Amanda versus the the Bliar's Mafioso friend

An friend who works for RAI - the Italian equivalent of the BBC - commented on how they bury news over there.

A news broadcast of 30 minutes devoted almost its entire length to the farcical Amanda Knox trial with about one minute given to the kind of item that in any normal civilised country would have been headline news everywhere.

A Mafioso Pentito - that is someone who has repented - revealed that one of the people who commissioned the murder of Judge Falcone was Berlusconi.

(If you don't know who Falcone was, he was a heroic figure who fought the Mafia in Sicily until his car was blown up).

Imagine the equivalent here! That the Prime Minister could have been involved in the killing of a national hero? Would that have been front page news, or what? But then every thinking Italian knows where Berlusconi got a lot of his money from.

One of the reasons I have great reservations about Europe, besides being governed by unelected bureaucrats is the astonishing degree of corruption there at every level - and not just in Italy. Chirac was a crook. Mitterand was a Nazi stooge. Sarkozy doesn't bear thinking about. And what will the future bring, with countries like Bulgaria, where murderers get elected to parliament so as to avoid prosecution.

But then again, a very significant percentage of Indian politicians are convicted criminals. And we all know about the Chinese.

No doubt our lot will catch up. I see the great Toad announced yesterday for the umpteenth time that "he" is going to wage war on benefit frauds. No, he's not. It's another ludicrous case of mistaking an announcement of intent for action. When the tax and benefit system you have created means it pays people not to work, what do you expect?