Eideard

Another example of how NOT to dress for a casual stroll through customs

A stunning model proved to be more than meets the eye after she was arrested by Italian police trying to smuggle more than £250,000 of cocaine into the country inside breast and buttock implants.

The 33-year-old woman, identified only by the initials MFM, was held by officers as she tried to distract them with her plunging neckline and tight-fitting outfit at Rome’s Fiumicino airport. But her plan backfired as they were so captivated by her looks they pulled her over for questioning and discovered the drugs when she failed to explain why she had been to South America.

The woman had flown to Rome from Sao Paolo in Brazil and a search by female officers revealed the fake breast and buttock implants she was wearing had also been used to hide 5.5lbs of cocaine…

”She had tried to distract them with a plunging neckline and tight outfit but they stopped her for questioning because she was so alluring and her story about why she was in South America just fell apart.

‘She actually became quite aggressive and was taken away for more detailed questioning by two female officers and that’s when the drugs were found hidden in the plastic breast and buttock implants.

‘The extremely pure cocaine crystals were found moulded into the implants that she was wearing…’

Commenters almost everywhere seem to agree it was a nutty attempt to sneak the drugs through – by making this babe look even more curvaceous. I would think that NOT attracting attention makes more sense than focusing the eyeballs of customs coppers on her bosom and butt.

Iceberg building complex

What material can you find in toothpaste, sunscreen, solar cells, on the baseline at Wimbledon, in a Roman church, and along a tunnel in Brussels?

Full marks if you guessed titanium dioxide, a nearly ubiquitous but wholly unsung material.

Its brilliant white has made it a staple in pigments – hence Wimbledon – but its eco-credentials are still coming to the fore. Titanium dioxide does a couple of clever tricks that mean we may well be seeing a lot of it in the future: it’s self-cleaning, and it breaks down pollutants in the air. And the fact that thin films of it are clear is the reason that a number of manufacturers use it in glass applications such as skylights.

The self-cleaning aspect comes about because one processed form of titanium dioxide is what is called superhydrophilic – literally, “water-loving”, which means that when water hits a dirty titanium dioxide surface, that surface will draw in a whisper-thin sheet of water across its whole surface, displacing grime that then washes neatly away.

But its second trick of removing pollutants is what has made it an increasingly popular choice for environmentally-minded building projects.

A bit of the ultraviolet light in sunlight frees up electrons from the material, creating “free radicals” that actively break down pollutants including so-called NOx gases (molecules of varying proportions of nitrogen and oxygen) or VOCs (volatile organic compounds).

A number of pilot projects around the world have seen the material used in, for example, concrete – hence the Jubilee Church in Rome. In Japan, Mitsubishi markets a brand of titanium dioxide-treated paving stones and Toto makes coated ceramic tiles.

The material hit the news again this week when the aluminium firm Alcoa announced its new product Ecoclean, a titanium dioxide coating on aluminium panels for cladding buildings…

The fact that such a large manufacturer has joined the ranks could mean that the real-world use of the material can finally be assessed on a large scale, says Anne Beeldens of the Catholic University Leuven in Belgium…

Dr Beeldens said: “When I look at it in the last year, a lot of projects are starting where there’s a link between application of the material and real air measurements, and I think once that link is really made, then it will start to be used all over the place.”

Bravo. Bravo for Anne Beeldens and her dedication. And Bravo to the contractors and builders who expand the range of Green building experiments – who appear to be proving one more compound and many processing is beneficial to our environment.

It sounds like something out of Father Ted: a renowned monastery in Rome where monks staged concerts featuring a lap-dancer-turned-nun and opened a hotel with a 24-hour limousine service has been shut down by the pope.

As part of Benedict XVI’s crackdown on “loose living” within the Catholic church, 20 or so Cistercian monks are now being evicted from the monastery at the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, which hosts some of the church’s holiest relics.

“An inquiry found evidence of liturgical and financial irregularities as well as lifestyles that were probably not in keeping with that of a monk,” said Father Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman. “The church remains open but the monks are awaiting transfer…”

The monks’ days have been numbered since 2009, when the Vatican sacked their flamboyant abbot, Father Simone Fioraso, a former fashion designer who built up a cult following among Rome’s fashionable aristocratic crowd as well as show business worshippers such as Madonna, who prayed at the church in 2008.

In 2009 Anna Nobili, a nightclub dancer who became a nun, was invited to perform her “holy dance” before an audience including archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Vatican’s cultural department. For her performance Nobili, who says she uses dance as a form of prayer, lies spread-eagled in front of the altar clutching a crucifix or twists and turns as in pole-dancing routines…

Sounds like a flock that seriously enjoyed experimenting with new ways to experience the rapture of holiness.

Or something like that.

If tourists find Rome unusually quiet next Wednesday, the reason will probably be that thousands of locals have left town in fear of a devastating earthquake allegedly forecast for that day by a long-dead seismologist.

For months Italian internet sites, blogs and social networks have been debating the work of Raffaele Bendandi, who claimed to have forecast numerous earthquakes and, according to internet rumors, predicted a “big one” in Rome on May 11…

“I’m going to tell the boss I’ve got a medical appointment and take the day off,” barman Fabio Mengarelli told Reuters. “If I have to die I want to die with my wife and kids, and masses of people will do the same as me.”

Chef Tania Cotorobai also said she would be taking a day off in the country. “I don’t know if I really believe it but if you look at the internet you see everything and the opposite of everything, and it end up making you nervous,” she said…

Bendandi, who died in 1979 aged 86, believed earthquakes were the result of the combined movements of the planets, the moon and the sun and were perfectly predictable.

In 1923 he forecast a quake would hit the central Adriatic region of the Marches on January 2 the following year. He was wrong by two days but Italy’s main newspaper Corriere della Sera still ran a front page article on “The man who forecasts earthquakes.”

Bendandi’s fame grew and in 1927 he was awarded a knighthood by Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini…

However the current panic appears to be due more to fear-mongering in the age of internet than to Bendandi himself.

Fear and ignorance seem to be motivators as central to social and political phenomena today as they were in the Dark Ages.

I wonder if there’s some way the Holy Roman Catholic Church will make a buck off of this?

An Italian bridegroom jilted at the altar by his future wife is suing her for €500,000 in compensation for the “emotional distress” of being dumped in the first case of its kind.

The 32-year-old groom, who has been named only as Riccardo R in court papers due to privacy laws – was dumped in a message delivered by the 30-year-old bride’s brother at the altar in front of stunned family and friends.

He had spent thousands of euros on the church wedding, which was due to take place in Rome two weeks ago, including a lavish reception at a top hotel and an exotic Pacific honeymoon.

His legal team said that Riccardo had needed hospital treatment for “hyperventilation and stress” after being told by the bride’s brother that she had left him as she was “in love with another man” with whom she had been having an affair for several months. Court prosecution documents state that there was “no justifiable motive” for the woman, known as Claudia, to dump her intended husband at the altar and that therefore she should be “liable for compensation for the emotional damage she had caused”…

The case has been filed in the Rome civil court and a medical certificate showing Riccardo’s admission to hospital was also submitted as evidence. The compensation claim has been broken down into €229,000 for costs associated with the wedding, €150,000 for moral damages and €120,000 for psychological damages as well as €1,000 court costs.

Har! I understand it – and it can be a 2-way street, of course. Should be a hell of an interesting trial – especially in a macho nation like Italy.

A newly revealed 1997 letter from the Vatican warns Ireland’s Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police because that would violate the church’s canon laws.

The letter, obtained by Irish broadcasters RTE and provided Tuesday to The Associated Press, documents the Vatican’s rejection at that time of an Irish church initiative to begin helping police identify pedophile priests.

In the letter, the Vatican’s diplomat in Ireland at the time, Archbishop Luciano Storero, told the bishops that a senior church panel in Rome, the Congregation for the Clergy, had decided that the Irish church’s year-old policy of “mandatory” reporting of abuse claims conflicted with canon law…

The letter, originally obtained by RTE religious affairs program Would You Believe?, said the Congregation for the Clergy in Rome would establish worldwide child-protection policies “at the appropriate time.”

The Vatican has not formally accepted any of the Irish church’s three major documents on child protection since 1996. All emphasize mandatory reporting of suspected offenses.

Yup. Let’s don’t try to hurry up something as insignificant as justice.

For its critics in the Vatican, it is a matter of “deep concern”. For its proponents, it is “evidence of great courage”.

Amid national controversy, the Kepler scientific secondary school became the first in the Italian education system to install condom vending machines for students. The machines, in the girls’ and boys’ toilets, will sell cut-price condoms just a few miles from the Vatican; the Kepler is in a lower-middle class district of Rome, just outside the city’s ancient walls.

Cardinal Agostino Vallini, who stands in for the pope in his capacity as bishop of Rome, deplored the initiative as “trivialising sexuality”…

In the grand scheme of things, there is little that isn’t trivial about religion, especially sects far beyond their use-by-date as the Roman Catholic Church. True Believers, however, may be dangerous.

The Kepler’s headteacher, Antonio Panaccione, invited other schools “not to take fright, and do the same“. His comments and those of others reflected the continuing influence in Italy of Catholic teaching on sexual matters.

“At the outset,” Panaccione said, “there was some hesitation among some of the parents and teachers, motivated by fear and insecurity. But then, by discussing it, that was all got over.”

The Italian student’s union, which noted that the French Lycée in Rome had been making condoms available to its pupils since 2001, said in a statement: “Only in Italy would this cause a stir.” It added: “A number of secondary educational institutions in western countries distribute condoms, as do many schools in the US…”

Cripes! The U.S. as an example of enlightened sexuality? Shows you how far behind Italy really is.

Italy’s very low fertility rate – estimated last year at 1.31 births per woman of child-bearing age – indicates that many couples do use contraception. But the prejudice against artificial methods remains strong…

Religions that excel in being stuck into the past, like around the Dark Ages, will never get it right. This was the core issue that drove my father’s generation from the Catholic Church – in 1942!