On sale: Now
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The more serious side of specialty coffee
While the taste of beans and freshness of roast is paramount to the specialty coffee scene, so is sustainability and workers’ rights.
The bulk of genuine specialty coffee companies aim to improve on these elements in every stage of production via direct relationships with farmers. For instance, Mokha 1450 on Al Wasl Road strives to work predominantly with women-owned and -operated coffee organisations, including female farmers in the Sabree mountains of Yemen.
Because, as the boutique’s owner, Garfield Kerr, points out: “women represent over 90 per cent of the coffee value chain, but are woefully underrepresented in less than 10 per cent of ownership and management throughout the global coffee industry.”
One of the UAE’s largest suppliers of green (meaning not-yet-roasted) beans, Raw Coffee, is a founding member of the Partnership of Gender Equity, which aims to empower female coffee farmers and harvesters.
Also, globally, many companies have found the perfect way to recycle old coffee grounds: they create the perfect fertile soil in which to grow mushrooms.
How much sugar is in chocolate Easter eggs?
- The 169g Crunchie egg has 15.9g of sugar per 25g serving, working out at around 107g of sugar per egg
- The 190g Maltesers Teasers egg contains 58g of sugar per 100g for the egg and 19.6g of sugar in each of the two Teasers bars that come with it
- The 188g Smarties egg has 113g of sugar per egg and 22.8g in the tube of Smarties it contains
- The Milky Bar white chocolate Egg Hunt Pack contains eight eggs at 7.7g of sugar per egg
- The Cadbury Creme Egg contains 26g of sugar per 40g egg
Sheikh Zayed's poem
When it is unveiled at Abu Dhabi Art, the Standing Tall exhibition will appear as an interplay of poetry and art. The 100 scarves are 100 fragments surrounding five, figurative, female sculptures, and both sculptures and scarves are hand-embroidered by a group of refugee women artisans, who used the Palestinian cross-stitch embroidery art of tatreez. Fragments of Sheikh Zayed’s poem Your Love is Ruling My Heart, written in Arabic as a love poem to his nation, are embroidered onto both the sculptures and the scarves. Here is the English translation.
Your love is ruling over my heart
Your love is ruling over my heart, even a mountain can’t bear all of it
Woe for my heart of such a love, if it befell it and made it its home
You came on me like a gleaming sun, you are the cure for my soul of its sickness
Be lenient on me, oh tender one, and have mercy on who because of you is in ruins
You are like the Ajeed Al-reem [leader of the gazelle herd] for my country, the source of all of its knowledge
You waddle even when you stand still, with feet white like the blooming of the dates of the palm
Oh, who wishes to deprive me of sleep, the night has ended and I still have not seen you
You are the cure for my sickness and my support, you dried my throat up let me go and damp it
Help me, oh children of mine, for in his love my life will pass me by.
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
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