bad holiday essay

The Worst Vacation Ever! — a Talking Points lesson plan for reading and speaking

This is a complete lesson plan that you can use in your English or ESL class today. You can use it for IELTS too.

Please let me know what you think in the comments below!

Table of Contents

The Worst Vacation Ever!

I knew this was going to be a terrible vacation as soon as we arrived at the hotel.

The travel agent told us that it was a brand-new hotel in a quiet part of the island. But when we arrived we found that it was not brand-new at all — the hotel was not even finished.

There were construction workers still building parts of the hotel!

But the manager assured us that our stay would be fine. In fact, he told us we would have a great stay.

We got to our room and it didn’t seem too bad. Everything looked like a normal good quality hotel room.

Then we looked in the bathroom. There was no shower. Only a washbasin and a toilet.

I asked the manager how we would take a shower and he just shrugged and said that we could use the showers in the spa. My wife asked what time the spa opened every day and he said 10:00am.

At that point, we had had enough, so I said to my wife that we would leave immediately. I didn’t say another word, just took hold of our luggage trolley and went to leave the room.

Then the manager stopped me. He was very apologetic about it. That week was one of the busiest times on the island. Apparently, there was a wine festival that had just started the day we arrived.

Every hotel is fully booked, said the manager. I can’t let you leave. You will have nowhere to sleep for the night.

My wife raised her hands to the ceiling and rolled her eyes.

I swore out loud.

The manager told us he would do everything he could to make it up to us. Then he left.

I lay down on the bed and kicked off my shoes. My wife unpacked our things and put them in the wardrobe. As she was doing that, she let out a scream.

I jumped to my feet and she leapt onto the bed. She was pointing at something in the wardrobe. I looked inside and I saw a huge dead rat. It looked like it had been dead for several days.

I was furious. I told my wife that we would go downstairs and tell someone on the front desk to change our room. And then hopefully go to the bar and get a stiff drink.

We left our room and went to the lifts. It was then that we saw a sign that said only one of the lifts was in operation. The other one was being repaired.

Things were just getting worse and worse!

Eventually, we got downstairs and I told the front desk about the dead rat but they said they couldn’t change our room as they didn’t have any other rooms available.

At that point, I didn’t need just one drink — I needed three or four.

I asked them where the bar was and they pointed to a door. Above the door was a sign that said The Lounge Bar.

We went in and there was no one around. No customers and certainly no barman.

I just shook my head. My wife started to cry.

Essential Vocabulary

Write down all the words and phrases in your vocabulary notebook. Look in your dictionary and find the meaning of each word. Write the definition next to each word.

Then make up your own sentences using each word or phrase.

For example:

Notebook — a small book with pages of blank paper that students use to make notes when

“ I left my notebook at home so I was unable to make any notes in my English class.”

Reading Comprehension Questions

When did Mike know that it was going to be a terrible vacation?

Is the hotel new or old? Is the hotel in a noisy or quiet location?

How did Mike know the hotel was still being built?

What was the problem with the bathroom?

What alternative did the manager offer as a bathroom? What time did it open?

Why did the manager stop Mike from leaving the hotel?

What did Sylvie find in the wardrobe?

Why did Mike want a drink after seeing what was in the wardrobe?

Why did Mike and Sylvie go downstairs?

What was the problem with the lift?

What was the name of the bar?

Why couldn’t Mike get a drink?

Discussion Questions

Why does Mike and Sylvie’s hotel have all these problems? Is this acceptable do you think?

Should the hotel offer them an alternative? Or compensation?

How did the dead rat arrive in the wardrobe do you think?

What did Mike mean by wanting a ‘stiff drink’?

If you were in this situation, what would you do? Talk about all the steps you would take.

Have you had a ‘vacation from hell’? What was it like?

What is the worst hotel you have ever stayed in? What about the best?

How can we check the quality of the hotel before going there? Provide details in your answers.

What are the ten most popular complaints that hotels receive do you think?

Have you ever lost your luggage on a vacation? What happened? How did you get your luggage back?

Have you ever lost your passport or a large sum of money while on vacation? What happened? Did you recover the lost items?

A Vacation From Hell!

Work on your own or in small groups.

You have to make up a story similar to Mike and Sylvie’s experience in the story above.

Try to make your story as crazy as possible!

Use your imagination and think of all the terrible things that could happen when you go on vacation.

When you are ready, tell your story to all the class.

Offering Help Using ‘Will’

If someone asks us for help – or tells us of a problem that they have – we often use the word ‘will’ to explain the things we want to do to help them.

For example, maybe a guest has arrived in a hotel and they tell the front desk that the airline has lost their luggage.

They don’t know what to do.

And the front desk might say:

I will call the airline and ask them what they can do to find your luggage. Then I will give them your flight number and your name and boarding pass details. After that, I will call the airport security and see if they know anything.

Once the airline or airport give me any information, I will call you and let you know what they said.

In this exercise, pretend you are working on the front desk in a hotel. Many guests have some problems today and need your help.

Using the word ‘will’ explain to them what you plan to do and how you can help them.

Look at all these guests’ problems below and prepare things to say.

• Our room is too small! We booked a room for three people.
• We are hungry but the restaurant is closed.
• Last night, some workers were repairing something on our floor and made too much noise.
• We went to the beach but it was really dirty! Lots of trash and litter all over the sand.
• We got sunburned lying on the beach because there were no sun umbrellas available.
• We tried to make some coffee in our room this morning but the kettle was broken
• We tried to brush our teeth this morning but there was no toothpaste
• Last night we tried to sleep but the bed was too cold
• We wanted to watch a movie last night in our room but we didn’t know how to use the TV remote
• The air-con in our room is set to hot and it makes us uncomfortable

This is a role play exercise using the exercise above.

There are two main people in this role play:

1. You are working on the front desk of a five-star hotel. The hotel is very busy but sometimes the guests complain about the smallest things.

It is your job to deal with these guests and ensure they are happy at all times.

Many guests approach you with complaints. You must help them.

2. You are a guest in the hotel. You have a complaint using one of the examples in the exercise above.

Express how unhappy you are to the front desk. Make sure you get complete satisfaction from the staff as you are a high-paying guest in a top hotel.

One student can be the front desk while the others take on the role of hotel guests. Each hotel guest has to express a complaint to the front desk.

You can change the student who is at the front desk. Let other students take on this role too.

You are Mike from the reading exercise at the beginning of the lesson. You have just got back home with your wife and you have had the worst experience in the hotel.

Write to the travel agent company and express how angry you are with their service.

Go through all the complaints and things that went wrong one by one.

In the end, ask the hotel what they will do about it. And see if you can get some compensation.

What did you think of this lesson plan? Was it useful for you class?

Let me know in the  comments below!

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2 thoughts on “the worst vacation ever — a talking points lesson plan for reading and speaking”.

Hi David, this was a very funny story and I thought the activities that went with it were great. They stimulate creativity and fun for the student. More lessons should be like this, because students can get emotionally involved which enables better learning.

Thank Leona! I’m glad you liked this lesson plan.

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Why I Hate Christmas

The grinch has it right..

When I was a kid in Minnesota my family had a huge Scandinavian feast every Christmas Eve, complete with two dozen relatives, three feet of snow, a mountainous evergreen trimmed to the top, a six-course dinner with lutefisk and turkey and eight or ten pies, long-winded after-dinner stories about baseball and World War II, and, of course, lots of brightly wrapped presents. It has taken me three decades of rigorous economics training and life on the East Coast to shake off the warm nostalgia of those holidays. But I am now willing to say out loud what I suspect many Americans are muttering all across the country at this time of year: Christmas has become a net loss as a socioeconomic institution.

Although for many years Christmas has been justified on the grounds that it is “merry,” rigorous quantitative analysis establishes that the opposite is the case. Despite claims advanced by proponents that the holiday promotes a desirable “spirit,’’ makes people “jolly,” etc., the data show that the yuletide time period is marked by environmental degradation, hazardous products and travel, and—perhaps most important—inefficient uses of key resources. The holiday is an insidious and overlooked factor in America’s dwindling savings rates, slack worth ethic, and high crime rates. Nor does Christmas truly fulfill its purported distributional objective: the transfer of gifts to those who need them. Moreover, the number of people rendered “joyous” by Christmas is probably equaled or excelled by the number made to feel rather blue. In short, as shown below, although Christmas is an important religious observance that provides wintertime fun for children (who would probably be having fun anyway), it fails the test of cost-effectiveness.

Christmas consumes vast resources in the dubious and uncharitable activity of “forced giving.” First, it is necessary to factor in all the time spent searching for “just the right gifts,” writing and mailing cards to people one ignores the rest of the year, decorating trees, attending dreary holiday parties with highly fattening, cholesterol-rich eggnog drinks and false cheer, and returning presents. Assuming conservatively that each U.S. adult spends an average of two days per year on Christmas activities, this represents an investment of nearly one million person-years per season. Just as important is the amount that Americans spend on gratuitous gifts each year—$40 billion to $50 billion, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s monthly retail trade sales. Extra consumer spending is often considered beneficial because it stimulates the economy, but the massive yuletide spike creates numerous harmful externalities.

Mistargeted giving is one indication of this waste. According to New York department stores, each year about 15 percent of all retail dollar purchases at Christmas are returned. Allowing for the fact that many misdirected gifts are retained because people feel obliged to keep them (such as appliances, tablecloths, etc., which must be displayed when the relative who gave them to you comes for a visit), and allowing for the widespread inability of children to return gifts, this indicates that up to a third of purchases may be ill-suited to their recipients. Christmas is really a throwback to all the inefficiencies of the barter economy, in which people have to match other people’s wants to their offerings. Of course, money was invented precisely to solve this “double coincidence of wants” problem. One solution would be to require people to give each other cash as presents, but that would quickly reveal the absurdity of the whole institution.

“Forced giving” also artificially pumps up consumption and reduces savings, since it is unlikely that all the silly and expensive presents given at Christmas would be given at other times of the year. One particularly noxious aspect of Christmas consumption is “conspicuous giving,” which involves luxury gifts such as Tiffany eggs, crystal paperweights, and $15,000 watches that are designed precisely for those who are least in need of any present at all (“the person who has everything”). Most such high-priced gifts are given at Christmas; the fourth quarter, according to a sampling of New York department stores, provides more than half the year’s diamond, watch, and fur sales.

Naturally, gratuitous spending delights retailers. Christmas accounts for more than a fifth of their sales and two-fifths of their profits, which suggests a Marxist explanation for the holiday—a powerful economic interest underlying the season’s gift-centered ideology. But for the nation as a whole it increases the burden of consumer debt (almost a quarter of Christmas season sales are financed by credit cards or charge accounts, and January is the peak month for credit card delinquencies) and reduces our flagging savings rate (now below 5 percent of national income).

For parents, one especially exasperating aspect of Christmas is mindless toy fetishism. Christmas now accounts for 60 percent of the United States’ annual $17 billion expenditure on toys and video games, according to the Toy Manufacturers Association. Much of this rapidly depreciating toy capital consists of TV-show tie-ins (there are 350 separate Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle products and scores more of Ghostbusters and Bart Simpson figures) and expensive gadgets that do not work or hold interest for more than a day. According to the toy association, the country now spends nearly as much on video games like Nintendo’s Super Mario and Gameboy (nearly $4 billion), activity figures like World Wrestlers ($500 million), and dolls like Barbie and My Pretty Ballerina ($1.1 billion) as on all retail book sales ($6.6 billion). Since six of the top ten toys are made by Japanese companies, one might adduce a subtle long-run Japanese strategy here.

What’s more, toys are unusually hazardous consumer products. The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that each year there are thirty-three deaths and 148,000 emergency room admissions due to hazardous toys, plus 1.2 million toy recalls. (The comparative figures for deaths caused by books and book recalls are zero and zero, respectively.) If these deaths, injuries, and recalls are allocated in proportion to seasonal sales, Christmas emerges as the cause of most of them. And one has only to visit any Toys ‘R’ Us or Child World at this time of year to see the impact of this season’s extraordinary pressures on child-parent relations: distraught mothers dragging tiny toy addicts kicking and screaming away from the latest high-priced, cheesy offerings. All of this unproductive consumption would be much better spent on pencil sharpeners, calculators, and green eyeshades.

Christmas increases congestion. At least in large urban areas, it is by far the most unpleasant time to shop, travel, dine out, or go to the bathroom in a mall. Just when stores are at their most crowded, shopping becomes mandatory; just when everyone else is making family visitations, they are de rigueur. December 21 and 22 are the year’s peak dates for air travel, according to the Air Transport Association of America, with 1.7 million Americans per day jamming the nation’s airports, as against a year-long daily average of 1.14 million. Twenty-three million travel during the period from December 19 to January 4—just when the weather is often at its worst and the airlines charge their highest prices.

According to the U.S. Postal Service, the volume of mail traffic more than doubles to 220 million letters and 6 million parcels per day the week before Christmas, battering a system already weakened by tens of millions of catalogs and advertisements during the previous two months. Telephone calls reach as high as 131 million per day in the month from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve, according to AT&T. At many stores and post offices, there are long lines, and costly second and third shifts have to be added to handle them, which consumers ultimately pay for. All of this “peak loading” at Christmas means that airlines, mail delivery, stores, banks, warehouses, telephone systems, roads, and parking lots must be built much larger than if activities were distributed more evenly throughout the year. That wastes precious capital.

Christmas destroys the environment and innocent animals and birds. These have perhaps not been traditional concerns for economists. But when one takes account of all the Christmas trees, letters, packages, increased newspaper advertising, wrapping paper, and catalogs and cards, as well as all the animals slaughtered for feast and fur, this holiday is nothing less than a catastrophe for the entire ecosystem. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 33 million Christmas trees are consumed each year. Growing them imposes an artificially short rotation period on millions of acres of forest land, and the piles of needles they shed shorten the life of most household rugs and pets. All the trees and paper have to be disposed of, which places a heavy burden on landfill sites and recycling facilities, especially in the Northeast.

This year, according to the Humane Society, at least 4 million foxes and minks will be butchered just to provide our Christmas furs. To stock our tables, the Department of Agriculture tells me, we’ll also slaughter 22 million turkeys, 2 million pigs, and 2 million to 3 million cattle, plus a disproportionate fraction of the 6 billion chickens that the United States consumes each year. To anyone who has ever been to a turkey farm, Christmas and Thanksgiving take on a new and somewhat less cheerful meaning. Every single day during the run-up to these holidays, thousands of bewildered, debeaked, growth-hormone-saturated birds are hung upside down on assembly-line racks and given electric shocks. Then their throats are slit and they are dropped into boiling water.

Christmas introduces sharp seasonal fluctuations into the money demand. This makes it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cushion the crests and falls of our economy. This is the peak season for people carrying large denominations around, and currency is a popular Christmas gift mostly among employers. The volume of currency in circulation peaks each year in December, then declines by about 4 to 5 percent.

Christmas leads to a sharp rise in absenteeism and a slump in labor productivity that is unlikely to be recaptured the rest of the year. Many U.S. companies shut down entirely for the two-week period from Christmas to New Year’s. For those that stay open, on-the-job performance often plummets because of the season’s wild parties and high jinks. Although there is no precise data on absenteeism, according to Labor Department experts, industries like manufacturing and construction are likely to have lower productivity while retailing’s productivity is likely to increase.

Far from being “the season to be jolly,” Christmas is really the season of sadness and despair. This period’s compulsory merriment, hypercommercialism, heavy drinking, and undue media emphasis on the idealized, two-child, two-parent, orthodox Christian family makes those who don’t share such lifestyles or religious sentiments feel left out, lonely, and even somewhat un-American. And even in so-called normal families, media hype about the season’s merriments often raises expectations and sets up many for disappointment. According to Dr. Quita Mullen, a psychiatrist in Boston, many women in particular exhaust themselves trying to meet both the demands of full-time jobs and the more traditional expectations about what holidays are supposed to be like—provided in part by their (non-working) mothers.

There is also a great deal of emotional stress associated with compulsory overspending and compulsory displays of affection. (Many people reportedly become highly anxious at the sight of mistletoe.) Police, psychiatrists, and hospitals all report that there is a dramatic rise in alcoholic “slips,” drug overdoses, domestic quarrels, hotline calls, and emergency medical calls at this time of year. “Any redolent setting can be very sad for people who don’t have a dancing partner,” says Mullen. “Christmas is one of those times.”

Christmas is one of the most hazardous times of the year. The combination of trees, lights, blazing hearths, yuletide passion, and other indoor festivities results in more household fires at this time of year than any other. The fire department in Washington, D.C., reports that fire calls in December are 40 percent above its monthly average; New York City had 2,800 residential fires last December, as compared with a 2,000-per-month average.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, December is the peak month for drunk driving and “DWI” arrests, which last year totaled 1.8 million. Not surprisingly, it is also the peak month for accidents—because of drunkenness, congestion, and bad weather—with more than 460,000 last year, compared with a monthly average of only 386,000. In just the three days around Christmas last year, 374 people died on the nation’s highways. The only consolation is that last year’s Thanksgiving was even worse, with 402 deaths. Of course, weather is a compounding factor—for most of us in the colder climes, life would be much easier if we could at least agree to observe Christmas in the summer, when the lutefisk is ripe.

December is also the peak month in the United States for robberies. Last year the number reached about 54,000, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, and it is the second highest for auto theft, with about 136,000. Police suspect that all this property crime is because criminals too are propelled by the need to fill their family stockings. December 1989 had nearly 1,900 murders, a disproportionate share. “Christmas is a crazy season,’’ says Sag Harbor, New York, Police Chief Joseph Ialacci. “It’s a potpourri of emotional extremes—either quiet or all hell breaks loose. There are more assaults, barroom brawls, and family altercations.”

Excessive eating and drinking are used to compensate for the tribulations of Christmas. According to the Distilled Spirits Council and the Department of Agriculture, in the six short weeks from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, this year we will consume $18 billion of alcohol—including 81 million gallons of hard liquor—1.1 billion pounds of turkey, and a huge quantity of ham, cookies, pies, eggnog, stuffing, plum pudding, and other trimmings. All this indulgence does little good for the nation’s waistline: Christmas is one of the single most important contributors to obesity—the average American consumes more than 3,500 calories at Christmas Day dinner alone. Naturally, January is the peak month for diet plans, many of which end up in failure and despair.

Perhaps most important of all, from a purely distributional standpoint, Christmas almost certainly aggravates inequality, since most gift-giving takes place within the family or the same social class, and doesn’t reach the people who really need our help. Salvation Army drum-beating aside, Christmas almost certainly reduces our capacity for charity by draining us of wealth that we might otherwise give to the needy, and of our charitable impulses. This is hardly what the person for whom the holiday is named had in mind.

Overall, the message is clear: Christmas imposes a huge efficiency tax on our economy, is hazardous to our health and safety, and does little to further social justice. And the efficiency tax may well be growing in real terms—an analysis of long-term changes in the seasonality of the U.S. economy suggests that the Christmas buying season has been getting longer and longer. Christmas commercialism, of course, is a modern innovation. The ancient Christians did not even observe the holiday until the fifth century, medieval Christians observed it much more modestly, and the Puritans sensibly refused to celebrate it at all. Only in the last fifty years, with the perfection of mass-market advertising and the commercialization of religion in general, has it become such a command performance.

Modern Christmas is like primitive Keynesianism, a short-run-oriented economic experiment that has been tried and found wanting. It is the flipside of the positive contribution the “Protestant ethic” once made to capitalism—Christianity’s high holiday now almost certainly makes us feel worse off. What is to be done? I suggest an experimental two- to three-year moratorium on the whole affair, to let us pay our bills and recover some of the distance we’ve lost. This may sound like tough medicine to youngsters, and to all the other interest groups that have acquired such large commercial stakes in this annual ritual—from bulb manufacturers to ambulance drivers. But the rest of us can no longer afford it. If we celebrate this holiday at all, we should do so mainly because it is over for at least one more year.

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Share your stories of holiday disasters

We would like to hear about your holiday catastrophes and trips that didn’t go to plan

With travel still subject to strict Covid rules, many of us will be opting to stay put this summer. But while we often idolise the idea of a sun-filled getaway, in reality, our holidays can sometimes fail to meet expectations – and sometimes they can be downright disastrous.

With this in mind, we’d love to hear about your holiday catastrophes and the trips that didn’t go according to plan, as a reminder that we might not always be missing out after all. Perhaps your luxurious city break was ruined by terrible weather? Or maybe your backpacking adventure plans were quashed by a bout of food poisoning? Whether your family vacation ended in tears, or your romantic weekend away was blighted by lost luggage and booking mishaps, tell us about it below.

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Essay on Holiday for Students and Children

500+ words essay on holiday.

Holidays are very important parts of everyone’s life, be it a student or a working person. Everyone deserves to take a break from the monotony to rejuvenate and maintain their health. Holidays help us do exactly that.

Other than that, a holiday allows us to complete all our pending work. Nowhere will you find a person who dislikes holidays. From a school going toddler to your house help, everyone looks forward to holidays and see them as a great opportunity to relax and enjoy .

Importance of Holidays for Students

When one thinks about what a holiday means for students, we notice how important it is for the kids. It is a time when they finally get the chance to take a break from studies and pursue their hobbies.

They can join courses which give them special training to specialize in it. They can get expert in arts, craft, pottery, candle making and more. Furthermore, they also make new friends there who have the same interests.

In addition, students get to visit new places on holiday. Like during summer or winter holidays , they go with their families to different cities and countries. Through holidays, they get new experiences and memories which they remember for a lifetime.

Furthermore, it also gives them time to relax with their families. Other cousins also visit each other’s places and spend time there. They play games and go out with each other. Moreover, students also get plenty of time to complete their homework and revise the syllabus.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of Holidays for Working People

Holidays for working people are somewhat similar to what they mean for students. In fact, they carry more importance to them than students. Though they are adults, they also yearn for the holidays. Why so? They do not get as many holidays as students do.

Most importantly, the holiday no matter how little it gives them a great chance to relax. More so because they work tirelessly for so many hours a day without a break. Some even work when they get home. This makes their schedule very hectic and gives them little time to rest. A holiday fills the gap for this rest.

Read 500 Words Essay on Summer Vacation

Similarly, due to such a hectic schedule working people get less time to spend with their family. They get distanced from them. Holidays are the perfect chance to strengthen their bonds and make amends.

In other words, a working person needs holidays for the smooth functioning of life. Without holidays they will face pressure and won’t be able to be productive when they work non-stop. After all, when a person earns, they must spend it on something recreational from time to time so they also remain happy and work happily.

Thus, we see how holidays play an important role in maintaining a great balance between our work and play. We must try to make the most of the holidays and spend them wisely so we do not waste time. Never waste a holiday as they are very few in number where you can actually, rest or utilize it properly.

Q.1 What importance does a holiday hold?

A.2 A holiday is one of the most important parts of anyone’s life. It brings joy and comfort to everyone. Everyone loves holidays as they give them time to relax and enjoy themselves with their families.

Q.2 How can one spend their holidays?

A.2 There are many ways to spend a holiday. You can pursue your hobby and take professional classes to master the art. Furthermore, you may also travel the world and discover new places and experiences to get more exposure.

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My Worst Holiday Ever B1

• Topic: Holidays + Airports
• Learning Outcome: Can describe a good or bad holiday.
• Grammar: Past Continuous

Holidays + Airports:  flight, souvenir, check in, passport, security, luggage, sunscreen, outdoor pool, airport security, delayed, on time, duty free, aisle, window seat, boarding pass, cancelled, inconvenience, baggage claim, depart, board, airline, gate, terminal, passenger.

Violet and her friend Tara have both just come back from a holiday abroad. Tara had an amazing time but Violet had a terrible holiday with lots of problems and bad luck from the start. What happened to Violet? Why was her holiday the worst holiday ever? And why didn’t she text Tara?

Aim of Activity

Follow up activity after watching Animation to check understanding.

Steps for Students

Step 1: Listen to the teacher and look at the pictures: Activity 1

Step 2: Are the sentences true or false?

Step 3: If a sentence is false, what is the correct answer?

• Click on the link or download the flashcards (see attachment): Activity 1
• Read following 15 sentences to your students
• Students can say ‘TRUE’ or ‘FALSE’ or  students can stand up if it’s TRUE and sit down if it’s FALSE or students can move left if it’s TRUE and move right if it’s FALSE
• Violet lost her flight ticket.
• Her family were getting impatient waiting for her to find it.
• She found her passport in the secret pocket of her bag.
• Security was strict at the airport.
• They were waiting at the departure gate for a long time.
• Violet was walking around the airport shops as she was bored.
• Violet was snoring on the plane.
• Violet didn’t disturb the other passengers.
• It only rained once on their holiday.
• Violet spent most of the time in her hotel room with her little sister.
• Violet spent a lot of time texting her friend Tara on her holiday.
• Violet’s little sister dropped her phone in the bath.
• Violet got her phone repaired.
• Violet gave Tara a souvenir from her holiday.
• Violet had an amazing holiday.

This activity could be done before the video is played and as a follow up activity.

• FALSE – She has lost her passport.
• FALSE – the passengers next to her were snoring.
• FALSE – she tripped and fell
• FALSE – it rained constantly
• FALSE – Tara says ‘Why didn’t you text me?’
• FALSE – She dropped it down the toilet
• FALSE – but she needs to.
• FALSE – she left it on the plane.
• FALSE – she had the worst holiday ever.

Activity attachment

To provide students with a controlled practice of past continuous forms.

• Click on this link: Activity 2
• Move around the words to make a question about a holiday photo.
• Your teacher will show you a holiday photo, please ask the above questions to find out more information.
• Share a photo from a memorable holiday and work with a classmate to ask and answer the same questions about your photographs.
• Tell another group about your partners photo using the past continuous: He/she was visiting … He/she was travelling with … He/she was staying at …
• Share with the class and ask them to unscramble the sentences to make questions:
• Where were you visiting?
• Who were you travelling with?
• Where were you staying?
• Who are you standing next to?
• What were you thinking about?
• What were you wearing?
• What were you doing?
• Who was taking the photo?
• What were you feeling?
• What were you doing before the photo was taken?
• Show them a memorable photo from a past holiday and instruct them to ask you the above questions.
• Ask the class to share a photo of a good or bad holiday they remember (this can be done online, or they can bring a photo to class the next day).
• Ask them to look at their partners photo and interview them about their holiday using these past continuous questions.
• At the end of the lesson, they must tell the class about their partner’s holiday using the past continuous.

If your class need to review the past continuous please see online worksheets here: https://www.allthingsgrammar.com/past-continuous.html

If there are students who would prefer not to share a personal holiday photo, please ask them to select an image from here: https://pixabay.com/images/search/holiday%20+%20travel/?manual_search=1

To develop listening comprehension for travel.

• Click on this link: Activity 3
• Watch a passenger checking in at an airport and listen carefully to what he and the airline staff say.
• Select the correct answer to the questions.
• Check your answers.
• Which ones are wrong? Listen again to check for the correct answer.
• With your partner create your own dialogue where one of you is a passenger and the other is airline staff.
• Click on the link: Activity 3
• Explain to the students that they need to watch and listen carefully to someone checking in at an airport. As they watch they will need to select the sentence that they hear.
• Before they do the activity, read the questions and multiple-choice answers together to check for any new vocabulary.
• After they have completed the activity and checked the answers, assign them into pairs to roleplay the dialogue with one student as airline staff and the other as a passenger.

Ideally students will work on their own devices in small groups on this activity.

Answers provided.

To connect topic to real life experience and teach vocabulary via a game format.

• Think of some answers to this question (+ be creative): What were you doing yesterday afternoon? Why weren’t you at school?
• Click on the link and continue with this activity: Activity 4
• Use the photos to help you and your group create some new answers to this question. The funnier the better but please remember to use the past continuous.
• Tell the class that they must think of answers to the question: What were you doing yesterday afternoon? Why weren’t you at school?
•   Write their answers on the board or shared online space and encourage them to use the past continuous e.g. I was helping my mother. I wasn’t feeling well. I was playing football.
•   Click on the link and ask them to continue this activity: Activity 4

This activity would work best done as a whole class, with students working in Teams. Give points for the most creative and grammatically correct answers.

Possible answers are:

• I was playing in a rock band.
• I was eating fast food.
• I was swimming with a shark.
• I was walking my pet rabbit.
• I was flying a plane.
• I was driving a fast car.
• I was riding a camel.
• I was sleeping (like a baby).
• I was painting my toenails.
• I was brushing an elephant’s teeth.

To engage students creatively with target language through a joint project or pair work activity.

• You are going to work in groups to create your own comic. The title of the comic is ‘My Worst Holiday Ever’ .
• You must invent their own original story + use the past continuous.
• Go to this website : https://makebeliefscomix.com/
• Click on “Create Comix Now”. (See the attachment for guide how to create a comix.)
• Read the comic to your class and roleplay the characters.
• Explain to the class that they are going to work in groups to create their own comic. The title of the comic is ‘My Worst Holiday Ever’.
• Instruct them to invent their own original story + use the past continuous.
• Click on “Create Comix Now ”.
• See the attachment for guide How to create a comix.

Ideally small groups should have their own devices to work on this together.

If it is not possible to use the above site – Canva has some printable options: https://www.canva.com/comic-strips/templates/

There are no answers.

The BOOST Project (Building Open Online Series for Teaching) aims to improve the digital readiness of teachers of English as a foreign language to students aged 8 -14 by providing an open-access series of engaging native-speaker content videos linked with a Resource Pack of ready-made activities to stimulate production of the language in online learning.

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• The worst holiday of my life.
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It all happened on my last holiday. It was terrible experience. It was the worst holiday I have ever had. I and my friend we decided to go to the New Zeland. We were saving money very long time to go on this trip. It was our dream to go to the land of "The Lord of the Rings".

We had made reservation for flight at the end of July. From that moment everything went wrong. It turned out that the flight was reserved for only one person because a woman at the travel agency didn't understand us correctly. I managed to reserve a flight but different one, so we couldn't go together. But I thought that it was not a big deal. My friend flew few hours after me. I was going first. When I arrived at the airport I was very happy because that meant that my holiday has started and nothing else could have happened. I was mistaken.

When the hour of my flight was coming I queued up to the custom clearance. My passport was all right and the next thing I had todo was to go through the metal detector. When I was passing through it started to beep. I was scared. I was taken aside immediately and I felt like a thief. It was terrible. The custom officer had taken me to the other room and she told me to undress. I tried to explain that I had a belly ring and maybe it was the cause of beeping but she didn't want to listen. I had to undress. They took my clothes somewhere and I was standing alone in the middle of the room. I was shocked and stressed. The woman came back after about 5 minutes which seemed to be ages for me. She gave me back clothes but I was not allowed to put them on. She checked me one more time with small metal detector which was obviously beeping in front of my ring. Of course the customs officials went through all my things but they didn't find anything. I was late for my flight so I had to wait for another one. My friend who was supposed to meet me at the airport and it was me who should wait was terrified that I was not there. Fortunatelly she decided to wait there.

After that horrible flight we met at the airport and we went to our hostel. It turned out that we expected something different but it was not that bad and we were to tired to look for something else. New Zeland is the most beautiful country I have ever seen. We loved everything about it. The people, their customs, their food and most of all the environment. We spent there three weeks. We had there really a good time. But when the time ended we had to fly back home. I was a little scared. This time I decided to remove my belly ring.

We came to the airport about three hours before the departure time. At the entrance to the airport we saw an older women who had a large card with the word written on it with capital letters: POLAND. So, I came up to her and I started to speak in polish. She smiled and we started to chat together. When we were just about to leave she asked me if I could take a box of chocolates with me and give it to her son in Poland. He was supposed to meet me at the airport, because she would phone him. Of course I agreed. And then it started again. At the custom clearance everything was OK. I came through the metal detector and nothing heppend. My passport was all right. I was almost free when the custom officer asked me about the chocolates. I said that it was given to me by the lady at the entrance and that her son is going to take it back at the airport in Poland. The custom officer asked me to open the box. I didn't want to agree as it wasn't mine. But I had to that. It turned out that inside there were not chocolates but the butterflys worth twenty thousand dollars. I was taken to the jail. I spent there two days and than everything had been explained. I could come back home and the lady and her "son" were caught and also taken to the jail.

I don't have to say why this was my worst holiday I have ever had…

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• Short Story

My Worst Holiday Ever

• Darcy Salmon, Grade 7

Last year we went on a family holiday, but it didn’t quite go as we had planned it to go. When we arrived at Tweed Heads campi9ng ground we set up our tent and had some lunch. While I was eating my ham and salad roll I was busting to go to the toilet, so I asked my Dad if he could set up the porta-loo. When I got back my ham and salad roll had fresh bird poo all over it. My family and I went and had a swim in the poll, but it was 6 degrees, which was too cold for us so we had to go back to the tent. We all decided to play Monopoly, but that was SO BORING! Finally it was dinner time! We had sausages, bacon and eggs. We were all hoping that tomorrow would be a new, fresh day! But that night our tent FELL down. “How bad can this holiday get?” I said to myself. The next morning we had breakfast and then we went to the pool again to see if it was any warmer. It was 16degees this time, so we stayed in there for a while. My little sister was BUSTING to go to the toilet and we didn’t want her to pee in the pool so we all had to walk all the way back to the tent. When my little sister Abby was on the toilet we heard her screaming “THIS STINKS!” We had dinner and went to bed. During the night my big sister Tia’s air mattress went down. We were all so tired because we hadn’t had a good night sleep in 2 days. The next morning we had pancakes. They were YUMMY! It was our last camping and that was lucky because we were running out of food and the closet shop was forty minutes away. We went and had a game of pool, on their pool table and then it was FINALLY time to pack up. When mum was packing up our beds she found our lolly stash and she got angry! Mum went to the office and told them that we were going to go home and thank-you for the GREAT holiday! Every thing was packed so we got in the car ready to go home, dad turned on the engine… but wait it wasn’t going. “OH NO! How long are we going to be here for?” we all groaned!!

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'Succession' actor bashes the Bible, calls religion a bad influence on humanity: 'People are so stupid'

"Succession" actor Brian Cox gave a harsh assessment of religion and its impact on the world in a new wide-ranging interview out this week.

In a new episode of The Starting Line podcast , the Scottish actor, who is a self-professed atheist and socialist, argued that religion has sold humans a false story about reality and contributed to their own "stupidity."

"Human beings are so f—d,  basically… because they're so stupid," he said.

Religion has " led us into all kinds of horror, " he went on to say, referencing the Holocaust and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. "The same things are being repeated again and again in belief systems which do not serve," he said.

The actor claimed the conflict in the Middle East is "never going to go away," because it is fueled by these faulty systems which hurt both Muslims and Jews .

Lamenting the lives lost in the conflict, he added, "People are so stupid… and they cannot see the writing on the wall."

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

The problem with religion is that it shields humans from examining how they are contributing to society's problems, he argued. 

"It's all about this notion of God, the idea that there’s a God that takes care of us all. There’s no such thing, doesn’t happen, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about us, and we don’t examine ourselves nearly enough. We don’t look at who we are. We’re always looking outside of ourselves, instead of looking inside ourselves," he explained of humanity's relationship with religion.

He also criticized the Bible as "one of the worst books ever." 

FAMOUS ATHEIST SAYS HE IDENTIFIES AS A ‘CULTURAL CHRISTIAN’ AND IS ‘HORRIFIED’ BY PROMOTION OF ISLAMIC HOLIDAY

He pointed to the creation account of Adam and Eve in scripture to complain that "propaganda" from the religious text has contributed to a "patriarchal" society.

"Because it starts with the idea that Adam's rib - you know that [from] Adam's rib, this woman was created, and they’ll believe it because they’re stupid enough."

"It is not the truth, it's a mythology," he continued. "We’ve created that idea of God, and we’ve created it as a control issue, and it’s also a patriarchal issue... and it’s essentially patriarchal - we haven’t given enough scope to the matriarchy."

CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF MEDIA AND CULTURE

Humans simply haven't "evolved" to the point where we look inside ourselves to deal with our problems rather than trying to solve our problems with religion, he argued.

The "Succession" star explained how he's found more answers to life's questions through acting. He explained that he believes the "one true church" to be the theater because it "is the church of humanity."

"It's people dealing with… those false gods we create for ourselves and the notion of the word God anyway, is a conceit. It's a terrible conceit that we don't really acknowledge."

Original article source: 'Succession' actor bashes the Bible, calls religion a bad influence on humanity: 'People are so stupid'

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Reflective Essay: My Favorite Holiday Memory

I’ve had many wonderful holidays, but my favorite memory is that of a few summer weeks spent in Italy when I was about 13. My mom had to go to a clinic there for treatment (nothing severe or worrisome in any way, thankfully), and we all went together as a family and took the opportunity to have a beautiful vacation as well. Why this is my favorite holiday memory is because, besides the fact that it was the first time abroad for me, it was a vacation that has broadened my perspective, taught me a lot, and helped shape a bit of who I am today.

Although we did visit many famous places in northern Italy, we stayed mostly in a little town where some friends of my parents lived. While all the renowned attractions in the country were, indeed, marvelous, nothing immersed me in the Italian culture and nothing helped me understand the locals’ Latin spirit better than my stay in this picturesque, almost magical town that many haven’t even heard of.

At 13, I was quite a shallow girl who was interested mostly in having fun with the girls – and not much else. Thanks to the holiday spent in Italy, I also discovered my passion for music, which stayed alive in me to this day and will probably stay forever. My parents’ friends had a son, Ricardo, who was a pianist. While dad had repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to make me study an instrument (and stick to it), when I heard Ricardo play, I instantly fell in love with music and felt a great desire to learn it. Ricardo taught me the first song I ever played on the piano, a silly, playful little tune that I still know by heart. Oh, and he was my first crush, too.

Another reason why I will never forget my holiday in Italy is the short trip we took to the Italian Alps at some point. I had never seen such majestic beauty before! The snow-covered peaks, the intimidating rocks, the fresh, harsh air – what an experience! And what I remember impressed me the most was the fact that, although this was a popular touristic area, the region was incredibly clean, still “natural”, with places that seemed to never have been touched by humans. Then, the shallow teen that I was learned what a real treasure nature is and how important it is to protect it.

Finally, there’s one peculiar memory from this vacation that stuck with me for reasons that I can’t say I grasp. It’s a pineapple & cheese sandwich that they sold at the clinic my mom went to for treatment. What a simple and ingenious mix of flavors – a sheer joy for the taste buds! I think it was the first time I tasted a mix of “regular food” and exotic fruit all in one, and I believe this is what triggered in me the pleasure I know have for experimenting with flavors in my cooking and coming up with unusual dishes. Looking back on it, this simple sandwich can also be a good metaphor for how you shouldn’t overcomplicate things in life – sometimes, the simplest solution and a bit of flair or courage can bring astonishing results.

My trip to Italy helped me understand more about other cultures, allowed me to find my passion (and let’s not forget about my first crush), taught me to cherish nature and do my best to protect it, and – maybe – inspired in me the courage to experiment (or, at least, it gave me the opportunity to discover that I adore pineapple & cheese sandwiches). This is why it is my favorite holiday memory.

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Essay: Where Global Governance Went Wrong—and How to Fix It

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Where Global Governance Went Wrong—and How to Fix It

International agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way that they should..

Global governance, never really settled, has recently been having an especially hard time. Everyone believes in a rules-based system, but everyone wants to make the rules and dislikes it when the rules work against them, saying that they infringe on their sovereignty and their freedom. There are deep asymmetries, with the powerful countries not only making the rules but also breaking them almost at will, which raises the question: Do we even have a rules-based system, or is it just a facade? Of course, in such circumstances, those who break the rules say they only do so because others are, too.

The current moment is a good illustration. It is the product of longstanding beliefs and power relations. Under this system, industrial subsidies were a no-no, forbidden (so it was thought) not just by World Trade Organization rules, but also by the dictates of what was considered sound economics. “Sound economics” was that set of doctrines known as neoliberal economics, which promised growth and prosperity through, mostly, supposedly freeing the economy by allowing so-called free enterprise to flourish. The “liberal” in neoliberalism stood for freedom and “neo” for new, suggesting that it was a different and updated version of 19 th -century liberalism.

This essay is adapted from the book T he Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton, 384 pp., $29.99, April 2024

In fact, it was neither really new nor really liberating. True, it gave firms more rights to pollute, but in doing so, it took away the freedom to breathe clean air—or in the case of those with asthma, sometimes even the most fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom to live.

“Freedom” meant freedom for the monopolists to exploit consumers, for the monopsonists (the large number of firms that have market power over labor) to exploit workers, and freedom for the banks to exploit all of us—engineering the most massive financial crisis in history, which required taxpayers to fork out trillions of dollars in bailouts, often hidden, to ensure that the so-called free enterprise system could survive.

The promise that this liberalization would lead to faster growth from which all would benefit never materialized. Under these doctrines that have prevailed for more than four decades, growth has actually slowed in most advanced countries. For instance, real growth in GDP per capita (average percent increase per annum) according to data compiled by the St. Louis Fed, was 2.5% from 1960 to 1990, but slowed to 1.5% from 1990 to 2018. Instead of trickle-down economics, where everyone would benefit, we had trickle-up economics, where the top 1 percent and especially the top 0.1 percent, got a larger and larger slice of the pie.

These are illustrations of British political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s dictum that “total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs”; or, as I have sometimes put it less gracefully, freedom for some has meant the unfreedom of others—their loss of freedom.

Just as individuals rightly cherish their freedom, countries do, too, often under the name “sovereignty.” But while these words are easily uttered, there is too little thought about their deeper meanings. Economics has weighed into the debate about what freedom and sovereignty mean, with John Stuart Mill’s contribution in the 19th century ( On Liberty ), and Milton Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s works in the mid-20th ( Capitalism and Freedom and The Road to Serfdom ).

But contrary to what Hayek and Friedman asserted, free and unfettered markets do not lead to efficiency and the well-being of society; that should be obvious to anyone looking around. Just think of the inequality crisis, the climate crisis, the opioid crisis, the childhood diabetes crisis, or the 2008 financial crisis.  These are crises created by the market, exacerbated by the market, and/or crises which the market hasn’t been able to deal with adequately.

Economic theorists (including me) have shown that whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect markets (that is to say, always), there is a presumption that markets are not efficient. Even a very little bit of imperfection can have big effects.

The problem is that much of the global economic architecture designed over recent decades has been based on neoliberalism—the kinds of ideas that Hayek and Friedman put forward. The system of rules that evolved from there must be fundamentally rethought.

U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at the G-20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 8, 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

From an economist’s perspective, freedom is the “freedom to do,” meaning the size of the opportunity set of what a person can do, or the range of the choices that are available.

Someone on the verge of starvation has no real freedom—she does what she must to survive. A rich person obviously has more freedom to choose. “Freedom to do” is also constrained when an individual is harmed. Obviously, if an individual is killed by a gunman or a virus, or even hospitalized by COVID-19, he has lost freedom in a meaningful sense, and we then have a dramatic illustration of Berlin’s dictum: Freedom for some—the freedom to carry guns, or to not be masked, or to be unvaccinated—may entail a large loss of freedom for others.

The same principle applies to the international arena. The rules-based trade system consists of a set of rules intended to expand the freedoms of all in a meaningful way by imposing constraints. The idea that constraints can be freeing, while seemingly self-contradictory, is obvious: Stoplights force us to take turns going through intersections, but without this seeming constraint, there would be gridlock and no one would be able to move.

All contracts are agreements about constraints—with one party agreeing to do or not do something in return for another person making other promises—with the belief that in doing so, all parties will be better off. Of course, if one party cheats and doesn’t deliver on its promise, then that party gains at the expense of others. And there is always the temptation to do so, which is why we require governments to enforce contracts, so that promises mean something. No government could enforce all contracts, and the so-called free market would crash if all participants were grifters.

But while there are similarities between discussions of freedom at the individual level and the country level, there are also a couple of big differences. Most importantly, there is no global government to ensure that the powerful countries obey an agreement, as we are seeing today in the case of U.S. industrial subsidies. The World Trade Organization (WTO) generally forbids such subsidies and especially disapproves of some of the provisions—such as requiring domestic manufacturing (“Made in America”)—in legislation passed recently by the U.S. Congress, including the CHIPS and Science Act .

Big Tech Is Trying to Prevent Debate About Its Social Harms

The industry’s “digital trade” strategy seeks to preemptively constrain governments.

The Global Credibility Gap

No one power or group can uphold the international order anymore—and that means much more geopolitical uncertainty ahead.

Moreover, within democratic countries, the role of power in the making and enforcement of the rules is often obscure; we know that inequalities in wealth and income get translated into inequalities in political power, which determines who gets to design the rules and how they are enforced. An imbalance of power means that the powerful within a country determine the rules in ways that benefit them, often at the expense of the weak.

Still, the democratic context means that every once in a while, power is checked—as it was when the antitrust laws were passed in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century, or the Wagner Act was passed during the New Deal of the 1930s, giving workers more power.

In an international setting, power is even more concentrated, and democratic forces are even weaker. What has happened in the past few years illustrates this. The United States was at the center in constructing the rules-based system, in both designing the rules and how they were to be enforced, including dispute resolutions through the WTO’s Appellate Body.  But when the rules—such as those concerning industrial subsidies—were inconvenient, it decided to ignore them, knowing that there was little, if anything, that any country could or would do about it. So much for the rules-based system.

And the United States’ confidence that nothing could or would be done was reinforced by the fact that it had effectively defenestrated the Appellate Body, because that Body had made decisions it didn’t like, and the U.S. thought that the Body was guilty of overreaching, going beyond what it was entitled to do. But rather than going back to the WTO and clarifying what the Body’s role should be, the U.S. simply hamstrung any adjudication within the WTO. The situation would be like suspending the U.S. Supreme Court while figuring out how to bring the justices back to a reasonable theory of jurisprudence.

This imbalance of power has played out repeatedly in recent years. When developed countries attempted to implement industrial policies—even mild policies, such as Brazil’s effort to provide capital to aerospace corporation Embraer at reasonable interest rates through that country’s development bank (as opposed to the outlandishly high rates then prevailing in its financial markets)—they were attacked . When Indonesia tried to ensure that more of the added value associated with its rich nickel deposits remained in Indonesia, it was attacked .

People line up to receive the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccination at a local hospital in in Harare, Zimbabwe, on March 29, 2021. Tafadzwa Ufumeli/Getty Images

Even worse, when more than 100 countries proposed a waiver of intellectual property related to COVID-19—in the spirit of the compulsory licenses already seemingly part of the WTO framework, but given the urgency of the moment, a less bureaucratic process was of the essence—they were denied. The result: vaccine apartheid , where the advanced countries had all the vaccines they wanted, and the developing countries had almost zero access. This almost surely resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths and tens of thousands of unnecessary hospitalizations in the poorer countries.

These are obviously no small matters in the well-being of citizens around the world, especially not for developing countries and emerging markets. Nor are they small matters in geoeconomics and geopolitics. The neoliberal rules forbidding subsidies effectively meant that developing countries couldn’t catch up to the advanced countries; the rules condemned them to being commodity producers, reserving the higher value-added production for the advanced countries.

This tariff structure has been rightly criticized as a crucial tool in the preservation of colonial trade patterns—aided and abetted by other unfair aspects of the trade regime, such as escalating tariffs. As economist Ha-Joon Chang has put it , the advanced countries “kicked away the ladder” from which they themselves had used.

It should be clear, too, that there are geopolitical consequences in refusing to play by the rules. The United States and the advanced countries are losing support for some of the most important issues requiring global cooperation, including climate change , global health, and the support needed to resolve the conflict in Ukraine as well as Washington’s apparent battle for democracy and hegemony with China.

The global south may yet steer the ship of international rules back on course. When the United States was the hegemon, it could do as it wanted, but its influence is now being challenged. China has provided more infrastructure than the United States has; early on in the pandemic, both China and Russia seemed more generous in providing vaccines.

Washington told the developing countries to open their doors to its multinationals, but when those countries asked that the rich corporations pay the taxes they owed, the United States was not supportive—reforms under an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development initiative called BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) generated sparse revenues for the poorer countries, and in return, the developing countries were asked to forego digital taxation. When, accordingly, the African Union asked for a change in venue of the discussions of global tax reform to the United Nations, the United States not only opposed it , but also tried to strong-arm others to do so. Last November, the United States lost the vote overwhelmingly at the U.N.

So whither goes global governance? In the absence of rules, the law of the jungle prevails. While the United States might win that fight, it would simultaneously lose the cooperation it needs so badly in a host of arenas. Overall, it would lose.

It is in the interests of the United States to abandon the corporate-driven rules-based system and work instead to create a set of at least basic rules that would reflect common interests. For instance, instead of the comprehensive so-called free trade agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership , that were really managed trade agreements (and managed specifically in the interests of Big Pharma and some of the big polluters), the United States should have narrow agreements—say, a green agreement to share knowledge and technology, promote sustainable forests, and work together to save the planet.

We need agreements that do more to constrain the large countries—whose actions can hurt the global economy—and do less to constrain the small, whose actions have little global consequences.

For instance, we need rules that would constrain the European Union and the United States from using monetary policy in ways that benefit their economies at the expense of others, as the United States has repeatedly done. Today, even the United States recognizes that investment agreements (such as NAFTA’s infamous Chapter 11 ) that allow corporations to sue states actually exert constraints on sovereignty without commensurate benefits. A key difference between NAFTA and the trade agreement that succeeded it is the effective dropping of Chapter 11. But the United States should go further, strengthening the ability of any government party to an agreement to sue corporations when terms of the agreement have been violated.

To win the hearts and minds in the new cold war brewing between the United States and China, the United States needs to do more. Washington needs to use the money it has to provide assistance to the poor, and the power that it possesses to construct rules that are fair. Nowhere is that more evident than in response to the debt crisis that the United States faces today and the recent pandemic, another of which the world will almost surely face in the future.

An aerial view shows open graves, left, near recent burials at a cemetery in São Paulo, Brazil, on May 22, 2021, during a surge of deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic. Mario Tama/Getty Images

With most sovereign debt contracts written in the United States, Washington has the power to change the legal framework governing these contracts in ways that make the resolution of crises—where countries can’t pay back what they owe—faster and better. This approach would address the “too little, too late” problem by which one crisis is followed by another, which has plagued the world for so long. With more creditors entering the field, debt resolution is becoming ever more difficult. There are important proposals currently before the New York legislature (where most of the money is raised), but support from the Biden administration would be enormously helpful.

The world has just gone through a terrible pandemic, and the recognition that there will be another has spurred work on a proposed pandemic preparedness treaty. Unfortunately, under the influence of Big Pharma, there are no provisions in the treaty for the kind of intellectual property waiver that the world so badly needs, let alone the technology transfer that would allow the production of all the products—protective gear, vaccines, and therapeutics—necessary to fight the next disease that strikes.

The freedom to live is the most important freedom that we have. Our global agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way they should. Better global agreements can benefit all countries, though not necessarily all people within them: Such agreements would constrain the power of the exploiters to exploit the rest of us, thereby making a dent on their bottom line, but they would benefit society more generally.

Striving to create global agreements that are fair and generous to the poor would, I believe, be in the United States’ self-interest—in its “enlightened” self-interest, taking into account the new geoeconomics and geopolitics. It was never in the United States’ self-interest to pursue a corporatist global agenda, even when it was the hegemon. But it is especially not so today.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University. Twitter:  @JosephEStiglitz

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Stock market today: Asian stocks follow Wall St tumble. Most markets in the region close for holiday

FILE- A person looks at an electronic stock board showing Japan’s stock prices at a securities firm in Tokyo, on April 30, 2024. Asian stocks fell Wednesday, May 1, 2024 with most of the markets in the region closed for a holiday. Meanwhile, U.S. stocks closed out their worst month since September. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

FILE - A person walks in front of an electronic stock board showing Japan’s Nikkei 225 index at a securities firm in Tokyo, on April 22, 2024. Asian stocks fell Wednesday, May 1, 2024 with most of the markets in the region closed for a holiday. Meanwhile, U.S. stocks closed out their worst month since September. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko, File)

A person passes the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 in New York. Global shares are trading mostly higher as investors keep their eyes on potentially market-moving reports expected later this week. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)

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HONG KONG (AP) — Asian stocks fell Wednesday with most of the markets in the region closed for a holiday. Meanwhile, U.S. stocks closed out their worst month since September.

Oil prices were lower and U.S. futures were mixed.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 index lost 0.8%, down to 38,089.09 in early trading after the country’s factory activity experienced a milder shrink in April, as the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index from au Jibun Bank rose to 49.6 in April from 48.2 in March. A PMI reading under 50 represents a contraction, and a reading of 50 indicates no change.

The yen continues to struggle. On Wednesday, the U.S. dollar rose to 157.89 Japanese yen from 157.74 yen.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 dipped 1.2% to 7,574.20. Other markets in the region were closed due to the Labor Day holiday.

On Tuesday, the S&P 500 tumbled 1.6% to cement its first losing month in the last six, and ended at 5,035.69. Its momentum slammed into reverse in April — falling as much as 5.5% at one point — after setting a record at the end of March.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1.5% to 37,815.92, and the Nasdaq composite lost 2% to 15,657.82.

Stocks began sinking as soon as trading began, after a report showed U.S. workers won bigger gains in wages and benefits than expected during the first three months of the year. While that’s good news for workers and the latest signal of a solid job market, it feeds into worries that upward pressure remains on inflation.

AP AUDIO: Stock market today: An ugly April for Wall Street is closing with some more losses.

The stock market opens with a loss of momentum. Here’s more from AP’s Seth Sutel.

It followed a string of reports this year that have shown inflation remains stubbornly high . That’s caused traders to largely give up on hopes that the Federal Reserve will deliver multiple cuts to interest rates this year. And that in turn has sent Treasury yields jumping in the bond market, which has cranked up the pressure on stocks.

Tuesday’s losses for stocks accelerated at the end of the day as traders made their final moves before closing the books on April, and ahead of an announcement by the Federal Reserve on interest rates scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

No one expects the Federal Reserve to change its main interest rate at this meeting. But traders are anxious about what Fed Chair Jerome Powell may say about the rest of the year.

GE Healthcare Technologies tumbled 14.3% after it reported weaker results and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. F5 dropped 9.2% despite reporting a better profit than expected.

McDonald’s slipped 0.2% after its profit for the latest quarter came up just shy of analysts’ expectations. It was hurt by weakening sales trends at its franchised stores overseas , in part by boycotts from Muslim-majority markets over the company’s perceived support of Israel.

Helping to keep the market’s losses in check was 3M, which rose 4.7% after reporting stronger results and revenue than forecast. Eli Lilly climbed 6% after turning in a better profit than expected on strong sales of its Mounjaro and Zepbound drugs for diabetes and obesity. It also raised its forecasts for revenue and profit for the full year.

Stocks of cannabis companies also soared after The Associated Press reported the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration will move to reclassify marijuana as a less-dangerous drug in a historic shift. Cannabis producer Tilray Brands jumped 39.5%.

The earnings reporting season has largely been better than expected so far. Not only have the tech companies that dominate Wall Street done well, so have companies across a range of industries.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.67% from 4.61%.

Benchmark U.S. crude fell 76 cents to $81.17 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, lost 72 cents to $86.51 a barrel.

In currency trading, the euro cost $1.0658, down from $1.0663.

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Guest Essay

Trump’s Trial Can Right a Wrong From 50 Years Ago

By Kevin Boyle

Mr. Boyle is the author of “The Shattering: America in the 1960s.”

Of the four criminal cases that Donald Trump is facing, the one unfolding in Manhattan is generally considered the weakest. Its legal foundation is complex. Its key witness is a felon. Its details are the sort of stuff that the tabloids splash across their front pages.

Worst of all, it doesn’t speak to Mr. Trump’s actions as president, as the other cases do. But as the Supreme Court oral arguments on immunity last week made clear, it is likely to be the only one the country will see resolved before Election Day.

As a historian who has written about the wrenching events of the 1960s and early 1970s, I can’t help seeing Mr. Trump’s legal troubles through the lens of an earlier Republican president, Richard Nixon. He spent more than two years, from the summer of 1972 to the summer of ’74, trying to prevent investigators from uncovering the tangle of crimes that made up the Watergate affair. But unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Nixon never faced criminal charges. For that, justice suffered, and the nation suffered, too.

So here we are, watching unfold in Justice Juan Merchan’s utilitarian courtroom the narrow, tawdry version of the trials the nation ought to have had this year and the trial the nation should have had 50 years ago.

Mr. Nixon won the presidency in 1968 promising to be tough on crime. And he was. From 1961 to 1968 the nation’s prison population fell by 15 percent. By the time Mr. Nixon left office in 1974, it was almost back to where it was in 1962 — the start of a spiral fueled by the furious politics of law and order that his administration had helped to unleash.

The punitive turn struck poorer people and communities of color with particular force, an outcome that a majority of Americans didn’t seem to mind. But when the Watergate investigation exposed Mr. Nixon’s own potential criminality, they thought that the law ought to apply to him, too. As the crisis reached its peak in the summer of 1974, that belief hardened: By almost two to one, Americans wanted the House of Representatives to impeach the president, the Senate to try him and prosecutors to secure his indictment, so that his case could move into open court.

None of that happened. In early July 1974, Mr. Nixon’s lawyer presented to the Supreme Court his client’s claim of presidential immunity. The justices took just two weeks to issue their ruling against the president’s position, by a vote of 8 to 0 .

In light of the Supreme Court’s conduct this year, it’s worth underlining that timing: The case was argued on July 8. The justices issued a decision on July 24.

Between July 27 and 30, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment. Mr. Nixon resigned nine days later, with the articles pending. President Gerald Ford waited a month and then gave his predecessor “ a full, free and absolute pardon ” for the crimes he had yet to be charged with committing. And something started to shift for Americans.

In April 1974, the month the Watergate cover-up started to unravel, 71 percent of Americans had at least a fair amount of confidence in the legal system. In the weeks after Mr. Nixon’s pardon, the share of people who felt that way fell to 67 percent. A year later it was down to 64 percent. That growing sense of disillusionment can’t be explained purely by the failure to bring Mr. Nixon to trial. But a revealing set of long-forgotten surveys suggests that it played a part.

In 1971 the Roper Organization, then one of the nation’s leading pollsters, asked a randomly selected sample of adults to say which groups the courts treated too leniently. Respondents put “dope peddlers” at the top of the list, followed by “heroin users,” “marijuana users” and “revolutionists, anarchists, agitators” — almost precisely the people Mr. Nixon had promised to bring to justice by restoring law and order. Roper asked the same question two years after he was pardoned. “Dope peddlers” came in first again. “Government officials” was second.

Americans’ view of the Nixon pardon gradually softened, while their underlying distrust of the legal system solidified, a dynamic undoubtedly driven by the nation’s rapidly rising levels of economic inequality. When Roper revived its question in 1987, government officials still ranked right behind drug dealers as the group most likely to get special treatment in court. This time, “top business executives” finished fourth (tied with “marijuana users” and “frequent offenders”), barely below “heroin users.” There the public’s perception remained, as the wealth gap widened and the apparently endless war on crime locked up a greater and greater share of the nation’s poor.

By 2001, as indicated in a poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research/American Viewpoint, 62 percent of Americans had come to believe that there were two justice systems in the United States: one for the rich and powerful and another for everyone else. By 2019, in a similarly worded question from a Willow poll, that figure had reached 70 percent, just a point below the proportion of people who had confidence in the courts in the spring of 1974.

Since then, the cracks that run through the system have been torn wide open by the 2020 protests against police brutality and the fierce law-and-order response that the Trump administration mounted against them — combat-ready federal agents on the streets of Portland, Ore., tear gas in Lafayette Square in Washington. Add to that pile of tinder Mr. Trump’s manic subversion of the electoral process and the peaceful and effective transfer of power, which has led to three of the four criminal cases he’s facing.

Mr. Trump has met the charges against him with a blatant display of the privileges that wealth and power create. Over the past two years, he has spent about $76 million of other people’s money on legal fees, much of it to pay for motions and appeals that have stalled the three most damning cases from coming to trial. He persuaded the Supreme Court to treat his immunity claim — far more sweeping than Mr. Nixon’s — with a deference, at least in oral arguments, greatly out of step with the precedents the lower courts followed.

Perhaps most striking, Mr. Trump repeatedly ignored the gag orders that prohibit him from publicly attacking judges, clerks, prosecutors and witnesses — as well as their families — because he seems to believe he can do whatever he wants without fear of consequences. (On Tuesday he was held in contempt of court by Justice Merchan on nine counts and fined $9,000.) All the while, he’s marched toward the Republican nomination with a campaign infused with yet another version of law-and-order politics, this one focused on undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers rather than dope peddlers and drug addicts.

Now he’s spending his days at the defendant’s table, glowering at the judge whose daughter he endangered, as the district attorney whom he has called an “animal” and a “criminal” lays out the lurid case against him. However the trial unfolds, it’s unlikely to change many people’s opinions of Mr. Trump — or of the legal system.

In polling, almost half of registered voters said they thought the charges Mr. Trump faces were politically motivated, and over two-thirds said that the outcome wouldn’t change their votes or that they would be more likely to vote for him if he was convicted.

No verdict in the Manhattan Trump case can undo the disillusionment with the system of justice that followed Mr. Ford’s pardon of Mr. Nixon. But the trial can, in its imperfect way, right the wrong of half a century ago, when the system last had its chance to prove that even the most powerful man in America is subject to its laws — especially when that man is so eager to take advantage of the politics of law and order. And there is a measure of justice in that.

What questions do you have about Trump’s Manhattan criminal trial so far?

Please submit them below. Our trial experts will respond to a selection of readers in a future piece.

Kevin Boyle, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author, most recently, of “ The Shattering : America in the 1960s.”

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