Unesco celebra Dia da Língua Portuguesa

A língua portuguesa vai ser celebrada na sede da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, Ciência e Cultura (Unesco), em Paris, na próxima quarta-feira.
A sessão terá início às 17h30 e contará com a presença do Secretário Executivo da CPLP, Domingos Simões Pereira e com intervenções do Embaixador Manuel Maria Carrilho, Representante Permanente de Portugal junto da UNESCO, do Presidente da Conferência Geral da UNESCO, Davidson Hepburn (ainda por confirmar) e da Directora-Geral da UNESCO Irina Bokova.
Estará também presente o Embaixador João Carlos de Souza Gomes, Representante Permanente do Brasil junto da UNESCO.
Na cerimónia irão actuar os artistas Maria de Medeiros (portuguesa), Celínia Pereira (cabo-verdiana) e Lulendo (angolano).

The Comfort of Saturdays

This story takes place in Edinbourgh. It's about life as a chance path. What I realized from the plot is how our daily life decisions are also conditioned by chance. As we look closer, we see further and we confront ourselves with several dilemmas. Though each of our decisions have it's own implications, chance can be quite determinant factor.

Isabel Dalhousie is the owner and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She believes that chance determines much of what happens to us. The irony, as this character says, is that we flatter ourselves into thinking that it just plays a small role in our lives.

I ask you to imagine this situation:

You are the owner and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. You are a conscientious person.
A highly regarded infectious diseases specialist doctor had led a clinical trial on a new antibiotic, monitoring it's use in patients.
When two patients develop serious side effects, such as heart palpitations, the health authorities asked the same doctor to look into these cases. The doctor's conclusion is published in a medical journal and he declares that the drug is perfectly safe, justifying the side effects with the fact of one of the patients being an addict and the other patient being a victim of a nursing error.
However, a few weeks after this, a man that takes the drug at the hospital, dies. And therefore, the hospital authorities investigated the case and took special attention over the doctor report. What they come to know is that the report has false informations about the level of dosage.
As consequence of this, obviously, the doctor is accused for his procedure.

This leads us to Isabel's dilemma: imagining that you were in Isabel's position and the doctor's wife would come to you and ask you to prove his innocence, would you accept her request?


When Isabel is invited to a dinner party, she is drown into this case of Marcus Moncrieff. After that dinner party, she receives a phone call from Stella Moncrieff, the wife of a doctor that had been accused of being responsible for a number of deaths due to a clinical trial on a new antibiotic. Stella, the wife of the doctor, tells her how he is paralysed with guilt and self-reproach and with shame, too. Though Isabel believes that "without shame, guilt became a toothless thing, a prosecutor with no penalties up his sleeve", she promises to solve the case, proving Marcus Moncrieff innocence. For her, ethics are not theoretical at all, but an everyday matter of life and death. Her decision is, therefore, to take the challenge of solving this case.

Throughout this episode, there are a few situations that involve her boyfriend Jamie. Jamie is much younger than Isabel and they have a baby child, Charlie. They live apart from each other. Because Jamie has to give classes not very near, he has his own house. Jamie makes acquaintance with Nick Smart. He is a musician and Nick Smart is an American composer, also young, like him. Though Jamie says, at first, that he doesn't like Nick's play, after the public performance, they get along and agree to go for a drink. Jamie asks for Isabel acceptance, but she is not included. After a few other incidents, she starts to feel resentment and doubt.


One day, while she is walking along Merchiston Crescent,

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as she is thinking about all the jealousy that might be operating. Isabel thinks that she is being excluded from an accomplice friendship.

These daydreams of hers (convincingly described by the author) do not, however, move her focus, just distract her a bit.
Isabel's niece, Cat, tells her on one occasion that she is going to travel to Sri Lanka. Isabel immediately offers herself to look after Cat's small business, a delicatessen.
Not even this change to her routine moves her away from her purposes. So she continues to dedicate part of her time to the baby and to unravel the truth of the mystery.

Jamie does not approve her interference in the doctor's situation and Jamie does mean a lot to Isabel. She feels that she is blessed with his presence.

On one occasion, she was with a couple of friends near one of Edinburgh's most astonishing architectural details: a house built into the rock of Dean Bridge.

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Her friends invited them both and Charlie, to diner, and she didn't want to include Jamie.

While Cat, her niece, goes to Sri Lanka and Isabel looks after her small business, she becomes closer to Cat's employee, Eddie. She decides to offer him help, by lending him some money. But he betrays her confidence and she is victim of her own gullibility.

To listen to Dr. Moncrieff's version of the facts, she goes on foot to the Mondrieff's flat, at Ramsay Garden.

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In Edinburgh, the annual arts festival was being prepared and near the Ramsay Garden, at the Castle Esplanade, pipe bands would play along with spectacular fireworks, all night long.

He tells her that one of the patients who had suffered from heart palpitations due to the antibiotic, was an addict and that "everything they say must be distrusted". For some reason, the nurse that had given him the medicine assured that the dose had followed the prescription. Isabel just couldn't imagine the patient as real and what happened to him remains as a story.
After that, the doctor reported to the chief medical officer, ensuring that the drug was reliable. When a man that had taken the antibiotic died and it was discovered that the doctor had received a research grant from the company that made the drug, all the suspicious were evident.
Isabel and Jamie are really intimate and they share everything. While they take a walk in Biggar Road

Jamie does not approve Isabel's interference in the doctor's story and he strongly doubts the reliability of the doctor's position in the case.

When Cat comes back, she announces that she is moving to Sri Lanka for good. She is, once more, in love. She once also had an affair with Jamie and some others after him. This sudden passion is, in brief, the reason for her decision.

Closer to the end, and after several conversations with Stella and other persons related to the case, the doctor ends up admitting his guilt.
It is, though, curious that Isabel keeps till the major evidence (the confession, that is), her benefit of doubt. But at some point of the novel, she points out a very interesting issue:

Since guilt is a feeling of responsibility for having done something wrong , is it possible that one feels guilty about a wrong that one did not do?