To get you acquainted with audiobooks, which may be very useful for your listening practice, your classmate Susana sent to me this one called White Death, by Tom Vicary, edited by Oxford Bookworms Library, Stage 1. This book deals with the misadventures of a young girl who finds herself in prison... And why so? You may wonder... Well, you'll have to listen to the story if you want to find out more. It is a very easy read, but with an interesting subject. Enjoy!
After reading the most incredible news story about trees in class, here follows the most outrageous news story of the year. The link below takes you to the International Business Times newspaper. The headline reads:
"Spain: 11 Immigrants Drown After Border Police Fire Bullets"*
You've made it through the mid-year exam, hurray!! Guess you're all happy about that, huh? As part of our karaoke sessions, your classmate Carlos has sent the following song to celebrate we're all alive and kicking after the oral exams.
You can first read the lyrics (to check out the words you don't know and stuff), and then just click on the video below to sing along!
Dear all,
As you guys must know by now, we're having our mid-year mock exam in a week's time. Check the class bulletin board for further details on the types of tasks to test your skills, and don't forget to sign up on the oral exams sheet!
Here's the link to the continuous assessment dates and types of test:
Remember the tips to improve your English we went through in class? One of them was singing along to your favourite songs, right? Well, this is the song your classmate Alberto sent to me to kick off the Karaoke Season: Hey Brother, by Avicii. So everybody get down to the music! And thanks, Alberto, for your message!
What follows is a brief summary of the presentation on House Eviction your classmate Mohamed gave in class the other day. He wrote up the following text for you guys. So just read on to find out more about his work.
On Monday December 15th, known as the Black Monday, the LEHMAN BROTHERS collapsed, then the banks stopped lending, and the credit dried up, which caused a big impact to the rest of the world's economy.
In Spain, according to many analysts and other observers, the main cause had to do with Jose Maria Aznar's land act of 1998, which freed up the land market, leading to a housing bubble, which grew very quickly, due to an easy access to credit and low interest rates. Spain had built in one year more houses than France, Germany and Italy all together. According to the Association of Registrars, 90% of the population became mortgage holders in 2006.
More than 400,000 families have been evicted from their houses since Spain's Property Market crashed in 2008, under the unfair mortgage law of 1861, reformed only in few cases as 1946 and 2012.
In 2012 the number of evictions broke record and reached 517 evictions a day in Spain. That means an average of 21 per hour, or an eviction executed in Spain every 3 minutes. As a consequence of this, more than 119 suicide cases are directly linked to these evictions.
The Platform of Mortgage Victims have been fighting against the evictions, demanding urgent reforms through a Popular Legislative Initiative which collected 1.402.854 signatures. On February 12th 2013, this was knocked down by the Popular Party.
THe PIL /ILP contains three measures as the minimum rules to put an end to this eviction hell.
1- STOP EVICTIONS.
2- HAND OVER YOUR HOUSE KEYS TO THE BANK AS REPAYMENT IN FULL WITH RETROACTIVE CHARACTER.
3- A PUBLIC PLAN FOR A SOCIAL HOUSING.
SO, It's clear, IT'S NOT A CRISIS IT'S A SCAM.
Also, check out the video "Spain Evictions and Homeless Crisis", by PressTV Global News. There you can see your classmate from minute 17.32 through 20.18. Thanks a lot for your work, Mohamed!!
