New Zealand airport wants you to hug goodbye faster

New Zealand airport wants you to hug goodbye faster
Travelers leaving the New Zealand city of Dunedin will have to keep their emotional farewells brief after a new three-minute time limit. (AP)
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Updated 22 October 2024
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New Zealand airport wants you to hug goodbye faster

New Zealand airport wants you to hug goodbye faster
  • Travelers leaving the New Zealand city of Dunedin will have to keep their emotional farewells brief after a new three-minute time limit

WELLINGTON: Emotional farewells are a common sight at airports, but travelers leaving the New Zealand city of Dunedin will have to be quick. A new three-minute time limit on goodbye hugs in the airport’s drop-off area is intended to prevent lingering cuddles from causing traffic jams.
“Max hug time three minutes,” warn signs outside the terminal, adding that those seeking “fonder farewells” should head to the airport’s parking lot instead.
The cuddle cap was imposed in September to “keep things moving smoothly” in the redesigned passenger drop-off area outside the airport, CEO Dan De Bono told The Associated Press on Tuesday. It was the airport’s way of reminding people that the zone was for “quick farewells” only.
The signs had polarized social media users, De Bono said.
“We were accused of breaching basic human rights and how dare we limit how long someone can have a hug for,” he said, adding that others had welcomed the change.
The signs were meant as an alternative to those at other airports warning of wheel clamping or fines for drivers parked in drop-off areas. Some in Britain have imposed fees for all drop-offs — however brief.
Dunedin’s airport — a modest terminal serving a city of 135,000 people on New Zealand’s South Island — preferred a “quirky” approach, De Bono said.
Three minutes was “plenty of time to pull up, say farewell to your loved ones and move on,” he said. “The time limit is really a nicer way of saying, you know, get on with it.”
A 20-second hug is long enough to release the wellbeing-boosting hormones oxytocin and serotonin, De Bono said. Anything longer was “really awkward.”
But passengers need not worry unduly about enforcement. “We do not have hug police,” De Bono said.
Visitors might, however, be asked to move their lingering embraces to the parking lot, where they can cuddle free of charge for up to 15 minutes.


New York museum unveils ‘Apex’ — an almost complete Stegosaurus

New York museum unveils ‘Apex’ — an almost complete Stegosaurus
Updated 4 min 10 sec ago
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New York museum unveils ‘Apex’ — an almost complete Stegosaurus

New York museum unveils ‘Apex’ — an almost complete Stegosaurus

NEW YORK: The American Museum of Natural History revealed the identity of its latest resident on Thursday — “Apex,” one of the most complete specimens ever discovered of the plant-eating dinosaur Stegosaurus, known for the upright plates on its back and a spiky tail.
To excited gasps from an audience of school children, the museum pulled back a beige curtain to reveal the 11-foot (3.4-meter) tall, 20-foot (6-meter) long skeleton of the Jurassic Period dinosaur.
“People are really excited about this fossil because Stegosaurus is an iconic dinosaur,” said the museum’s dinosaur curator Roger Benson.
Stegosaurus walked on four legs and lived in North America around 150 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. Its fossils were first discovered in the 1870s.
“Although it was a herbivore, Stegosaurus wasn’t like a cow or a sheep,” Benson said. “It’s a herbivore that could look after itself. It has these wicked spikes on its tail. It has plates along its back.”
Those would have been useful as protection against meat-eating dinosaurs like Allosaurus.
This Stegosaurus fossil was found in Colorado and fetched a record $44.6 million at a Sotheby’s auction in July. The buyer has loaned it to the New York museum, one of the leading natural history museums in the United States.
“Everyone has their own favorite dinosaur, but Stegosaurus is up there in the top five. So it’s hard not to get excited about a really complete, large individual of this animal,” Benson said. 


Germany hands over Australian ancestral remains held by museums for over 100 years

Germany hands over Australian ancestral remains held by museums for over 100 years
Updated 05 December 2024
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Germany hands over Australian ancestral remains held by museums for over 100 years

Germany hands over Australian ancestral remains held by museums for over 100 years
  • The restitution is part of ongoing efforts by German museums and authorities to return human remains and cultural artifacts that were taken during colonial times
  • In this case, three sets of remains that had been in Berlin since 1880 were handed over along with two other sets of remains held in the northwestern German city of Oldenburg

BERLIN: Five sets of ancestral remains from Australia that had been in German museum collections since the 19th century were handed back at a ceremony Thursday that a community representative described as a sad but “very joyful” moment.
The restitution is part of ongoing efforts by German museums and authorities to return human remains and cultural artifacts that were taken during colonial times.
In this case, three sets of remains that had been in Berlin since 1880 were handed over along with two other sets of remains held in the northwestern German city of Oldenburg. They were received by four representatives of the Ugar Island community, part of the Torres Strait Islands off the northeastern tip of Australia.
“These ancestral remains were never meant to be here,” said Hermann Parzinger, the head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin’s state museums.
“They’re here because, during the colonial era and beyond, Europeans presumed to make other peoples and cultures the subject, or more often object, of their research — appropriating artifacts from cultures outside Europe on a scale that is almost unimaginable today and even desecrating the burial places of those communities in the process,” he said.
Around the turn of the 20th century, he added, Berlin museums set up a network of scientists, travelers, traders and others who sent back cultural items from around the world, and “in racing to compete with the other major European museums, they all too often disregarded the humanity and dignity of the peoples they encountered.”
The restitution of the remains from Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and the State Museum for Nature and Man in Oldenburg means that 162 sets of ancestral remains have now been returned to Australia from Germany, and about 1,700 from around the world, said Natasha Smith, Australia’s ambassador to Germany. She said the returns are “an extremely high priority” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and the government.
“It’s sad, but it’s a very joyful moment,” Ugar Island representative Rocky Stephen said at the ceremony honoring the ancestors. “This is a process of healing that’s going to happen when they return back to us.”
“No matter (if) it was nearly a 40-hour journey to travel here, because it’s been 144 years they have been missed back at their home,” he said.
Berlin’s museums now aim to do “everything we can to make the repatriation possible” of remains whose countries and communities of origin can be identified and want to bring them home, Parzinger said.
More broadly, governments and museums in Europe and North America have increasingly sought to resolve ownership disputes over objects looted during colonial times.
In 2022, for example, Germany and Nigeria signed an agreement paving the way for the return of hundreds of artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes taken from Africa by a British colonial expedition more than 120 years ago.


Study of 700-year-old handwriting unveils leading Byzantine painter’s identity

Study of 700-year-old handwriting unveils leading Byzantine painter’s identity
Updated 05 December 2024
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Study of 700-year-old handwriting unveils leading Byzantine painter’s identity

Study of 700-year-old handwriting unveils leading Byzantine painter’s identity

THESSALONIKI: Crime-solving techniques applied to a medieval illuminated manuscript in Paris may have solved a centuries-old puzzle — the true identity of a leading Byzantine painter who injected humanity into the rigid sanctity of Orthodox religious art.
A contemporary of Giotto, considered the father of Western painting, the artist conventionally known as Manuel Panselinos was equally influential in a totally different tradition that’s largely overlooked in the West.
But nothing is known of his life, and scholars now believe Panselinos was just a nickname that eventually supplanted the real name of the man for whom it was coined — likely Ioannis Astrapas, from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki.
The art of Byzantium, that decorates churches across Greece, Serbia and other Orthodox countries, stands out for the stark formalism of its elongated, glowering saints, quasi-cubist mountains and doe-eyed Madonnas.
Work attributed to Panselinos, from the late 13th and early 14th centuries, is considered the finest produced in an empire that straddled Europe and Asia and endured from the fall of Rome until the capture of the imperial capital Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Art historians had long suspected that the name — Greek for “full moon” — could have originated as a nickname for some member of the so-called Macedonian School of painting, based in Thessaloniki.
Recent research by a Greek monk and linguistics scholar linked “Panselinos” with Macedonian School painter Astrapas. Now court handwriting expert Christina Sotirakoglou has matched lettering on a manuscript tentatively attributed to Astrapas with characters on a church painting in northern Greece, long seen as Panselinos’ best work.
Father Cosmas Simonopetritis, a former senior administrator in Mount Athos, the semiautonomous monastic community where the Protato church stands, says Sotirakoglou’s and his own research “clearly prove” Panselinos’ real identity.
“Panselinos was a real person, and (the name) was just the nickname by which Ioannis Astrapas became known,” he told The Associated Press.
Constantinos Vafiadis, a professor of Byzantine art in Athens who was not involved in the studies, said he found merit in the nickname theory and Astrapas link, even though it appeared more than one painter had undertaken the Protato project.
“I agree with attributing part of the paintings to Ioannis Astrapas,” he said. “But again there remains much ground for future research into that person, because other Mount Athos monuments from the same period have not yet been sufficiently published.”
“Panselinos” — a role model for generations of painters — and his contemporaries are associated with a renaissance of kinds in Orthodox art that revived forms and techniques inherited from antiquity. Facial expressions acquired a deeper humanity, and greater attention was paid to proportion and depth of field in composition.
Father Cosmas said Astrapas was an “extremely gifted painter ... with vast knowledge who harmonically combined the ancient, classical world with Orthodox Byzantine spirituality.”
“And that ... makes his work unique worldwide,” he added.
Artists’ signatures were not common at the time, although some survive from members of the Astrapas family. There are none by “Panselinos.”
The trail started with earlier research linking Astrapas with the artist and scholar who wrote and illustrated Marcian Codex GR 516, an early 14th century Greek handwritten text treating subjects from astronomy to music theory. Among the painted illustrations was a full moon.
“For me ... that was the main proof,” Father Cosmas said.
With a name found for the hand that produced the manuscript, the next step was to check its style against writing on the Protato painting, traditionally linked with “Panselinos.”
“Mrs Sotirakoglou, who is a handwriting expert, filled in that blank,” Father Cosmas said.
There was one problem: Women have for more than 1,000 years been banned from entering Mount Athos.
“I was forced to study the Protato paintings based on photographs,” Sotirakoglou, who works as a court consultant on identifying or authenticating handwriting in criminal cases, told the AP.
“(The work) was very difficult, because the writing on the wall paintings is in capital letters, and the painters subdued their personal handwriting to conform” with the traditional format, she said — rather like anonymous letter-writers’ attempts to disguise their true style. “The Marcian codex is written in very small lower-case letters.”
The first clue came from the Greek letter Phi, the English F.
“It’s a Phi that stands out, and is similar” in both the manuscript and the Protato painting, she said. “Matches also followed with other letters, T, with its proportions, which is bigger, covering the other letters and is topped with a curve, the proportions of the K.”
“But when the Phi was revealed, the code of the writing was broken and the job became much easier,” she added.
Father Cosmas said that during his administrative duties on Mount Athos he attended services at the Protato church on a daily basis.
“That’s where my desire was born ... to explore the mystery around the name and the identity of Panselinos,” he said, adding that he thinks the artist “has now acquired his true identity.”


Japan’s famous sake joins UNESCO’s cultural heritage list

Japan’s famous sake joins UNESCO’s cultural heritage list
Updated 05 December 2024
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Japan’s famous sake joins UNESCO’s cultural heritage list

Japan’s famous sake joins UNESCO’s cultural heritage list

LUQUE: Sake is perhaps more Japanese than the world-famous sushi. It’s brewed in centuries-old mountaintop warehouses, savored in the country’s pub-like izakayas, poured during weddings and served slightly chilled for special toasts.
The smooth rice wine that plays a crucial role in Japan’s culinary traditions was enshrined on Wednesday by UNESCO on its list of the “intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”
At a meeting in Luque, Paraguay, members of UNESCO’s committee for safeguarding humanity’s cultural heritage voted to recognize 45 cultural practices and products around the world, including Brazilian white cheese, Caribbean cassava bread and Palestinian olive oil soap.
Unlike UNESCO’s World Heritage List, which includes sites considered important to humanity like the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Intangible Cultural Heritage designation names products and practices of different cultures that are deserving of recognition.
A Japanese delegation welcomed the announcement in Luque.
“Sake is considered a divine gift and is essential for social and cultural events in Japan,” Takehiro Kano, the Japanese ambassador to UNESCO, told The Associated Press.
The basic ingredients of sake are few: rice, water, yeast and koji, a rice mold, which breaks down the starches into fermentable sugars like malting does in beer production. The whole two-monthlong process of steaming, stirring, fermenting and pressing can be grueling.
The rice — which wields tremendous marketing power as part of Japan’s broader cultural identity — is key to the alcoholic brew.
For a product to be categorized Japanese sake, the rice must be Japanese.
The UNESCO recognition, the delegation said, captured more than the craft knowledge of making high-quality sake. It also honored a tradition dating back some 1,000 years — sake makes a cameo in Japan’s famous 11th century novel, “The Tale of Genji,” as the drink of choice in the refined Heian court.
Now, officials hope to restore sake’s image as Japan’s premier alcoholic drink even as the younger drinkers in the country switch to imported wine or domestic beer and whiskey.
“It means a lot to Japan and to the Japanese,” Kano said of the UNESCO designation. “This will help to renew interest in traditional sake elaboration.”
In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, in a statement, said he was “delighted” by the inscription of traditional sake-making, the traditional technic that Japan is proud of. Ishiba congratulated those who dedicated to preserving and promoting the tradition.
Also, Japanese breweries have expressed hope that the listing could give a little lift to the country’s export economy as the popularity of sake booms around the world and in the United States amid heightened interest in Japanese cuisine.
Sake exports, mostly to the US and China, now rake in over $265 million a year, according to the Japan Sake and Shochu Makers Association, a trade group.
Japan’s delegation appeared ready to celebrate on Wednesday — in classic Japanese style.
After the announcement, Kano raised a cypress box full of sake to toast the alcoholic brew and cultural rite.


Eminem’s mother Debbie Nelson, whose rocky relationship fueled the rapper’s lyrics, dies at age 69

Debbie Nelson, mother of rap star Eminem, appears in Mount Clemens, Mich., on April 10, 2001. (AP)
Debbie Nelson, mother of rap star Eminem, appears in Mount Clemens, Mich., on April 10, 2001. (AP)
Updated 04 December 2024
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Eminem’s mother Debbie Nelson, whose rocky relationship fueled the rapper’s lyrics, dies at age 69

Debbie Nelson, mother of rap star Eminem, appears in Mount Clemens, Mich., on April 10, 2001. (AP)
  • Eminem has disparaged his mother in songs such as the 2002 single “Cleaning Out My Closet”

Debbie Nelson, the single mother of rapper Eminem whose rocky relationship with her son was known widely through his hit song lyrics, has died. She was 69.
Eminem’s longtime representative Dennis Dennehy confirmed Nelson’s death in an email on Tuesday. He did not provide a cause of death, although Nelson had battled lung cancer.
Nelson’s fraught relationship with her son, whose real name is Marshall Mathers III, has been no secret since the Detroit rapper became a star.
Eminem has disparaged his mother in songs such as the 2002 single “Cleaning Out My Closet.” Eminem sings: “Witnessin’ your mama poppin’ prescription pills in the kitchen. ... My whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn’t.”
In lyrics from his Oscar-winning hit “Lose Yourself” from the movie “8 Mile,” his feelings seem to have simmered, referencing his “mom’s spaghetti.” The song went on to win best rap song at the 2004 Grammy Awards.
Nelson brought and settled a pair of defamation lawsuits over Eminem’s statements about her in magazines and on radio talk shows. In her 2008 book, “My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem,” she attempted to set the record straight by providing readers details about the rapper’s early life, writing that Eminem had forgotten the good times they had.
“Marshall and I were so close that friends and relatives commented that it was as if the umbilical cord had never been cut,” she wrote.
In 2004, she was dragged from her car on Eight Mile Road, the street in a Detroit suburb made famous by “8 Mile,” by a 16-year-old who was later sentenced to more than four years in prison. She suffered bruises and a broken foot.
The highly acclaimed rapper Eminem won for best hip hop act at the 2024 MTV EMAs and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
He announced in October that he was going to be a grandfather, saying his daughter Hailie Jade is pregnant by way of a touching music video that is a tribute to their relationship.