Really?

Buon appetito, says Jamie

Jamie Oliver plans to open a string of ‘authentic, rustic’ Italian restaurants in Britain’s high streets, according to an article in today’s Guardian.

That’ll be ‘authentic’ as in spaghetti alla carbonara… with cream? Oh dear.

Pro-life (as in, er, death)

Amnesty International’s decision to endorse the decriminalisation of abortion when the woman’s life is at stake or the foetus is the product of sexual violence has been attacked by religious fundamentalists, including, naturally, the gaggle of officially celibate old men in the Vatican. Maybe they should all go and live in the fabulously roman catholic Nicaragua, where a blanket ban on abortion has led to the deaths of at least 82 women since its introduction. You can find out more about this pernicious life-hating law and its effects here, in an article from today’s Guardian. It starts like this:

María de Jesús González was a practical woman. A very poor single mother, the 28-year-old’s home was a shack on a mountain near the town of Ocotal in Nicaragua. She made the best of it. The shack was spotless, the children scrubbed. She earned money by washing clothes in the river and making and selling tortillas.
That wasn’t quite enough to feed her four young children and her elderly mother, so every few months González caught a bus to Managua, the capital, and slaved for a week washing and ironing clothes. The pay was three times better, about £2.60 a day, and by staying with two aunts she cut her costs. She would return to her hamlet with a little nest-egg in her purse. She bought herself one treat – a pair of red shoes – but she would leave them with her family in Managua, as they were no good on the mountain trails she had to go up to get home.

No abortion isn’t the only thing the sex-obsessed geriatrics in the Vatican would like about Nicaragua. It’s also the only country in Latin America with a law that prohibits gay sex. Article 204 of the Constitution imposes sentences of up to three years for sodomy. But you don’t have to buttfuck to get into trouble; all you need to do is say you’re gay and happy and you can be arrested. Oddly enough, according to Nicaraguan activist, Don Pato:

Article 204 is used as a tool to institutionalize child abuse where the many poor children and parents in this country dare not accuse the perpetrator. To accuse anyone a priest, teacher or not so wealthy land owners of male on male contact can equate to justifiable homicide in this place, and the accusing person can end up jail for libel. Nicaragua has the highest rate of underage sex abuse anywhere in Latin America.

Two laws, in other words, that strike directly at the poorest and most defenceless. As Tony Blair so famously said: I wonder what Jesus would have done.

Tengo famiglia

La Sapienza in Rome is the largest university in Europe. This isn’t necessarily an advantage: the place is famous for its overcrowded classrooms, Byzantine administration, no-show professors, assistants in de facto charge of courses, massive drop-out rates, er, too many cars. In an attempt to solve the last of these problems, work began n March on a new underground car park. The cost of the car park? Almost nine million euros (six million pounds). It’s being built by a company called CPC (Compagnia progettazione e costruzioni), the chairman of which is the architect, Leonardo di Paola. Di Paola isn’t just an architect and businessman; he also teaches at La Sapienza. His son Marco, CEO of CPC, and chairman of ANCE, the association of young constructors, does too. Last Friday, seven tax officers spent eight hours in the relevant offices to try and see where that odd fishy smell was coming from.

While they were there they had a closer look at the documentation surrounding a recent appointment. Maria Rosaria Guarini, daughter of La Sapienza’s dean, Renato Guarini, became a researcher early last year after winning a concorso (competition) for the post. The specific subject she chose to present for the exam was Estimo (Estimation), taught by Professor Di Paola (sound familiar?). The first part of the exam was conducted in the Professor’s private study, conveniently situated in the same building as the offices of CPC. Later parts were held in the Faculty of Architecture, where Ms Guarini, already an employee at La Sapienza, gallantly fought for the post against two other candidates, one of whom had failed to attach a list of publications to his application, while the other ‘declared but failed to present three publications’. The only person to show up for the final written and oral exams was Maria Rosaria Guarini. It took a month and six meetings to give her the post, despite her failure to publish anything at all. Her sister, Paola, has been teaching at the university since October 2006 – officially; unofficially she’d been teaching for some time before that on a tecnico-amminstrativo contract. Her partner, a geologist, also teaches at La Sapienza. As Italians caught with their snouts in the truffle sack so often say: Tengo famiglia (I have a family to support)

The cherry on the cake? The deputy dean and head of the faculty of medicine, a certain Luigi Frati, whose votes were decisive in Guarini’s election as dean, has also been investigated for nepotism. His wife and two children all work, you guessed it, in his faculty.

Language slaves: update

It’s come to my notice that numerous teachers of foreign languages in Italian universities (yes, lettori), despite having regular full-time contracts, are expected to make up any lessons they may have missed as a result of illness or public holidays. In other words, they aren’t paid when they’re ill or when they’re prevented from working by state-imposed interruptions, even though they, like all other workers with regular contracts, pay national insurance and have the right to be paid in both cases. In other, even simpler, words, they’re being shafted.

This is an administrative decision, proving once again that there are two battles to be fought. The most visible is for academic status, although that’s not worth a great deal in the humanities faculties of Italy, where full professors are often unpublished (or as good as: look up S. Nuccorini in any reputable citation index) and, mercifully, unsung, except by themselves. The most irritating is the one for basic workers’ rights, routinely denied us by ignorant and servile university administrations.

Gay bomb gets Nobel, sort of

This year’s Ig Nobel Prize for Peace has been given to the Air Force Wright Laboratory of Dayton, Ohio, theorisers of a chemical weapon that would make soldiers sexually irresistible to one another (as if they weren’t already).

For details of the other awards, click here.

For my initial, over-excited, reaction to this extraordinary device, click here.

Facebook journalism

It’s chastening to discover that Isabelle Dinoire, the French woman who received the first face transplant, wouldn’t have known that the donor had committed suicide if it hadn’t been for the gallant investigative efforts of British tabloids. There’s an article about her autobiography here.

Pontifical knickers twisted

Editorialist for La Repubblica and one of Italy’s sharpest journalists, Curzio Maltese, has been looking at the way Italian taxpayers contribute, largely without their direct consent, to the Vatican’s bulging coffers. The money collected by the catholic church each year through the legalised scam known as otto per mille* amounts to an extraordinary €80 billion. Of this, just over a third comes from taxpayers who specifically choose to direct part of their money to the Vatican; the rest of it – €524,565,000,000 in 2004 – is skimmed off the taxes of those who express no preference.

It would be nice to think that all this free money is spent on good works. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be the case. The 2005 campaign (created by Saatchi and Saatchi, friends to the wise and good) showed images of the tsunami and its devastating effects. The price of the campaign? Nine million euros. The amount of aid provided by the Vatican to tsunami victims? Three million euros. In percentage terms, the Union of Jewish Communities gave twenty terms as much, despite the fact that there are no Jewish communities in the areas affected. The amount of otto per mille money actually spent on charitable works by the catholic church amounts to no more than 20% of the total. The rest of it goes on, well, other things. I’ll leave you to decide what these might be, but they certainly aren’t priests’ wages: these have halved since 1999; the amount of tax money the church has received in these years has quintupled.

Livia Turco, ex-minister for solidarity, once suggested that the otto per mille money assigned by taxpayers to the state (around 8% of the total) be used directly to combat infant poverty, imagining the Holy See would be only to keen to back her. She couldn’t have been more wrong. The Vatican peevishly accused the state of ‘unfair competition’ and the idea was dropped. Infant poverty is clearly Vatican business. Under Berlusconi, the state’s portion was used to finance the war in Iraq and, get this, the restoration of churches. Catholic churches, naturally.

The response to Maltese’s articles was immediate. Vatican house organ Avvenire called them ‘one of the most colossal operations of disinformation of recent times’ – unlike, presumably, the Vatican’s tsunami campaign – and, for good measure, ‘indecent’: a common ploy when anyone dares to criticise the church, as though decency were a spiritual rather than social value. Unlike his papal predecessors, who let their underlings do the dirty work, Eggs Benedict threw one of his usual hissy fits, insisting that the catholic church doesn’t ask for or expect financial favours. I’m sorry? Say that again? Even the EU begs to differ.

*Otto per mille. Italian tax payers can devolve 0.8% of the tax they pay to a religious body of their choice, or to the state. Most of the people who bother (40.86% of taxpayers) devolve it to the Vatican. The percentage of tax that isn’t assigned to anyone is divided up in the same proportions as that which is, although some churches – such as the Waldensians – refuse it. The Vatican, in other words, gets a substantial slice of revenue from people who don’t want to give it to the catholic church.

Get with child a mandrake root

It’s good to see Exeter University’s professor of complementary medicine expressing serious doubts about the validity of many herbal remedies. Most of them, apparently, don’t work and may even be harmful. This ought to be self-evident but, for an ever-increasing number of people, from Prince Charles down, hocus-pocus continues to exercise its awful appeal. I broke my shoulder just over a year ago and was recommended homoeopathic pills to encourage the bone to heal. As I wasn’t prepared to break the other shoulder to provide myself with a control group I’ve no idea how efficacious they might have been, but common sense (remember that?) suggests that sugary pellets that contain not the slightest measurable trace of any active ingredient probably didn’t have much effect on my compound fracture. Maybe I should have used crystals.

Interesting though that the Independent should consider the findings of Professors Ernst and Canter to be ‘controversial’. Next thing we’ll be reading that doubts about the credibility of the virgin birth or the transformation of Hyacinth, son of Amyclas, into a spring bulb are ‘controversial’ as well. The only thing that doesn’t appear to be controversial any longer is the weight given to superstition in daily discourse. Italian news programmes talk regularly about miracles as though they’d actually taken place, which is at least as worrying as the presence of herbal ‘medicines’ on chemists’ shelves.

Joined-up government

A valuable, and shocking, article in today’s Independent describing the hypocritical divide between what the UK government says about people fleeing brutal and corrupt regimes, and what the Home Office actually does with these people. You can read it here. It set me thinking about the way we now seem to prefer the term asylum-seekers to refugees. Etymologically, a refugee is someone who has found refuge: 1685, from Fr. refugié, prop. pp. of refugier “to take shelter, protect,” from O.Fr. refuge. The provision of protection, and the need for it, both seem to be implicit in the word. The term asylum-seeker, on the other hand, suggests that refuge has still to be found, may not be found and, even worse, may not be deserved. It shifts the moral onus, and burden of proof, onto the exile.