Dixon, my good man, appears you saw a ‘bit of action’ the other day at the local crop circle, eh what?

Listen here, old chap….absolutely nothing to worry about. Encounter, not cricket obviously, but not in the least bit suspicious – in fact, if anything, a blasted nuisance and a bit of a bore.

Naturally, no aliens involved.  Lot of stuff and nonsense! Ha! Guffawing out loud at the very idea!

To follow, possible explanations for wobbly upper lip:

• Yellow Hot Air Balloons (always sending them up – blighters always coming back down)

• Abba Tribute Band (one playing in local village – awful racket)

• Farmers’ prank (damned jokers, when they’re not shooting themselves, that is!)

• Cows (damned silly creatures – neurotic around electric fences)

• Kids (upstarts in general)

• Americans (rather tall on the whole)

Suggest a jolly good drink/walk with the wife to let the dust settle, then back to work it is, my good fellow, protecting our glorious countryside against dirty rotten vandals, who seek to undermine our British way of life, eh what?

Yours,

Major Charles Pickett-Humes
Ministry of Defence (Public Relations Dept.)

Hewdge has been following the outpouring of irritation at Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi’s latest gaffe, where he once again refers to US President Obama’s ‘tan’.
Read the full and unbelievable story here:

Yo, Sylvizzle,
Fo’ Shizzle dude, yo is lunchin’, cuz yo is mo than fitty, yo dig? Yo ain’t straight man, yo wack, yo know what I’m sayin’?
Yo axe ma nizzle one mo’ time if he be tanned, I’m a busta cap in yo ass. Ma nizzle is a payce dawg, yo know what I’m sayin’? Yo ain’t gonna diss him, wanksta, yo dig? Whas goin’ down wid yo and that I-talyan fugly ho, yo know what I’m sayin’?

Which, roughly translated means:

Well, Mister Berlusconi, there’s no doubt you are going a little bit crazy, maybe because of your age. After all, you are over 50. Do you get it? You’re really not being fair. If you ask my President one more time if he’s ‘tanned’ I will shoot you in the behind.
President Obama is a man of peace and you cannot disrespect him like some kind of idiot. Do you understand what I am saying? Do you get it? By the way, what is the latest news story concerning  you and that ****ing  ugly Italian ‘Lady of the Night’?  Do you know what I’m saying?

Hewdge’s last article concerns Cuba’s strongman and former sex symbol Fidel Castro, who has sired more than 10 children by various women on the island, and whose prowess is the subject of a new book ‘Without Fidel’ by journalist Ann Bardach.
Click here for the full story:

Dear Fidel or ‘Faithful One’
Wow Commandante! It was fun reading about you and your ‘tribe’ of little ‘Fidelitos’. I hear Cuba has named a few cocktails in your honour – ‘Sex On The Bay Of Pigs Beach’ and ‘Cuba Libido’ immediately spring to mind…
We have so much in common! I too, am a celebrity tyrant and have a small tribe – actually, 14 offspring in total (according to my publicist)
Fidel, I need your advice: one of my volunteer nannies is a cute Cuban guy called Julio, who says I shouldn’t consider wearing my new Gap Che Guevara bikini at my next TV interview, until I get a full tummy-tuck. A tummy-tuck? How superficial!
Fidel, I know you’ve had a little surgery yourself recently, so think about it! Why should a media-star and national treasure like myself undergo a full tummy-tuck without getting breast implants, liposuction and a chemical peel? It doesn’t make sense. Are Cubans always this unreasonable?

Love,
Octomom

PS: How can I be more like you and get entire countries to donate to me?

The Cuban leader with female admirers in New York, 1959 Photo: GETTY

Fidel Castro is renowned in Cuba for his verbosity and longevity. But his long-suffering compatriots know little about another sphere where El Commandante has proved prolific – his private life.

Discussing his womanising ways is strictly taboo on the Caribbean communist outpost, even on an island where the gossip grapevine flourishes in the absence of a free press.

But a long-time Cuba-watcher has now revealed the scale of his philandering and the existence of at least 10 offspring. That is more than previously believed – but very possibly not the full tally.

When journalist Ann Louise Bardach asked Castro how many children he had during an interview with Vanity Fair in 1993, he smiled and answered “almost a tribe”.

During the research for Without Fidel, her new book chronicling the lives of Castro and his brother, Raul, to be published by Scribner, she discovered how true that observation was.

Castro, now 83, was a dashing young man whose good looks and rebel swagger clearly leant him a strong sexual allure during the years before and after the 1959 revolution. Indeed, media reports describe female fans swooning after he arrived triumphantly in Havana and during early trips to the US.

He had one child, Fidelito (Little Fidel), with his first wife Myrta Diaz-Balart in 1949 and five boys between 1962 and 1974 with Dalia Soto del Valle, a little-seen companion whom he is said to have secretly married in 1980. Remarkably, she was first shown on Cuban television in 2003 – “so forbidden” was Castro’s personal domain, Ms Bardach observes.

But there have been many more paramours and several other children along the way – most notably from the time when the 29-year-year old rebel leader celebrated his release from prison in 1955 for a failed uprising.

For three Castro offspring were born to three women during 1956. Most famously, there was Natalia Revuelta, an aristocratic beauty who became a fierce defender of his revolution – she bore him a daughter, Alina Fernandez.

Ms Bardach, an investigative journalist and a member of the Cuba Study Group at the Brookings Institution think-tank, had previously reported the existence of another illegitimate 1956 child, Panchita Pupo. She was not even known to his other offspring and her mother remains unidentified.

And in this book, she reveals the identity of the mother of Jorge Angel, the third Castro child of 1956 – Maria Laborde, an admirer who Castro met just after was he freed.

She also discloses another apparent addition to the brood – a son known as Ciro, the early 1960s product of another brief fling. He was previously unknown outside the family inner circle, but a close relative of Celia Sanchez, Castro’s closest confidante and yet another rumoured lover, revealed his existence to the author.

Ciro, named after a revolutionary martyr and whose mother’s name is still secret, is said to have “movie star looks”, with green eyes and dark complexion. He went into sports medicine after studying physical education at college, married a minor party official and lives in a Havana suburb where nobody knows his provenance.

And if claims made earlier this year by a Cuban intelligence defector that he sired another son in 1970 are true, that would take the count to 11 children by seven women – and counting.

Castro’s first name is derived from the Latin for “faithful”, but while he has remained true to his politics, the same cannot be said of the women in his life. His offspring have however largely adhered to their father’s instructions not to flaunt their privileged backgrounds and are rarely seen in public, His first son, Fidelito, has received the highest prominence. But when he mishandled the country’s nuclear power programme, his father ordered his dismissal. “He was fired for incompetence,” Castro said. “We don’t have a monarchy here.”

Many Cubans would, however, disagree with the last point – and with good reason. After the crippling intestinal disease of diverticulitis nearly killed him in 2006, Fidel’s brother Raul was anointed to replace him. The younger Castro was confirmed as president last year in a handover which appeared almost feudal.

Ms Bardach predicts that the most likely member of the family’s next generation to emerge as a future leader is Raul’s son, Alejandro, 43, a colonel and rising star in the powerful interior ministry The book also discloses the explosive inside story of how Raul Castro purged two close lieutenants of his older brother. Carlos Lage, the economics czar, and Felipe Perez Roque, the foreign minister, had both been considered possible future leaders, but were ousted after a year-long surveillance operation.

In classic old communist style, the two men were forced to write mea culpas for political sins which are still unclear. Raul, the veteran defence minister, has moved allies from the armed forces into virtually all areas of government and the economy – apparently inspired by the commercial success of the People’s Liberation Army in China.

And Ms Bardach reveals that Fidel Castro’s pride and obstinacy almost proved fatal when he rejected the recommended surgery in 2006 – a colostomy. Castro insisted on a much riskier operation as he did not want to suffer the perceived indignity of living with an attached bag.

The bolder procedure failed and Castro was nearly killed by a peritonitis infection as a result. After a life-saving colostomy was finally performed, Ms Bardach reports that Castro was distraught. “Fidel was crying,” a source present in the hospital told her. “He cried several times that day. He was devastated.”

From her contacts within the Cuban medical system, she also learns that Castro was fed intravenously for five months after the surgery and lost 45 pounds. A Spanish doctor brought in to treat him feared he was “starving to death” and gradually restored solid foods to a highly restrictive diet.

In his occasional photo shoots with visiting left-wing Latin American proteges, Castro has abandoned his old uniform of olive fatigues.

Instead, he opts for garish track suits because they hide the hated colostomy bag – emblematic of his transformation from hirsute heart-throb to frail octogenarian.

Dear Readers
Hewdge is sometimes the only true sanctuary that a person of consequence might flee to when avoiding the savage glare of the international media spotlight. In the case of Italy’s prime minister, Sylvio Berlusconi, who has been accused of sleeping with prostitutes and even of being a sex addict, the Italian press has rendered him the object of amusement among Roman matrons and the butt of tasteless Viagra jokes worldwide. Click here for the full story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/6174403/Silvio-Berlusconi-threatens-to-sue-call-girl.html
However, the promiscuous prime minister does have loyal friends who are ready to support his decision to sue Patrizia D’Addario, a woman who claims that Mr Berlusconi slept with her on a number of occasions for money. One such ally is Roman Catholic Cardinal Gustavo Porchi, Sylvio Berlusconi’s boyhood friend. Hewdge publishes the Cardinal’s open letter, in the hope that the Italian media might pause to consider the damaging impact of its political witch-hunt.

Open letter from Cardnal Gustavo Porchi:

I wish to publicly defend my dear friend and prime minister, Mr Sylvio Berlusconi, against this blatant smear campaign orchestrated by the Italian and international press.
Mr Berlusconi’s private life is his own and he should not have to defend against hearsay, or rather – ‘whore-say’ , from that little tart, Patrizia D’Addario, who is the very worst kind of creature that God ever put on this earth. Why, at night I have heard Sylvio crying, crying into his pillow because of the damage to his reputation! That PUTANESCA is going to burn in the devil’s hell fires for her wickedness!!

At least I am grateful for one thing, that Mama Berlusconi (God rest her soul!) is not here to see her little Sylvio being branded as a common sex addict. I fervently pray that the press allows our prime minister to get on with the serious business of running the country, but should his enemies continue hounding him, we have excellent lawyers permanently on call at the Vatican who are deft at defending against trumped-up allegations in matters of the flesh, if you know what I mean….

For my part, I will immediately cross out that whore’s telephone number from my piccolo libro nero, recite ten Hail Marys, and flagellate myself until my pizza arrives.

May God Bless You And Keep You,
ex toto corde paenitet me,

Cardinal Gustavo Porchi

In the tapes, which were obtained by the Italian press, a man identified as Mr Berlusconi is heard telling her to wait for him on “the big bed” while he takes a shower.

Mr Berlusconi, who this week became the longest-serving leader in Italy’s post-war history, said that he was considerin legal action, alleging that he had been the “victim of an attack by a person who wanted to create a scandal”.

He added that Miss D’Addario would have to answer before an Italian court for the “four crimes” she had committed, although he did not specify what they were.

“She will have to answer to Italian judges. Suffice to say that the maximum penalty for the four crimes that this person has committed would amount to 18 years in prison.”

The three-times prime minister, whose wife is seeking a divorce over his womanising, has never denied sleeping with Miss D’Addario. But he says he neither paid her nor knew she was a prostitute.

Miss D’Addario, who last month told the Daily Telegraph that she was being persecuted by the political establishment and likened herself to Joan of Arc, responded by challenging the prime minister to a public debate.

She said it should focus on “relations between men and women, techniques of conquest, sex and power.” Mr Berlusconi admitted for the first time to knowing Giampaolo Tarantini, the Bari-based businessman who allegedly provided up to 30 young escort girls, starlets and TV actresses to his parties and who is being investigation for procuring prostitutes.

“A person from Bari, Tarantino or Tarantini, came to some of my dinners accompanied by beautiful women,” the billionaire premier, who turns 73 at the end of this month, said.

He denied knowing that any of them were prostitutes, saying that he understood that they were simply friends of Mr Tarantini.