‘Gastronomic Xenophobia’ in Italy

From the Guardian:

Italy‘s Northern League is not just anti-immigration. It’s anti-kebab. The agriculture minister, Luca Zaia, a league member, said that Italy must block the arrival of all food that had nothing to do with the country’s rich agricultural heritage. What, like tomatoes, which came from Peru, or pasta, which probably arrived from China? Fired with gastronomic xenophobia, some cities have banned new ethnic food shops from opening on their patch. The town of Lucca set the way in January, followed by Altopascio, where a kebab shop was firebombed. Bergamo, Genoa and Prato all followed suit in what La Stampa, the daily newspaper, called a new Lombard crusade against the Saracens. Lucca councillors are outraged at the suggestion that this is racism, directed primarily against the immigrant owners of foreign food outlets. They claim that all they are doing is to protect their culinary patrimony in a campaign that is as much directed at McDonald’s as it is at kebab restaurants. A fatwa has been declared against the use of French butter in parliament, and illegal Chinese vegetables have been uprooted in Tuscany. (What, by the way, is an illegal Chinese vegetable?) Forced on to the back foot, leading kebab chefs presented all-Italian ingredients for their kebabs at a food convention in Milan last week. Happily, the Northern League is finding it difficult to determine which food is ethnic. French restaurants pass muster, but Sicilian cuisine, heavily influenced by Arab cooking, must also be a cause for grave concern.

A tax-induced brain drain

The Telegraph reports:

David Landau, 59, who made his fortune from the free advertising newspaper Loot, said he had left because Alistair Darling’s tax raid on non-domiciled individuals had “broken” their trust.

Mr Landau has returned to Italy because of the tax change, which came into force in April.

Under the new legislation, non-domiciles face a fixed annual levy of £30,000, regardless of income.

As news of Mr Landau’s departure came, a leading tax accountant provoked fresh fears of a tax-induced ‘brain drain’.

George Bull, head of tax at accountants Baker Tilly, warned that half of his US clients were considering leaving Britain because of the “double whammy” of the non-domicile levy and the new 50 per cent tax rate.

Mr Landau, who has served as a trustee of the National Gallery, a governor of the Courtauld Institute and on the board of the Art Fund since coming to Britain to be an Oxford don in 1983, said of the levy: “It really broke the trust of non-domiciles.

Libyan Leader Gadhafi to Urge UN to Abolish Switzerland

According to Swiss minister Christa Markwalder, when Libyan leader Moammer Gadhafi arrives in New York on September 23rd, he will ask the United Nations to abolish Switzerland and divide its land between France, Germany and Italy.

The UN charter, however, dictates that no member nation can threaten the sovereignty of another, so not much should be expected.

Swiss-Libyan tensions began last year when Gadhafi’s youngest son, Hannibal, was arrested in a Geneva hotel for beating two servants with a belt and a coat-hanger.

Italy legalises vigilante patrols

The Guardian reports,

Silvio Berlusconi’s government, which has already put several thousand soldiers on the streets of Italy, will tomorrow legalise vigilante patrols and set out the guidelines under which they will operate.

The plans prompted an outcry from opposition politicians and police unions, but got a mixed reception from Italy’s mayors, who must decide whether they want law enforcement volunteers in their towns. An overwhelming majority of those in favour run cities in the north, where the anti-immigrant Northern League has long argued for wider use of vigilantes.

Leisure inequality

The Economist reports,

Despite changing attitudes and even laws to promote equality between the sexes, it appears that women still have their work cut out. Men enjoy more leisure time than women in every one of 18 countries examined by the OECD. Italian men have it easiest in comparison with women, lazing around for nearly 80 minutes more each than women who, apparently, clean the house. Other staunch Catholic countries also see big gaps between the sexes, and even in egalitarian Norway men manage to sneak an extra four minutes more to themselves.

Crime is Italy’s most profitable business

According to Bloomberg:

Revenue raked in by Italy’s mob surged 40 percent last year, turning crime into the nation’s No. 1 business, Eurispes said in its annual report.

Income increased to 130 billion euros ($167 billion), up from about 90 billion euros in 2007, according to figures supplied by Eurispes and SOS Impresa, an association of businessmen to protest against extortion. Drug trafficking remains the primary source of revenue, bringing in about 59 billion euros, and the mob earned 5.8 billion euros from selling arms, the Rome-based Eurispes research group said today.