You have to hand it to these Nigerians – the wife of the President is not yet cold in her [reduced-size] coffin but already her ‘Financial Adviser’ is offering me millions for helping him deal with the funds she squirrelled away before her ill-fated appointment with the Spanish cosmetic surgery clinic.

In a survey of ‘safe driving’ in 13 EU countries, Spain came 12th. But there’s no place for smugness; the UK came 11th. Mind you, Portugal came in the top 3 and, if you’ve ever driven there, you’ll know this is a nonsense as an indication of your likelihood of surviving on the country’s roads. Some clue to the structure of the survey came from a comment in El Pais that the UK – despite the lowest accident rates in the EU – had suffered because it’s not compulsory there to carry 2 triangles. Nor a full set of light bulbs and a luminous jacket, I guess.

There’s a protest march in Madrid tomorrow against the government’s plans to revise education so as, inter alia, to further reduce the importance of religion [i. e. Catholicism] in the curriculum. Although the march will be attended by a number of high-ranking clerics, the church has said the march is ’Nothing to do with us, guv.’ The problem the government has is that a significant amount of education is still provided by Church-linked schools in Spain. For which it is given vast sums of taxpayers’ money. So, my bet is on the government.

Quote of the Day

The worst imaginable world would be one in which the leading expert in each field had total control over it.
Friedrich Hayek, in ‘The Road to Serfdom’

Why have the French institutionalised the idea that you can buy your way out of trouble with higher taxes and more regulations? Because they've let the best minds take control of politics. The results have been what they always are once you let the best minds take control: disaster.
P. J. O’ Rourke