Johnny Foreigner

For €40, it was a steal: the opportunity to see the world’s first open-air amphitheatre, with ruined columns, stone steps and statues tucked into a hill in the north-eastern Italian countryside.
But tourists found themselves short-changed when the artefact was revealed to not have been built before 393AD, but in the early 2000s.
Now, Franco Malosso von Rosenfranz, the curator of the Berico Maritime Amphitheatre near the north-eastern city of Vicenza, has been jailed after he levelled a hill, built the fake archaeological site on top and charged tourists €40 (£35) to visit the site.

The entire thing a fake, “fiberglass, papier-mâché, or similar elements”.

Which is very fun, obviously. But this is Italy. The surprise is someone trying this so far north. If it was around Naples – say, and for example – it would be thought of as local boy doing well against the outside world.

Then again, given what they’ve already got around Naples as real stuff they’d not bother but that’s a different point.

French police last week named Anastasia Berezovska as the person captured on CCTV leaving a rucksack outside a Monaco apartment block. It blew up, injuring the Ukrainian businessman Vadym Iermolaiev as he emerged from the building with his partner and their 13-year-old child.

Prosecutors said that Berezovska, 39, who had disguised herself as a man, fled in a car with German registration plates, crossing into France and then Italy.

On 1 July, she travelled to Ukraine, catching a bus to her home town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv. Officials announced on Tuesday that her body had been found in woods near the capital.

Taking out your own employees has a bad name. Demotivational, d’ye see?

But then UKR is, for all else that might be said about the place, viciously corrupt still.

Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has been charged with embezzlement, influence peddling, corruption in business dealings and misappropriation of funds at the end of a two-year investigation by a judge in Madrid.

Gómez, 55, has been accused of using her influence as the wife of the socialist prime minister to secure and manage a post at Madrid’s Complutense University, and of using public resources and personal connections to further her private interests.

That’s like discovering an appreciation of markets in hte current British cabinet. Just not what you expect.

The investigation into Gómez was triggered by a complaint from Manos Limpias (Clean Hands), a self-styled trade union with far-right links that has a history of using the courts to pursue those it deems a threat to Spain’s democratic interests.

Those evil far-righties, eh?

The decision to formally charge Gómez comes at a fraught time for Sánchez as the prime minister’s younger brother, David, is due to be tried next month on charges of influence-peddling. According to another complaint from Manos Limpias, David Sánchez was handed a bespoke job by the socialist-led council of the south-western city of Badajoz in July 2017, when his brother was the national leader of the socialist party. He denies the charges.

Meanwhile, two senior former figures in Sánchez’s government are on trial for alleged corruption. The prime minister’s former right-hand man, the ex-transport minister José Luis Ábalos, is accused – along with his former aide Koldo García and the businessman Víctor de Aldama – of taking kickbacks on public contracts for sanitary equipment during the Covid pandemic. Ábalos and García, who deny all charges, are facing sentences of 24 years and 19 years respectively while Aldama, who has already admitted to his part in the alleged scheme, faces a seven-year sentence.

Evil, evil, far-righties.

Cooper scoffs at this. “The idea that Reform or the Conservatives would want to make decisions just based on what the US do or say – or what any other country does or says – doesn’t feel like sensible foreign policy. It’s not based on values. It’s based on dogma. Look, our partnerships are really important, our alliances, the global multilateral cooperation is really important. But also important, as part of that, is that we’re following the UK principles and interests.”

Whatever else, the US is the global hegemon. Thus our foreign policy doesn;thave to be the same as – obviously – but clearly it’s going to be based upon what the global hegemon does or says.

The weaponisation of energy when Russia invaded Ukraine has given way to “weaponising everything” since Donald Trump returned to the White House, Germany’s former economy minister has said.

Robert Habeck, the Green politician responsible for keeping the lights on during the last energy crisis, said the belief gas “would never be a political weapon” led successive German governments blindly into Putin’s trap by building the Nord Stream pipelines and selling strategic reserves to Gazprom, which Russia emptied before the invasion.

I guess Germans can be naive, yes. If it’s not written down, in hte regulations, then it’s not going to happen?

Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of the late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been chosen as his successor.

Both east and west Christianity did away with that. Which is probably wise really, that they did.

A bill to recognise English as an official language of New Zealand has cleared its first hurdle in parliament amid ridicule from opposition parties and linguists who say it is “unnecessary” and “cynical”.

The bill seeks to give English, which is spoken by 95% of the country, the same official status as te reo Māori (Māori language) and New Zealand sign language. The bill said the status and use of the existing official languages would not be affected.

How dare the normies, with their normie language, get what we speshul folk have?

And I do think it fun that sign language is official but English is not. Because, well, sign language is normally based upon an underlying and what is NZsl but upon English?

Ireland has suffered nearly 150 incidents of anti-Semitism in the past six months, a Jewish group has revealed.

The Jewish Representative Council of Ireland (JRCI) recorded 143 anti-Semitic incidents between July last year and January, averaging nearly one per day.

It’s one of those oddities that the place is alarmingly antisemitic. But:

It called for the “rapid development of a dedicated national plan to counter growing anti-Semitism” and protect the 2,200 Jews living in Ireland.

Assume each incident affects one person only. That’s still a 5% chance for any individual of being subject to an “incident” in only 6 months.

That’s, you know, a lot?

On the 29th February 2024, she proposed – presumably because I wasn’t getting on with it. That’s if you regard: ‘I expect to be your wife, not your mistress’ as a proposal. At least, I think it was.

A gift that falls from the sky’: why farmers are using Etna’s ash as fertiliser
Falling volcanic ash has for years been viewed as a nuisance. But a Sicilian project has discovered its agricultural potential and wants to spread the word

Why d’ye think the peasants keep farming Vesuvius, Stromboli, Etna, the Flegrean Fields? You know, even in the knowledge that they might pop and kill ’em all, or wipe out the farms?

Because that volcanic soil is increadibly, overwhelmingly, fertile. It’s lovely, lovely, stuff. So now a project has “discovered”? Ah well, to the rest of the Italians the Sicilians are more than a little suspect. Even, possibly, the dim country cousins – akin to Arabs.

The renewed protests serve as a further reminder that Trump has not yet fulfilled his pledge to “Iranian patriots” during the January demonstrations that “help is on its way”.

Gotta be Trump’s fault in some way, obviously. But that’s pretty much a stretch, eh?

‘Mazin’ how bad politics and worse economics can turn a place right shitty, eh?

In the meantime, there is something small everyone in the world can do – and that is to give the battered and besieged people of Iran our attention. After the massacres, the protests seem to have reduced in intensity – the natural consequence of fear. But as they have receded, so has media coverage and political discussion, even as thousands of corpses from a colossal slaughter are barely cold. Many of those who usually pride themselves on their solidarity with the oppressed of the Middle East have been uncharacteristically restrained this time and oddly quick to move on, perhaps reluctant to be too hostile to an Iranian regime that defines itself as the foe of the US and Israel. Maybe they think that any enemy of Trump’s is automatically a friend of theirs. Maybe they fear it weakens their support for the Palestinians to oppose a regime that wants to see Israel destroyed.

Like Owen Jones’ little piece earlier in the week which blamed the whole thing on the CIA for overthrowing Mossadegh. Vile little shit that he is.

The commission found it “implausible” that Pilton was unaware that a man called Lachlan, who did not have a responsible service of alcohol certificate, did in fact serve alcohol.

This is a pub 200 km out in the middle of fick all. This is one of the reasons the booze licence has not been renewed.

As ever, the problem with Oz is not that half of them are descended from criminals, it’s that the other half are from prison guards.

Thousands of tents supplied by China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to shelter displaced Palestinians in Gaza offer only limited protection against rain and wind, an assessment compiled by shelter specialists in the devastated territory has revealed.

The assessment will undermine claims that Palestinians in Gaza are being supplied with adequate shelter. Fierce storms in recent weeks blew down or damaged thousands of tents, affecting at least 235,000 people, according to UN estimates.

Prepared by the Palestine Shelter Cluster, which coordinates the activities of nearly 700 non-government organisations in Palestine and is jointly chaired by the Red Cross and the UN, the assessment found that newly delivered tents housing hundreds of thousands of people would “likely need to be replaced”.

“The fabric [of the Egyptian tents] tears easily as sewing quality is poor,” it reported. “The fabric is not waterproof. Other issues include small windows, weak structure, no flooring, the roof collects water due to the design of the tent, and no mesh for openings.”

Tents from Saudi Arabia were criticised as having “non-waterproof light fabric, weak structure” and tents donated by China were “very light” and not waterproof.

Those supplied by Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the United Nations were judged to have met the specifications of UN experts.

The findings – based on 9,000 responses to a poll on social media in November, observations “from partners on the ground” and “community feedback” – will raise new questions about the quality of aid being supplied directly to Gaza by individual countries, which have been favoured by Israeli authorities seeking to bypass the UN.

Look at what claim 1 is. Because THE JOOOOS don’t work with the UN therefore the Pallys are being left tentless. Or reasonably tentless. It is the fault of THE JOOOOS, obviously, not the people who sent the tents. Of course.

Sigh.

Now really think about this. The people who aren’t allowed to manage the aid – the UN – are complaining that the aid – not being managed by the UN – isn’t good enough. Now who could have predicted that reaction from a bureaucracy?

Reporting – from outside Iran – on events in Iran with special reference to the economy. He used to be the editor – inside Iran – of the economics section of a major Iranian newspaper. Had to get out. But what a time to start that new job, eh?

Mass protests have erupted across Iran calling for “death to the dictator” over the regime’s economic crisis.

Tear gas was used to disperse protesters as shops shuttered in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar and main markets.

University students called on their peers to join the demonstrations, while chants echoed from rooftops in several cities and the Iranian rial plunged to record lows, all against the backdrop of ongoing threats from Israel and the US.

Residents in one city near Tehran told The Telegraph that a heavy presence of armed motorcycle-mounted security forces was visible around midnight.

Just to note, Iran is the only market where one of my books has gone into a second edition.

Senioruniversitet, a national university that collaborates with Sweden’s adult education institution Folkuniversitetet, has about 30 independent branches around the country which run study circles, lecture series and university courses in subjects including languages, politics, medicine and architecture.

The Stockholm branch, which is Sweden’s largest, has become so popular since it was founded in 1991 that it is now run across multiple venues across the capital by about 100 volunteers. Its most popular event, the Tuesday lectures, gets about 1,000 people each week.

Recent Stockholm lectures have included “The art of awarding Nobel prizes” by a former member of a Nobel committee, “Disinformation and AI – the threat we invented ourselves” and “From soap to cultural heritage/canon and vice versa.”

Sweden has reinvnted the Women’s Institute!

Why the French are so determined to spoil our holidays
The common denominator for much of our travel woes are our allies across the Channel

Seems a logically valid answer to me at least.

The state department has barred five Europeans from the US, accusing them of leading efforts to pressure tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints, in the latest attack on European regulations that target hate speech and misinformation.

Secretary of state Marco Rubio said the five people targeted with visa bans – who include former European Commissioner Thierry Breton – have led “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose.”

“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states – in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Rubio said in an announcement.

I – personally – am neither in favour of nor against this. But I do think it funny.

Italy first country to win Unesco recognition for national cuisine

Italy is one of those places which doesn’t have a national cuisine. There is a series of highly distinct regional ones. And they really are distinct too.

So, an amusement then…..