The following position arose from a blitz chess game played on the Internet Chess Club this afternoon. I am white, and black is to move.


As you can see, material is even; white has all his pieces but the Rd1 trained against the enemy kings' shelter, a strong knight on f6, and is threatening to win an exchange with Nxe8 -however good or bad that move may be, given the strength of the knight in the game position.

As elections to renew the european parliaments get closer, the political arena in Italy fails to deal with the matters that should interest voters, and instead concentrates on the behavior of Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

In a crescendo of events, each of which could have brought less gutsy politicians to resign, the italian press is getting totally dominated by the personal matters of the prime minister. Let me give a brief summary below.

A trial proved that Berlusconi had corrupted an English lawyer, Mills, to get a false testimony from him; a law masterfully crafted by Berlusconi's lacqueys only a year ago is now preventing his impeachment. Berlusconi's wife Veronica Lario publically announces she is asking for

The catholic church has long lost its race against islamism for the religious institution with more adepts. And they ache for it: you can tell from their resentful remarks on the matter. Bishops and spokespersons of the Vatican have been recently reported to say that the data need to be verified, that the number of muslims is inflated, that there is no clear record... The fact is, the data come from the World Christian Database, a US institute which is hard to refute. In 2007 it already estimated muslims to beat catholics 1.322 to 1.115 billions.

Here is what I reported on the matter two years ago:

The "new" section of experimental physics papers in the arxiv today features a preprint by the CDF collaboration, titled "First Observation of Vector Boson Pairs in a Hadronic Final State at the Tevatron Collider". This is another instance of a difficult analysis where the CDF and DZERO experiments have competed in the past, and one which is relevant for Higgs boson searches. And CDF got there first once again.

I will describe in detail the analysis and the results later today, because this particular study is dear to me for at least three different reasons:

"Berlusconi in his life had about twenty wives, two of whom were his"

Roberto Benigni