Italian wins gay driving ban case

One of the reasons Hitler wasn't keen on Mussolini being an equal in warmongering was that he wan't to be trusted. The Nazis thought the Italians couldn't be trusted. In fact, it went right through the German thought process. That's why the Italians were given co-belligerent status. A euphemism for being second fiddle. As it turned out, the Allies came to pretty much the same conclusion. Italians are not a people for warfare, being that they are more attuned to internal strife.

However, individual Italians can show panache, bravery, courage, all the things we think of in the battle. They can also show class. In the first Iraq conflict, an Italian officer insisted on taking his antique writing desk with him so that he could be esconced in his tent with a certain amount of comfort about him.

When it comes to being an individual in modern day Italy, it is the convuluting system of brown envelopes, regulation, and general inefficiency that one confronts. Danilo Giuffrida is homosexual. In Italy he has civil rights. However, he has also received a few civil wrongs. Certain people within authority decided they'd make his life difficult. So they put him through the hoop routine. He told doctors he was homosexual during a medical examination for military service. They then decided that he'd have to retake his driving test because of his "sexual identity disturbance".

He took them to court and won. The judge said the actions of the ministries showed "evident sexual discrimination". But that's not necessarily the problem. Of course they were way out of line, but I think it is very sneeky to undermine people in this way. It is the secretive element. It is the premeditated approach. It's almost like a cat playing with a mouse, deciding on what action to take with the hapless creature.

And if they think his "sexual identity disturbance" is reason to question his driving abilities, where does that put a lot of people? Max Mosley will be in trouble if he ever crashes a car!

EU to probe Northern Rock lifeline!

Those snout-nosed number-crunchers from Brussels have been drawn into sniffing around the emergency government funding given to Northern Rock last year, after it was hard hit by the credit crunch. Some Danish bankers have complained to these bureaucrats that the British government is not playing fair.

All I'd say is that before these guys pick up their pens they start to look at the appalling accounting system within the confines of the Brussels Bureaucracy. Otherwise they'll look a bit like Robert Mugabe probing the London Mayoral election results, should there be a complaint.

The EU is in a mess financially, no accounts signed off for 13 years, and a simpering President, Jose Manuel Barroso, who no doubt knows how the brown envelope culture works, in complete denial.

Whatever the Northern Rock fiasco has created, it pales into insignificance compared to the collossal corruption emanating from Brussels!