"Gay marriages are to blame for UK floods" says UKIP Councillor

A UKIP councillor has blamed the recent storms and heavy floods across Britain on the Government's decision to legalise gay marriage.

David Silvester said the Prime Minister had acted "arrogantly against the Gospel".

In a letter to his local paper he said he had warned David Cameron the legislation would result in "disaster".

UKIP said Mr Silvester's views were "not the party's belief" but defended his right to state his opinions.

Divine retribution

Mr Silvester, from Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, defected from the Tories in protest at David Cameron's support for same-sex unions.

In the letter to the Henley Standard he wrote: "The scriptures make it abundantly clear that a Christian nation that abandons its faith and acts contrary to the Gospel (and in naked breach of a coronation oath) will be beset by natural disasters such as storms, disease, pestilence and war."

He added: "I wrote to David Cameron in April 2012 to warn him that disasters would accompany the passage of his same-sex marriage bill.

"But he went ahead despite a 600,000-signature petition by concerned Christians and more than half of his own parliamentary party saying that he should not do so."

He then went to on blame the Prime Minister for the bad weather:

"It is his fault that large swathes of the nation have been afflicted by storms and floods."

He went on to say that no man, however powerful "can mess with Almighty God with impunity and get away with it".

A UKIP spokeswoman said: "It is quite evident that this is not the party's belief but the councillor's own and he is more than entitled to express independent thought despite whether or not other people may deem it standard or correct."

PS: This reminds me of an Iranian Imam claiming in public a couple of years ago that earthquakes in Iran are caused by too vigorous and excited copulation due to females not covering up their shape in public thus causing much sexual excitement.

Beware of the Bitcoin Mania

The true identity of the inventor of Bitcoin remains the subject of speculation among aficionados of the virtual currency. But one thing we know for sure is that Satoshi Nakamoto is an extremely clever person. Not only did he or she devise the unalterable algorithm that mints the currency automatically – an impressive feat of technological prowess. Nakamoto also understood something fundamental about money. Holding and using it involves a leap of faith.

Nonetheless, Nakamoto missed a crucial point. A good currency must hold its value over long periods. It must also be readily exchangeable for the goods and services that people actually want. Combining those two functions in a single instrument requires a delicate balance. If issuance is too tight, there is not enough money moving around to meet the payment needs of the economy. This can lead to deflation and recession. Yet if too much money is issued the result will be inflation, which erodes the currency’s value. This is the dilemma that “private money”, the creation of banks rather than government authorities, has never been able to solve. Nor have money regimes based on commodities, such as the gold standard.

To solve this problem, many countries have created independent central banks. The quantity of money that society needs changes constantly because of fluctuations in economic and financial activity. Human judgment is required to make sure that, when the economy grows, an adequate supply of money is maintained. But, crucially, central bankers have to be made independent. This guards against excessive expansions in the money supply – a permanent temptation in all political systems because it spreads economic cheer, but one that over time erodes the value of money.

Nakamoto thought he could solve the dilemma in a different way, with an inflexible rule. This could work, if the rule were a good one. Milton Friedman had a simple suggestion, arguing that the money supply should expand at a constant rate. That is a proposal on which someone of Nakamoto’s intellectual agility could no doubt have improved – for example, by increasing the rate of issuance as Bitcoin gained wider currency, or somehow making it sensitive to changing economic conditions. That could have given Bitcoin a chance of success.

But Nakamoto chose a different rule. The stock of Bitcoins – which currently stands at roughly 12m – will grow at a predetermined and gradually decreasing rate. Once there are 21m of the electronic tokens, new production will cease altogether.

This is a fatal mistake for two reasons. First, over the next century and a quarter, the supply of Bitcoins will increase on average by 0.6 per cent a year. If the Bitcoin economy grows faster than this, the currency will grow scarce and the prices of goods expressed in it will fall. Second, the supply of Bitcoins will expand more slowly than that of physical currencies. Other things being equal, its exchange rate will appreciate significantly.

This may be one reason why investors have pushed the price of Bitcoin to dizzying highs, with the result that it has become valuable even before it had the chance to establish itself as a means of payment. With real-world currencies such as sterling and the dollar it was the other way around: the currency became valuable because it was widely used as means of exchange.

Paradoxically, this rapid increase in the value of Bitcoin makes it unsuitable as a means of exchange. Someone who expects the currency to be worth more tomorrow will be unwilling to spend it today. And, if few people are spending Bitcoins, there is little incentive to accept them. There are no statistics available but one suspects that very few purchases of real goods are settled in Bitcoins.

The currency is at present attractive for two reasons. One is anonymity, which makes it suitable for tax evasion and money laundering. This will not last; authorities are already wising up. The other is pure speculation. Bitcoins are the tulips of modern times. The mania is not yet over. But the longer it lasts, the more investors are likely to be burnt.

The writer is professor of economics at SciencesPo and a former deputy governor of the Banque de France

31-year old nun unaware of being pregnant

A nun who gave birth to a baby boy in the central Italian city of Rieti, said she had no idea she was pregnant, local media report.

The 31-year-old was rushed to hospital with abdominal pains, which she thought were stomach cramps.

The young mother, who is originally from El Salvador, reportedly named her newborn Francis after the current Pope.

The mayor of Rieti, Simone Petrangeli has appealed to the public and media to respect the woman's privacy.

The news has drawn international attention to the small city of 47,700 inhabitants.

The nun called the ambulance on Wednesday morning. A few hours later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

"I did not know I was pregnant. I only felt a stomach pain," she was quoted as saying by the Ansa news agency.

People at the hospital have begun collecting clothes and donations for the mother and her child, Italian media say.

The woman belongs to a convent near Rieti, which manages an old people's home.

Fellow nuns at the convent said they were "surprised" by the news.

Local pastor Don Fabrizio Borrello told journalists that the nun planned to take care of the baby.

"I guess she's telling the truth when she says she arrived at the hospital unaware of the pregnancy."

Madness, total madness!

A man lay dying at home waiting for paramedics as an ambulance waited outside a hospital for nearly five hours to drop off a patient, an inquest has heard.

Despite a fully-staffed ambulance service Fred Pring, 74, from Mynydd Isa, Flintshire, died 42 minutes after his wife, Joyce, had first called 999.

Mrs Pring wants the ambulance service to review its policies on 999 calls.

The coroner John Gittins will present his conclusions on Monday.

The inquest in Ruthin heard that Mr Pring, who had been receiving treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, had been categorised as a lower priority by the ambulance service.

On Friday, Gill Pleming of the Welsh Ambulance Service said on the day Mr Pring died in March 2013 there were seven ambulances and one rapid response vehicle to cover Flintshire and Wrexham.

But, she said, at the time of Mrs Pring's first call there were no ambulances available.

Coroner John Gittins asked: "Presumably the caller isn't told that? They're not told 'Sorry, we haven't got one available'?"

Miss Pleming replied: "No."

The court was told one ambulance had spent nearly five hours (287 minutes) waiting at Wrexham Maelor Hospital to drop off a patient.

Another ambulance had been at the same hospital for more than an hour and a half.

"In a nutshell, six vehicles waiting to transfer patients into Wrexham Maelor Hospital, three waiting to transfer patients into Glan Clwyd - all experiencing delays significantly beyond the 15 minute target handover," the coroner said.

'Red two'

Mr Pring's case had been classified by the ambulance service as 'red two', which is a lower priority than 'red one' which means an immediate threat to life, but Miss Pleming said the aim was to arrive within eight minutes for either classification.

Mr Gittins asked whether the call would be upgraded to a higher priority if there was a delay in sending an ambulance.

"No," Miss Pleming replied.

Mr Gittins said: "The truth of the system is that members of the public could cause chaos - if you want to get an ambulance there, you just tell them that he's dead."

Earlier a Home Office pathologist said it was extremely difficult to answer whether Mr Pring's life would have been saved if an ambulance had arrived sooner.

Dr Brian Rogers said the cause of death was heart disease and chronic lung disease.

The chief executive of the Welsh Ambulance Service, Elwyn Price Morris, told the hearing it was not unusual for the ambulance service and the NHS to experience severe pressure such as happened on the night Mr Pring died.

He added it did not happen on a daily basis, but hinted there might have been similar incidents in the past and that there was no easy solution to ambulances being stuck outside hospitals.

Matthew Makin, medical director of the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, said the health board and ambulance service had been working together at the time of Mr Pring's death to try to minimise the amount of time ambulances spent waiting outside hospitals.

Mr Pring's cardiologist told the hearing on Thursday if the ambulance had arrived after the first 999 call he would have survived.

The consultant told the coroner he would have expected the ambulance to have arrived in six minutes.

In a statement issued outside the hearing through her solicitor, Mrs Pring said she believed the ambulance service needed to review its policies in view of what had happened to her husband.

"[It should] review the questions asked by the 999 operators, perhaps using a flowchart so that a person is never asked again if their relative is breathing when they have been told that the person has died," she said.

The statement also called for the ambulance service to review its policy of sending two ambulances to a 'red one' call.

~  ~  ~

Madness, total madness ! Heads should role. Those responsible should be charged with being accessories to murder.

Portrait of Catrin of Berain - A Nazi mystery

Mystery of the Nazi and the portrait of a Welsh lady

By Stephen EvansBBC News, Berlin

The subject of the painting is Catrin of Berain - or Katheryn to her English friends. For centuries the portrait hung in family homes near Denbigh in North Wales but somehow it was acquired by the Nazis.

She seems the gentlest of gentlewomen as she stands reflectively. Her skin is pale against the blackness of her dress. She holds a prayer book, indicating devout learning. Her other hand rests easily on a skull - the reminder of death. She exudes nobility.

The story of how the painting went from Wales to Berlin and then back to the National Museum of Wales has been pieced together by experts keen to establish that there are no legitimate counter-claims to its ownership. Controversy invariably surrounds works of art accrued by the Nazis so the curators in Cardiff have made doubly sure that the portrait of a Welsh gentlewoman has a clean past.

After all, there are currently fierce legal disputes over a collection of paintings discovered hidden in Munich, and over priceless artefacts from the medieval church - bought by the German state from Jewish art dealers in the 30s when the Nazis were in power - and now on display in a museum in Berlin.

Looking at Catrin's life story, it's difficult to see why exactly a top Nazi might take an interest in her.

According to Helen Williams-Ellis, who is writing a biography of Catrin, the noblewoman was born in 1540 in Berain near Denbigh in north-east Wales.

Catrin's father was a land-owner, Tudur ap Robert, with a substantial 3,000 acres. At the age of 22, Catrin married one John Salusbury, the son of a neighbouring land owner. Money married money to keep money in the family.

After nine years of marriage and two children, Catrin's first husband died. Williams-Ellis told the BBC that afterwards Catrin married another rich man, Sir Richard Clough, again, according to Helen Williams-Ellis, to keep money in the family.

Goering was Hitler's deputy

Clough, known by the Welsh as Rhisiart Clwch, was a merchant who divided his time between north Wales, London - where he was one of the founders of the Stock Exchange - and Antwerp. In what seems like a Welsh cliche, Clough had not been born to immense wealth but was noticed for his fine singing voice in the choir of Chester Cathedral and despatched to court in London. That opened the way to riches.

In Antwerp, Catrin had her portrait painted and the picture was hung for more than two centuries in family homes in north Wales.

In 1938, the owners decided, for reasons that haven't been established, to sell the picture and contacted a dealer in London. It was offered to the National Museum of Wales but, somehow, the sale failed to happen.

Continue reading the main story

The London dealer had connections with the art market in Amsterdam and in November, 1940 the painting was bought by Walter Andreas Hofer, the adviser on art to Hermann Goering.

It seems incongruous that the founder of the Gestapo should be an art collector but he was building up a collection to aggrandise the Reich.

In 1945, with the Reich in ruins a mere 12 years into its existence, the portrait was rediscovered by the victorious Allies and documented. Special units, soon to be depicted in the movie The Monuments Men, rescued works and then traced their route to the Nazi collection - the circumstances in which they were acquired, who originally owned them.

In the case of the portrait of Catrin, they tracked down the Dutch dealer who originally had sold it and returned the painting to him. It is for this reason that the National Museum of Wales is confident there can be no dispute over ownership. The man who sold it got his work back.

Why did the Nazis want the painting of a Welsh noblewoman? Oliver Fairclough, the Keeper of Art at the National Museum of Wales, said the Nazis accrued works to aggrandise themselves and their regime.

"A lot of it was 'art as power and status'," Fairclough says. They wanted to display the best of traditional art.

Area around Denbigh 1885

It seems the regime wanted the picture because it was a Flemish masterwork rather than for its subject. It was probably painted by Adriaen van Cronenburgh who produced portraits of merchants in the commercial hub that was 16th Century Antwerp.

Nonetheless, Fairclough is intrigued by what he calls a "fascinating" picture.

"She is very well dressed," he says. "She's wearing black which was a very expensive cloth because it had to be dyed. There's a gold chain around her neck and pearls in her head dress".

Despite the seriousness of the portrait, there is a scintilla of a hint of a smile if you want to see one. It is nice to imagine that she was not straight-laced. In all, she married four times and had six children by three husbands.

Williams-Ellis wonders if she is pregnant in the picture because rich women of the era occasionally had their portraits painted before childbirth, which increased the family's consciousness of mortality.

Catrin divided her life between the deep countryside of north Wales and the hubs of the new commercial world, Antwerp and London. It must have been a whirlwind of change as she moved between Denbighshire and these two bustling centres.

Six years into their marriage, Sir Richard Clough died in Hamburg at the age of 40 - the second husband Catrin had lost. There is a theory that he was poisoned as a suspected spy for Queen Elizabeth I - Catrin's world was not boring and ordinary.

For a time, Antwerp was Catrin's home

She then looked back to Wales and to property for her third husband, Maurice Wynn of Gwydir, the High Sheriff for Caernarfonshire. The cynical view - and also the view of Catrin's present-day fan, Williams-Ellis - is that marriage was, at least partly, about financial considerations. Catrin had another two children with her third husband. And then, he, too, died.

So she married a fourth husband, who, finally, survived her.

After her death, 13 elegies were written in praise of her - eight in Welsh, two in Latin and three in English.

What about the man who had bought the portrait for Goering? Walter Andreas Hofer was "Director of the Reichsmarschall's Art Collection" from 1939 to 1944. After the war, a French military tribunal sentenced him in absentia to ten years in prison.

Somehow, though, he never served that sentence and continued to work undisturbed as an art dealer in Munich, dying in an obscurity he no doubt welcomed in the early 70s.

And what about the mysterious Catrin? It would be nice to think that she shudders from beyond the grave at the very thought of monstrous Goering once gazing on her kindly image.

Chicken a la Basque with peppers

This dish started life as 'Chicken a la Basque' but over time I have altered it in so many ways that now it would probably be an insult to the Basques to call it that. I now call it 'Chicken a la SGK'. Basically it is a chicken and peppers stew with the usual and expected extras: olive oil, onions, garlic, a tomato (optional), paprika (the hotter the better), a potato or two (optional), half a bottle of your favourite wine (red or white) and, in the absence of chicken stock, a couple of chicken stock cubes.

I hate measuring things out when cooking. Consequently my dishes always taste slightly different from the last time. 

There is very little time needed for preparing the the dish. I diced two small onions (didn't have a large one) and 3 cloves of garlic. Washed the peppers and cut them into 2 x 3 cm strips. Peeled 2 small potatoes and cut them into 3 x 3 cm cubes, blanched and peeled a small tomato. The chicken breast, about 140gr, I diced into small bite-size pieces about 2-3 cm square.

I heated 4 tbsp of olive oil in a pan and when hot added the onions, garlic and chicken, stirring constantly for a couple of minutes until the chicken lost its pink colour and the onions turned transparent. Next, I sprinkled 3 tsp of paprika into the dish, and stirred things to coat the chicken pieces well with the paprika. 

Then I dissolved the chicken cubes in pint and quarter of boiling water and poured it into the pan, stired, and added the peppers, tomato and potatoes, gave it all a good stir again and allowed the dish to simmer until the meat was cooked - about 15-20 minutes.

You can be as creative with this dish as you fancy. For example, while the dish simmers you could boil a small cup of rice in a separate pan and use that instead of potatoes, or hard-boil an egg, quarter it, and serve it on top of the dish as garnish. 

And the wine? Drink it at intervals while cooking!


TIPS: 
Do not add salt if you are using stock cubes; cubes tend to be salty. 
Add less water if you want the dish to be less soupy.
Use onions and garlic according to taste.
But DO NOT skimp on paprika. It's what gives the dish its unique flavour.

Saturn

This image of Saturn and its rings was taken from deep space by the Cassini probe. If you have good eyesight and look carefully you will see a tiny, tiny pin-prick size dot in lower left, off centre. That's Planet Earth.