Friday 16 June 2023

One untruth shot down

Over breakfast this morning, I was talking to BH about how odd it was that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the boss of Putin's convict army (think 'Dirty Dozen' on a very large scale) went to Berlusconi's state funeral in Milan. To say the least of it, surely someone like that would be arrested on sight in any self-respecting NATO country?

After breakfast, I got to wondering where I had acquired this particular fact from. First thought was the Financial Times, my lead newspaper, but search there failed to turn anything up. But Bing did rather better and Google better still. 

I now think it likely that I picked this item up in the margins of opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge, which comes by default with a raft of stuff from the very dodgy Microsoft News feed. Something that I do many times every day. I could easily have caught an Express headline from one of their panels. The online Express being another very dodgy news operation. Maybe I need to investigate changing the default.

Along the way I came across reference 3, which explains that Prigozhin used the phrase 'I was at Berlusconi's funeral' as a rather florid way of saying that he did not know anything about some alleged Ukrainian missile attacks on that very day. He might just as well have said 'I was taking tea on the moon'.

Which does not detract from the facts that Putin and Berlusconi had plenty in common and that Progozhin had met Berlusconi on various occasions.

The fact in question has now been consigned to the recycle bin.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirty_Dozen.

Reference 2: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1781021/wagner-berlusconi-milan-russia-ukraine-funeral-prigozhin.

Reference 3: https://news.italy24.press/news/634847.html.

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