Spain was on Friday bracing for its biggest ever outdoor drinking party, with tens of thousands of young people expected to show up nationwide to guzzle hard liquor, wine and beer overnight.
Thousands of police were preparing for the event known as macro-botellon, which had been arranged anonymously through cell phone and internet messages with some 20 cities vying for which one would draw the largest number of people to get drunk at squares or parks.
The event was based on a practice known as botellon (from the word botella meaning bottle), which has evolved in Spain over the past decade.
It basically consists of youths, mainly between 15 and 24 years of age, gathering outdoors to drink together.
They often make so much noise it keeps locals from sleeping at night and leave behind a mess of garbage, vomit pools, glass shards and graffiti.
The disturbance has prompted some cities, such as Madrid and Barcelona, to prohibit such drinking outdoors and to impose fines of up to 30,000 euros (US$36,500) on those who break the rule.
Yet the threat of police repression did not impress the anonymous people who launched the call for the macro-botellon in the southern city of Granada in an attempt to outdo Seville, where a street bash of more than 3,000 youngsters made national headlines a month ago.
The party call quickly spread to other cities, alarming Spanish Health Minister Elena Salgado who called it an "attack against health" and urged parents to keep under-age teenagers from attending such events on Friday night.
The young practitioners of the botellon say they drink out of doors simply because it is too expensive to do so in bars or discotheques.
Analysts say the botellon also reflects a certain change in drinking habits in Spain, where people traditionally sipped wine with meals while youths are now turning to Nordic-style heavy drinking.
Studies show that 38 percent of people aged between 14 and 18 years drink alcohol regularly in Spain. Girls drink as much as boys, and the number of youngsters drinking is on the increase.
More than just an expression of teenage rebelliousness, the botellon has also been described as a deeper symptom of ill-ease in a consumerist culture where young people are expected to spend money on concerts, movies and other forms of leisure.
Some say massive drinking is a form of protest typical of a permissively raised generation looking for "easy and cheap transgression," in the words of Antoni Gual, a Barcelona physician specialized in health troubles caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian
RSS