Italian News 28th June

Sophia Loren, who grew up in the Neapolitan resort of Pozzuoli and was once imprisoned for evading taxes has appealed to people living in Campania to redouble their efforts to resolve the rubbish crisis. Payment of taxes would of course help.

Italian soldiers of the Folgore brigade based in Livorno have a new martial arts instructor: a 77 yer old Japanese grandmother who is 5 ft tall. Useful preparation for an invasion of Japan.

A pregnant woman in Foggia, taken to the labour ward in a hospital which was not her local one, refused to give birth unless there was a member of the carabinieri present. After the arrival of the officer she gave birth to a baby girl, which is likely to have a lantern jaw and a moustache.

The average Italian takes one and a half pills a day (525 doses a year), 3% up on last year

The financial crisis has hit the restaurant trade, with a quarter of Italians saying they have only been out to eat once a month.

Italians spend less than 1% of household income on alcohol, compared to an EU average of 1.2%. The UK was on 1.4% whilst the highest was Ireland at 4.1%. Italians drink an average of 46 litres of wine a year, compared to 52 for France and only 9 for America.

The car is the preferred means of transport for 90% of Italians with most citing freedom of movement as the reason. But 6.4% of Italians said they chose to use their cars out of a passion for them while 2.9% considered driving to be ''pleasurable mania'', an apt description of behaviour on Italian roads.

The opening act of Bologna’s heavy metal festival will be Fratello Metallo, led by a 62 year old Capuchin friar, Brother Cesare Bonizzi, who performs in traditional habit. Bonizzi, who has released 15 albums in a long heavy metal career, said ''Heavy metal has given me the opportunity to meet a world of people of a unique beauty and tenderness”

The new head of Alitalia, Aristide Police, said he would have a plan by the end of next month.

The Vatican daily newspaper l'Osservatore Romano is preparing its first edition in Malayalam, the language spoken in Kerala, Southern India, where there are 6 million Catholics.

The head of inspection services at Sicily's Regional Department for the Family and Social Policies has had his appeal refused against a conviction for violently kissing a colleague who refused his sexual advances.

The rate of suicides and murders committed by family members in Italy increases by 20% in the heat of the summer.

A Uruguayan prostitute working in Italy is refusing to pay 90,000 euros of taxes on her suspected earnings on the grounds that she did not receive protection from the police, who could only intervene if blood was spilled.

A cyclist in Verona was fined 148 euros for using a cellphone while riding his bike.

Pope Benedict XVI's clothing has come under scrutiny: His Holiness has been spotted wearing trendy sunglasses, a velvet cap with ermine trim and fashionable slip on shoes, all in cardinal red. L’Osservatore Romano angrily denied that Christ’s Vicar on Earth shopped at Prada; the shoes were from Adriano Stefanelli, who has also supplied calfskin versions for winter wear and a nappa leather pair for hot Rome summers.

The European Space Agency has received 927 applications from Italian would-be astronauts, slightly more than Britain but less than half the French total. The average age of the astronaut corps is currently over 50.

Discrimination

As Harriet Harman introduces a bill which will permit and encourage discrimination against white males, I am reminded of the story of Cliff Hall, the West Indian singer with Liverpool folk group The Spinners, a popular TV act in the 60s and 70s.

For their first album the record company, fearful of promoting a multi-racial act, made for the record sleeve a cartoon of the group, in which they were all white.

If you can laugh that off, you can laugh anything off. The excellent Cliff Hall has died aged 82.

A glimpse of the future

Hearing that Jack Straw is determined to ‘plug the loophole’ that witnesses in court cannot remain anonymous takes us into a new Kafkaesque world. This, then, is Jack Straw’s vision of the future.

A man, to pick a name at random Tim Hedges, is walking down a street, going about his lawful business, when a policeman stops him, asking where he is gong and why, and demanding to see his ID card. The card is read by a portable device, and due to a governmental computer error, Mr Hedges is identified as a suspect in a murder case. He is detained in prison for 6 weeks without knowing why, or what he is accused of. On day 41 of his incarceration he learns that he is charged with the murder of a child and that the tabloid press is baying for blood. He is remanded in custody until his trial.

He is confident that such a silly mistake can be rectified, when the prosecution produce a witness who prefers to remain anonymous, giving evidence from behind a screen, his voice altered. The witness says he saw Mr Hedges slaughter the child. He cannot be questioned as to his name or background but Mr Hedges thinks it is the chap next door who fancies his wife. Another witness, who again prefers not to be cross examined, on the grounds that Mr Hedges and his associates might plan reprisals against him, corroborates the story (Mr Hedges thinks it is another neighbour with whom he has been in dispute about a boundary but again cannot know).

To the delight of the press, Hedges is imprisoned for life, his wan smile a reflection that at least we don’t have the death penalty. Yet.

Couldn’t happen here?

Finally Mandela speaks

Nelson Mandela has finally criticised the Mugabe regime. Speaking in London he described it as 'a tragic failure of leadership'.

While we are on the subject of failure of leadership it should be remembered that only now has Mandela spoken. The silence from him, Tutu and Mbeki has been deafening. While newspapers fawned and world leaders queued up to have their photos taken with him, Mandela, the most influential man in Africa, watched the disaster of Zimbabwe unfold without comment.

For many, it is too late.

Lisbon Treaty going ahead

There is a report from Friends of Europe on what is happening behind the scenes regarding the Lisbon Treaty. It appears that discussions are going on behind closed doors about the implementation of certain parts of the Treaty, in particular the creation of the EEAS, the diplomatic service.

The Lisbon Treaty provides for work to start early – between signature and ratification – but if we remember, the Treaty has been rejected. It looks to me as if democracy is being ignored because it is less important than the European Project.

I should like one of our MPs to ask the Government to confirm that it is not a party to such discussions and never would be unless the Treaty were to be ratified by all member states.

Sign of the times

From the Telegraph we learn that female students at West Kent College, Tonbridge, have been warned against whistling at and making comments to the builders on the site. ‘This constitutes harassment’ says an email to students.

And harassment is serious: the Sexual Offences (Scotland) Bill will create a new offence of "communicating indecently", punishable by up to 10 years in jail and being placed on the Sex Offenders Register.

I think this incident shows just how damn silly are some of the laws being passed. Someone human and normal needs to put a stop to it.

Zimbabwe's Election

The withdrawal of the MDC from the presidential runoff in Zimbabwe has not left the rest of the world with as big a problem as it might think. We have after all been here before.

Some say that if Tsvangirai had competed and won, it would be an easy decision to invade and support his presidency. But we never did that with Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.

Some say that if the elections are fiddled and opposition brutally suppressed we can and should invade. But we never invaded China.

No, I think we can and will purse our lips, say ‘jolly bad show’ and pretend it isn’t really too awful.

Makes you wonder, though, doesn’t it? Might it not be better just to give up on the UN, and admit it has been a disaster which simply gives credibility to tyrannical regimes, such as China (incredibly, a permanent member of the Security Council) and Zimbabwe (Mugabe was in Rome the other week talking about food shortages!) ?

Italian News Midsummer

The hot weather has begun in Italy, with temperatures over 30C. People who were last week complaining about the cold are complaining about the heat.

Central Italy has been found to be moving slowly eastwards. Within 100,000 years the Adriatic will no longer exist.

The diocese of Rome has refused permission to the makers of the prequel of the Da Vinci code to film in the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria in the city centre. A bourbon palace in Caserta will represent the Vatican where, understandably, they are not wanted either.

Italy has roughly the same population as the UK and roughly the same length of railway, but nearly twice the length of motorway

Coast guards checking safety standards on the beach at Imperia discovered that a lifeguard had taken a break from his post, leaving in his place an inflatable doll, wearing his shirt and with his whistle in its mouth.

In an attempt to break Italy’s backlog of cases, the government proposes to suspend trials relating to crimes committed before June 30 2002, excluding those where the defendant could receive a jail sentence of more than ten years or those connected to the mafia or workplace accidents.

Coincidentally this would include a corruption trial involving Silvio Berlusconi and British corporate lawyer David Mills, although Berlusconi as said he will not avail himself of the law.

The number of women holding top-level company director posts in Italy has increased by over 28,000 in the last five years, although it lags behind the European average.

Italian scientists are creating a genetic database to conserve the taste and smells of Italy's different tomato varieties, such as the San Marzano plum tomato and the pink Sorrento tomato.

Florence will revoke the 700-year-old sentence which forced Dante into exile for the rest of his life. Five councillors opposed the motion which would be ''a decisive step towards Dante's complete rehabilitation''.

Dante died in Ravenna in 1321, where he was buried. ‘Dante’s tomb’ in Florence’s Santa Croce church is empty.

Judge Edi Pinatto, whose failure to write up a sentence over an eight-year period left convicted Mafia bosses at loose in Sicily has been dismissed from the judiciary, although he may appeal. He has said that all judges do it.

The Court of Cassation has ruled that the Carabinieri cannot have extramarital affairs because they besmirch the honour of the corps. It is still permitted in the local and provincial police.
Italy has 34,000 hectares of vineyards dedicated to the production of organic wine, the largest of any country, out of a total of 80,000 worldwide.

An increasing number of Italian wine producers are making kosher wine. ’In order to respect Jewish law, it is necessary for only observers of the Jewish faith to come into direct contact with the wine. Therefore we have two Jewish employees who actually make the wine while the rest of our staff offer their advice,' said Alesandro Calmieri of Feudi di San Gregorio. A similar procedure operates for inorganic wine (two people doing the work, the rest offering advice).

Italy is number five in the world and first in Europe for producing organic foods, which take up 1.147 million hectares of the country's farmland. There are 51,000 organic farmers in Italy who produce a turnover of 2.2 billion euros.

A dentist in Genova is offering his services on the Internet in exchange for sex. His professional body is investigating whether this is in breach of its ethics code.

Italy's black economy fell to a maximum of 17% of gross national product in 2006 down from 9% in 2000. Italy includes the underground economy in GDP estimates

Italian researchers at Catania University have been the first to observe the formation and emission of helium-2 nuclei, a new type of radioactivity that opens up fresh avenues for research. The new nuclei are extremely unstable and have a half-life of less than a billionth of a second before they decay, so they were able to observe them between coffees.

Students taking English as part of the maturita exam (A-levels) were given as a text an online interview by a Yemeni journalist with the German-born owners of a resort at Swakopmund in Namibia, ‘a funky guest-house’ . The text, in halting English, was described as ‘almost incomprehensible’ by a language teacher. The chief examiner has been dismissed.

The end of an era: there has been widespread dismay at a proposal by the State Railway to end the dining car service, replacing it with a snack bar. Many Italians expect a full meal on long journeys.

The new security bill before parliament includes a proposal to put 2,500 troops on patrol in large cities alongside police, restrictions on magistrates' use of phone tapping in investigations and the expulsion of EU citizens unable to prove they have "sufficient economic resources" to stay in Italy for more than three months, a measure aimed above all at Romanians.

However, following Finance Minister Tremonti’s first budget Romanians are asking whether Italy has the resources to support them for more than three months.

Shocking Language

I heard an item on Sky News which has shocked me to the core. The ueber-model Naomi Campbell, involved in some self-indulgent rant about the loss of her luggage, apparently told the captain of the flight 'You wouldn't be doing this if I were white'.

Now, I don't wish to cast aspersions on Sky News' reporters, but are we really being asked to believe that this woman used a subjunctive? '..if I wuz white', surely?

There again, the BBC website report says she said 'if I was white'. Or was her grammar in fact perfect and the BBC are dumbing down?

Hard to tell. Oh, by the way, she apparently assaulted a police officer and if this is the case should be stuck in gaol, without her Louis Vuitton luggage. The police are here to protect us (her, too) and the last thing they need is some self-important bint thinking she is above the law.

Inflation and you

Those of us who lived through the rampant inflation of the 1970s may well think that forecasts of 4% are nothing to take seriously.

Nevertheless at 4%, if you are on a fixed income, after 5 years it takes around £1.25 of your limited resources to buy something which used to cost a pound; after 10 years it takes £1.50 and after 15 years £2.

That is to say if you retire at 60, by the time you are 75 the value of your money has halved.

That is why we have to take action.

EU Constitution Treaty

If you feel, as I do, that the Irish 'No' vote meant the Treaty was dead, and that attempts by other nations subsequently to ratify it are nothing more than trying to bully Ireland, you can sign a petition to Downing St here

The Death Penalty

It is not widely publicised that Japan still has the death penalty. Three people were hanged there yesterday. One, Tsutomu Miyazaki, was convicted of strangling four children, mutilating them, raping them and drinking their blood. He has shown no remorse for his deeds, and in 1994 his father, out of shame, took his own life.

I suppose this sort of case makes it easier to support the death penalty. I have been against it since the West Midlands police dragged our own system down by forging evidence in the 1980s. You see, if someone is going to be wrongly convicted (or, for that matter, imprisoned without charge for 6 weeks) I always think it might be me.

There is one other aspect. I believe I am correct in saying that in Britain if you had not been hanged within 101 days of final appeal you were reprieved. Miyazaki was arrested in 1989, sentenced in 1997 and hanged in 2008. In America, which also has inmates on death row for long periods, the constitution forbids ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ which surely this is.

No...Please..

In the USA, poor Barack Obama has had his share of bad luck over the last few months, what with an almost insane preacher and an opponent who for her own personal reasons carried on long after she had lost, but now, just when he might have sat back and enjoyed a quiet moment as the undisputed nominee, he has had the misfortune to receive the endorsement of Al Gore.

What this surprisingly popular self-publicist will do to Obama’s presidential campaign we cannot know for certain.

But it won’t be anything good.

(picture of Gore snatching microphone from NY Times)

Election Spending

Following a large number of reports to the effect that the Labour Party is insolvent, or nearly so, we learn today that the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has called for an end to the "damaging arms race" in election spending. He will bring forward measures to limit the spending that political parties can make during election campaigns.

No connection between the two, obviously.

The Honours System

For some years now I have found the twice yearly honours an increasingly depressing experience. On each occasion we seem to plumb some new depth.

But Des O’Connor? I mean The Nation Honours Des O’Connor? Have we lost all sense of reality?

Italian News 14th June

Wayne Rooney and George Bush made separate visits to Italy. Rooney got married; Bush’s visit will be remembered for making it impossible to get a mobile ‘phone signal in central Rome.

Confusion continues in Venice where militant pigeon lovers rowed into St Mark’s square from the lagoon and scattered bird seed in defiance of a city ordinance aimed at reducing the damage caused by the birds. The protesters also draped the Bridge of Sighs with a banner saying ''Venice Without Pigeons Is Like (Mayor Massimo) Cacciari Without His Beard''. Health officials are reported to be urgently checking Mr Cacciari’s facial growth.

A new tax on windfall profits by oil companies will be called the ‘Robin Hood Tax’ after the outlaw who made the poor pay more for their petrol.

Tuscany has 564 homemade ice cream shops, an increase of 26% over 2007. 134 of these are in Florence.

A series of designer jail cells went on show in Turin for an exhibition of prison architecture. Eleven architects' studios from countries including the United States, China, Iran, Libya, Japan and Italy are showing off their designs.

Doctors at the private Santa Rita clinic in Milan are suspected of conning patients into unnecessary operations, killing at least five. A further 20 suspicious deaths are being investigated.

Catholics pray to Santa Rita in ‘impossible cases’

A TV show which secretly took swabs off 50 MPs’ foreheads and tested them for recent drug use has been found guilty of ''deceitful and fraudulent'' behaviour by The Cassation Court. The tests showed that one in three had taken cannabis and cocaine in the preceding 36 hours.

The anticipated prosciutto crisis has been averted after Italian pig farmers scaled down a nationwide strike.

Italy has made the world's top ten for spending on primary schools, the Save The Children organisation has reported. The tables were led by Luxembourg and Switzerland.

62% of Italians between the ages of 14 and 29 read three or more books a year (excluding school textbooks) compared to 43% of young people in Spain, 48% in France and 61% in Germany, according to a new survey. Only Britain pipped Italy to the post, with 65%. The number of young Italians who read a newspaper at least once or twice a week has risen in the last four years, from 60% in 2003 to 78% in 2007.

Germans are apparently not keen on Euro notes from the PIGS countries (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, more politely known as the Olive Belt). The numbers on German notes begin with an X, French with a U whereas Italy’s begin with an S.

Interestingly, if you add up all the numbers on your note, and then add together the digits of that number, an Italian note always comes to 7 whereas a German note comes to 2.

If you’re interested in the numbers on bank notes, try to get out more.

The new Speaker of the House, Gianfranco Fini will take action on the ‘pianists’ – MPs who put up both hands to vote, covering the absence of a colleague. His preferred solution is an electronic one, requiring both hands to make a single vote, making the proceedings even more like a game show.

After Silvio Berlusconi’s successful attempt to block Finland hosting the EU food standards agency, on the grounds that the Finns didn’t even know what prosciutto was, but ate marinated reindeer meat, a Finnish restaurant chain has produced a reindeer meat pizza, calling it ‘The Berlusconi’.

A new trick for money laundering has been discovered in Savona, where fraudsters pay for a mass for fictional dead relatives with counterfeit 100 euro notes, receiving the change in good money.

Naples will raise a task force of helpers to clear up the streets, which will be called ‘angels of rubbish’. The city is at present sending 700 tons a day to Hamburg by train at a cost of 250 euros a ton. I thought the northbound trains had got dirtier.

The first parish church in Rome to celebrate Mass entirely in Latin for nearly half a century has been inaugurated with a service attended by over 500 worshippers.

The inaugural Mass, at the church of SS Trinita dei Pellegrini near the Campo de’ Fiori was presided over by Fr Joseph Kramer, an Australian priest.

A deer resembling a Unicorn has been discovered in a Tuscan wildlife park. Small and bone-headed, they are wondering who to call it after

Now we must be vigilant

Following Ireland’s rejection of the Constitutional Treaty the unelected Eurocrats will try to carry on with its implementation. They will try to make the Irish vote again, they will offer bribes, they will pretend it doesn’t matter. Time and again we must remind them that they must bow to democracy.

Gordon Brown has apparently told Sarkozy that Britain will proceed with ratification. If this is true it is disgraceful. But ratification of what? If the Irish are to receive concessions why can’t we receive some too? Surely a change to the Irish deal is a change to the Treaty?

These people need watching. We must be vigilant

Principle and 42 days (2)

Most observers are surprised at David Davis’ decision to fight a by-election on the 42 days issue and some are condemning. ‘David Davis's behaviour is a pure piece of political theatre’ (Actor David Blunkett); ‘David Davis sounded slightly unhinged.’ (David Hill, former Labour Communications chief) ‘This forced by-election is a farce’ (Hazel Blears)

I opposed David Davis as leader of the Conservative Party (not that my opinion, having resigned from it in 1990, counts for anything) partly because his verbal delivery was so poor that people would not connect with him. I turned on the radio shortly after the beginning of his speech, to the staccato, disjointed mumbling and said ‘that sounds like David Davis, but no, it can’t be him resigning...’

Davis mentioned other attacks on our freedoms: ‘42 days, ID cards, more CCTV cameras and the DNA database. This cannot go on. It must be stopped and for that reason I feel it incumbent on me to make a stand.’

Poor communicator he may be but this looks to me not like a piece of theatre but the principled stand of a decent man. For me to vote for Cameron in the next election I would need to be satisifed that he had thrown Conservative resources behind Davis’ re-election. Anything less would be a disgrace.

I salute Mr Davis. His stand contrasts with that of Labour MPs who disagreed with six week detention of citizens without even a charge against them but nevertheless voted for it, just to save their jobs. At a time when we are desperately short of politicians with any principle at all, this is very, very welcome

Unshakeable Principle and 42 days

I posted a while back that we can do nothing for Zimbabwe, having lost any moral authority we had by invding Iraq. Now we have approved that citizens can be imprisoned without charge – without even knowing what they are suspected of – for six weeks. To find out the impression this will give internationally, listen to Hizb ut-Tahrir, which campaigns for the reintroduction of the Muslim Caliphate:

‘The House of Commons has approved a series of draconian measures, some of which would be condemned outright by Britain were regimes like Zimbabwe or Burma to implement them. .....these measures further push Britain's security system into a kind of 'Liberal Inquisition'.

Taji Mustafa, Media Representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, said "Gordon Brown has not used evidence or principle to garner support for this bill, but the fear of a humiliating party political defeat. It is but the latest example of the games politicians play with security matters.
Principles that are claimed as fundamental and unshakeable, such as innocence until proven guilty, habeas corpus, and 'free speech' have been cast aside in the name of security - proving that, for liberal democracies, these are not really 'principles' at all.

In the name of security the world has seen western governments legitimise 42 days internment, rendition, torture and the gulag at Guantanomo Bay. By contrast, the Khilafah (Caliphate)... has fixed principles within its legal framework which do not change because of external provocation or political expediency. Hence the Shariah absolutely forbids torture, spying on citizens, retrospective punishments and internment without trial.'

We came to regret internment in Northern Ireland, and in my view we will come to regret this.

MixedFeelings

News that the European Commission is to censure Britain for its excessive budget deficit provoked mixed feelings. My first reaction was ‘what the hell business is it of theirs? We don’t even belong to the Eurozone!’. My second was that perhaps it is better that someone says something since parliamentary scrutiny appears non-existent.

The Treasury’s response that its policies remain prudent, is, I’m afraid, La-La land. It has overspent, overborrowed and overtaxed leaving us unprepared for an economic downturn. Whatever you call that, it is not ‘prudent’.

Zimbabwe

It wasn’t long ago that Archbishop Tutu was urging us to remember the good things that Robert Mugabe had done. Now the old fraud has caught which way the wind is blowing and wants.... wait for it... us to ban the cricket tour.

What really needs to happen in Zimbabwe is that he and his old mate Mbeki stop being apologists for Mugabe’s regime and actually do something for the growing humanitarian crisis. The reason they don’t is that intervention would direct the world’s conscience towards other African states where the ruling elite has impoverished the country for its own profit.

The Irish vote

It is generally recognised as a diplomatic faux pas to intervene in the political affairs of another country, particularly in the run-up to an election. But this has not stopped Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France, who has reminded the Irish that they have received a large amount of European money and should vote in the correct way on the Constitutional Treaty.

The Irish have of course received a large amount of money from Europe, but I’m not sure anyone told them there would be strings attached, and that these strings would involve the abnegation of their democracy. My hope is that this foolish intervention from the erstwhile soixant-huitard will teach the undecided, reportedly 30% just two days from the referendum, exactly what is at stake here, and that they will vote accordingly.

Italian News 7th June

2nd June was Republic Day in Italy. A survey shows that 29% of Italians celebrate it without knowing what the celebration is for.

Several Italian MPs, including Alessandra Mussolini (picture), unhappy at the House seating plan, have demanded that their chairs be made more comfortable

Twelve businessmen have been arrested in Foggia after the discovery of an illegal rubbish tip measuring half a million cubic metres, thought to be the biggest in Europe. They are also charged with diverting a river in order to conceal it. The tip is the equivalent of a football pitch with rubbish piled 100 metres high.

Seven out of ten Italian girls are unhappy with their bodies, the Association of Food Science Specialists (ANSISA) has said (without mentioning how many men were satisfied with them). Over a million young Italian women suffered from ''serious'' illnesses related to food such as anorexia and bulimia.

Despite the continued popularity of ice cream parlours, Italians now consume more ice cream at home, averaging four kilogrammes a year of the pre-packaged product. This has increased from 250 grammes a head in the 1950s, when commercially packaged ice cream was first launched in the country.

Over 200 prisoners have been transferred from Rome's central Regina Coeli (‘Queen of the Heavens’) prison to make room for any protestors arrested during the visit here by United States President George W.Bush.

Christmas Crib making is a popular and competitive pastime in Italy and several artists will produce commemorative cribs for the European Football Championships. Gennaro ('Genny') Di Virgilio of Naples will depict soccer stars Alessandro Del Piero and Antonio Cassano as Siamese twins, joined at the waist.

A poll found that 85% of Italians were in favour of the repeal of the 1958 ‘Merlin’ law which closed brothels in Italy. 47% were in favour as a means to clean up the streets, while 38% were in favour because it was a way to protect prostitutes from exploitation and violence. Only 4% viewed the reopening of brothels as ''an immoral act''.

One out of two Italians, including many who voted for the centre-left opposition, have a favourable opinion of what the government of Premier Silvio Berlusconi has done since taking office last month, according to a new poll.

Leaders of 183 countries, including Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, have gathered in Rome for a conference at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is based in the city. At the scheduled end no agreements had been reached..

The Italian National Nuclear Physics Institute has found a way to increase the performance of particle accelerators. The Institute is headed by the delightfully named Pantaleo Raimondi and his particle accelerator is called Daphne.

Police in Catania have arrested a 16-year-old boy after he was caught robbing the same pharmacy for the fifth time in three weeks.

An Italian school teacher who became qualified to teach in 1974 waited eight years until 1982 to get on to the permanent teaching list but has had to spend 25 years as a substitute teacher, plugging gaps. She has finally been offered a permanent post, two months before her retirement.

Motorcycling ace Valentino Rossi has had his bike and clothing coloured blue and white to show his support for the Italian soccer team.

The ID Card for Shoes has been launched in Lucca. Through the Ecodatabase site, a portal dedicated to shoes, it will be possible to have information on the manufacturing process of your footwear. The measure is to counteract fakes.

Over 3,000 companies in Tuscany are involved in the shoe making trade.

Italians are the world's biggest consumers of bottled water, drinking an average of 246 litres a person, more than the United Arab Emirates or Mexico.

In Venice, 18 million visitors will be handed a kit consisting of an empty plastic bottle and a map showing the location of 122 fountains across the city, with a chemical analysis of the water. It is a measure supported by the Church: In February the Venice patriarchate called on the faithful to give up mineral water for Lent.

Almost two out of three Italians believe that the teachings of the Catholic Church are still valid today, as against 54% last year. It is a sign of the increasing popularity of Benedict XVI

Cesena cathedral will have to be purified after worshippers at a 7am service discovered a couple of goth rock fans having sex in a confession box.

Vanna Marchi her daughter Stefania Nobile amassed a 30million euro fortune between 1996 and 2001 by selling ''magic numbers'' on TV to over 250,000 Italians. She also sold 'magical rites' to remove ''negative vibes and the evil eye''. The pair were rearrested pending an appeal hearing on the grounds they were prone to flight, presumably well within their capabilities

In flower in Umbria

Pomegranate

Olive

Vine

Zimbabwe

Is there anything that can be done for Zimbabwe? It now seems that Mugabe’s influence in the military was deeper than had been supposed. Soldiers are effectively carrying out ethnic cleansing in order to win the election: bullying, intimidation, murder and a nod to democracy. British and American diplomats have been arrested at gunpoint. Aid work has been stopped.

There was talk some time ago of the United Nations doing something. But two out of the five permanent members of the security council don’t believe in democracy. China was recently found to be trying to supply Mugabe with armaments.

An invasion by the West? Here we can see the real damage of our invasion of Iraq. It would no longer be politically possible for America and Britain to invade a country without UN approval, however worthy the cause. And that approval will not come. The Zimbabweans are condemned to poverty and starvation.

The turning point?

The Fed announces it is more worried about inflation than recession and doesn’t want the dollar to fall any further; oil and other commodities will no longer therefore be a hedge against a falling dollar; India and Malaysia announce an end to fuel subsidies. July oil slips under $123.

I am just wondering if we might one day look back on this week as the turning point, or the first indications of a turn, for the USA. I still think Europe has a way to go.

The First Way

I am an avid Guardian reader: I like it when it is insightful and right (Andrew Rawnsley, Marcel Berlins) and I like it when it is barking and wrong (Polly Toynbee et al.). The bits I don’t like are when it is unthinking, and there’s a cracking example in Sunday’s Observer.

Will Hutton has been on some Pope’s committee, and he is anxious that you should know it: 'What I told the Pope about how to shape the new capitalism’ is the title, and in case our conviction might waver on what a life changing event this has been for His Holiness we are reminded ‘Rather, it was [Benedict’s] opportunity to .... listen to what we had to say on the great issues he confronts.’ And ‘I was invited to the Vatican ..... to give my thoughts on what is happening in contemporary capitalism’.

But these thoughts are, unfortunately for the Holy See, just the empty headed tosh he has been spewing out for years. Once you have got over the arrogance you are plunged into a whole new world of murky thinking. Hutton is the author of Tony Blair’s short-lived ‘third way’: we hate capitalism but like business. Business must be allowed to make profits, but, hey, not too much. ‘[Catholics] want decent wages; more autonomy and dignity at work; they want the rich to accept obligations to promote the common good; firms to recognise that there is only any morality to profit making if it is as a consequence of delivering a declared economic purpose - to manufacture a great car, build a safe plane or whatever.’

But this is the nub. People do go into business to make money. Hutton quotes Unilever, Boeing and Sony as having some higher moral purpose. My guess is the Lever brothers, and Messrs Boeing and Ibaru of Sony started out wanting to feed their families. That is quite healthy. Of course their mission statements are written in Huttonish Doublespeak about promoting social welfare but that is just the zeitgeist. All three companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to beat the competition and keep their costs down: that is why they are successful.

The Pope will easily understand that it would be very nice if someone started a bank in order to feed the poor, but equally that the bank would fail. The point Hutton misses is this: that although he lumps them together in his addle-pated Blairite way there is a huge difference between overtaxing and regulating companies in some spurious attempt at morality and, in his words ‘the rich to accept obligations to promote the common good’. The first is a recipe for poverty. The second involves companies trading freely and the people who have profited from them giving their wealth freely. The Pope will not need Mr Hutton’s help to understand that: it is called charity. He probably calls it ‘the first way’.

Lost Tribe

I can't help thinking about the lost tribe 'discovered' in South America.

That's it for them, now, isn't it? They can look forward to a future of counselling, welfare, cheap trainers and game shows on TV.

They shot at the helicopter, you know.

Italian News 31st May

After 10 years of work, engineers have stabilised the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the first time in 800 years. It will never be straight because 12th century builders, realising it was tilting, compensated in the construction and it is slightly curved.

La Scala has commissioned Giorgio Battistelli to produce an opera version of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" for the 2011 season.

International research has shown that Italians, both men and women, are the most desired partners for a holiday romance.

58% of Italian women in their fifties, and 38% of those in their sixties, confess to having had an affair, whilst only 11% of twenty year olds say they have.

‘La Ciemonna’ or interplanetary critical mass, is the name given to a mass cycling demonstration in Rome, to promote the healthy effects of cycling.

Museion, the Bolzano museum, has been criticised for displaying a one metre high sculpture of a frog nailed to a cross with a foaming mug of beer in one hand. In 2006 Museion officials were prosecuted over an installation that involved a lavatory flushing to the musical accompaniment of Italy's national anthem.

May 26th was National Bread Day and to celebrate, a Rome bakery has invented the Tottino, a half kilo loaf named after the captain of the national football team.

Based on data from 2006, a report shows that Italy had 3,092 bank robberies compared to 582 in Germany, 438 in Spain and 271 in France. For every 100 bank branches, 9.67 were robbed in Italy compared to 1.37 in Germany, 1.14 in Spain and 0.97 in France. One cause is that Italians still tend to use cash.

Women now account for about half of all wine sales in Italy. Out of 13 million female wine lovers, younger women tend to drink less and pay more attention to quality, whilst the older ones drink more cheap plonk.

Researchers at the Scientific Institute for Food Production have developed a process which eliminates the hard, thorny leaves from artichokes and prepares the artichoke for cooking, but also extends its refrigerator life to up to ten days.

Reservoirs in South East Italy are an estimated two-thirds below capacity and the remaining water is at risk of evaporating due to the current heat wave. The situation is the opposite in the north where, as opposed to recent years, the levels of water in the major lakes are all above average.

The retirement age at Milan's La Scala opera house is 52, compared to 42 in most other countries.

A switchboard operator at Taranto jail has faked blindness for 24 years in order to keep his job. He comes to work on a motorbike.

The Italian Farmers Association has warned that Italy may soon be in the grip of a national prosciutto shortage after Italian pig farmers confirmed they will be going on strike this weekend.

The Court of Cassation has ruled that a wife is not entitled to assets jointly held in the marriage as she disgraced the marital bed by taking a lover. Unfortunately the case has taken 33 years to get to the Court and the Husband is now 75 and the wife 69.

Giancarlo Gentilini, Deputy Mayor of Treviso, is trying to ban foreign breeds of dog from the city. Gentilini once took out all the park benches in Treviso in case immigrants slept on them.

The annual Matanza, the lure of migrating tuna fish into harbours for slaughter, has begun in Carloforte, Sardinia. The largest tuna speared weighed 400 kilos.

150 villagers of Campobasso have issued a petition to police for the release of a 48 year old man accused of wife beating, claiming he is the victim of a plot. The man is also accused of beating his daughter when she tried to intervene.

Mayor of Milan Letizia Moratti is being criticised for stopping a light show at Leonardo’s masterpiece The Last Supper. The show, by British film-maker Peter Greenaway, will project montages, including images of Christ's genitalia, on to the painting, accompanied by actors' voices, in an attempt to link "8,000 years of art and 112 years of cinema".

Left Wing Nazis

From The Times’ Richard Owen, 26th May:
‘Balaclava-clad gangs, some wearing bandanas emblazoned with swastikas, smashed shop windows with iron bars and baseball bats and beat up shopkeepers in a hitherto bohemian neighbourhood of Rome.

Members of the gangs shouted “Get out, bastard foreigners” as they attacked Bengali shopkeepers in the explosion of xenophobic violence.

Gianni Alemanno, the capital’s new right-wing Mayor, condemned the attacks, which took place in the eastern suburb of Pigneto, an area with a reputation for tolerance, on Saturday night.’

Now, the organiser of this outrage has been arrested and has admitted his part. He has a tattoo of Che Guevara on his arm and is proud of his left wing credentials. The Pigneto raid, described in most of Europe’s lefty press as ‘Nazi-style’ was organised by the Left, in association with the Camorra, who felt the immigrants were muscling in on their patch.

I am not trying to excuse the extreme right, who are just as vile as the extreme left, but trying to explain that this isn’t as straightforward as people think, and the chance of pinning the Nazi label on it all has been accepted with a little too much alacrity.

The BBC

News that the BBC Internet operation is 48% over budget will not, unfortunately, surprise many people.

It is laxness on the part of the politicians, however, that I blame. Programme makers and news editors should only have an eye to a quality product. Politicians and management should have an eye to not overspending.

What we have is the opposite. The TV schedules are filled with rubbish (OK, not quite as bad as Italy but low quality pap for the most part) because they want to compete with the independents (Why?). And those with the purse strings loosen them in the name of quality.

I would reduce it to one TV channel, The World Service (which I would expand because it is Britain’s window on the world) Radios 3 and 4 and nothing else. The news department would be by far the biggest and feed into the individual units to avoid duplication (we are sending more BBC people to the Olympics than athletes) and have a limited but high quality website..

Every pound spent by the BBC crowds out investment by talented independents. It’s like Old Labour’s nationalised industries and its sell-by date is long past.

Daniel Hannan

The Telegraph feature writer, blogger and Euro MP, who is generally speaking on the side of the angels, goes so far over the top on his blog that it has to be challenged. He reports that the estimable Richard North has given up on his campaign for a referendum on the EU Constitution, saying ‘we end on a note of abject failure’.

Daniel recalls previous times when the game seemed to be up, such as 1992 ‘I campaigned frenetically....I remember feeling utterly alone..’

What you should have done, Daniel, is what I and thousands of others did (you were far from alone) and resign from the Conservative Party. I too had hopes of a career in Tory politics but this was a point of principle, too important to be ignored. Not for Daniel, though. Hannan, as we know, became a Conservative Euro MP, accepting a decent salary for ditching everything he purports to believe in, accepting the Conservative line whatever it may be. This is why the cause has failed: the Conservatives don’t need to be eurosceptic when they have soi-disant eurosceptics who are ready to toe the line.

He goes on ‘This blog, for one, plans to stay in business. Now who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?’

You are not keeping the bridge, Daniel. You surrendered long ago. But some of us remain.

A new PM?

Amidst all the stories of Labour figures plotting to get rid of Gordon Brown, several commentators have said that they cannot (or should not) replace one unelected Prime Minister with another, without calling an election.

Of course there is one person, qualified to be prime minister and never rejected by the electorate, who could be called on. It would be the ultimate humiliation for Mr. Brown.

Fireflies

The first fireflies are out here in Umbria, and can be seen at dusk, zooming round the garden flashing like tiny airborne belisha beacons. The firefly is in fact a type of beetle. 90% of the energy it uses to produce the light actually goes into light, making it 9 times as efficient as an electric light bulb.

The Italian for firefly, lucciola, is also the slang for a prostitute. Peter Hobday, the former Radio 4 presenter, lives in the charmingly named Val delle lucciole, which he refers to as Tarts Valley.

The Italian for ‘to get hold of the wrong end of the stick’ is ‘to mistake a firefly for a lantern’

Italian News 24th May

The think tank Eurispes has published estimated accounts for the ‘ndrangheta, the Calabrian organised crime syndicate, showing annual income of 44 billion euros, equivalent to around 3% of Italy’s GDP, or the entire GDP of Estonia and Slovenia combined. It is made up of drugs (27bn), industrial corruption (5.7bn), usury (5bn), arms trafficking (2.9bn) and prostitution (2.9bn). No figure given for taxes paid.

Other organised crime syndicates include the Mafia (Sicily), Camorra (Campania) and Sacra Corona Unita (Puglia).

In the last ten years the Italian home mortgage market has increased fivefold but is still low at less than 20% of GDP compared to a European average of 50%. Italians have the highest rate of home ownership but traditionally they have owned their houses outright.

On average a person’s income doubles on becoming an MP in Italy. Italian MPs incomes have risen 6 times faster than the Italian average.

Italy has no university in the world top 100 and Southern Italy doesn’t have one in the top 300.

An estimated 3% of Italians are believed to have hepatitis C, some 1.8 million people, the highest percentage in Europe. In some African countries, like Egypt, 20% of the population has the disease. 14,000 people in Italy died from hepatitis C in 2003 compared to 447 who died from AIDS.

The Ponte dell'Accademia, one of just four bridges across Venice's Grand Canal, will be made into a permanent structure. The current bridge, made of wood and iron and opened in 1933, was only ever intended as a temporary measure.

A Milanese pensioner was stabbed in the face after a fight broke out in a shopping centre restaurant over who got the last slice of cake.

Police in Pescara have discovered that the owner of a local factory has falsely sold 400,000 jars of preserves to the United States, under the Fiordifrutta label (which belongs to another company). He had also illegally attached labels to the jars certifying that the jam was kosher.

Tuscany is marking the 80th anniversary of the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover by opening up the Villa Mirenda at Scandicci where D.H. Lawrence wrote the novel. There will be a series of lectures and films. The book was not published in England until 1960.

An association of Padre Pio devotees has said it will press charges against the Capuchin friars of San Giovanni Rotondo for desecration, in that they allegedly opened up the tomb to take an early peek.

Italians will not in general buy agricultural produce from other countries, the exception being apples. According to the Farmers’ Union, there are 1,800 varieties of apples in Europe, but around 80% of Italian demand for the fruit was fulfilled by just four types: Red Delicious and Golden Delicious from America, Granny Smith from Australia and Gala from New Zealand. Producers of English Russets should take note.

Italy banned nuclear power after a referendum following the Chernobyl disaster, but following energy shortages in recent years, industry Minister Claudio Scajola has confirmed that Italy will begin construction on new generation plants in the current legislature

Special 'anti-Mafia' pasta will be on sale from Sunday. The plan is to sell 100,000 packets of spaghetti produced by a youth cooperative using wheat grown on lands seized from the Mafia around the Sicilian town of Corleone.

Exports of Tuscan red wine to The United Kingdom were up 20% in value and 18% in quantity for 2007 with respect the previous year.

‘Open Cellars’ marks its 16th year with some 800 vineyards opening their cellars to the public. Well over a million people are expected to be drawn to the countryside to see where and how wine is made and discover what it tastes like at its source. There are currently around five million practising wine tourists, also known as 'wine-nauts', in Italy.

Much of Italy's 3,700 kilometres of beach been conceded to private businesses who charge people for entrance as well as other facilities. In Liguria, only 19 km out of 135 km of beaches are free of charge. However the 10 metres next to the sea on any beach is, by law, public property, so if you don’t cross the private part but swim in you can use the most exclusive private beach free of charge.

Tiscali founder Renato Soru has bought the Communist newspaper l’Unità. Founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924 it was the official mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party until 1991. Former editors include Walter Veltroni, now leader of the Democratic Party. Soru said the paper was ''an asset to culture and democracy''.

Following restrictive legislation, about 600,000 Italians have given up smoking in the last year. However, the number getting through more than one packet a day has risen to 36%, an increase of 4% on 2007. Some 26% of all Italian men and 18% of women smoke - a total of 11.2 million people. Most smokers have their first cigarette at the age of 17.

Most Italian trains are given names, but hitherto there has been no name for the commuter trains. After a poll of primary school children it has been decided to call them ‘dingoes’. The other winning names included, for Italy's new generation of high-speed trains, Cheetah and Gazelle. Existing names include Tortoise (obviously) and Crocodile.

According to a survey conducted by Il Giornale, almost seven out of 10 Italians said they wanted immigrants to be fingerprinted and DNA tested.

With a new government, plans to build the world's longest suspension bridge to link Sicily and the Italian mainland are back on track and the bridge may open as early as 2016, they say. A Sicilian spokesman in dark glasses said the slightly costly structure would be ''an asset to culture and democracy''.

The beautiful game

The Moscow Police must have felt they had drawn the short straw with two English teams reaching the final. A nice all-Swiss clash between Appenzell Athletic and FC Graubunden must have been what they had dreamed of. But it seems they played a blinder: no violence, no arrests.

No violence is more than can be said of the football where, presumably out of the referee’s sight (I am not too clear on the rules), players were pushing, punching, kicking and in one case (Carlos Tevez) trying to strangle others. A poor example, and I think it is even worse that it seems to have gone unreported.

There were arrests at Stamford Bridge, of course, thousands of miles from where the match was staged. I am not of the Authoritarian Tendency but can on occasions be tempted to think that tougher penalties might be the answer. In more sensible mood I think we need an answer to this: what sort of society have we created where a game – 22 nancies chasing a ball – becomes so important, where people have so little else to cling to, that they indulge themselves in such behaviour? I suppose we’re all to blame, but how? How did it get this way?

Cricket: the second Test against New Zealand starts tomorrow.

Oil prices

Oil reached $135 a barrel today and the BBC’s The World at One devoted its entire programme to a well meaning but rather confusing, lightweight analysis of the problem.

Ten years ago the price was $10. But the point of my giving that figure is not to show how much it has gone up. Oil then had collapsed to (in real terms) a disastrous low which no one had foreseen. Those connected with the oil industry, as I was, saw page after page of memoranda, endured hour after hour of meetings, on how to cope with $10 oil for the next ten years, quite possibly (the reports said) more. Equally no one had foreseen the $130 price and it is not set in stone (or I should say in sedimentary rock formations) much less the apocalyptic $200 a barrel forecasts that have been bandied about.

What’s happening? Demand from the Chinese, some have said: if every Chinese bought a motorbike we’d be.. gosh, I don’t know where...(buying motorcycle manufacturers’ shares, perhaps). But no, the growth in Chinese and indeed global demand has been declining. Yes, declining. There’s the fall in the dollar which seems to have been worth $25-30 a barrel (for us Europeans). There’s interruption of supply in Nigeria and Iraq, which is a problem, and there’s speculation: nerves and ambition. My end of year forecast was that the price would come off, and I still see little in the way of fundamentals to keep it so high.

Some of the environmental nutters say this is the endgame, a slow decline in the world’s reserves leading to catastrophic prices. Nonsense. There is still oil. When I was first involved in the industry in the late 1970s they said there were reserves for about 45 years. Now 30 years later there are reserves for about..er..45 years. I remember being told that the production west of Shetland wasn’t viable at less than $40 a barrel; there is oil from shale, in massive quantities, which (people threw up their hands in horror) isn’t viable at less than about $60 a barrel. There’s oil left in established fields that it just wasn’t worth getting out when prices were $10.

Oil is a long term business. It is quite easy to imagine, for people who have seen a whole cycle or two pass before their eyes on the Reuters’ screen, that over the next decade massive investment and then production takes place and then there is too much oil again. We don’t know. In ten years it might be $10 again. The price at the pump? I think it is going to be high (but not much higher and occsionally a fair bit lower) for 2 years. But I don’t know either.

If there is to be massive investment driven by the high prices, Britain (if it still exists then) wants its fair share, so a word of advice to Mr Cameron: if he does become Prime Minister at a time of high oil prices he should guarantee a tax regime to the oil companies for the long term, encouraging them to prospect for more. Mr Brown cheated them by fiddling the duties and they never trusted him again. When you invest for 25 years and more, trust is important.

Poor Ada

Some people may have been surprised at Gordon Brown's reference at PMQs to Britain's worst enemy Alchy Ada. I'm not; the old dear can be quite a handful after a couple of gins.

Eurovision

Belgium is, as we know, a country divided by language and culture, and so I was interested to read on the BBC website about its Eurovison entry. It is in a made up language. The ‘words’ include "O julissi na jalyni, O julissi na dytini, O bulo diti non slukati, Sestrone dina katsu..." which doesn’t mean anything at all, in any language but is, I suppose, inoffensive.

I rather hope it wins: it seems to symbolise the whole event.

The Embryology Bill

Ian Dale says that anyone who has a public platform should be prepared to show how he would vote on a sensitive issue like the Embryology Bill. He may be right and for what it’s worth I’ll give a couple of observations. All societies condemn killing and just as when I was young we had to reach for a definition of what ‘dead’ meant – stopped breathing, no viable life predicted, brain dead etc – so now we have to reach for a definition of what being alive is. And in my view we have to do it before we start discussing more complicated matters such as the Embryology Bill.

The only conclusion I have been able to come to that makes any sense (to me) is that life begins at the moment of conception. I should say immediately that I bear no resentment or ill will to anyone who has come to a different conclusion – it is a difficult matter, particularly in my case because its implications are unpopular. The people I do despise are those who vote for abortion because it is convenient.

For me it means that there is no moral difference in killing a human 20 weeks after conception to killing one 20 weeks or 20 years after birth. Accordingly I would have abstained on the 20-24 weeks issue on the grounds that the difference is purely aesthetic: the age and similarity of the aborted foetus to a grown human. I might possibly have persuaded myself that animal-human hybrids are not humans so you can do what you like with them but I doubt it and find the scales tipped by its sheer repugnance. I should certainly have voted against ‘saviour siblings’ because in my terms this is saying your child can live if we kill 99 others. That I should have done so in the knowledge that this might limit the chances of a cure for a number of diseases is an indication of how difficult an MP’s job can be.

I hope MPs have informed themselves fully on this and related matters, such as whether the alternatives to embryo cells are viable. Some people are saying that embryo cells are not as good as stem cells taken from the spine or from blood because they are naturally carcinogenic. Some are saying we simply cannot progress using only non-embryo stem cells. Which is the truth?

But I have my doubts as to whether MPs are taking their responsibilities seriously and the Tory response of splitting the difference between the proposed 20 weeks and the existing 24 smacks of canny politics which has no place in this debate. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Lastly, I am fed up with being grouped with the ‘religious objectors’ and therefore regarded as mad by the left wing press. This has nothing whatsoever to do with religion: it is a secular, humanist morality with which the Roman Church (to which I don't belong) agrees.

Bad Reporting

I’m paraphrasing this but you can see the original on the Sky website. Sky’s David Bowden: this lady has agreed to tell her story in her own words...she doesn’t speak any English and I don’t speak any Chinese so we are going to talk through an interpreter..

Interpreter ... she really really wants to thank the government and the lovely soldiers...

Bowden..is she worried there will be another big earthquake and she will be in danger?..

Interpreter: she says that even if there is another big earthquake she is not worried because she thinks the government and the party leaders are able to handle the situation.

Bowden: so there you have it, in her own words..

So.. let’s see if we can guess where they hired the interpreter? How any reporter could fall for this I really don’t know.

Italian News 17th May

Research into the body clock reveals that only 3% of Italians are able to wake on time without an alarm clock. 16% use one occasionally and fully 81% use one all the time. No research yet as to why they are still always late for appointments.


Terravision, which operates a bus service from Rome’s Ciampino airport to the city centre for passengers on low-cost airlines has had its fleet of 12 buses impounded by police for not having a valid licence. In some cases officers boarded the vehicles ordering off the passengers and their luggage. Terravision contests the claim.


Researchers in Turin were startled to find DNA traces of the Tuber indicum, a Chinese truffle, on tree roots in Italy. The Chinese truffle looks the same as the black Italian truffle, but has no taste or smell and grows more aggressively than either the black or white Italian versions and if the spores have spread it could usurp them. The spoors had been impregnated into plants and sold to truffle cultivators as the real thing.


Italy has the world’s lowest birth rate at 1.2, against a European average of 1.5 and the necessary rate for population replacement of 2.1

The Cassation Court has upheld a conviction and 150 euro fine under Italy's law against noxious emissions against a woman who owned 30 cats and dogs and allowed them to foul her garden.

Sultry Italian screen goddess Monica Bellucci has won a Gerard, the French equivalent of the American Golden Raspberry Awards for ''worst achievements in film'', for her role in Le Deuxieme Souffle, not a cookery programme but a film noir ‘The Second Wind’.


The North Eastern region of Trentino-Alto Adige will hold a three-day conference on living with brown bears, in an effort to stem the fears of local residents. ''Bears are appearing more and more frequently, worrying villagers and farmers. They tend to divide public opinion,'' said organisers. Bears were reintroduced into the border regions without any agreements with neighbouring countries and several have been killed.

Italian scientists in Cremona have created the world's first pigs to be born without the antigen that causes humans to reject transplanted animal organs.

Italian Yacht building is undergoing a boom. Fashion Yacht Italia & C. group have produced the Fashion 68, the first model made with gold leaf flooring in the interior, and will open The Fashion Yacht Cafe' in Livorno in October, to give everyone the opportunity to experience dinner on board a yacht.

Italy has got its first TV news show in Romanian. The show goes out each Friday on a local station in Turin, which has about 60,000 Romanian immigrants.

The head of Venice city council's 'urban decorum' office has appealed to people to stop the graffiti on historic buildings and monuments. Augusto Salvadori said the council could no longer put up with the costs required for such clean-up operations.


The urban decorum office also sends volunteer patrols of 'guardian angels' round the city to prevent ''indecorous behaviour'' among the 20 million tourists the city receives each year, which includes sitting on the pavement, eating sandwiches or going bare-chested. Other moves include banning the feeding of pigeons, a crack-down on street artists, laws to stop the sale of fast food in St Mark's Square and plans to fine beggars up to 500 euros and confiscate their day's takings.

Work to stabilise Venice's famous bell tower in St Mark's Square has come to a halt after builders hit archaeological remains while digging a drain for the workmen's toilets.


Half of Italian men between the ages of 30 and 50 have made an appointment with a specialist to discuss having plastic surgery. Only around 20-30% go through with the process, however. The most requested procedures are reabsorbable fillers, laser depilation, botox treatments and lip retouching.

The rubbish crisis in Naples and the Campania region has resulted in a 650,000 drop in tourist numbers and a loss of earnings of around 64 million euros. On Friday traffic in Naples city centre was blocked by some 5,000 tonnes of rubbish, and firemen were called out on 60 occasions on Thursday night as desperate residents set fire to rubbish mountains.

Italy's greatest clown, Carlo Colombaioni, who worked on several Fellini films, has died in France at the age of 75.


His successor, Silvio Berlusconi, has announced that the new government will have 37 under-secretaries but no junior ministers. The government has won a vote of confidence in the Senate and so is all set to race ahead with the political programme just a month after being elected.

Tax

In today’s Times, Chris Dillow congratulates Alastair Darling on getting himself out of a hole (although over a million people are still going to be worse off) over the 10p rate. He also discusses the proposition that borrowing is a tax on future generations. Quite interesting.

Where I differ with Dillow is in this: ‘He seems to have learnt what Gordon Brown didn't as Chancellor - that the best way to help the low paid is to lift them out of the tax system altogether’.

I believe that everybody should pay some tax, to give them a sense of civic responsibility and to give them an incentive to campaign for the tax to be reduced. No one is going to push for smaller government if it is effectively free.

Israel

Today is the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel, that is to say of the date when David Ben-Gurion made the declaration of an independent state. I mention this because if you believed the press it started to happen ten days ago and indeed scarcely makes the papers today.

I haven’t always agreed with everything Israel has done but what I have liked about it is that it carries on in the face of such resentment, such hatred. It is an example in national courage which I respect and envy.

Happy birthday, Israel.

Brown and Cameron

Criticism of Gordon Brown is now so widespread and so serious, I think as bad as I have ever seen of a political leader, that it will soon start to be working, perversely, in his favour. People will start to think ‘wait, but he’s not that bad... what about the other bloke...’. There is, in short, a danger that the Tories have peaked too early.

Cameron was sensible to be heard this morning talking about Burma and not criticising the government. He must look like a leader in waiting, not keep telling us this is a government in decline.

Italy disappoints British Lefties

One of the worst crimes a journalist can commit is to decide on the answer and fit facts or near-facts to make it the conclusion. We have seen quite a lot of this recently where the Left in Britain, unable to conceive that a European country threw out a centre left government and replaced it with a centre right one (you’ll see another soon, chaps) have decided that Italy has turned fascist. From their usual outlets, the Guardian, The Independent and the New Statesman has emerged a chorus of drivel which would have put Mussolini’s press management to shame.

One or two wanted us to believe that there were strutting fascisti on the steps of Montecitorio making fascist salutes. I looked as close as I could at the photos and they were just people waving, having a good time. What might have been two straight arm salutes could have been people catching the attention of the camera or even about to make closed fist communist salutes. None of the worthies claimed that Italy was facing disaster when the communist salute was visible everywhere. Indeed there have been communists and ‘post communists’ (Tobias Helm uses the term ‘post fascist' in the hope that you will think they still are) in the government in recent years but the lefty comentariat never suggested that Italy was heading for a period of Stalin’s gulags or Jewish pogroms. Indeed even that is not a fair comparison because there was a hard right party standing at the election (La Destra, headed by Storace and Santanché) which refused to join Berlusconi’s People of Liberty without assurances as to policy which they were not given. La Destra was completely wiped out, as of course was the hard left. If there is only one conclusion that we can draw from recent elections it is that Italy has rejected extremism.

People in Italy, politicians in particular, do things for effect. When the likes of Tobias Helm quote Bossi as having the firearms ready they don’t understand (or perhaps they do but don’t want you to) that he would have been horrified by such a thing, even before his heart attack. Helm shows neither a liking for nor an understanding of Italy. He is the author of a lightweight book called the Dark Heart of Italy, in which he complains, inter alia, that Italian Sex Shops are called Sexy Shops – foreigners unable to get his language right, you see.

The big issue in Italy, particularly in Rome, is crime. A black girl was raped and killed outside one of Rome’s stations; most of the kids in juvenile detention centres are non-Italians; most people think illegal immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of the crime in Italy and most people think that the generations of left wing governments in Rome and elsewhere haven’t done enough. So they voted for someone else. Nationally they thought the centre left government didn’t do enough on a range of issues, so they voted for someone else.

Here is Tobias Helm again: ‘Many in Italy are deeply worried by the results. Berlusconi's coalition, they say, wasn't an ordinary rightwing movement, but instead an assortment of far-right extremists and dangerous, deluded rabble-rousers.’ So who are these ‘many people’, Tobias? Met them down the sexy shop, did you? Or was it, perchance, in the Guardian’s editorial room?

What people really are worried about here is not that Berlusconi will be screeching plans for an invasion of Africa from the Palazzo di Venezia but that he will do what he did the last time: nothing, except keep himself out of prison.

Italian News 10th May

A housewife from Avezzano has been treated for severe burns after an artichoke she was peeling exploded in her hand. The planting of the explosive is thought to be a ‘Unabomber’ style gesture.

Responding to high street inflation, Italians are eating 2.6% less pasta than a year ago; the staple has increased in price by 18.6%. They are saving money by eating 4% more chicken and eggs, now that the avian ‘flu threat is forgotten.

The annual miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, took place as usual. It was witnessed by 1,500 people, mainly tourists. Some people say that if the saint abandoned the people of Naples, the streets would fill with rubbish.

60% of Italian males say they would have sex without love, against only 27% of women. 85% of men thought seduction was an essential part of sex. The survey was conducted in 12 European countries and found Italy about average in that 53% of people would like more sex and 20% would interrupt a sex act if it was becoming boring.

The European Commission is taking Italy to court for the excessive rubbish in Naples

Italian justice is so slow that 95% of crimes are subject to the statute of limitations and go unpunished.

The Vatican website now has a section in Latin - Sancta Sedes (Holy See) - with Latin papal texts and religious works. Father Reginald Foster, an American priest who is the Pope's official Latinist, has a weekly programme on Vatican Radio called The Latin Lover, in which he explains the historical and contemporary uses of the language.

45% of Italians between the ages of 30 and 35 still live with their parents. Only 18% of parents believe their children should leave home once they turn legal age. However, almost half of new couples go to live within a kilometre of the home of the parents of either the husband or wife.

Italy is the best place in the world for children but not for their mothers, according to the 2008 Mother's Day Report Card put out by the Save the Children charity. Out of 146 countries Italy, whilst first for children, for the second year in a row, was 19th best for mothers and 24th for women. Although behind Hungary, Spain and Greece in the women's category, Italy was a better place to live for women than Austria, Japan and Luxembourg.

The Archdiocese of Naples has joined a campaign aimed at reducing traffic deaths. ''The diocese feels it is its duty to join in this mission of civic faith and defence of life,'' Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the archbishop of Naples, said. The campaign is called 'a maronna t'accumpagna', which in Neapolitan dialect means 'may the Virgin Mary be by your side' (presumably not wearing a seatbelt and talking on a mobile ‘phone).Naples has two road accidents every three hours, 23 people injured every day and an average of 2.6 deaths a week in traffic accidents. Road accidents are the most common cause of death among people under 30.

Padre Pio's shrine at San Giovanni Rotondo, where the saint's body has been put on show, has become a bigger attraction than Lourdes. It is forecast that nine million visitors will make the town the world's second most popular destination for religious tourists behind the Vatican. Lourdes averages eight million visitors.

The mayor of San Paolo Matese in Molise, after the town had been cut off by snow for three days, denounced the company contracted to clear the snow as having ''a couldn't-give-a-f*** attitude and scant professionalism'' hoping they would be fined, but was himself charged with defamation. The Court of Cassation has however ruled that mayors are entitled to swear at companies who fail to carry out services necessary for citizens to go about their daily life

Arezzo in Tuscany has built the world’s first urban hydrogen duct. Hydrogen produced using solar energy is pumped direct to users, and powers an industrial estate and the surrounding houses.

Following the temporary publication of the entire nation’s tax records with addresses and income details, Rome Police are investigating the violation of privacy and are questioning outgoing deputy finance minister Vincenzo Visco, who it will be recalled once transferred away a team of investigators who were looking at a bank which had financed his party.

Silvio Berlusconi has had sworn in his new government in what papers are describing as the shortest time ever – just short of a month. Italy's new government is the 66th since the fall of Fascism and the 60th since Italy was proclaimed a republic after the war. The new executive is made up of 12 full ministers and nine without portfolio, for a total of 21, four less than the outgoing centre-left government of Romano Prodi. The average age of the ministers is 50, six years less than the outgoing Prodi government.

Four out of 21 ministers are women, although only two hold portfolios. In the Prodi government six out of 25 ministers were women, the same percentage..


Italians have more confidence in Silvio Berlusconi than his government as a whole, according to a poll in La Repubblica. However, Youth Policy Minister Giorgia Meloni (pictured), the youngest minister ever, enjoys the greatest confidence among all the government ministers with an approval rating of 62%.

The cabinet's first formal meeting will be held in Naples, as Berlusconi promised during the election campaign, prioritising the rubbish clearance. However one miracle a month is thought to be all Naples will get.

Europe Day

Today is Europe Day. Anyone knew that? Good.

It is the anniversary of The Schumann Declaration of 1950 which Euro-loonies regard as the symbolic beginning of their undemocratic state.

In fact we now know that Schumann had nothing to do with it. It was written by Jean Monnet, a man who had advocated a supranational power even during the First World War, who handed it to Schumann as he took the train to his country estate for the weekend, and it came back signed on the Monday. We can't even be certain he read it.

Happy Birthday Europe...er..Robert...er Jean. God help the lot of us.

A Scottish referendum?

Amidst all the talk about Scotland holding a referendum on independence from the UK, and the politics is about as messy as it can be, one piece of common sense seems to be missing. The Union of England, Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland is the property of all of us. A change to it should be put to the vote amongst all the constituent parts.

I personally would vote for independence for Scotland. They have a higher level of representation at Westminster, proportionate to population, than the English, they receive a far higher level of government spending and the idiocy of the West Lothian Question means that a Scottish MP can vote on the English health service but not on the Scottish one, making a nonsense of our democracy. And yet the Scots are always whingeing, like a spoilt child demanding more Christmas presents.

Off they go, is what I say. If the Scottish Nationalist Party had any sense they would field candidates in England. I think a lot of English people would happily vote to get them off our backs.

Brown a waxwork?

Most amusing - Mme Tussauds are asking you to give your views as to whether they should make a model of Gordon Brown

Names in Nantwich

This blog will continue fearlessly to expose instances of politicians not using their correct names. Here is one from the forthcoming Nantwich and Crewe by-election.

The first name of Tamsin Dunwoody, who also passes under the name Tamsin Dunwoody-Kneafsey, is Moyra.

I urge you not to consider voting for someone who will not put their right name on their own publicity.

Bunkum

What’s the connection between Henry Ford and Margaret Thatcher? Or between Henry Ford and Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton?

For something I’ve been writing I’ve had a look at Henry Ford’s supposed saying ‘History’s bunk’. Did he just come out with it? Why? Or is it a misquote, like Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’? In fact it was more like Mrs Thatcher’s ‘There’s no such thing as society’* – a truncated version giving a different impression..

Here’s the quote: ‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today’ which I think is rather good, for an industrialist, and relevant in 1916. In fact Ford was described as an anarchist by the Chicago Tribune and sued for libel. He was cross-examined for eight days but emerged victorious.

The word bunk, properly ‘bunkum’, dates back to 1820 when Congress were discussing the Missouri Question. The debate had gone on for some time and the congressmen wanted to proceed to the vote but the representative from N Carolina, who hailed from Buncombe County, insisted on putting across his views, however much they had already been heard from others, because he wanted ‘to make a speech for Buncombe’.

N Carolina, including Buncombe if it is still there, goes to the vote soon for the Democratic nomination. This blog prefers Obama to Clinton, but doesn’t think he can beat McCain, whereas she might. Good luck to them all.

*And the Thatcher quote: "I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”

Which isn’t quite the same.

Italian News

Vicenzo Barlotti, a surgeon from Capaccio Scalo, has sued the Italian State on the grounds that his patients are uncivil. He clams 2 million euros to rebuild his life after the great suffering, disorder and degradation in which he was constrained to live.

Extensive testing on nearly 1,000 buffalo herds has ensured that buffalo mozzarella is once again completely safe to eat, outgoing Agriculture Minister Paolo De Castro has said.

Italy was responsible for almost a quarter of all workplace deaths within the European Union with 918, compared to Germany 678, Spain 662, France 593 and Britain (where almost no mozzarella is eaten at work) 209.

Unexpectedly, the Italian Tax Office put the details of all Italian taxpayers on the internet, a move described by the outgoing minister as ‘in the spirit of openness’. Beppe Grillo commented ''madness, pure madness. After the pardon which emptied the nations' jails, this imbecile outgoing government is offering criminals information on taxpayers' incomes and giving them their addresses''. After a day the privacy watchdog ordered the information to be removed.

But not before we discovered that out of a total of 40.74 million Italians filing tax returns, over 22 million (more than half) declared an income of between 1,200 and 1,300 euros a month (£11,160 - £12,180 p.a.). Just over 300,000 declared earnings of over 100,000 euros (£78,000) a year, equal to 0.74% of tax payers. More than half of Italian companies claimed to have broken even or declared losses.

The Tuscan city of Capannori claims to have the world’s highest rates of recycling and is aiming for ‘zero garbage by 2020’.

A survey of 13,000 people in nine countries found that just 14% of Italians were able to correctly answer basic questions relating to the Bible. Among questions frequently failed: whether Jesus helped write the Bible, whether the Gospels were part of the Bible and whether Moses or Paul appeared in the Old Testament.
More correct answers were given by Poland at 20%, but even fewer by France (11%) and Spain (8%). 27% of Italians said they had read a passage from the bible over the last year, against 75% in the USA. 79% of Italians thought God was watching over them, similar to Poland and Russia, slightly lower than in the US (86%), and far more than in France (47%). There again, God isn’t watching over France.

88% of Italians claim to be catholic.

The latest 31 recruits to join the Swiss Guards, the Vatican's private army, will swear their oath of allegiance on May 6th, anniversary of the heroic deaths of 147 guards defending the Medici pope Clement VII during the Sack of Rome by Emperor Charles V in 1527.
The Swiss Guard was founded in 1506 by Pope Julius II, and numbers 110. Most will take their oath in German, while 11 will do so in French, one in Italian and one in Ladin, the Romansh language spoken in the Engadine.

Rome’s third Film Festival may be different to the first two. Founded by Walter Veltroni, the outgoing mayor, who was a film buff, it is thought by the new mayor to be a waste of money, celebrating Hollywood A-listers rather than the Italian film industry.

Southern Italy's Paglicci Cave, one of the most important Stone Age sites in Europe, may soon collapse if repairs are not made, archaeologists have warned. The Paleolithic settlement in Puglia's Gargano peninsula is thought to have been continually inhabited by early man between 200,000 and 11,000 years ago.

The Pope failed to make Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Those who did make it include the Dalai Lama, the Patriarch of Constantinople, George Clooney, Andre Agassi, Mariah Carey and Miley Cyrus, an actress.

The saga of Venice’s pigeons continues: after the ban on feeding them was extended to St Mark’s Square, animal rights campaigners have stepped in after two days to distribute 30 kilos of birdseed to the hungry creatures. There had been 19 licensed birdseed sellers in St Mark’s Square alone.

The Rome mayoral race was won by Giovanni Alemanno, 50, an environmental engineer from Bari. Alemanno was formerly head of Fronte della Gioventù, the youth movement of the fascist Italian Social Movement MSI. He is a former agriculture minister, praised for his opposition to genetically modified organisms, his efforts to boost the export of Italian quality foods and his defence of authentic national products against foreign counterfeits.
The main subject of debate in the election was the high levels of petty crime popularly believed to be committed by camps of illegal immigrants along the banks of the Tiber.

Former foreign minister Gianfranco Fini has been appointed House Speaker. The former fascist leader of AN is the first right winger to hold the post since the war.

Italy's new government will be up and running within two weeks, Premier-elect Silvio Berlusconi said on Tuesday, making just under a month since the election. There are unconfirmed reports that the new governmental team will contain ‘zero garbage by 2020’

Oil Prices

Anatole Kaletsky has been hitting some good form recently, after what I at least regarded as a suspect phase a couple of years ago (economic analysis well past its sell-by date) and he has a good article in the Times today reminding us that wheat and several other commodities have come sharply off their peak prices and the same may well happen to oil in the near future.

Someone recently said to me that the oil prices were driven by speculators and I had to ask ‘but why aren’t the speculators selling rather than buying?’ Now we may be seeing the first signs that they are.

London Elections

It is the day of the London Elections and the candidates will be waiting earnestly to hear whom this blog endorses.

First, it has become increasingly apparent that Ken Livingstone must go. He has been there too long, there are reports, if not of corruption, of less than scrupulous usage of the citizens’ taxes and of his obscure obsessions being given greater licence as his power became unassailable. The Labour Party in happier times might have worked this out – after all they got rid of the party leader in order to undergo some sort of renewal, but they were powerless before Great Ken (another reason he should go).

It is equally apparent that if it is not to be Ken it will be Alexander (Boris) Johnson. But I do not find him a wholly attractive proposition. The man is shambolic, an actor, and with the attention span of a butterfly. He will make an adequate mayor if he knows how to delegate and is able to make mature character judgments of the people he is delegating to. But we know nothing of this. And we must start punishing people for not using their proper names; it is as if they are avoiding their creditors.

Accordingly this blog recommends that you show your displeasure at Boris by voting for one of the protest candidates, Brian Paddick if you like him, Gerrard Batten the UKIP candidate if, like me, you find that important, the Green (she is very good looking) or whatever. And that you give your second preference to Boris. Scraping in on the second preferences will at least indicate to Boris that this is not a lifetime sinecure and that he will have to do something positive.