Daily Mail on top form

From The Daily Mail:

Mafia fugitive found living in quiet west London suburb is freed after winning battle against extradition to Italy

Yes, but which suburb, is he a homeowner and if so, what kind of house is it and what is it worth..?

Mr Rancadore, 65, who spent nearly 20 years living a secret life on the run in suburban Uxbridge, walked free today after the shock ruling...

Uxbridge, OK, that's a start…

... in August last year Scotland Yard officers raided the bungalow in Uxbridge where Rancadore had been living…

A bungalow, OK, getting warmer…

Rancadore had been controversially granted bail with conditions including a £50,000 security last November - despite being repeatedly branded 'a flight risk'.

Right, we are finally talking money… and here comes the money shot…

Mrs Skinner had also offered a surety of between £360,000 and £370,000 - the valuation then given for her Uxbridge home.

Well done, The Mail, for keeping us in suspense until half way through the article, that's more like it!

Nearly there...

What is particularly annoying about aeroplane hijackers is when they hijack a flight en route from A to B; force the pilot to land in C instead; and then demand safe passage to D.

Why don't they just get on a 'plane to D in the first place; or having hijacked it, ask the pilot to land in D instead of C?

From The Evening Standard:

An Ethiopian Airlines jet with 202 passengers and crew on board was hijacked today by its co-pilot.

The 30-year-old man landed the Addis Ababa to Rome flight safely in Geneva before climbing out of a window on a rope and asking for asylum.

So at least he landed where he wanted to end up, but…

a) Is Switzerland more generous with asylum than Italy, where the 'plane was headed anyway?

b) Why didn't he just get himself on a flight to Switzerland in the first place? Geneva's quite a bit further than Rome, so he might have run out of fuel, which would have been embarrassing for all concerned.

c) Why the window/rope stunt? Why didn't he just go down the stairs with everybody else?

Location, Location, Location

From the Telegraph

Roger Bannister, his brother Steven and their wives Wendy and Joyce were astounded to be charged 16 euros (£13.50) each on Sunday after ordering four ice creams at the Antica Roma bar and gelateria close to the Spanish Steps.

Well, yes. "close to the Spanish steps". Buy a small coffee on the Champs-Elysee in Paris and you pay €13 to sit outside. Walk off the Champs-Elysee and into a local cafe and you pay €4 at worst.

"And when we paid up, they didn't even say thank you," Mr Bannister, of Birmingham, told Corriere della Sera newspaper on Monday, holding up the receipt to prove the amount he had been charged.

Well, they don't really have to care. You're buying maybe one ice cream, per year from them. If they're polite or otherwise with you, they still don't get repeat business. There's plenty of other people who will do likewise.

Officials in Rome said it was shameful that the tourists had been charged so much and that such practises harmed the image of Italy.
"It's a scandal and it should be treated as such," said Matteo Costantini, a city councillor. "It's not the first time that things like this have happened." In 2009 a restaurant near Piazza Navona, one of the city's most popular with tourists, massively overcharged a Japanese couple for dinner, handing them a bill for 695 euros.

Imagine if Rome applied a bit of tax to these places? "Right, we spend a load of money keeping the Trevi fountains looking nice, the main beneficiaries of these locally are your businesses, so we're going to charge a £1m tax on your ice cream parlour, take it or leave it". Think they'd be complaining then?

It's what towns and cities do with street food licenses. The public wants a hot dog from a van, they can buy a hot dog. To avoid the street getting cluttered with vendors, they have limited numbers of licenses, but because they know that you make money hand over fist from doing it, the licenses aren't cheap, and licenses vary according to locations. Councils extract the rent for monopoly rights to locations that are enhanced by the state. It's a form of LVT that already exists in the UK and it works very well.

No oil painting (2)

Epic

Chuckles spotted this tale in Takimag:

A cow, nicknamed “Libera” (free) by article’s author, had been on the loose now “for months” in the Apennine Mountains near the small city of Forlì where I live, and “quella enorme massa di 800 chili” (that enormous mass of 800 kilos) was charging anyone who approached it.

It was not that the cow had decided one day to become a bull, or a butch lesbian, or anything so boringly human. The cow’s feelings about its sexuality had nothing to do with it: The cow simply had enough of its life of slavery as a farm animal...

Well worth a read in full. I've no idea whether the story is true or is an elaborate hoax to trap cow-story aficionados. I've tried cross referencing to other articles, but the newspaper that seems to have run the original story is behind a paywall.

Fun Online Polls: The next bail-out & Any ideas?

The results (after reallocating one vote, as requested) to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Which Euro-zone member will be bailed out next?

Cyprus - 45%
Italy - 39%
Belgium - 3%
Malta - 1%
Slovakia - 1%
Slovenia - 1%
Estonia - 0%
Other, please specify - 11%

Two people suggested "Spain. Again".

So there we have it, let's see if we're right.
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I normally start a new Fun Online Poll each Monday, but this week either nothing interesting is happening or my mind has gone blank. I can't do football because the 62-minute incident appears to have been pronounced upon quite enough, and England's next match is on Sunday (which ruins the Monday timing).

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: Any ideas?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Faceless Bureaucrat

Silvio Berlusconi

Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle..

... the cow didn't even manage to clamber over the barrier.

Spotter's Badge: Sue.

Fun Online Polls: The Saturdays and financial markets doolally

Last Friday's Fun Online Poll was a damn' close run thing:

Who is your favourite out of The Saturdays?

Frankie - 3 votes
Molly - 2 votes
Rochelle - 2 votes
Una - 0 votes
Vanessa - 0 votes
They're all identical, aren't they? - 1 vote
Who or what are 'The Saturdays'? - 56 votes

Frankie is the second one from the left in this picture. I think that was the right decision.
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Financial markets doolally, yawn, vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Absolutely bizarre

From The Metro, earlier today:

Rome officials are preparing for thousands of residents to leave the city today amid widespread fears of an earthquake - which was apparently predicted by seismologist Raffaele Bendandi more than 30 years ago. [He] made a series of predictions that the Italian capital would be destroyed by a huge quake on May 11th 2011, which would be followed by two more events next year.

Bendandi's reputation for accuracy was cemented by his correct prediction of a similar earthquake in 1923 that killed more than 1,000 people. The meteorologist, who died in 1979, was honoured by former Italian leader Benito Mussolini in 1927 and he is so respected in Italy that his prediction of today's events has led to mass panic in Rome...

From the BBC, later this evening:

At least 10 people were killed after a magnitude 5.3 earthquake toppled several buildings in southern Spain, near the town of Lorca, officials say.

The quake struck at a depth of just 1km (0.6 miles), some 120km south-west of Alicante, at 1850 (1650 GMT), the US Geological Survey reported. Lines of cars lay crushed under tonnes of rubble and a hospital was evacuated as a precaution...

Apart from the fact the earthquake was a thousand miles to the west (not a huge distance in tectonic terms), was Bendandi really on to something or is this just a blind coincidence?

Health Scare Story Du Jour

From The Metro:

Ogling too much internet pornography can make you impotent, according to a study by Italian scientists. However, they stress that the effects on the ability to get an erection are only temporary.

The revelation comes from the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine, which surveyed 28,000 men on their porn-surfing habits. Researchers explained that many of them were being turned off sex over time by looking at explicit internet images. Many had become addicted to blue movies by the age of 14 and showed signs of ‘sexual anorexia’ by their mid-20s, or as the study says - ‘anorsexia’.

The head of the team, Carlo Foresta, said: ‘It starts with lower reactions to porn sites, then there is a general drop in libido and in the end it becomes impossible to get an erection.’ But he stresses that the effect is entirely reversible. ‘With proper assistance recovery is possible within a few months,’ Foresta said.

Splendid

From The Telegraph:

While the Irish rescue removed the immediate threat of "haircuts" for senior bondholders of Irish banks, it leaves open the risk of burden-sharing from 2013 on all EMU sovereign bonds and bank debt on a "case-by-case" basis.... Yields on 10-year Italian bonds jumped 21 points to 4.61pc, threatening to shift the crisis to a new level. Italy's public debt is over €2 trillion, the world's third-largest after the US and Japan.

"The EU rescue fund cannot handle Spain, let alone Italy," said Charles Dumas, from Lombard Street Research. "We we may be nearing the point where Germany has to decide whether it is willing take on a burden six times the size of East Germany, or let some countries go."

Italy distanced itself from trouble in the rest of southern Europe early in the financial crisis, benefiting from rock-solid banks, low private debt, and the iron fist of finance minister Giulio Tremonti. But the crisis of competitiveness never went away, and the country has faced a political turmoil for weeks.

If Portugal and Spain have to follow Ireland in tapping the EU's €440bn bail-out fund – as widely feared after Spanish yields touched 5.4pc – this will put extra strains on Italy as one of a reduced core of creditor states. The rescue mechanism has had the unintended effect of spreading contagion to Italy, and perhaps beyond. French lenders have $476bn of exposure to Italian debt, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

H/t, Devo at HPC.

Fun Online Polls: Wills and Kate; EU-bailouts

With a very good turnout (thanks to everybody who took part), the response to last week's Fun Online Poll Wills and Kate have decided to get married: what do you think? was as follows:

So what? 67%
Who are "Wills and Kate"? 21%
It is a great moment for national celebration! 12%

It seems that we're swimming against the tide on this one, as most of the newspapers devote at least a page every day to the topic, which usually include a brief explanation of who "Wills and Kate" actually are, to wit, a celebrity jobless couple from the South of England.
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The EU 'bailed out' Greece in February of this year, which was supposed to sort out 'financial instability in the Euro-zone' once and for all. It didn't of course, because the banks then go hunting for the next easy target, do a bit of rumour-mongering and short-selling, make a nice profit on the way down and then go running to the EU or the IMF for a bail out.

So next on the list was Ireland/Irish banks (the two are now more or less synonymous), who were successfully cajoled into accepting a bail out at the weekend.

These patterns tend to repeat themselves, I just wonder how good are we at recognising them? So that's the topic for this week's Fun Online Poll: "Which country will the EU 'bail out' next?"

FWIW, my money is on Portugal, as it is easier to bully small countries, even though logic says that Spain are in a bigger mess, relatively, having had a far larger land price bubble. If they try this with Italy, the banks might find that they have bitten off more than they can chew, and there must come a stage where we realise that the European Central Bank emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Burka Ban Fun From Around The World

The excellent Newsnow website has set up a new category for Burka Ban. Here are a few headlines to whet your appetites:

Italy: Berlusconi ally brings anti-burqua bill in parliament.

Ireland: Catholic schools ban full Muslim veil.

Australia: Muslim women rally against burka ban

More Mafia/wind farm related tomfoolery

From the FT:

 

Italian anti-mafia police have made their largest seizure of assets as part of an investigation into windfarm contracts in Sicily. Officers confiscated property and accounts valued at €1.5bn belonging to a businessman suspected of having links with the mafia...

 

The article continues in this vein for several paragraphs, and at no stage is it made clear whether any actual crimes have been committed and if so which. The only clues are:

 

Some projects were sold through intermediaries to foreign renewable energy companies attracted to Italy by generous subsidy schemes.

 

Easily fixed. Scrap the subsidies. And:

 

The renewable energy sector is under scrutiny across much of southern Italy. Some windfarms, built with official subsidies, have never functioned.

 

Again, scrap the subsidies, and whoever built them will have little choice but to cut his losses and finally get them hooked up. However little electricity they generate, it's got to be more than nothing (unless the cost of hooking them up is greater than the potential revenue). And:

 

A separate probe in Sardinia has involved political allies of Silvio Berlusconi, prime minister. They have denied bribing officials to win tenders.

 

And:

 

Mr Berlusconi's government is proud of its record of cracking down on the mafia, seizing more than €10bn in assets and arresting more than 5,800 suspects since taking office in May 2008.

 

So maybe this all just boils down to a bit of political tit-for-tat and showboating?

Tide turning or King Canute?

From the BBC:

Female students wearing a full face veil will be barred from Syrian university campuses, the country's minister of higher education has said. Ghiyath Barakat was reported to have said that the practice ran counter to the academic values and traditions of Syrian universities...

In 2009, Egypt's then foremost Muslim cleric, Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, barred female students from wearing the full-face veil at the al-Azhar University, Sunni Islam's centre of learning and scholarship. He also upset other Muslim scholars by saying French Muslims should obey any law that France might enact banning the veil.

Earlier this month, France's lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public. It must be ratified by the Senate in September to become law. Belgium's lower house of parliament has also passed a bill to ban clothing that hides a person's identity in public places, although it does not specifically refer to full-face Islamic veils.

See also Italy.

International cow attack round up - June 2010 - German speaker's edition

Weisenberg Township, Pennsylvania: ... the 1,200 pound cow charged at herdsman Jason Angstadt Friday morning. Granger said the cow was with a calf and apparently attacked because it perceived a threat to its youngster. "It twisted his body and put him down," Granger said. Granger said it's the first time in his 25 years owning the operation that an animal injured someone.

 

Swiss/French border: Vom Gewitter aufgescheuchte Kühe haben im Jura in der Nähe der französischen Grenze zwei Wanderer angegriffen. Die beiden jungen Schweizer erlitten leichte Verletzungen, als die Kuhherde sich im Bereich des Reculet gegen sie wandte, wie die Polizei am Sonntagabend mitteilte.

 

Brief translation. Thunder scared cows. Cows attacked hikers.

 

Switzerland: Ein Ehepaar aus Uznach hat am Dienstagnachmittag bemerkt, dass eine Kuh aus der Herde ihres Sohnes kalbert. Darauf hin wollten sie das Kalb mit der Mutter von der Herde absondern und in den Stall treiben. Der Bauer nahm das Kalb auf die Arme und trug es Richtung Stall. Seine 68-jährige Frau wollte die Kuh ebenfalls in Richtung Stall begleiten. Plötzlich muss die Kuh die Frau angegriffen haben, sodass diese stürzte. Die Kuh verletzte die am Boden liegende Frau am Körper und im Gesicht schwer.

 

OK, that one was from May. Briefly: farming couple wanted to separate cow and new born calf from rest of herd. Farmer picked up calf. Cow did not like this one bit, knocked over farmer's wife and trampled her to death.

 

Austria: Eine 30 Jahre alte Obersteirerin ist am Dienstagvormittag bei einer Kuhattacke schwer verletzt worden. Die Frau war mit ihrer Mutter (47) und drei kleinen Hunden neben einer Weide unterwegs gewesen. Wegen des Gebells sah eine Kuh offenbar ihr Kalb bedroht, sprang über den Weidezaun und griff die 30-Jährige an.

 

Briefly: woman and mother out walking with three small dogs. Cow in field at side of path saw this as a threat to her calf, jumped over the fence and injured the woman badly.

 

South Tirol: Am Freitagvormittag ist es in Gröden zu einem Arbeitsunfall gekommen, bei dem ein 77 Jahre alter Bauer lebensgefährlich verletzt wurde. Der Mann wollte gegen 8 Uhr morgens in der Nähe seines Hofes in Wolkenstein Kälber auf die Weide treiben - eines davon führe er am Strick. Aus bisher ungeklärter Ursache rannte dieses plötzlich los und brachte den 77-Jährigen aus dem Gleichgewicht. G.P. stürzte und wurde vom Kalb über eine Teerstraße geschleift.

 

Briefly: Farmer taking calves to pasture with a lead attached to one calf, which made a run for it. The farmer fell over and was dragged across a track, suffering life threatening injuries.

 

Bavaria: Eine 54-jährige Bäuerin ist am Samstagabend auf ihrem Hof in Zenting (Landkreis Freyung-Grafenau) von einer Kuh angegriffen und tödlich verletzt worden. Wie die Polizei in Passau mitteilte, wollte die Frau, die zum Zeitpunkt des Unfalls alleine zuhause war, einige ausgerissene Rinder zurück auf die Weide treiben. Offenbar wurde sie dabei von einer Kuh so schwer verletzt, dass sie noch auf der Weide verstarb. Ein Angehöriger fand die Leiche der Frau am frühen Sonntagmorgen.

 

Briefly: Police assume that farmer wanted to drive cattle which had escaped back onto the pasture, her corpse was found on Sunday morning.

 

Rhineland: Eine 46-jährige Frau ist am Samstag beim Versuch, eine entlaufene Kuh einzufangen, schwer verletzt worden... Am Mittag entdeckte die Frau das Tier, das in Bogel auf der Straße lief. Die Kuh rannte mit gesenktem Kopf auf diese zu. Die Frau stürzte und wurde von der Kuh überrannt...Ursache war laut Polizei vermutlich eine Rotte Wildschweine, die die Kühe in Panik versetzt hatte.

 

Briefly: Farmer wanted to catch an escaped cow. The cow headbutted and trampled her. Police assume that the herd had been panicked by wild boars.

Italy shows us how it's done

From the BBC:

A woman visiting a post office in Novara, north-western Italy, has been stopped by police for wearing an Islamic veil covering her face. A police official told the AFP news agency the woman would have to pay a 500-euro (£430) fine.

It is the first such police action since Novara brought in a by-law in January banning clothing preventing immediate identification in public...

Novara Mayor Massimo Giordano said the by-law was meant to deter women from covering themselves with the veil in public. "But unfortunately it is apparently not yet clear to everyone that clothes preventing the wearer's identification can be tolerated at home but not in public places, in schools, on buses or in post offices," he said, according to the Italian state news agency Ansa. "There are still some people that refuse to understand that our community in Novara does not accept and does not want people going around wearing the burka."

He said the by-law was "the only tool at our disposal to stop behaviour that makes the already difficult process of integration even harder"...

Italy has, since 1975, had a national anti-terrorism law which forbids any mask or clothing that makes it impossible to identify the wearer. However, the law permits exceptions for "justified cause", which has often been interpreted by courts as including religious reasons for wearing a veil, Ansa reports...

Fabio Capello