Welcome to Declassified, a weekly humor column.
It’s been a tough few weeks for former Italian Prime Minister and Bunga Bunga-enthusiast Silvio Berlusconi. After being handled for persistent leukemia, the getting older lothario was moved out of intensive care earlier this month. Which means he can obtain guests, and he has — which not less than provides the poor nurses a break from all that groping.
Among the many guests was the mom of Marta Fascina, the 86-year-old Berlusconi’s 32-year-old girlfriend. Nothing uncommon there (by which I imply receiving guests in hospital will not be uncommon, whereas a 54-year age hole is) besides that Fascina’s mother is named Angela Della Morte, which interprets as “Angel of Dying” — not a perfect identify for a customer if you’re simply out of intensive care.
Staying in Italy, it’s been a foul week for the nation’s tourism ministry, which put out a video that includes a computerized model of Botticelli’s Venus as if she was a — shudder — social media influencer. It additionally includes a group of younger individuals smiling on a patio consuming wine. How very Italian! Besides they aren’t in Italy consuming Italian wine, they’re in Slovenia consuming Slovenian wine. Oops.
Our journey eastward continues to Hungary, the place Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continues to offer glorious worth on the burning tire fireplace that’s Elon Musk’s Twitter. First he responded to a POLITICO article on NATO Secretary-Common Jens Stoltenberg declaring that “Ukraine’s rightful place is in NATO” with a one-word response: “What?!” It in all probability took as lengthy to kind that because it did to determine whether or not to assist Kyiv in its struggle towards the Russian invaders.
Then Orbán visited the Hungexpo exhibition middle in Budapest and in addition to taking quite a few selfies with younger individuals, was taken (and, fairly frankly, dreamy-eyed) as he watched a person in conventional gown brandish a large whip. By no means one to overlook a possibility to look macho, Orbán grabbed the whip and commenced swirling and cracking it with the fervor of a person imagining he was in a convention room in Brussels being instructed the following tranche of EU coronavirus funding had been withheld due to rule-of-law abuses.
He accompanied a video of the whip heroics with the fairly menacing phrase “That’s why you don’t mess with Hungarians” and the sun shades emoji. It was fairly a disturbing sight, though clearly not as dangerous as final month when he visited a pizzeria that serves a dish in his honor with the toppings rooster breast, jalapeño peppers and slices of orange (and sure, the orange is the emblem of Orbán’s occasion, Fidesz, however that doesn’t make placing it on pizza much less of a hate crime).
CAPTION COMPETITION
“EU-funded remake of ‘Titanic’ suffers from inevitable lack of consensus on who ought to play the Leonardo DiCaprio character.“
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Final time we gave you this photograph:
Thanks for all of the entries. Right here’s the most effective from our postbag — there’s no prize apart from the reward of laughter, which I feel we are able to all agree is way extra worthwhile than money or booze.
“In fact I actually need to take my pants off as properly once I do my elephant impersonation,” by Paul Barrett.
Paul Dallison is POLITICO‘s slot information editor.
