Lord of the Flies

Photo credit - Melynne Stone (via A.P.)

This is one for the record books! Jamison Stone, an eleven year old student who just completed Grade 6 in school, killed this 1,051 wild hog near Anniston, Alabama on May 3, 2007. In the photo he poses with the gun he used in the hunt. It's a customized .50 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver, and his loads were 350 grain Hornady bullets. According to the Associated Press article making the rounds Jamison said "he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot."

Now before anyone howls about "kids with guns" I hasten to add that his father accompanied him in the chase and had a high powered rifle ready at all times in case the monstrous porker charged. The beast was sporting five inch long tusks which can kill a man quite handily. As the wheel holds only five .500 rounds the boy had to stop to reload at least once. Mr. Stone allowed his son to complete the hunt on his own terms, and it's unlikely the lad will ever have an experience to equal it.

This is the Smith & Wesson Model 500 hunting revolver used in the story. It retails for a healthy US$1,462. so it is definately for serious shooters only. This example from the S&W online catalog is stainless, while Jamison used a blued example. It is good that the young fellow is himself rather well built, because this firearm packs quite a kick.

About a month ago I spotted an interesting photo of a pack of wild boar on a roadside in Estonia and I have been saving it in my photo bin. Note that these animals are using their tusks to rip up the grass looking for edible grubs or roots. These are smaller animals, but equally dangerous.

Jamison's proud dad had put up a website called "Monsterpig.com" but it has gone down - perhaps because readers of the AP story have overloaded the server. It's a fabulous adventure story. Jamison attends a private Christian Academy but is no choirboy. He's been hunting since age five.

Update: May 28, 2007 - It is truly amazing to witness the firestorm of hate comments which polluted the Internet following the publication of Jamison's story. His father Melynne Stone has been called a fraud, a photoshop trickster, etc, and the boy has been called down. Why not visit their website yourself and bypass all the mealy mouthed commentary? http://www.stoneauctioneers.com/monsterpig/index.htm

UPDATE: Jan. 22, 2011 - I had an email from "D.J. " this AM, informing me that one of these photos had been digitally manipulated. That's common enough. In this blog I often trim photos for size or clarity or to add explanatory text. It seems the top photo in this blog article has been photo shopped to remove an adult. The effect of course is to intensify our sense of wonder - that this youth stood down a giant beast, kept his nerve, and took him down with a hand cannon. My article has been read every day since I posted it, proof of HOGZILLA's enduring appeal. William Golding's novel LORD OF THE FLIES also endures, and it too removed adults from the picture. So in the interest of fair play, I am providing a link to to the commentary on photo manipulation. http://66.226.75.96/pig/ It's not as BIG an issue as Obama's birth certificate, but the Jamison Stone hog killing is now a part of Americana. "Kill the beast, drink his blood!"

Canadian "Anarchism"- something worse than Napalm

[Reading Note: Sometimes in writing of prose the author may use quotation marks to distinguish a word which seems to need particular attention. Your humble Runagate-Blogger often does not agree that the meaning commonly attached to a word is correct. Hence the frequent use of sarcastic " ". They save time and space.]

Laid up over the weekend with an injury, I found time to ponder my Sat. morning Blog on the neophyte Ottawa "anarchist" who sought to "expose" the putative Tory agenda on "managing" climate change with taxes and other coerced behaviour. The Tory agenda of course has more to do with managing voter opinion than with counting carbon molecules, but that's another con, and another Blog.

For me, the only aspect of the news story of interest was the
claim that the "whistle blower" is an anarchist. With just a little Google
sniffing you too can quickly profile every member of the Anarchist collective which has just opened a 2nd floor bookshop in downtown Ottawa.

The group upon inspection, seems to be nothing more than an assembly
of inoffensive free spirits. Their quoted values and opinions betray the
fact that they haven’t read Anarchist theory or even its history, but then who ever claimed that Canadian youth read books? Hell, according to
Bob Black, even the middle aged anarchists haven’t found time to read Anarchist theory. (Black once wrote that he had read 19 important books on Anarchism, and couldn’t find another person in the movement who
had read more than a few.) Bob Black often derides the trend to form
anarchist collectives, (like the Ottawa group at hand) or a variety of alternative social systems – which “will let you smoke pot, suck cock,
sniff panties and watch TV so long as you join up.”

The simple core belief of these Ottawa anarchy-groupies seems to be
that T shirts and song lyrics can change the world. Mr. Monaghan (the "whistleblower") plays in a punk band called The Suicide Pilots, and of course Young Ms. Pascale Gagnon-Arpin (allegedly a budding graphic artist) favours badly designed T shirts with confused messages.

In the photo a Douglas Skyraider dropping napalm canisters. Note message- "Democratic governments kill". Get it? I am really curious about how people respond to political shirts. I saw napalm dropped once but in peacetime. It was a Canadian CF-5 dropping its load on an air bombing range in New Brunswick, and it wasn't that impressive. Hollywood does it better. I am impressed by the fact that our young anarchists choose to assail democracy with such frequency, while living under the protection of its institutions. The young lady is too young to know much, but her naiveté and that of her Ottawa friends (reported to be unhappy with Canadian combat troops in A-Stan), bring to mind a poem written in 1967, during the era of napalm.

POWERLESS, WITH A GUITAR
By Gunter Grass

WE READ napalm and imagine napalm.
Since we cannot imagine napalm
We read about napalm until
by napalm we can imagine more.
Now we protest against napalm.
After breakfast, silent,
we see on photographs what napalm can do.
We show each other coarse screen prints
And say: there you are, napalm.
They do that with napalm.
Soon there’ll be cheap picture books
With better photographs
which will show more clearly
what napalm can do.
We bite our nails and write protests.
But, we read, there are
worse things than napalm.
Quickly we protest against worse things.
Our well-founded protests, which at any time
we may compose, fold, stamp, mount up.
Impotence, tried out on rubber facades.
Impotence puts records on: impotent songs.
Powerless, with a guitar.
But outside, finely meshed
And calm, power has its way.

Ms. Arpin’s plaintive views on living an anarchist lifestyle were recently published in the Ottawa (X)Press. On the need for founding the Exile Infoshop she said: "It's important for cities to have this kind of safe environment for activists and curious people alike, to be able to exchange ideas…” A safe environment for anarchists??? Bob Black would sh*t his pants if he was forced to read such tripe. Anarchy reduced to needing shelter, like a home for pregnant teens or an after school drop-in centre for urban youth? Are Canadians so freaking pampered that even our anarchists are now promoting the Nanny State? Apparently so. Sickening isn't it?

ANARCHIST LITE- stunting for the media

Jeffrey Monoghan on May 10, his trainer beard shaved off, sans the ball cap, ready for his 15 minutes. Still posing for the camera, but he's certainly no anarchist. Just embarrassing himself.

This was Jeffrey Monaghan on May 1, posing in his AK PRESS ball cap with an old example of popcorn anarchist literature. Posing with a cute drawing of a bomb, rather than just a bomb. He's a "bookseller" who skims newspapers for the Feds and plays in a rock band. Kool-Aid anarchism in Canuckistan.

The story began with this headline: THE ANARCHIST AND THE LEAK. It detailed the arrest of a federal employee who got his hot little hands on some documents detailing the Tories confidential plans to position themselves as serious players in the great "Let's Fight Man-Made Global Warming" scam. Said employee, young Jeff Monaghan, (no covert operator he) went to his nearest STAPLES office supply centre and faxed the pages to another bunch of Harper haters - the local Environmental lobby. What's more hilarious is that the Tories even stamp their "Eco-Plan" bullshit with the word "Secret". Videotaped blinking and gulping on Parliament Hill, the young "victim" of Big Brother complained: “Our society knows the threat presented by the changing climate, global warming, and the rapidly increasing growth of industrial emissions... We deserve real action, not cynically calculated PR campaigns and witch-hunts on public servants.” Anarchist as "public servant"? What does he smoke?

Jeffrey Monoghan's Mini-bio: current age 27, a part time employee of Environment Canada where his job was to skim up to 48 newspapers a day to clip environment stories, and then pass a summary up the bureaucratic food chain. He's a former student at Carleton University and campus radio personality and a devoted heterosexual. Until now his claim to fame was a drummer in a band called The Suicide Pilots (A twin-towers homage? Silly stuff) and a volunteer staffer at the newly opened EXILE INFOSPOT bookstore in Ottawa. For those too dumb to get it, the pilots have posted

a cartoon on their MySpace page where you can also give a listen to their

silly songs. "gah, gah,gah, gah..... Harper Yoo - ooth."

According to THE TORONTO STAR the "pilots" like to belt out lyrics about the alleged rise of the "right-wing" and the naked power of the wealthy. His performing name is "Bones". One ditty called called "HARPER YOUTH" compares Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Adolf Hitler, leader of the new Hitler Jugend. "Give me your fear, give me your hate, give me your intolerance and I'll give you a place in the Harper Youth."

Ee eye, ee eye, owe.

I couldn't help grinning when I saw this non-story pop up. Now even the freaking pseudo-anarchists are buying into this Global Warming Apocalypse shtick. In Canada "anarchism" is such a dead political philosophy that you couldn't find it if you spun the Hubble telescope around and trained it on a campus. But leave it to the wacky Ottawa press corps to find a use for the label "anarchist" for just one day.

"Monaghan was inside man! He got inside the fortress of mean, Dude!" Why didn't he pull a "Tyler Durden" and head for the Parliamentary cafeteria? He could have done more damage to the Tories by pissing in their salads than he has posturing as an anarchist for the bored press corps. The sad truth is that young Monaghan doesn't really want to be an anarchist. That's work. That's commitment. That's self sacrifice. He just wants to be a recognized face, or a wiki page, like every other Canadian you meet. Labeling yourself an "anarchist" doesn't make you one, any more than labeling someone a "fascist" makes them one.

A hundred years ago the real Anarchists were a feared bunch here in North
America, and they had the backing of an equally feared labour movement - the I.W.W. Then, after World War 1, they all defected to the Communists because - surprise! ... they too favoured BIG GOVERNMENT. But it had to be a bloated bureaucracy that was a puppet of labour, not of the tycoons.

Just what sort of "anarchist" are the Ottawa Mounties dealing with? Well let's let the "Treasurer" of the EXILE INFOSPOT book emprium speak out.

From the punk website - Brownout's Blurbs:
"About me: I have returned from the Great Western Adventure! Living in Ottawa for a while at least. Concerts are my favorite thing in the entire world. I strive to not let THE POLICE STATE rule my life. I am interested in WHAT I AM SUPPORTING or not supporting... Spreading the word of corruption, exploitation and abuses of power... believe me, I too am losing hope... I also skateboard, snowboard, hitchhike, play bass, and play ukulele. I want to learn how to grow vegetables. I've co-organized 5 free outdoor Tumbleweed music festivals, and DIY punk music has been my life since the first non-stadium show I ever went to. I've worked for three record labels/music collectives: Tumbleweed Entertainment, DPS Music, No Records. LET'S BUILD AN ECOVILLAGE! proclaim our disagreement with capitalism, consumption, corruption, and environmental degradation. We'll represent everything capitalist society destroys: equality, awareness, respect, freedom."

The lovely Ms. Arpin models a Loose Screws anarchist black T. It's Skyraider napalming chic.

You can sleep comfortably tonight kids. The real anarchists today are holed up in the Afghan mountains with Osama or perhaps sleeping in ugly stucco bungalows in Surrey, B.C.

Tory, Tory Pants on Fire

Gordon Smith - truth teller

Wow, what an interesting month April was! On every front imaginable - Science, Literature, Military Affairs, Politics, Technology, Law Enforcement, Education, you name it… there were wonderful developments. Too bad I was so busy with other projects that I couldn’t spare more time for Blog articles. Regrets... there are a few.

Terrorism Investigation was Sabotaged

And what do we find in this morning’s fish basket? The Commission of Inquiry into the [Sabotaged] Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182, yesterday heard from an aging ex-Tory bureaucrat who attempted to heap scorn on the bombshell revelation offered last week from James Bartleman, Ontario’s Lt. Governor. Bartleman recall, testified that he was riffling through a 100 page daily stack of electronic intercepts prepared by Canada’s super-secret monitoring agency, the CSE, when one transcript seized his attention.
It was very specific about a threat to an AIR INDIA flight originating in Canada. As there was a top level meeting underway in the building of an ad hoc task force specifically assembled to deal with Sikh terrorism (CSIS, RCMP, External Affairs and Solicitor General) Bartleman ran down the hall with the document in hand to share it with the players. The RCMP careerist he handed it too wasn’t thrilled to see him. Let’s refresh our memory of how Bartleman’s recollection was reported in the press last week.

1) “Bartleman told the inquiry he took the classified document, an electronic intercept, and showed it to an RCMP officer who "hissed" at him that of course the RCMP had seen the report and taken appropriate action. Within five minutes of seeing that document, I was showing it by hand, to a senior RCMP officer in a position to take action.”

2) “The man flushed and, according to Mr. Bartleman, replied that "of course" he had seen it and he didn't need to be told how to do his job. Believing the matter to be in hand, Mr. Bartleman returned to his office.” He added that he had embarrassed at the time, because he had never in his career in public service been spoken to like that.

3)“He asked a senior Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, whose identity he cannot recall, if he was aware of the threat. His reaction startled me. He flushed and told me that, of course he had seen it, and that he didn't need me to tell him how to do his job."

4) Asked at a news conference why he had offered to testify, Bartleman said: "I thought that as I was director general of intelligence analysis and security at the time of the terrible event, I believed I could be of assistance to the inquiry. …I thought it was my civic duty to tell the commission what I knew, whatever the consequence." It was!

Now here is where the basket starts to smell. Yesterday Mr. Gordon Smith, now a university lecturer, did his utmost to discredit Bartleman’s testimony. "I think it's possible ... that he has conflated several events and run them together and his memory in that sense is playing tricks on him." More astonishing, he implied inaction on Bartleman’s part! "I would have thought he would have come forward immediately," Smith said of Bartleman. "That would have been a very relevant piece of information for a lot of us to have." Is this guy for real??

Is there any thinking person in this country who doesn’t understand what happened following the terrorist bombing in 1985 which massacred people? The careerist in Law Enforcement, Intelligence and assorted bureaucracies weighed the value of a genuine, balls to the wall investigation – against their pension points, and selfishness won out.
Yesterday the head of this Inquiry, Supreme Court Justice John Major, stated the obvious. Gordon Smith had been bought in to discredit his old “friend” Bartleman. Major noted the government is losing control of the official story line is making an “effort to discredit Mr. Bartleman”. Smith, predictably, stepped outside the hearing room to express his outrage that his rendition of events is not believed. Boo Hoo!

I am reminded of another man named Major who investigated the case. Bernard Major, a former Scotland Yard detective, investigated the case for the insurance adjusters on the case. His views were reported in the Vancouver SUN in 1994 – “Police failed to act on Bomb Tip, prober says”. I’m also reminded of a PROVINCE story around that time which revealed that RCMP officers had shredded transcripts and tapes of thousands of wiretaps, before giving carefully weeded material over to investigators. So determined were they to destroy the evidence of what they overheard Sikh terrorists discussing that they pulled hard drives from computers which contained transcripts, took them into the RCMP garage on Heather Street and busted them up with metal grinders.

Truth is dead in this country. As dead as the 327 bombing victims of flight 182. This photo shows the wreckage of the Air India 747 jumbo on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. This picture doesn't lie but everyone with a tongue in their mouth has.

China and Human Rights - Nien Cheng is still alive you bastards!

The arm band of a Mao Thought Worker - Canton HQ 1966

I sometimes encounter proud young things who possess newly printed degrees from Canadian universities. Those who claim to have read modern Chinese history catch my attention because I’m always eager for exposure to new schools of thought. They usually disappoint. It bugs the hell out of me how few of them bother to investigate the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and worse, I have never met a Canadian grad whose read Nien Cheng’s memoir LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI. That’s a lapse which no China “specialist” should ever admit. In my view, if they haven’t read Nien Cheng, their degree is worth sh*t.

I would extend that unsavoury opinion to include the legitimacy of the new Canadian Museum of Human Rights. Our federal government just committed to pouring a staggering $311,000,000 in vote buying dollars for the museum's construction in Winnipeg, and goosed that with an additional $22,000,000 per year (for starters) in guaranteed operating costs. What is it's mandate? Probably to spend money and leave the government alone. My suggestion is that the new Museum seek out and record the tragic experiences of thousands of Chinese Canadian families who were victimized by the Chinese Communists during Mao's Cultural Revolution, much as Steven Speilberg has done with his Shoah Foundation and European Jewish Holocaust survivors. If they do that, instead of merely duplicating what's already been done by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, their museum will not be a total waste of our money.

Butt ugly design for $311 million CDN Human Rights Museum

Every thumb-sucking poseur in the world now feeds his or her vanity by getting a friend to post a Wiki page. Who cares for my gracious hero, Nien Cheng? Very few, it seems. So much for the self described “China experts” out there. Check out her Wiki tribute page! The fact is that the aged monsters who populate Chinese Communist retirement resorts have done a truly splendid job in suppressing Madame Cheng’s testimony. Several years ago a wealthy woman in Taiwan, a some time movie director, ahem!, purchased the film rights to LIFE AND DEATH IN SHANGHAI. It will never be filmed of course. The Red villains of Shanghai bribed the pseudo-Taiwanese bitch with primo real estate in Shanghai, in a covert Op to silence Madame Cheng’s voice and influence. Taiwanese are often easy to bribe. Fortunately her astonishing memoir is readily available on eBay, but simply buying a copy is not the real effort. Reading her testimony from cover to cover - now that's a commitment. It’s grown up subject matter after all. It demands something of you the reader. I’ve only read her book twice, but I know I can always benefit from another careful reading, and I will. It’s a responsibility which I feel deep in my soul.

Final thoughts? Oh yes, and for those Canadians planning a holiday trip to the Beijing Olympic Games – here is a little Chinese reality your grinning hosts will hide from you. Because... you just can’t handle the truth.


Beijing 2001. Women cops drag woman away to be executed.


AN UGLY SEQUENCE - Mass execution in 1994
Five images culled from a series taken at a Chinese Execution Ground. I don't know what these two women were accused of. I do know that blowing their heads apart with an assault rifle is totally inexcusable.

They were first paraded before the public, and apparently one of her escort is ready for trouble. I suspect he has a pistol in his pocket and will plug her if she attempts to run or cry out.

The condemned were off-loaded from trucks and lined up at the Execution Ground. They were then frog-marched to a berm,  and stone dead not more than two minutes later.

Chinese field execution of another young woman, using an assault rifle to blow her head off. Note the two cops leaning away from the muzzle blast. They don't want the taste of her brains in their mouths.

A chilling image and not one I enjoy posting, but it still happens in China on a regular basis.

The second woman, equally disfigure by a high velocity bullet from an  assault rifle.  As stomach churning as these  images are,  I have seen a few even worse.

Movie Badness and Cho Seung-Hui's Madness

Cho Seung-Hui rockets onto the 'big screen' - his way.


"I'm setting the example, and it's going to be puzzled over and studied and followed, from now on." Kevin Spacey as John Doe in the movie SEVEN, New Line Cinema, 1995.

Writers of cinema murder mysteries toil like engine room stokers feeding the engines of Hollywood studios. They weave fabulously intricate yet reasonably plausible stories, festooned with clever plot devices, meaningful symbolism and of course, diabolical killers with deep background. Most of that exposition flies right over the brows of today's predominantly youthful movie audiences. Someone who understood that fact was 23 year old monster Cho Seung-Hui, the beast of Virginia Tech. Cho clearly wrote his own splatter film screenplay in his head and kept it simple enough for everyone to follow. His own agent and his own publicist, Cho gave the media a press kit (through NBC) that some are calling his "Multi-media Manifesto", a DVD replete with video clips, a still gallery, and art work. In other words it was carefully tailored for instant dissemination by all media on the planet.

Tony Burman, Editor in Chief of CBC News asked a question yesterday on his CBC webpage: "So what will be the iconic image that will forever recall the massacre at Virginia Tech? Will it be the grandfatherly face of Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu? Or the glowing smile of Canadian Jocelyne Couture-Nowak?" Hardly. I replied in part with: "The answer to your question is that all of those faces, some even more appealing than the two you chose to distinguish, will be forgotten within a few weeks." That's undeniably true. The ONLY face we will remember is that of Cho.

His version of the Chow Yun Fat two-gun power pose.

The image most referenced by the world press was Cho's two-gun pose modeled after the Chow Yun Fat figure in A BETTER TOMORROW 1&2, and now much imitated. Today plenty was been made of the fact that Cho emulated iconic scenes from the the 2003 Korean film OLDBOY, and that is undeniably true. The plot of OLDBOY, a hyper-violent vengeance movie, was championed by Quenton Tarantino at Cannes, and is well thought of. Unquestionably it fed the sick fantasies of a reclusive paranoid like Cho, who was determined to set a new record for a mass killing, and to trigger a Wiki page that would last for a decade.

Two years ago security police at the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg removed Cho briefly from their campus and had him examined by an expert at a nearby mental health facility. He was diagnosed as mentally deranged and clearly suicidal. Still he had committed no crime that anyone knew of, and in deference to his rights he was released after a 48 hour stay. It's instructive to examine his signature "Seung Cho" on the legal form he signed at the time of his release. In addition to the severe rythmical disorganization, notice the left to right slash stroke before both the date line and the signature line. This guy was angry at being confined and it is not a stretch to suggest that he began to fantasize a massacre even before they released him.

2010 Olympics - Are they as Corrupt as the 1976 Montreal Olympics?

Corruption comes in many forms… influence peddling, insider trading, cushy bonuses, pilfering, fixed contracts, big lies, dishonored promises. It comes as no surprise then to read in today’s Vancouver SUN that the elected government of B.C. continues to find creative ways to shovel fresh bales of our money into the 2010 Olympics incinerator. We now learn that ICBC, the vehicle licensing monopoly, has decided to become an “Official Supporter” of the 2010 Winter Games. ICBC’s fee to play in the Games? “15 – 50 million in cash and/or services”. The precise amount is currently a secret. This means that a whole raft of ICBC executives will be getting free Olympics tickets. You don’t believe it? Than how else explain why only 70% of Olmpics tickets will be offered for sale to the public? There are so many crooks lining up for free tickets that 30% are being held back to pass out to Olympics “Supporters” and “Friends of the Games”. How many suckers who pay hundreds of dollars for their seats will appreciate that the happy fellow sitting next to you got in for free?

Since “history repeats itself,” I thought I should read a little about the highly corrupt 1976 Montreal Olympics, to get a leg up on the RCMP investigations which will begin in 2010. The best book on the subject was THE BILLION DOLLAR GAME : Jean Drapeau and the 1976 Olympics, written by Nick Auf der Maur. Amazing to tell, but this book isn’t profiled on the Internet. Yesterday I bought a copy of my own. The book is an eye opener, and possibly an indication of the scope of the scandal which will follow Vancouver’s 2010 Games. The most interesting chapter covers OPERATION HERMES, a series of more than 40 police raids on the construction companies building the venues. The Olympics Village contract went to a figure involved with the Mafia in Quebec, but the dictatorial mayor of Montreal, in concert with Quebec justice officials used their influence to prevent any criminal charges being laid before the Olympic Games had been staged.

The principle Mafia figure involved in 1970s Olympics construction was Guiseppe (Joe) Zappia, a fellow with one foot in construction, another in politics and both hands on the cash. Incredibly, Zappia was in so tight with Quebec’s political elite that he accompanied Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s delegation to meetings with the Shah of Iran in October 1975. They flew on separate planes of course, but Zappia was there in Teheran. Quebec companies, already bloated with Montreal boodle, were salivating over the contract to build the Olympic Village for the proposed 1984 Teheran Games.

When the RCMP and Quebec police investigations got too hot Joe Zappia did what many crooks do – he became a political candidate. In 1976 he became a contender for the leadership of the federal Progressive Conservative Party. (This tactic is a time honoured tradition out here in B.C., especially in the South Asian and Chinese communities. Not so much among the local Italians, unless I’m mistaken.) The Tories were stunned and had to work fast to keep Zappia out of the race. Auf der Maur’s book was published in 1976 but a few journalists continued to dog Zappia, who has always maintained his position in the Cosa Nostra. He was finally charged with Olympics construction fraud but the case dragged on till 1988 when he was acquitted “after two key witnesses died before testifying at his trial”. Reclaiming his Canadian passport, Zappia moved back to Italy and set up a new construction company. What else? At the age of 80 he was still at it. In 2005 he was arrested by the Italian police, charged with money laundering in relation to a $7 billion dollar public works project – the new bridge to link Sicily to the Italian mainland.

That's a history lesson. Get ready for the news.