generalspeaking

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi admitted Monday his marriage to actress Veronica Lario was doomed. Fuming at his wife's public insinuations of infidelity, he used a series of interviews to hit back and demand an apology: "Madam says I'm cavorting with 17-year-old girls. It's an assertion I cannot allow", Berlusconi told the newspaper Corriere della Sera. "It's the third time she has done this to me in the middle of the election campaign. It really is too much." Berlusconi, 72, denied his wife's accusation he had put forward showgirls as candidates for the European Parliament on behalf of his party, the People of Liberty.
Madam of course, knows of what she speaks. Her husband is an unreconstructed womanizer, and the younger, the prettier, the more hollow-headed the better. This is Italy, after all, and her husband is the primary bimbo-chaser.

Severe flooding has hit Brazil's perennially drought-stricken northeast, killing 15 people and leaving 70,000 others homeless, authorities said Monday. The states most affected by the flooding are Maranhao, Piaui, Ceara, Alagoas and Bahia. the Sao Francisco hydroelectric company said the Poty river was 14 metres above its normal level. The torrential rains also affected the country's Amazon region.
Isn't Mother Nature a tyrant? A commonly drought-stricken area suddenly engulfed in floodwaters, imperilling the lives of people, rendering tens of thousands homeless.

Princes Marie, the wife of Prince Joachim, youngest son of Denmark's Queen Margrethe, gave birth Monday to a boy - the couple's first child - the royal palace announced. The boy, seventh in line to the Danish throne, weighed six pounds, 11 ounces and the 39-year-old father was present for the birth. The mother, 33, and child were both well, a palace statement said. Joachim has two boys from his first marriage.
Well done; now there's the little matter of inheritance and palace intrigues...stay tuned, but be patient about it. We won't know for a while yet whether things get fishy there.

A mother who lost her unborn baby in an automobile accident has been convicted of manslaughter and ordered to pay blood money, in the first such ruling in the United Arab Emirates, newspapers reported Monday. The court found the 27-year-old Lebanese woman had failed to exercise due diligence when driving and caused her car to collide with another vehicle in October when she was nine months' pregnant, Al-Emarat Al-Youm reported. The Dubai Traffic Court ordered the mother to pay $5,450 U.S. in diyyah or blood money to the unborn baby's next of kin and fined her another $550 for "unintentional homicide".
Bloody hell, isn't that a right civilized way to treat a mourning mother-to-be vehicle-accident victim. You just don't want to fool around with next-of-kin with a tribal mentality; good thing she wasn't indicted for 'intentional homicide'.

True to their reputation as leisure-loving gourmets, the French spend more time sleeping and eating than anyone else in the world's wealthy nations, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation & Development's Society at a Glance report. The average French person eats for more than two hours a day and sleeps almost nine hours every night, which is more than an hour longer than the average Japanese and Korean, who sleep the least in the survey of 18 nations.
Not to mention short working hours, looooong vacations, car-torching, looting, and workers' rights-entitlement parades and protests, and oh those strikes...

An Iranian Canadian accused of trying to export parts that could be used in the production of nuclear weapons was denied bail yesterday by a judge in Toronto. Mahmoud Yadegari will remain in custody until his trial on charges of violating the Customs Act and of breaching United Nation Security council resolutions restricting the export of certain items to Iran. He faces a maximum of five years in prison if convicted. The 35-year-old Toronto resident was arrested on April 15 and is accused of purchasing two 'pressure transducers' that were allegedly destined for Iran.
Life can be so unfair for people who just want to use their initiative to get ahead in the world; enablers, enterprising entrepreneurs, short-order nuclear clerks.

A wave of bomb blasts and shootings killed 32 people, including two children, in Afghanistan on Monday as President Hamid Karzai jetted to the U.S. for a summit on defeating extremism. In the bloodiest incident, a bomb tore through a tractor and trailer transporting a group of Kuch nomads in a remote district of southern Zabul province. The dead included six women, two children and four men. Taliban fighters elsewhere attacked a construction site near the Zabul capital where labourers were re-building bridges destroyed in earlier action. In the Eastern province of Laghman, a suicide attacker walked up to a vehicle carrying the provincial mayor and blew himself up, killing the official and six other people.
Religious fanatics owe nothing to humanity and everything to their vision and version of a merciful holy spirit.

India's prime minister has increased speculation that he could step aside for Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party's general secretary, after voting ends in the general election later this month. Mahmohan Singh declined to commit himself to serving another full term and said: "I have said Rahul Gandhi has all the qualities a good PM should have. I certainly at some stage would like the seat of power in the hands of younger people than I am." Sonia Gandhi and her son, Rahul, who has led the Congress Party's election campaign, insist that Singh will continue as prime minister in any Congress-led government.
The familial dynasty is doomed to continue its trajectory of ascendancy and rejection; rejection wouldn't be so bad, it's the assassinations that are so worrying....

A peace deal between the Pakistani government and the Taliban appeared to have collapsed after militants attacked an army convoy in Swat valley on Monday. The fragile agreement, in which the government said it would allow Islamic law in the region in exchange for militants laying down their arms, was left in tatters when a soldier was killed in an ambush. It happened just a day after two officials were beheaded by the Taliban and militant fighters began patrolling Mingora, Swat's main town. Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the North West Frontier Province information minister who helped to negotiate the pact said: "We set up Islamic courts, we gave them Islamic judges, yet they do not accept this. They have some other agenda. We will fight them and, God willing these handful of miscreants will be defeated and the nation will prevail."
Those who don't study the history of appeasement are doomed to repeat the profound disappointments of history repeating itself, over and over and over again