Start the Engine

Formula One is back!

All the petrolheads in the world rejoice with the comeback of the Formula One circus. This season the eyes are put upon the Mercedes team wondering if they will maintain the hegemony shown in 2014 and if the relationship between 2014 driver champion Lewis Hamilton and teammate Nico Rosberg will continue as tense as last season.

In a season where some hotshot drivers changed wheels, the attention will also go to Sebastian Vettel now at Ferrari. The former world champion has a tremendous challenge ahead: To give back the rage to the Ferrari racing horse. It will not be easy but the winter practices indicated some promising performances.

Another interest point for the 2015 season will be Fernando Alonso who is back to McLaren. The Ron Dennis team starts the season involved in great mystery. First, for its new power unit, Honda, which during the winter practices, seemed not quite ready for the beginning of the season. The second question is about Alonso himself. The Spaniard suffered an enigmatic crash at Barcelona in the last winter practice of the pre season, a crash that wasn’t fully explained by McLaren and that cost him its driving seat at Melbourne. The reports say that Alonso will be ready for Malaysia, but no one knows exactly what is the health condition of the Spaniard ace.

Obviously, we cannot forget about the emerging young wolves, always ready to bite the dust of the front row aces. www.netufino.com

It’s Oscar Time

Tonight is the big night of Hollywood, and this year the candidates for best motion picture are a movie about an American sniper, a boy, a genius scientist, a human right activist, a coder, a hotel, a movie star and a music conservatory student.

Bets are on to guess who will get the Oscar. www.netufino.com

Fight The Power

 In the 2012 Greek’s general elections, Germany and the European Union draw an apocalyptic prophecy of Europe’s end in the case of the emerging radical left-wing party Syriza’s victory. The Greeks got scared and decided to deliver their votes to the EU align New Democracy party. For the 2015 general elections, Germany brought back the 2012 nightmare, but this time the EU didn’t share the same dream.

In the past years, almost all EU states endured a deep recession. Germany, backed by a stable internal financial situation, wasn’t too affected by the crisis and took the helm of a falling EU. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, put in place a financial dogma that all EU members had to follow; otherwise they could lose the much-needed German financial support. Austerity became the most sacred word in Europe and budget cuts were the only way EU countries could survive in the turmoil. The choice was simple: austerity or a hard financial bailout plan that would deliver a country’s financial sovereignty to Berlin, through Brussels.

That was precisely what happened in Ireland, Portugal and Greece. Those EU members didn’t resist at the toughness of the recession and had to endure a bailout plan. Today Greece is the only country still under such plan, a plan that torn down the whole country and led to the rise of political forces objecting to the hardness of financial measures that were put in place by the EU. So far, Germany had managed to mute those emerging forces, until last weekend, when the Greeks decided to fight back.

Greek’s Syriza political force saw the strong new winds that are coming from the American economy. They also saw that those winds are affecting the EU ship as well, which is going faster than it thought it could be possible just a year ago. A growth that is becoming a reality, leaving years of austerity that didn’t produce anything more than more austerity behind, despite what Germany preached. That’s why EU didn’t fully backed Germany this time in the apocalyptic vision of a Syriza victory, like it did in 2012.

Now other political forces throughout Europe could take profit of the Syriza defiance and could emulate the Greeks and soon Germany could find itself alone in the defence of its much loved austerity dogma. www.netufino.com

Cristiano RonaldOR

 60 games

61 goals (1,02 goals per match)

13 penalty goals (93% accuracy)

5 head goals

9 left foot goals

46 right foot goals

3 hat tricks (3 goals in a single match)

1 poker (4 goals in a single match)

17 goals in one edition of the UEFA Champion League (all-time record)

52 goals with Portugal national team (all-time top scorer)

22 goals assists

4 collective trophies:

UEFA Champion League

UEFA Super cup

Spain’s Copa del Rey

FIFA Club World cup

12 individual trophies:

Globe Soccer best player of the year

Globe Soccer fan’s favourite player

BBC overseas sport personality of the year

World top scorer

Alfredo Di Stefano’s award

Spain’s La Liga top scorer

Spain’s La Liga best player award

Spain’s La Liga best forward award

Spain’s La Liga best individual goal

UEFA best player award

FIFA FIFpro world XI award

Globe soccer best player award

Any doubt about who was the best football player in the world in 2014? www.netufino.com

The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword (Je Suis Charlie)

 Someone said that the pen is mightier than the sword. Yesterday in Paris, a jihadist commando tried to erase those words of wisdom.

The brutal raid on the Charlie Hebdo news’ room had the purpose to silence a newspaper that published a few years ago a Muhammad caricature, but what the fanatic commando got was a very different reaction. The whole world raised its voice and its pencils against the jihadist’s terrorists defending the freedom of expression and remembering those who died defending it.

At the end, the pen will still be mightier than the sword, despite some lunatic barbarians who don’t understand what freedom is. www.netufino.com

Season’s Greetings

Down For The Count

Nobody knows about Internet piracy. Nobody knows about peer-to-peer file sharing. Nobody knows about The Pirate Bay website. But the Swedish police raid to this website has put the Internet community on hold.

The site was launched in 2003 and became the biggest source of files sharing in the world with more than one million visitors per day. In there, one could find movies, songs, books, software; you name it… all free of charge.

It wasn’t odd to see this Internet mogul under fire, but The Pirate Bay always managed to get through the anti-piracy law’s strong arm, until this week, when the Swedish police raided the site headquarters and shut it down. This time, the authorities say that it is for good, and even the men behind the website are saying that they will not try to reboot The Pirate Bay. Will it be the final blow in the Internet piracy war? I don’t think so.

Soon another website will pick up the pieces left behind by The Pirate Bay and will bring to the million who don’t know about Internet piracy what they looked for at The Pirate Bay. www.netufino.com

 

Please Charge

European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe had a shining mission. The probe was due to perform a succession of world première features in space, travelling some 6.4 billion kilometres to reach its gold.

The first of these features was to meet the Churyunov-Gerasimenko comet, a small city size rock coming from deep space on its route to the sun. Once the rendezvous was achieved, Rosetta had to set an orbit course around the comet, preparing itself to launch its probe son Philea to land on the comet. All went as planned and on November 12th, Philea graciously landed on the ground of the comet. ESA was rejoicing, but soon discovered that the bright success wasn’t so bright after all.

Philea landed some 500 metres from the planned landing site and with this minor miss fall, on a comet with some four kilometres wide, came the bad news. Phileas had landed on a shadow spot of the comet irregular ground, away from the sunlight and unable to recharge its batteries. Soon Philea went dead without energy.

It’s ironic that a probe that landed on a comet en route to the sun got dead without sunlight but, after all this is just another odd chapter of the space journey odyssey. www.netufino.com

The Wall

In 1961 the authorities of East Berlin, backed by the Soviet Union, decided to erect a wall cutting off the city into two, preventing its inhabitants to suffer from the malevolence of occidental winds of change.

In 1989 after weeks of protests, a grey old and tired eastern politician gave an unprepared answer to a simple question posed by a journalist on live television. The question was whenever the population of Eastern Berlin would be allowed to visit the Western side of Germany. The answer was: Right away! That night the exodus toward the West started and the Berlin wall began to fall bringing with it the whole communist bloc.

25 years later, Germany is still licking the scars of that enforced split who last 28 dark years, fighting to level the rich West and the poor East. www.netufino.com

 

Masterpiece Renaissance

In 1541, Pope Paul III took possession of a colossal commission work given to master painters of the Renaissance. What the Pope saw when he entered into the Sistine Chapel can be admired from this week on in its full splendour.

The paintings of the Sistine Chapel endured five centuries of deterioration mainly caused by candle smoke, sunlight burning and some 20 million visitants a year. The masterpiece frescos of Michelangelo, Pietro Perugino, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Bartolomeo della Gatta or Botticelli got throughout time a blackish coat that diminished the ensemble.

In 1984, works begun to reverse the deterioration. The frescos were carefully washed, revealing the original colours and clearing them from the clothes that were painted by Daniele da Volterra under the strict order of Council of Trent in 1565, to hide the many nude genitals painted. A state-of-the-art illumination was also put in place to bath the frescos with a brighter and harmful light that venerates all the frescos and not only the one’s from Michelangelo.

Finally, the Vatican has put in place a limit of visitors. Now, only 6 million lucky visitors will appreciate the Sistine Chapel greatness each year, admiring the beauty of one the greatest and biggest art masterpiece of all times. www.netufino.com