General Blog About Everything

The news was buried deep inside the Roman news section of La Repubblica. None
of the other papers even bothered with it: Cicciolina to go to jail. In the
postage-stamp-sized photo, the tiny, peroxide-blonde, diva whose career has
traced the history of Italy in the past 30 years clutched a Victorian doll,
smiling the same too-broad, too-bright smile she has flashed at a thousand
film cameras, the hard flat charcoal eyebrows crammed down over her cerulean
eyes.

Barcelona is a dry city. It is dry in a way that two days of showers can do nothing to alleviate. The Catalan capital’s weather can change from one day to the next, but its climate, like that of the whole Mediterranean region, is inexorably warming up and drying out. And in the process this most modern of cities is living through a crisis that offers a disturbing glimpse of metropolitan futures everywhere.

French unions staged nationwide protests today against plans by President
Nicolas Sarkozy to make people work longer to qualify for a full pension.

The Austrian authorities have complained that “catastrophe tourists” are descending on the house where Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned in a cellar for 24 years – while new evidence revealed that her father raped her in front of their first two children when they were toddlers.

It is perhaps the most remarkable archaeological site in the world and more
than 3 million visitors stampede through it every year. But if the new
tourism councillor for Campania has his way, the numbers visiting Pompeii
will be drastically cut, and the site will be thrown open to multinationals
for private events to rake in the money needed to maintain the ruins.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered the hallucinogenic drug LSD,
has died aged 102, the organisation that republished his book on the
mind-altering substance said.