Italy

This is the kind of jihad I can believe in:

[M]embers of Ukrainian feminist group Femen staged protests across Europe as they called for a “topless jihad.” The demonstrations were in support of a young Tunisian activist named Amina Tyler. Last month, Tyler posted naked images of herself online, with the words “I own my body; it’s not the source of anyone’s honor” written on her bare chest. The head of Tunisia’s “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” reportedly called for Tyler to be stoned to death for her putatively obscene actions, lest they lead to an epidemic. Tyler has since gone quiet, leading some to fear for her safety.

Below are some images from Femen’s protests in Sweden, Italy, Ukraine, Belgium, and France. A warning, nearly every photo depicts nudity, and most contain offensive language. I did warn you so don’t go moaning in the comments about it.  Read more »

If investing in publicly funded energy projects is good enough for the Green Taliban, it’s good enough for the Green Mafia as well:

Italy made its biggest confiscation of mafia assets in history on Wednesday (April 3), including dozens of alternative energy companies worth a total of 1.3 billion euros ($1.67 billion), police said.

A court in Trapani on the island of Sicily ordered the definitive confiscation of assets first seized in 2010 from Vito Nicastri, a 57-year-old businessman, who was deemed a front man for the Sicilian mafia, known as Cosa Nostra.

Police and magistrates say Nicastri, once dubbed the “Lord of the Wind” because of his vast wind farm holdings, invested money made from extortion, drug sales and other illicit activities for Matteo Messina Denaro, believed to be Cosa Nostra’s boss of bosses.

Most of the seized assets were located in Sicily, home of the Cosa Nostra, and in southern Calabria, home of its sister crime organization.

Police said the haul included 43 companies, 98 properties and even cars and boats.

Video over the break. Caution, it starts playing by itself.
Read more »

Ok, now don’t get a shock.  Here’s a bit of culture for you.

Read more »

Don’t say I never do arts posts…but I am wondering how the wops can afford this, they are flat broke and will probably go on the bludge expecting us to pay for their expensive art exhibition.

A Dunedin artist has been invited to show his work at one of the world’s most prestigious art exhibitions.

Dunedin School of Art senior sculpture lecturer Scott Eady will travel to Italy in May to install his work “Personal Structures” at the Venice Biennale 2013.

“It was very unexpected and, of course, very exciting news. I am a little overwhelmed,” Mr Eady said yesterday.  Read more »

Beppe Grillo, Italian comedian, activist and blogger. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Beppe Grillo is looking to exit Italy from the euro, and he isn’t taking kindly to some of the horse-trading going on:

He also insisted that his party would not take part in any “horse-trading”, describing the overtures from the Left as “the usual whorish way of doing politics.”

Ian Steadman, at Wired, meanwhile thinks that Grillo has become the world’s most powerful blogger.

A comedian on an anti-corruption crusade, his success (and his political movement) has been built on the back of his blog– the most popular in the country, and one of the most widely-read in the world.Grillo’s blog has long hosted names of politicians convicted for charges of corruption, and in posts the satirical comedian has railed against the corruptions problems in Italian politics. In 2007, he corralled his supporters into a one-off “V-Day Celebratio” where the “V” stood for vaffanculo – “fuck off”. Other campaigns targeted certain bills or vested interests, with the culmination being the launch of the Five Star Movement (M5S) in 2009, a populist bloc whose unifying characteristic isn’t so much what it’s for as what it’s against — the status quo. Its members organise online, it has an extreme direct democracy slant, and, judging from exit polls and seat projections, M5S looks likely to be the third-largest political bloc in the Italian parliament.

Read more »

via plantandfood.co.nz

Yesterday there was a report that scientists at Otago University have figured out the path that the Kiwifruit bacterial disease, PSA, took to get to New Zealand by analysing DNA.

I’ve been waiting for someone to suggest the introduction of PSA into New Zealand wasn’t accidental.  That it could possibly be a deliberate act of economic war.

Here’s the critical part of ODT piece   Read more »

He is apparently a lot funnier than Bob Parker. And he drinks less.

Italy’s parliamentary elections have ended in stalemate and the possibility of a hung parliament.

With all domestic votes counted, Pier Luigi Bersani’s centre-left bloc has narrowly beaten ex-PM Silvio Berlusconi in the lower house but has failed to secure a majority in the Senate.  Read more »

Italians are banning the bikini from the Miss Italia competition.

Italian men might as well pack up their balls and allow the gypsies to invade.  It is over.  Laughing stock.

Pageant organiser Patrizia Mirigliani said: “With this type of costume we will be returning to the classical beauty of the 1950′s, the era of female legends who we still admire and respect even today,” the Daily Mail reported.

Whatever.  If beautiful women are to parade in bikinis who has the right to stop them?

ᔥ The Telegraph

Some of Farrar’s lot were out spreading the gold in Italy when they ran into bottles of wine that were offensive.

Michael Hirsch, a lawyer from Philadelphia, complained to local media after he found a supermarket near his hotel was stocking wine bottles with Hitler in various poses and another bottle featuring an image of Pope John Paul II.

“It is very shocking and startling to us,” Mr Hirsch told The Daily Telegraph on Wednesday. “We would think of it as neo-Nazism It makes you wonder about the sympathies of the local people.”

One bottle features Hitler with his arm raised in the Nazi, another is labelled ‘Mein Kampf” and another was labelled “Ein volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer” (one people, one empire, one Fuhrer), Mr Hirsch said.

It doesn’t appear that the wine bottles have broken any laws, so the prosecutor wants a new one.

Prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia told news agency ANSA that inquiries were under way.

“The only crime that could be currently attributable to this is that of apologising for fascism,” prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia told Ansa. “At this point though it would be opportune to invent the crime of human stupidity”.

Human stupidity is probably not going to be on the statute books any time soon. Thought the Greens and labour give it a good crack as often as they can.