Bolek wrote:As if it's that hard to follow the news from Portugal on online news sites.
I suppose they refer to
this.
If only things were that simple...
To make it short, the
Universidade Independente (UI) is a Portuguese private university in Lisbon. As you might already know, private universities in Portugal are places where people who have rich parents and aren't smart enough to get into a renowned (public) university go to study. This one in particular seems to be quite bad. Some months ago the dean and other members of the administration started being investigated and some of them were arrested. To make things more interesting, our prime-minister completed the last year of his engineering degree at UI, which got the press very interested. They investigated the matter and everyday seemed to find irregularities regarding his academic background. Two weeks ago he had to give an interview in which he showed all the diplomas and said he didn't have anything to do with the way the university worked (e.g. students could submit their exams by fax
) Anyway, this became a great topic for jokes (if you watched last week's Gato Fedorento, they were making jokes about whether the prime-minister was an engineer or not throughout the whole show). Meanwhile the Minister of Higher Education decided to close down the university for good. They had 10 days to appeal the decision (until today) and that's what the article you linked to talks about.
But anyway, this is hardly the only thing you need to know to fully understand the sketch...
Pedro Mantorras is an Angolan football player that plays for
SL Benfica. He suffered a knee injury and spent like two years in recovery. Even today some people say he runs and plays in a strange way because of that. Let's just say there are plenty of jokes about him. He is their "patient".
The part about the ER refers to the fact that our Minister of Health has recently decided to close down some ERs in smaller towns and concentrate the services on larger cities.
The part about the
INEM has to do with the fact that this service is supposed to cover all the country but in practice is mostly focused on urban areas. A few months ago they took 6 hours to take an injured man from a small village in the Alentejo to a hospital in Lisbon, which eventually resulted in the man's death.
The part about Mantorra's Medis card (medical insurance) not being valid because it's from Angola has to do with the fact that Mantorras was recently arrested and fined for driving using an Angolan driver's license (which is not valid here). This started a small incident between Portugal and Angola as the next week the Angolan authorities launched an operation to find and arrest Portuguese citizens driving in Angola with a Portuguese driver's license...
The part about the abortion should be obvious, considering the recent referendum.
The part about racism and sexual harassment is universal
In the second sketch, the university is empty precisely between it's UI, which was closed down. Therefore there's no one to kill.