If writing the news in resort was strange, scribbling notes down on a flight to London and finishing them off in Las Vegas is positively bizarre but that’s the odd situation I find myself in due to the absence of any direct Geneva Las Vegas service. Perhaps the Swiss aren’t big gamblers, or maybe the glitz, glamour and utter debauchery of Sin City is too much of a paradigm shift to have a direct artery. As Orson Welles wrote in The Third Man, In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Chemical Ali has been hanged in Iraq. One of Saddam Husseins chief aids, Ali Hassad al-Majid, was responsible for the chemical weapons programme and the alleged gas attack on Halabja in 1988, which decimated the Kurdish population more than Winston Churchill and the Royal Flying Corps ever managed. Former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has been cleared of trying to smear President Pepe le Pew when the two were jostling for power back in 2004. Given he resembles his own Spitting Image puppet I’m sure the court ruled that most things werefair game. France has caused controversy this week by making preparations to ban the Burqa in public. Muslim women worldwide are outraged that a fundamental symbol of their symbolic fundamentalism might force them to stop shopping at Primark. In other news, shares in Maybelline, Rimmel and Max Factor have soared. The Southern Sky Column in Zhangjiajie, Hunan province in China will now be known as the Avatar Hallelujah Mountain due to its similarity to the imaginary world Pandora in the movie. Dances with Smurfs Mountain had already been taken. Economy beds on Air NZ are to be offered with a raised footrest installed for people prepared to buy three seats together. Known as the Skycouch, is it just me or are they just admitting anyone to the Mile High Club these days. Novelist JD Salinger has died. A recluse for the forty years since he published his most famous work, Catcher in the Rye, otherwise known as the scourge of GCSE English students, why couldn’t Michael Jackson have followed his example.
And finally, there’s a Facebook campaign against an AQA Biology paper for having unfair questions. It’s not enough that they’re giving away A grades these days, but to find the equivalent of the captain of
rugby and his mates doltishly protesting when they couldn’t get past the name section ofthe paper is probably taking it too far. Until next week I’m off to… what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas 
Tags: S5E08
