Pizza strike

Rome, Sept. 19 (Reuters): Italy is famous around the world for strikes in every sector from transport workers to doctors, from teachers and even prostitutes.

Now the first “pizza strike” has been called on Saturday. The consumer group ADUC says the price of a pizza is just too high and disproportionate to the cost of ingredients.

The group estimates that the ingredients for a classic Pizza Margherita — tomato, mozzarella and basil — cost a mere 49 euro cents (about 50 US cents), but restaurant goers are charged an average of 5 euros, an increase of some 1,000 per cent. In order to protest against the high cost of the national staple, the group has called on consumers not to buy pizzas all day on Saturday.

Patient pain

London (Reuters): Patience may be a virtue, but it doesn’t always pay off. A man suspected of trying to steal jewellery from one of Britain’s poshest stores was arrested after police discovered him concealed behind a false ceiling where he had been hiding for several hours. A police spokeswoman said on Thursday officers from the Metropolitan force had gone to Harvey Nichols in London’s swanky Knightsbridge on Wednesday morning to investigate an overnight break-in. They left only to be called back in the afternoon by shop staff who noticed a ceiling panel moving. Police officers then discovered the man in a false ceiling cavity. The jewels were worth about £100,000 and that the man had been hidden for more than 12 hours.

Manic music

Porto Allegre, Brazil (Reuters): A gun-toting musician forced a southern Brazilian radio station to play his debut album for more than an hour on Wednesday after apparently having no luck opening the doors of show business, the man's father said. Marcus Vinicius dos Santos, 27, the vocalist for the rock group ACC — a Portuguese acronym for “Beyond the Gray Sky” — stormed disc jockey Marcio Paz’s booth at Atlantida FM in the city of Porto Alegre and forced him to play his album Phases of Life. “ The five-member band portrays itself on its website www.accpop.com as futuristic superheroes living in a post-apocalyptic world. Vinicius dos Santos goes by the name “Cram” and wears Alice Cooper-style black eye makeup. The episode was reminiscent of the 1994 Hollywood movie Airheads, in which dimwitted members of a rock band, fed up with rejection from music industry executives, take matters into their own hands and hijack a radio station to air their songs. The Brazilian incident ended after about 70 minutes when Vinicius dos Santos surrendered to police, who had evacuated the building.