The Vatican cannot operate officially within the PRC, but I appreciate the real situation is more complex.

The Vatican has shown a persistent interest in Russia, and yes, there is a significant Russian speaking Catholic minority, as well as a potential convert base. If I remember rightly, Russia (or the USSR) gets a prominent mention in the Fatima narrative.

Russian has declined a lot in importance over the past thirty years, but it is still a major world language in terms of its spread. It is a surprising omission.

I've found it fairly useful for picking up other alphabets, as opposed to languages.

One such example was businesses claiming physical cash was unhygienic while promoting dirty touchscreens for ordering. Real science has indicated that many of these touchscreens are covered in bacteria if they are not cleaned regularly.

The Daily Mail has been telling us that the Yellowstone supervolcano is about to blow for nearly thirty years now at least. Maybe one day it will, but hasn't yet.

Where is most of that public money going to?

Ardern's ?uncle was also a big noise in the Mormon church. Used to run the Pacific region, where it has major influence in countries like Samoa and Tonga. She's well connected.

Other than "Shortland Street", the news and some sports games, there has been disappointingly little in the way of domestic television production. A shame because NZ can produce excellent films and dramas sometimes. It is pretty clear that Peter Jackson has done more for New Zealand that way than the state broadcasters ever did.

That isn't propaganda, it's something barely discussed. You've probably never even studied it before and you won't get a rounded view of it off Wikipedia. In fact some of the incidents (which included burning down homes sometimes of elderly people) would have barely gone recorded if it weren't for the Napier Commission which nearly didn't happen. Most of the incidents never did get recorded, because the victims were already in the big cities and other continents.

Now the billionaire Tetrapak heir wants to remove the few remaining people from the Highlands to finish the process. The super rich were always misanthropic and this is just one more example. They can hide their hatred of the common people behind environmentalism all they like. I doubt they care much for nature either. How much pollution has Tetrapak etc produced from its factories? A tonne more than any crofter ever did. But guess who pays? The peasants like they always did.

The Highlands were not just like "the rest of the unpopulated parts of the UK". They were completely different to many of them in multiple ways, even in language. They had been inhabited by people for thousands of years before abusive landlords evicted most of the population. They retained aspects of cultural and social organisation which had disappeared from much of Europe by that time.

This pattern repeats again and again. Most of the Irish were chased off their land by abusive landlords who ground them into poverty and famine. Stalin and other dictators forcibly removed millions of people from their ancestral lands by force and pressure.

The media also need to stop referring to CO² as just "carbon". That is misleading too. (You didn't to be fair.) Carbon itself is common in our environment and is even okay in many other compounds.

You should be well aware by this point in life that plenty of good causes are used to justify not so good things. Or to put it another way, "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

On the most basic level, I could give the example of various children's charities being used to line the pockets of someone rather than doing what they are supposed to. That has happened a number of times.

In much the same way, we can see child safety and bullying (both of which are real issues) being used to excuse clamping down on freedom of expression online. A generation ago, the excuse of terrorism was used to remove civil liberties as well.

With women's rights, we see a genuine issue being abused. We see women from upper class or aristocratic backgrounds like Ursula von der Leyen getting jobs, while the bulk of women continue to work in grinding poverty, and can barely support themselves let alone a family. That is just the same old oligarchy and nepotism with a female face.

Word has it that the Devil Wears Prada 2 is much better than the original.

It's a bombastic film, and rolls along nicely. At the Q&A last night there were some just criticisms of the film. Brenda (Roxanne Hart) is underutilised in the final bit, although by distracting Kurgan she helps Connor win. Clancy Brown should have been paid far more than he was. I would have liked to have seen more of the other immortals — Kim who was cut out entirely, the African guy who gets a small appearance and so on.

The remake will be interesting, and the cast holds out some promise.