My friends may remember that the BBC's CEO Mark Thompson responded to demands that the repulsive Nick Griffin be excluded from the program Question Time with the following memorable remark: "It is not the BBC's job to exclude people from broadcasts. The government has to do that ( Read more... )

A rather battered-looking, elderly man was spotted walking about in the rain by a suspicious citizen in Long Branch, New Jersey. The police were called and, after some palaver, finally took the supposed bum to a hotel where he was staying and where he was able to prove that, yes, he was indeed Bob Dylan.

So there is this region of Japan called the Shizuoka prefecture, which is very prosperous. Prosperous to the point that it felt that the 97 airports already in use in Japan were not enough; it wanted one of its own, built to intercontinental standards ( Read more... )

Or at least the state is turning out all its pockets to see if it has anything worth selling that will help stop the most immediate holes in its budget: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/05/schwarzenegger-san-quentin ( Read more... )

The eleventh prize in a private lottery in San Marco in Lamis, a small town in Puglia, Italy, was a free luxury funeral, with a luxury casket with pillow and upholstery, a headstone, an "eternal light" made of glass and brass, a place at the town cemetery, and sacred items coming from Padre Pio's sanctuary at San Giovanni Rotondo. Although the ( Read more... )

Al Capone's oldest brother, Vincenzo (who took the name of an early Western movie star, Richard Hart), became, quite independently of his younger brother, a frontier lawman in Nebraska. The same opportunity made both brothers: while young Al went to Chicago and swiftly grew rich on Prohibition smuggling, his brother went to Homer, Nebraska, ( Read more... )

They had been warned. In April 1914, General von Plettenburgh, commanding the Prussian Guards Corps, issued a decree against the wearing of the so-called "tooth-brush" moustache, pointing out that such an appendage was unsuitable for a Prussian soldier and "not consonant with the German national character." Subsequently, a well-known political ( Read more... )

BBC News 13.00, 14.02.2007

I swear I heard the following sentence drip from the anchorwoman's pearly pink lips:
"Cleopatra is remembered as a raving beauty who made Caesar fall in love with her and brought down the Roman Empire..."

My head hurts.

One of France's leading cultural icons is the philosopher and journalist, Bernard-Henry Levy. He is about my age, tall and handsome and a ready writer, not without courage ( Read more... )

This happened a mile or two down the road from where I live.