An alleged Mafia boss hanged himself in jail, hours after being arrested in a police swoop, officials in Sicily said today.

Authorities had ordered the sweeping raids to prevent what they said were mob efforts to rebuild Cosa Nostra. Some 90 suspects were arrested in the blitz.

... Authorities said they ordered yesterday's raids to head off a bloody power struggle among rival mob bosses to rebuild the crime syndicate.

Police made new arrests on Tuesday night in the investigation into the attempted murder of a police chief in the southern Germany city of Passau who was at the forefront in the battle against neo-Nazis in his area.

Public Prosecutor Helmut Walch said a man and woman had been detained. Neither were suspected in the stabbing, but investigators hoped the two could help lead them to the perpetrator. Local officials told SPIEGEL ONLINE that the arrests were of two people who had been active in the local right-wing radical scene.

"Live Better without Nazis." Demonstrators marched against the right wing in Passau on Monday in response to the attack on the city's police chief, presumed to have been perpetrated by a neo-Nazi.

(The banner is held by the Greens College Group Passau.)

Mannichl was seriously injured in the attack (though is recovering well). Just before the man plunged the blade into Mannichl's midriff, he called him a "left-wing police pig" and said "greetings from the national resistance movement."

...Bavarian public radio station Bayerischen Rundfunk has reported that Mannichl was given little support in his fight against the right by the state. Mannichl hired an attorney at his own expense in an effort to remove calls for violence against him from the Internet.

It has been called the "Big Brother" law in the German media due to its provisions allowing online and telephone surveillance. The Interior Ministry in Berlin describes it as a necessary step to protect the country from the dangers of international terrorism.

But journalists in Germany see the bill -- currently in the parliament's arbitration committee after having failed to get through the country's upper legislative chamber, the Bundesrat, in November -- in a different light. They are concerned the law would make it much easier for investigators to spy on reporters without their knowledge, giving the state access to both their computer files and their sources. That, they say, represents an unacceptable attack on freedom of the press in Germany. Publishers, journalists and media lawyers are up in arms.

...Paragraph 20 of the law would significantly weaken journalists' rights to protect their sources, say media professionals.

A doctor cleared of links to the London Glasgow terror plot accused the Government of "sour grapes" today after he was not released.

Jordanian Dr Mohammed Asha, 28, was acquitted by a jury of any involvement in the terrorist conspiracy yesterday.

...He said: "Finally, justice has been done - a jury has cleared me of any involvement in these allegations. The jury had no doubts whatsoever that I am an innocent man.

"Even though I was acquitted, justice has not been done and is not being done. I am still in HMP Belmarsh.

"The Home Office has handed me a notice of detention on the basis that my visa had lapsed."

Belmarsh Prison is Britain's Guantanamo. A blogger kept calling Bliar "Lord Belmarsh" for that.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The legislative package, which easily passed the European Parliament after being put forward by last week's summit of the EU's 27 member states, mandates a 20 percent reduction in the EU's 1990 levels of CO emissions by the year 2020.

...To get the deal passed, the bloc was forced to make concessions to many of the EU's newer, formerly Communist, Eastern European member states, which are still highly dependent on coal power.

As a compromise, states such as Poland will get roughly 12 percent of the revenues generated by the emission trading scheme.

Automakers also lobbied for and won more time to be able to meet stricter climate standards.

The deal's 18 percent cut in maximum allowable CO2 emissions for new cars will take effect in 2015 -- three years later than the date proponents had originally hoped for.

More than a week after the police shooting of a 15-year-old, young people in Greece continue anti-government demonstrations. They briefly hijacked radio and TV stations -- as well the country's most famous monument.

At the Parthenon on Acropolis Hill, young demonstrators unfurled two huge banners, one of which featured the word "resistance" written in Greek, English, and other languages. The other called for protestors across the country to continue their marches.

Sit-ins continued at schools and universities on Wednesday, Dec. 17. Protest leaders say around 600 educational institutions are currently being occupied while authorities put the number at around 100.

Early on Wednesday morning, gas bombs exploded in front of a bank and at least one office building in Thessaloniki, Greece's second-largest city. The buildings were damaged, but there were no initial reports of any serious injuries.

German business confidence dropped to the lowest in more than a quarter century in December as the credit crisis pushes Europe's largest economy deeper into a recession.

The Ifo institute in Munich said its business climate index, based on a survey of 7,000 executives, fell to 82.6 from 85.8 in the previous month. That's the lowest reading for Ifo's main index since November 1982. Economists expected a drop to 84, the median of 39 forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey shows.

Germany's economy is on course for its worst contraction since 1993 next year as a global slowdown saps export demand, forcing companies to curb spending and hiring. Daimler AG, the world's biggest maker of heavy trucks, said the recession may be "deep" and the European Central Bank this month cut its key interest rate by the most on record to stem the slump.

"The indicator points to a heavy recession," said Heinrich Bayer, an economist at Deutsche Postbank AG in Frankfurt, who correctly forecast the Ifo outcome. "We need stimulating effects through further rate cuts and fiscal impulses as soon as possible, ideally internationally."

The Federal Reserve ripped up decades of monetary policy-making, saying it would no longer set an explicit target for US interest rates and instead set a range - and it said it would be happy to see rates at zero.

In its groundbreaking statement, it said it would employ a whole new set of tools to bring down interest rates for struggling borrowers, extending its interventions across the money markets and in effect printing money to halt the economy's downward spiral.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pledged billions of euros in fresh public infrastructure investments to boost the flagging economy. The measures, to be announced after Barack Obama's Jan. 20 inauguration, will come on top of the €32 billion package launched earlier this month.

...Merkel was cricized heavily over that first economic package after closer scrutiny revealed that most of the measures had already passed and that the new intiatives were worth only €5 billion a year.

"It's obvious that everything will be done in the area of infrastructure that can be done quickly," Merkel said in a speech at the ZEW economic institute in Mannheim, in southwestern Germany.

"I think it will amount to an additional few billions," Merkel said, adding that Germany's regional states should start presenting their road building plans so that construction or repair work could start early next spring.

Merkel added that she was opposed to issuing vouchers to boost consumption. She said the German government knew that the initial stimulus package would not suffice to shore up the economy.

Sigh...


_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

The victims of the world's biggest fraud are raising harsh questions about how Bernard Madoff was able to run his $50bn (£33bn) scam for so long without his staff, the authorities or his trading partners noticing.

A firestorm of legal action is gathering as individuals who lost their life savings and charities threatened to pursue the banks and investment firms that made their ill-fated introduction to Mr Madoff.

"If this were a traditional bank robbery, the eyewitness reports would say Mr Madoff walked out with billions of dollars as someone held the door open for him," said Jeffrey Zwerling, a lawyer representing some of the victims. "There is just no way that this happens without help of some kind."

Members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have agreed to cut oil production by 2.2 million barrels per day. The move is to take effect on January 1 and represents the largest single production cut by OPEC since 1982. The decision came during a meeting of OPEC-member oil ministers in the Algerian city of Oran. The cartel is seeking to counter slumping demand and falling oil prices which have dropped to less than $50 per barrel from a July peak above $147. The cut is the third this year and brings the total reduction in OPEC supply to 4.2 million barrels per day. That's a reduction in world oil supplies of nearly five percent.

D Bank decides not to repay €1bn bond

Deutsche Bank jolted bond and equity investors on Wednesday when it became the first big bank to say it would not repay €1bn ($1.4bn) of a particular kind of bond as expected in January.

(...)

The bonds are typically repaid at the first opportunity after an initial period when redemptions are not allowed. If an issuer does not redeem then, they must pay a higher penalty coupon rate.

Deutsche Bank decided it was more cost-effective to pay this penalty rate rather than replace the funding in current difficult market conditions, which have made finance more expensive.

More than $800bn such bonds have been issued globally this decade, according to Dealogic, hitting a peak of $175bn in 2007. Most of the issuance has come from banks. Their importance in supporting bank balance sheets during the crisis is shown in the $137bn of deals in the past year.

When banks decide not to redeem the bonds at the earliest opportunity, the market value of the instruments falls, hurting investors. Analysts and bankers said such a scenario could see investors turn away from buying these deals in the future - further narrowing banks' ability to raise new money.

"Deutsche Bank is running the risk that this may be seen as more symptomatic of capital and funding pressures which the institution may be facing," said Roberto Henriques, credit analyst at JPMorgan.

The €1bn bond, which is part of Deutsche's Tier 2 capital, an important but not core element of its balance sheet, has its first call date in mid-January.

We're entering an interesting times when all deals in the past are suddenly reconsidered in light not of what was customary practice, but of what the legal rights of a party are. As this case shows, the practice in good times was rather different from what the formal rights are. ore of this is likely to happen, in many different sectors.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

... Keynesian "pump-priming" in a recession has often been tried, and as an economic stimulus it is overrated. The money that the government spends has to come from somewhere, which means from the private economy in higher taxes or borrowing. The public works are usually less productive than the foregone private investment.

In the Age of Obama, we seem fated to re-explain these eternal lessons. So for today we thought we'd recount the history of the last major country that tried to spend its way to "stimulus" -- Japan during its "lost decade" of the 1990s. In 1992, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa faced falling property prices and a stock market that had sunk 60% in three years. Mr. Miyazawa's Liberal Democratic Party won re-election promising that Japan would spend its way to becoming a "lifestyle superpower." The country embarked on a great Keynesian experiment: ...

<...>

... Debt-to-GDP reached 128.3%.

Japan's economy grow anemically over that decade, but as the nearby chart shows, its national debt exploded. Only in this decade, with a monetary reflation and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's decision to privatize state assets and force banks to acknowledge their bad debts, did the economy recover. Yet recent governments have rolled back Mr. Koizumi's reforms and returned to their spending habits. But Japan does have better roads.

Now we're told that a similar spending program -- a new New Deal -- will revive the U.S. economy. How do you say "good luck" in Japanese?

By Peter Whoriskey Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 18, 2008; Page A01

Struggling U.S. automakers are launching a round of severe cutbacks as they wait for a government rescue, with Chrysler saying yesterday it will idle all 30 of its U.S. factories for one month.

Chrysler's plants will furlough 46,000 workers beginning Friday, as a planned two-week holiday shutdown is extended to a month and possibly longer. The company, which has told Congress it needed $7 billion to survive the month, also told dealers that it may suspend financing for new cars in a bid to conserve cash.

"No one will return to work any earlier than Jan. 19," Chrysler spokesperson Shawn Morgan said. "I don't want to get into speculating about what may happen after that. . . . We're going to continue to monitor the situation."

"If I were a Chrysler worker, I'd be worried that the plant won't reopen," said Brian Johnson, an industry analyst at Barclays Capital.

The moves come as other U.S. and foreign automakers are announcing steep production cuts that will idle tens of thousands of other U.S. workers as the industry copes with withered demand for new cars and trucks. Ford said yesterday that it would stop production for an extra week in January at all but two of its plants because of flagging consumer demand. General Motors said Friday that it will cut production and temporarily close 20 factories.

Gordon Brown and his Iraqi counterpart, Nouri Maliki, made the announcement in a joint statement released as they held talks in Baghdad.

They said: "The role played by the UK combat forces is drawing to a close. These forces will have completed their tasks in the first half of 2009 and will then leave Iraq."

The premiers added that the partnership between the two countries would continue.

Yesterday, the Iraqi council of ministers agreed a new resolution allowing British troops to remain in the country until the end of July.

...The tall, slim retired US general has nothing but good things to say about the Germans...

But General James Marks is not a witness...

...He could talk about the spring of 2003, when he was sitting in a windowless, air-conditioned briefing room at the US military's Camp Doha in the Kuwaiti desert, reading the reports of two BND agents who held out in Baghdad during the war. And he could talk about how the information provided by the Germans was incorporated into the situation reports he presented in daily videoconferences to General Tommy Franks, head of the US invading forces, and sometimes to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In the spring of 2003, Marks headed up the military intelligence efforts both before and during the American campaign. It was his job to ensure that the 115,000 US troops didn't run into any surprises as they advanced toward Baghdad. All information relevant to the war ended up on his desk. By virtue of this position, Marks, more than almost anyone else, knows how important the reports provided by the two Germans were for the American war effort.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier will testify before the parliamentary investigative committee on Thursday. When the Iraq war began in early 2003, Steinmeier was head of Germany's secret services as well as being then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's chief of staff. Schröder, for his part, owed his re-election in September 2002 primarily to his tough opposition to US plans to invade Iraq.

In a SPIEGEL interview, US foreign policy expert Strobe Talbott discusses the daunting foreign policy challenges facing Obama, the next president's desire to turn Americans into global citizens and the prospects for reinvigorated trans-Atlantic relations.

...SPIEGEL: When it comes to culture, doesn't America -- with its large domestic market and fixation on itself -- seem like one of the least globalized countries in the Western world?

Talbott: There is no question that the population of the United States takes its sovereignty very seriously. We don't have a tradition of transnationalism like you do in Europe. I know many people on your continent who identify as European just as easily as they identify as being German, British or French. But this European culture is only 60 years old.

...Talbott: The issue of finding the right policy for Afghanistan is going to be tough. Obama will try to persuade the Europeans that we have to fight the war in Afghanistan together. The Clinton name is also a global brand, and that will prove effective. Hillary Clinton comes off the Senate Armed Services Committee and understands the needs of NATO.

A UN resolution passed on Tuesday gives countries a one-year mandate to battle Somali pirates in the water and on land. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has made clear land assaults will not be part of the Bundeswehr's mission, which is to be approved by parliament Friday.

President Robert Mugabe is planning to declare a state of emergency in Zimbabwe, the opposition said yesterday, after what the government claims was an assassination attempt on the head of the air force.

In a rare example of grassroots political power, angry protests by drivers prompted lawmakers in the far eastern Primorye region on Monday to ask the country's two leaders to delay raising import duties on foreign cars.

The Primorye regional legislature, led by United Russia deputies, voted unanimously Monday to ask President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to postpone the tariffs, which take effect on Jan. 11, according to a decree signed by Putin.

Thousands of drivers took to the streets in several far eastern cities and towns Sunday to protest the tariffs, blocking traffic, clashing with police, openly insulting Putin and Medvedev and even calling on Putin to resign.

Putin's decree would increase the prices for imported cars by between 10 and 20 percent, a move the government has defended as a way of protecting domestic auto makers during the growing financial crisis.

The Primorye region's representative in the Federation Council, hockey legend Vyacheslav Fetisov, met with regional car dealers in Vladivostok on Monday and promised to pass on their request to the government to call off the tariffs, which they say would ravage their business.

Fetisov also promised to pass the dealers' request to the Prosecutor General's Office to examine the legality of Putin's decree, Interfax reported.

...

Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Information, said the anti-Putin and anti-United Russia signs protesters held during the demonstrations represented economic, rather than political, demands.

Thirty-nine percent of Russians are increasingly unhappy with the government, while 26 percent believe the economic crisis is getting worse in their region, according to a poll released last week by the Kremlin-friendly Public Opinion Foundation.

The level of disapproval was the same among all social groups, regardless of income, education and profession, according to the poll, conducted Nov. 14 to 25 among 34,000 people in 68 regions.

Despite a massive public outcry, including over 20,000 emails from the Organic Consumers Association, President-Elect Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to be the next Secretary of Agriculture.

While Vilsack has promoted respectable policies with respect to restraining livestock monopolies, his overall record is one of aiding and abetting Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) or factory farms and promoting genetically engineered crops and animal cloning. Equally troubling is Vilsack's support for unsustainable industrial ethanol production, which has already caused global corn and grain prices to skyrocket, literally taking food off the table for a billion people in the developing world.

The Organic Consumers Association is calling on organic consumers and all concerned citizens to join our call to action and block Vilsack's confirmation as the next Secretary of Agriculture. Please help us reach our goal of 100,000 petition signatures against Vilsack' nomination. Sign today!

Tribune photographer Tom Van Dyke was driving west on Irving Park Road this morning when he saw someone jogging against traffic in the slush.
He thought it was odd that someone would be getting his feet wet in the cold, so he gave the guy a good look and saw it was Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

Van Dyke did a U-turn, got ahead of the governor, stopped and grabbed his camera.

"I told him I was from the Tribune and he smiled and said, 'Ok! Come on let's go.'"

Van Dyke jogged along for a bit on Sheffield Avenue, and asked the embattled governor why he was running.

"It's what I always do," Blagojevich said. "It does a lot of good things for you."

The governor said he runs to clear his head and for physical fitness.

"And it keeps love in your heart," he said.

Truly bizarre...


Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

WASHINGTON -- The State Department's inspector general has warned in a new report that Blackwater Worldwide, the security contractor, may not be licensed by the Iraqi government to continue to protect American diplomats in Baghdad next year, forcing the Obama administration to make new security arrangements.

The report says that if State Department contractors lose their immunity from criminal prosecution under Iraqi law, as many officials expect, employees of Blackwater and other contractors may choose to leave Iraq or demand higher pay. Five Blackwater guards were indicted this month in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed at least 17 Iraqis.

Unlike some American contractors in Iraq, Blackwater does not have a license, but it has applied for one. Iraqi authorities have allowed it to operate while officials consider the application.

The inspector general's findings were first reported Wednesday by The Associated Press, and The New York Times obtained a copy of the report.

The report says the State Department "faces a real possibility" that no license will be granted and that the Iraqi government will ban Blackwater. The American Embassy in Baghdad would then face a major challenge; officials said Blackwater's services would not be easily replaced.

  Barack Obama's selection of Arne Duncan for secretary of education does not bode well either for the political direction of his administration nor for the future of public education.
-------------
    Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, presided over the implementation and expansion of an agenda that militarized and corporatized the third largest school system in the nation, one that is about 90 percent poor and nonwhite. Under Duncan, Chicago took the lead in creating public schools run as military academies, vastly expanded draconian student expulsions, instituted sweeping surveillance practices, advocated a growing police presence in the schools, arbitrarily shut down entire schools and fired entire school staffs. A recent report, "Education on Lockdown," claimed that partly under Duncan's leadership "Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has become infamous for its harsh zero tolerance policies.
-----
 Duncan's neoliberal ideology is on full display in the various connections he has established with the ruling political and business elite in Chicago.[5] He led the Renaissance 2010 plan, which was created for Mayor Daley by the Commercial Club of Chicago - an organization representing the largest businesses in the city. The purpose of Renaissance 2010 was to increase the number of high quality schools that would be subject to new standards of accountability - a code word for legitimating more charter schools and high stakes testing in the guise of hard-nosed empiricism. Chicago's 2010 plan targets 15 percent of the city district's alleged underachieving schools in order to dismantle them and open 100 new experimental schools in areas slated for gentrification. Most of the new experimental schools have eliminated the teacher union.
------------
    Duncan's advocacy of the Renaissance 2010 plan alone should have immediately disqualified him for the Obama appointment. At the heart of this plan is a privatization scheme for creating a "market" in public education by urging public schools to compete against each other for scarce resources and by introducing "choice" initiatives so that parents and students will think of themselves as private consumers of educational services.[7] As a result of his support of the plan, Duncan came under attack by community organizations, parents, education scholars and students. These diverse critics have denounced it as a scheme less designed to improve the quality of schooling than as a plan for privatization, union busting and the dismantling of democratically-elected local school councils. They also describe it as part of neighborhood gentrification schemes involving the privatization of public housing projects through mixed finance developments.

More of  " The Best and the Brightest"?

Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.

Turkish warplanes and Iranian artillery pounded border areas of northern Iraq on Wednesday as they pressed an offensive against Kurdish rebels, an Iraqi Kurdish security forces spokesman said.
"Turkish and Iranian forces are continuing to bombard the Iraqi border region on the pretext of fighting the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the Haj Omran and Qandil mountains districts," Jabbar Yawar told AFP.

As the Minneapolis Federal Reserve reports, the major claims about a credit crisis that justified Congress cutting a trillion-dollar blank check to Wall Street were demonstrably false. And new data and reports show they remain demonstrably false.
---------------------
For instance, take a look at line 1 and line 5 of this December Federal Reserve report on bank lending. That's right -- you see no significant decrease in lending, and in some cases, an increase. Interbank lending has dropped some, but certainly not at the crisis levels the Bush administration and banks claimed.

Then take a look at this story from Reuters, recounting a big report from a widely respected financial analysis firm:

    "The credit crunch is not nearly as severe as the U.S. authorities appear to believe, and public data actually suggest world credit markets are functioning remarkably well, a report [from Celent consulting] released on Thursday says. ... The report, much of which is based on U.S. Federal Reserve data, challenges a long list of assumptions one by one, arguing that there is indeed a financial crisis but that, on aggregate, the problems of a few are by no means those of the many when it comes to obtaining credit.

    "It is startling that many of (Federal Reserve) Chairman (Ben) Bernanke and (Treasury) Secretary (Henry) Paulson's remarks are not supported or are flatly contradicted by the data provided by the very organizations they lead," said the report.
 Regarding U.S. business access to credit, the report says: Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever; U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007; corporate bond issuance has declined, but increased commercial lending has compensated for this; [interbank] lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent; the cost of interbank lending ... dropped to its lowest level ever in early November and remains at very low levels; [consumer credit] was at a record high in September; and local government bond issuance had continued at similar levels to those before the credit crisis, while bank lending for real estate reached a record level in October 2008, it says. (emphasis added).

A venture by Algeria's Sonatrach, the United Kingdom's BP, and Norway's Statoil to strip CO2 out of natural gas and store it underground could help cut emissions.

Given Germany's skepticism about Tom Cruise portraying the German officer who almost killed Hitler in 1944, the cautious praise from German reviewers for his film 'Valkyrie' comes as a surprise. Cruise's performance has been panned, though.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 16, 2008) -- Scientists are expanding the search for extraterrestrial life -- and they've set their sights on some very unearthly planets. Cold "Super-Earths" -- giant, "snowball" planets that astronomers have spied on the outskirts of faraway solar systems -- could potentially support some kind of life, they have found.

Such planets are plentiful; experts estimate that one-third of all solar systems contain super-Earths.

"We know there are a lot of super-Earths out there, and the next generation of telescopes will be even better at spotting them," said Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University.

Despite the name, a super-Earth has little in common with the Earth that we know -- other than the fact it is has a solid surface.  A super-Earth is covered with ice, and may have a substantial atmosphere - perhaps much thicker than the Earth's.

Yet Gaudi joined with Eric Gaidos of the University of Hawaii and Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to model whether such planets might harbor a liquid ocean that could support life, and whether they might be detectable from Earth.

Gaidos reported the team's early results at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

"It turns out that if super-Earths are young enough, massive enough, or have a thick atmosphere, they could have liquid water under the ice or even on the surface," Gaudi said. "And we will almost certainly be able to detect these habitable planets if they exist."

The BBC has been fined £95,000 by media watchdog Ofcom for broadcasting quizzes which listeners could not win.

The competitions ran on eight editions of Dermot O'Leary's Radio 2 show in 2006 and five Tony Blackburn programmes on BBC London 94.9 in 2005 and 2006.

All were pre-recorded, however, so there was no way to take part in them.

Ofcom ruled these to be "serious" breaches and in a separate report, the BBC Trust ruled audiences were "misled" and said on-air apologies were needed.

A South Korean court today handed out a suspended prison sentence for adultery to a popular actress who had been trying to overturn a law that criminalises extramarital affairs.

South Korea enacted its adultery law more than 50 years ago to protect women who then had few rights in a male-dominated society, but critics say now it is a draconian measure no longer fit for a country with an advanced civil and family court system.

Today is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers and Strategic Missile Force Day, and this Sunday will be Global Orgasm for Peace Day.

Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

I'll be back in late Feb at the revival screening of a movie from the Devonian era that I worked on that'll play at the Curzon in Soho. Tickets 8 quid.

You can't be me, I'm taken