Latest news with #FrancisI
L'Orient-Le Jour
2 days ago
- Politics
- L'Orient-Le Jour
France condemns 'unacceptable' bombing of church under its 'historic protection'
France condemns the "unacceptable" bombing of the Catholic Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, "placed under France's historic protection," which left two people dead, Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot posted Thursday on X. "I expressed to the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem the emotion and solidarity of our country. These attacks are intolerable; it is time for the carnage in Gaza to stop," the minister wrote. "France protects Catholic religious communities in Israel and Palestine. This role is the legacy of a long history that goes back to the capitulations signed by Francis I with Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1535," the Foreign Affairs Ministry recalled in a written response to a senator's question in 2014. Since the 1920s, France has no longer had a "legal role in protecting Eastern Catholic Christians. However, the agreements signed between France and the Ottoman Empire at Mytilene in 1901 and Constantinople in 1913, which granted France protection over Catholic religious communities in the Holy Land, have been recognized by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities and are thus still in effect," according to the Ministry. The Gaza Civil Defense and the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem announced Thursday the death of two people in an Israeli airstrike on the only Catholic church in the Palestinian territory, which has been a refuge for this small community since the beginning of the war. Israel, at war with the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas since Oct. 7, 2023, said it "never targets" religious sites in the Gaza Strip and added that the circumstances in which the church was damaged were "under review."
Scottish Sun
5 days ago
- Scottish Sun
Story behind the tiny ‘Scottish village' in the Italian Alps with just 300 people
Nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps is a unique little village with a distinctive Scottish feel CALEDONIAN CONNECTION Story behind the tiny 'Scottish village' in the Italian Alps with just 300 people ITALY and Scotland have shared close ties over the years, with thousands of Italians emigrating to Scotland over the past 150 years. The influx in the late 19th century sparked a lasting love affair in Scotland with Italian cuisine, as many people settled and opened ice cream parlours and restaurants serving up pizza and pasta dishes. 3 Gurro in northern Italy near the border with Switzerland has Scottish connections Credit: Getty 3 Legend has it that hundreds of years ago Scottish soldiers got snowbound in Gurro and never left Credit: Getty Others started up fish and chip shops, cafes, and hairdressing businesses. But nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps is a unique little village with a distinctive Scottish feel. Gurro in the Piedmont region of northern Italy is said to be home to the descendants of Scottish soldiers. A small unit called the Gardes Écossaises, which translates to the Scottish Guards, travelled to Italy to fight alongside the French king. But during the Battle of Pavia in February, 1525, Francis I of France was captured during the conflict. The Scottish troops fled the region and as they made their way back home they passed through Gurro. Legend has it that they got stuck in the village during a snowstorm and decided to stay and put down roots. Today, Gurro is home to around just 300 residents but there are still clues to be found reflecting its Caledonian connection. Saltires can be found decorating parts of the village and locals have a unique dialect. It is understood that residents of nearby residents struggle to understand some of the Gurro vocabulary, with Gaelic said to have an influence. Inside Italy's most Scottish town But one of the biggest giveaways is the underskirts of traditional dresses worn by some older women. It features a distinctive chequered pattern, similar to tartan. Some locals use the word "aye" as a way of saying "yes", instead of using the Italian word "si". Gurro is not the only settlement in Italy with Scottish links. Barga in Tuscany, is known as 'the most Scottish town in Italy'. Many of the town's locals moved to Scotland around the end of the 19th century. Throughout the 20th century, some of the migrants returned to the idyllic area. Some locals in Barga can trace their ancestry back to Scotland and there's even a red telephone box in the town. Cockenzie, Longniddry, Port Seton and Prestonpans in East Lothian have been twinned with Barga since 2006.
The Independent
08-07-2025
- The Independent
What are your top day trips to escape Paris?
Q Could you recommend a couple of day trips from Paris? K Jones A Versailles is so close to Paris that I'm not sure you can count it as a day trip; trains from Montparnasse station in the capital take just 12 minutes to reach this pretty town and its formidable chateau. So I shall instead recommend locations that are distinctively outside Paris yet easily accessible by rail. Compiegne, 50 miles northeast and an hour by train from Gare du Nord, is a joy: a compact, elegant city. It has a palace to rival Versailles, except in terms of crowds. The grounds are spectacular. A few miles to the east of Compiegne is the forest location central to the 20th-century conflict. You can visit the 'Armistice Carriage' – a replica of the wagon in which the German surrender in 1918 and the French surrender in 1940 were both taken. It is part of a sombre and informative memorial to the events and their consequences. Back in town, you can find plenty of agreeable places to lunch at prices much lower than in the capital (or Versailles). Fontainebleau, 40 miles southeast of Paris, is served by fast (40 minutes), frequent and low-cost trains. The highlight is the Chateau de Fontainebleau, which Francis I transformed from a 12th-century medieval castle into an Italianate palace. As a royal residence, it pre-dates Versailles. After the French Revolution, the chateau became the Imperial Palace, much enjoyed by Napoleon Bonaparte; it houses the only Napoleonic throne room still in existence. The surrounding forest used to be prime hunting territory for French royalty, but is now the preserve of cyclists, hikers and rock climbers. For lunch (or an early dinner before heading back to Paris), I recommend the convivial, tasty and good-value La Petite Ardoise bistrot. I have also heard good things about Provins, a fortified medieval town southeast of Paris. It is on the Unesco world heritage list, and on my must-visit list. Q I have been watching all your reports about the changing rules of cabin baggage. For the last 12 months or so, on a number of flights with British Airways, ground staff have instructed that cabin luggage of certain boarding groups should be placed in the hold. How could a change of legislation impact that behaviour, if passed? Paul B A The background: pressure is mounting in Europe to increase the free cabin baggage allowance for every airline passenger. Consumer groups across the EU are demanding that every passenger should be allowed to carry a wheeled suitcase, as well as a 'personal item' such as a handbag or laptop bag, free of charge. MEPs at the European parliament have voted in favour of the concept. They say allowing two cabin bags on board 'would enhance transparency and consumer protection for all air travellers'. The budget airlines say making two free bags mandatory would do exactly the opposite. It would remove the option that every passenger has to take only one, fairly small bag on board without paying extra. They add that their charges are entirely transparent; the basic fare is available to anyone, but for more than minimal baggage, you will pay extra. While I sympathise with their view, the low-cost carriers have brought extra attention to their policies by upping the cost of baggage to an absurd degree. On 1 October, for example, I can buy a Ryanair flight from Manchester to Cork for £16.99. But taking a larger piece of cabin baggage will cost an extra £17 – more than doubling the cost. The basic fare is too low, and the charge for taking a trolley bag on board is way too high. If the European Union presses ahead with a new law, by default, it will be imposed in the UK, I believe. The consequences will be messy. As you describe, British Airways – which has a generous two-bag limit – often has to consign the wheeled cases of lower-spending passengers to the hold. All the airlines would end up doing something similar, slowing down the boarding process and adding to costs. But I predict the EU will see sense and leave things as they are. Q I travelled to South America fairly frequently in the 2010s, usually changing planes in Madrid or using the Avianca nonstop from London Heathrow to Bogota. For my first post-Covid visit I'm interested in something a bit different: travelling via Africa or the Atlantic islands. What are the options? Daniel C A Hundreds of daily flights link Europe, the US and Canada across the North Atlantic. But precious few cross the South Atlantic between Africa and Latin America. I can muster only four – all of them heading from Africa to the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo, which is the main aviation hub in South America. The most accessible from a UK perspective is the Royal Air Maroc link from Casablanca, which operates three times a week. Further south, Taag Angola connects the capital, Luanda, with Sao Paulo – once again three times weekly. And South African Airways flies on alternate days from Johannesburg and Cape Town to the Brazilian hub. Fares are high, reflecting the limited supply of seats. If you are tempted to avail of one of them, I suggest you use a good travel agent. They may be able to leverage the alliances to which Royal Air Maroc and South African Airways belong: Oneworld and Star respectively. You also mention the Atlantic islands. Unfortunately, I can see nothing from the Canary Islands, the Azores or the Cape Verde archipelago to South America, despite the strong heritage links. Tenerife was once connected with Caracas in Venezuela – the country known as the 'eighth isle' of the Canaries because so many islanders settled there. But the implosion of the Venezuelan economy brought an end to the link. I can see a slightly greater chance of one of the Cape Verde islands being connected to Brazil. Both are former Portuguese possessions; Sal to Recife is under 1,900 miles, representing a four-hour flight to a key Brazilian city. But with a worldwide shortage of planes, I do not predict that route will be announced anytime soon. And neither will either of the former Air France Concorde routes be resurrected: Santa Maria in the Azores to Caracas, and Dakar to Rio.
CairoScene
21-05-2025
- Health
- CairoScene
When Europe Ate Mummies: How Colonial Cannibalism Lasted Centuries
In the grainy photograph, the man sits cross-legged beside two stiff, linen-wrapped corpses. The vendor does not smile. His posture suggests this is ordinary business. In a sense, it was. That year, in 1865, Western travellers to Egypt could buy a mummified body. Once destined for the afterlife, these ancient dead had become commercial goods, shipped by the crate-load to Europe where they were crushed into pigment, powdered for medicine, unwrapped at parties, or, most disturbingly, consumed. The practice, colloquially referred to as 'mummy medicine', was more than a passing fad. For centuries, Europeans ingested the remnants of ancient Egyptians with the belief that doing so might heal them. The logic, though warped by distance and desire, was not incidental. It was built on a collision of scientific misunderstanding, colonial hunger, and philosophical confusion about what the dead owe the living. The belief in mumia's healing power was deeply rooted in prevailing medical theories of the time. One such theory was the doctrine of signatures, which held that natural substances resembled the ailments they were meant to cure. Mummified flesh, preserved for centuries, seemed an obvious candidate for treating decay, wounds, and internal deterioration. The origins of this strange commerce trace back to a linguistic and pharmacological confusion. In the Arabic language, the word 'mumia' referred to bitumen, a sticky, tar-like substance used by ancient Egyptians in the embalming process. Bitumen itself was thought to possess curative properties, especially for internal bleeding or bruising. By the 12th century, European apothecaries had begun importing it under the same name. But over time, the material truth behind mumia shifted. As medieval physicians and pharmacists grew more eager for the miraculous powers of 'mummy,' they began harvesting it not from mineral deposits, but from the mummified bodies themselves. Whether by misunderstanding or willful redefinition, the corpse had replaced the compound itself. By the 16th century, mummy powder, scraped from desiccated flesh and ground into a fine brown dust, was a fixture in European pharmacies. 'Take the bones of an unspoiled mummy,' advised French physician Guy de la Fontaine, 'reduce them to powder and mix them with a bit of wine.' This was mainstream medicine for them. A 1672 edition of the London Pharmacopoeia recommended mumia vera aegyptiaca, 'true Egyptian mummy', as a treatment for epilepsy, bruising, and internal hemorrhage. The French king Francis I is said to have carried mummy powder in a pouch around his neck. The British aristocracy swallowed it by the spoonful. Sanctified cannibalism was justified scientifically. To understand how such a practice could be so widely accepted, one must examine the medical logic of the time. Renaissance and early modern medicine was dominated by the humoral theory, in which health depended on the balance of four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. Illness indicated imbalance. Remedies were needed to counteract it. Mummified flesh, being dry and dark, was seen as ideal for absorbing excess humors. Moreover, the fact that these remains had withstood centuries in desert tombs seemed to signify resilience. 'There was also the allure of the exotic. Egypt, ancient, mysterious, and distant, offered an imaginative cure for European anxieties about death and decay,' Monica Hanna - Egyptian Egyptologist, scholar and Dean at the Arab Academy for Science, Technology & Maritime Transport - tells CairoScene. 'To ingest a mummy was, in effect, to ingest the magic of immortality.' But this logic carried a darker implication: to consume another human, stripped of name and identity, was acceptable so long as that human came from elsewhere, both geographically and historically. 'What mattered was not the life that had been lived, but the myth that could now be bottled and sold,' Hanna reflects. The dead served not only the sick, but the vain and the curious. By the 18th century, mummies had become fashionable in European drawing rooms. Mummy unwrapping parties, popular among Victorian elites, turned human remains into parlour spectacle. Attendees, often wealthy patrons or amateur scholars, would gather to watch an 'orientalist' expert, usually a male collector or physician, slowly peel away the layers of an ancient body. Gasps would follow the unveiling of teeth, nails, amulets. Sometimes a long-preserved hand would be passed around the room. These events were framed as scientific, even reverent. But their true function was voyeuristic. To unwrap a mummy was to metaphorically dominate the past, to possess not just the body, but the narrative of history. The echoes of these events are still seen today. 'The mummified body of Shepenese, an ancient Egyptian priestess, lies half-naked in a glass coffin in Switzerland's Abbey Library of St. Gallen — her chest unwrapped. Looted from her tomb in the early 19th century, Shepenese has been exhibited for decades as a tourist attraction. Now, over 200 Egyptian scholars, archaeologists, and civil society figures — joined by Swiss academics and cultural leaders — are demanding her repatriation.' Hanna tells Cairoscene. Meanwhile, artists were finding another use for the ancient dead. A pigment known as 'mummy brown' was made by boiling ground mummy powder with white pitch and myrrh, resulting in a rich, smoky hue ideal for glazing. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and other Romantic painters prized it for its depth. The irony was cruel: in being dismembered and repurposed, the mummies were being 'preserved' again, this time not in linen, but in oil on canvas. By the mid-19th century, demand had grown so great that supply faltered. Egyptian tombs, already ransacked, were running dry. Enterprising merchants responded with counterfeit mummies, sometimes made from the bodies of contemporary Egyptians, beggars, or criminals, treated with tar and buried briefly in sand to mimic ancient desiccation. The product is mystique. Though much of this trade occurred with the complicity of European and Egyptian middlemen alike, it was built on a profound erasure. The people whose bodies were sold, pharaohs and farmers, mothers and children, were never named. Their wishes, if recorded, were discarded. Their tombs, often sealed with prayers for peace, were breached in the name of curiosity and commerce. European museums and collectors often justified the trade as a civilizing mission: to rescue antiquity from ignorance. Yet as National Geographic notes, this collecting was often indistinguishable from plunder. During Napoleon's Egyptian campaign in 1798, thousands of artifacts were removed from temples and tombs. By the late 1800s, mummy exports from Egypt had become so routine that customs authorities listed them as bulk goods, alongside cotton and dates. In one reported case, hundreds of mummies were ground up for fertilizer. 'Medical cannibalism, though framed as a rational practice, rested on a deeply irrational foundation: that the dead could be consumed without consequence if they were far enough removed from one's own sense of self. Ingesting a corpse was unthinkable—unless that corpse was foreign, ancient, and exoticised,' Hanna tells CairoScene. In this, mummy consumption reveals something enduring about the Western philosophical relation to the 'Other'. As philosopher Michel de Montaigne wrote in 1580, condemning European cannibalism of the dead, 'We call barbarous what is not in our customs.' Yet the real barbarity, he implied, lies in the forgetting of the dead's humanity. Scientific historian Louise Noble, writing in the journal Early Modern Literary Studies, describes the practice as 'corporeal colonialism', the literal digestion of the colonial subject. It was not just a metaphor. The British, the French, the Germans, each in their way, absorbed Egypt into their bodies. 'The practice of selling mummies as street commodities, often to tourists, is perhaps the most striking example of cultural commodification,' Hanna asserts. It reflected the pervasive belief that the Egyptian past, with its mysticism and grandeur, could be distilled into an object for consumption. These mummies were displayed as curiosities in European drawing rooms, or worse, sold to apothecaries for use in potions, powders, and medicines. This commodification of human remains, once part of sacred rites, became a direct symbol of the way colonial powers extracted value from native cultures, often disregarding their intrinsic cultural significance in favor of economic gain. Even as medical cannibalism waned by the late 1800s, its legacy lingered. Anthropologist Beth Conklin, writing in Current Anthropology, has shown how the logic of medicinal corpse consumption often reemerged in other forms of epistemic violence: in the dissection of colonised bodies, the display of human remains in museums, and the extraction of DNA from the dead without consent. Many of the mummies exported during this time still reside in European institutions. The British Museum alone holds over 120 mummies. In recent years, calls for repatriation have grown louder. In 2022, Egypt formally requested the return of the Rosetta Stone. Other requests have followed for human remains. Yet few have been granted. Museums often cite preservation, access, and educational value. The irony is painful: that those once consumed for health are now exhibited for knowledge, still denied rest. "What can we, as Egyptians, do? Accountability for the centuries-long trade in Egypt's dead must go beyond mere repatriation,' Hanna asserts. 'It requires a multifaceted response—one that includes formal apologies from the institutions and nations involved, acknowledging the harm done and the deep disrespect shown to Egyptian culture.' It is tempting to dismiss this story as a bizarre footnote in the annals of medical history, a quirk of the pre-modern mind. But its contours echo into the present. It reminds us how easily knowledge and power can overwrite reverence. How the desire to understand can slip into the impulse to possess. The vendor sits beside his cargo, silent, indifferent. We do not know his name. We do not know the names of those beside him. But we do know this: they were not ingredients. They were people, who lived, and died, and were embalmed with care in the hope of an afterlife. What they received instead was a second death, one not of biology, but of narrative.
CBS News
08-05-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
New Pope Leo XIV honored by Trump: "It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope"
Washington — President Trump celebrated the election of the first U.S.-born pope, calling it a "Great Honor" that Robert Francis Prevost, who chose Leo XIV as his papal name, was selected Thursday as the first pontiff to hail from the U.S. "Congratulations to Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who was just named Pope," Mr. Trump said in a post on Truth Social. "It is such an honor to realize that he is the first American Pope. What excitement, and what a Great Honor for our Country. I look forward to meeting Pope Leo XIV. It will be a very meaningful moment!" Prevost, 69 was born in Chicago and attended Villanova University before becoming a missionary in Peru. He was elected and accepted his fate as the next Bishop of Rome, leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics earlier Thursday. The U.S. has the fourth-largest Catholic population, after Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines. The late Francis I was the first pope born in the Western Hemisphere, as a native of Buenos Aires.
