This morning I was unsure whether I had really heard the phrase. Perhaps I had only imagined it being uttered on last night’s RTE news–such an absurdity seemed more likely to be coined during a particularly choppy REM pattern.But no. It was confirmed, in black-and-white, by this morning’s Irish Independent: Mr Ahern said the increases […]
No, not really. He is bitter to the end. He is claiming that a judge’s decision to force a couple of PiS-sympathetic journalists to appear in court in a libel case is evidence that the new rulers of Poland are in cahoots with the judiciary to do down PiS. I know, I know it doesn’t […]
Over the long weekend, at the start of this month, Gianfranco Fini (the intelligent and increasingly acceptable face of fascism), declared that no-one should ‘exploit’ the murder of Giovanna Reggiani last week. Fini IIAFFtm said this from the railway station where Ms Reggiani was last seen alive, and went on to blame various members of […]
I stumbled across this fascinating article (thanks to a posting on Chet Raymo’s excellent Science Musings blog. It’s an old article, but was news to this monkey. I had always presumed that it was accepted fact that Primo Levi had committed suicide. Virtually every mention of the celebrated Italian chemist/author/holocaust survivor ends noting that Levi […]
I stumbled across this fascinating article (thanks to a posting on Chet Raymo’s excellent Science Musings blog. It’s an old article, but was news to this monkey. I had always presumed that it was accepted fact that Primo Levi had committed suicide. Virtually every mention of the celebrated Italian chemist/author/holocaust survivor ends noting that Levi […]
Around 80 pages into Anne Enright’s The Gathering, I remarked to a friend that the experience of reading it with a heavy cold felt as enjoyable as walking up Croagh Patrick barefoot. However, just as pious pilgrims probably feel some sense of accomplishment while they gingerly massage their shredded soles after completing their climb, I […]
In the week that the London Metropolitan Police were found guilty of a series of errors that led to the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, members of Italy’s ruling coalition voted against holding a committee of enquiry into the conduct of policing at the G8 summitt in Genoa in 2001.
The prosecutors in Poland’s most highly politicised prosecution service (Warsaw) have had enough. Exclamation mark. They are rebelling. Exclamation mark. Nine or ten of them are resigning over the political interference in their work of putting criminals where they belong. Oh yes. Up with this they will no longer put. It’s pretty easy to resign, […]
Valiantly overcoming a cold virus that seems to turned half the city’s populace into snivelling wrecks, I dragged my diseased carcass (perhaps the prose style of my current livre de chevet, The Gathering, is getting to me) into the city centre yesterday to see the indomitable Seymour Hersh hold forth at the Amnesty International Lecture. […]