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Article 5 of the Constitution of Iran refers to the leadership of the Ummah (Islamic community) during the occultation of of the Twelfth Imam, and states that this post should be held by a just and pious faqih (Islamic jurist) who is knowledgeable about affairs of the day, in accordance with Article 107. Article 107 of the Constitution of Iran specifies the qualities and theological qualifications (further specified in Article 109) that such a candidate is expected to possess in order to be elected supreme leader by the 88-man ‘Council of Experts’. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Iran_1989 If you are interested in a balanced discussion of the Constitution of Iran, then you might also wish to consider: Article 13 (Recognized religious minorities) - which states that: "Zoroastrian, Jewish, and Christian Iranians are the only recognized religious minorities, who, within the limits of the law, are free to perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education." Article 14 (Non Muslims) - which states that : "In accordance with the sacred verse ("God does not forbid you to deal kindly and justly with those who have not fought against you because of your religion and who have not expelled you from your homes" [60:8]), The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and all Muslims are duty-bound to treat non-Muslims" with "Islamic justice and equity", provided those non-Muslims "refrain from engaging in conspiracy or activity against Islam and the Islamic Republic of Iran". I have found nothing in the text of the Constitution of Iran so far to support your claim that:

The maverick Victorian adventurer, linguist and explorer Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) made a scholarly contribution on this topic while serving as the British Consul in Trieste from 1872 onwards. https://greatbritishnutters.blogspot.com/2008/03/sir-richard-burton-gone-to-devil.html Unfortunately this unusual piece of scholarship did not long survive his demise from a heart attack in 1890 aged sixty-nine, and the protective behaviour of his wife.

The Constitution of Iran (in its 1989 amendment form) contains 177 articles organised in 14 chapters. Perhaps you would like to specify which articles you are referring to ?

Today I learned that the word TARE found on railway wagons and shipping containers comes from an Arabic word طَرْح ṭarḥ meaning “deduction” or “that which is removed”. The word refers to the unladen weight of a cargo van, vessel or container, and its use in English dates back to the reign of King Henry VII at the end of the 15th century. A TARE weight is subtracted from the value recorded on a weighbridge to calculate the actual weight of the cargo for customs or shipping charges. The photo is of a “Cavell Van” a type of railway parcel van, so named because it was famously used to transport the body of nurse Edith Cavell from Belgium back to Britain in 1919. https://kesr.org.uk/the-cavell-van/

I’m not entirely sure what you are criticising or taking exception to here. The pernicious effect of what is commonly known as ‘Christian Zionism’ in neo-con political circles concerned with US foreign policy has been widely documented for quite a number of years. To avoid any misunderstanding, what is being referred to here are white evangelical fundamentalist christians who believe that they are living in elder times in which the apocalyptic events described in the Book of Revelation are being re-enacted. They fervently believe that the locale and the geo-political objectives they are pursuing will coincide with the arrival of the Antichrist and his defeat in the final battle of Armageddon on the plains of Megiddo and the valley of Jehoshaphat, followed by the second coming of the messiah, and a ‘rapture’ of the faithful up into heaven by the Lord. President George W. Bush was susceptible to this form of bible-thumping, and it was one of the factors that helped direct his administration’s disastrous march into the second Persian Gulf war from 2001 onwards. Mike Pompeo a former director of the CIA who became the Secretary of State in the first Trump administration was yet another believer. A New York Times article from 30 March 2019 spelled out quite clearly what that belief system involved: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/politics/pompeo-christian-policy.html Mike Huckabee the current US Ambassador to Israel is another senior political figure who has expressed views similar to those of Christian Zionism in a recent interview with Tucker Carlson https://forward.com/news/807715/mike-huckabee-christian-zionism-tucker-carlson/ President Trump still routinely holds ‘prayer meetings’ in the Oval Office with fundamentalist christians, and there have been troubling reports that key foreign policy decisions are sometimes being influenced by what used to be known as Stichomancy (from the the Greek root στιχος - “row, line, verse”) aka Bibliomancy, a form of divination in which the bible is opened to a random page and a finger placed on a verse with your eyes closed. The same was said to have happened during the G.W Bush administrations as well.

“I think it means bringing the end of the world closer, sort of.” (Illuminatus! - Vol 1 - Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson) According to a report in ‘The Guardian’, US military commanders have been invoking extremist Christian rhetoric about biblical “end times” to justify involvement in the Iran war to troops, according to complaints made to a watchdog group. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/03/us-israel-iran-war-christian-rhetoric The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) has received more than 200 complaints from personnel across the US armed forces including members of the Marines, Air Force and Space Force. According to one complaint from an NCO in a unit on standby to be deployed “at any moment to join “operations against Iran, their unit commander had “urged us to tell our troops that this was ‘all part of God’s divine plan’ and he specifically referenced numerous citations out of the Book of Revelation referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.” “He said that ‘President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth’”, the NCO added. According to Mikey Weinstein (MRFF’s president) “These reports indicate an increase in Christian extremism in the military”, noting that the complainants “report the unrestricted euphoria of their commanders” who perceive a “‘biblically-sanctioned’ war that is clearly the undeniable sign of the expeditious approach of the fundamentalist Christian ‘End Times’.”

On Sunday March 1st at UTC 18.11, shortwave radio-hams in France and Italy noticed that a new ‘Numbers’ station had begun broadcasting in Farsi on 7910 KHz. The broadcasts began the day after the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran by US and Israeli forces on Saturday 28th February. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErmbTpxAM7Q Numbers stations are enigmatic radio broadcasts that consist of nothing but a human voice reciting cryptic groups of numbers. They are widely believed to be communication channels used by intelligence agencies to transmit instructions to field-agents in foreign countries. The numbers are copied down by agents equipped with shortwave receivers, and decoded with the help of a one-time pad. Provided that the one-time pads are never reused, the encryption is unbreakable. Numbers stations have been extensively used by western intelligence agencies from the Cold War period onwards, but Iran has no history of ever having used them up to now - which makes the appearance of a brand new Farsi language Numbers station all the more remarkable. Article 111 of the Iranian constitution provides detailed instructions on the succession plan to be followed in the event of the death of the Supreme Leader, but the decapitation attack carried out by Israel and the US appears to have killed many of the Iranian officials who would have been in charge of carrying out the succession plan. This raises the possibility that the activation of this new Farsi Numbers radio station might be part of a Doomsday contingency plan. Faced with the death of their leader and the imminent destruction of their state, Iran’s surviving military leaders have already launched widespread and indiscriminate missile and drone attacks against infrastructure and civilian targets in many neighbouring countries of the middle-east. The worry must now be that the new Numbers station might be sending instructions to activate whatever sleeper agents and terrorist assets Iran possesses throughout the whole of the middle-east and Europe. This could mean not only a sudden spate of fresh gun attacks in western capitals, but the nightmare scenario of a ‘Fourth Protocol’ attack ( c.f. the 1984 Fredrick Forsyth novel) involving chemical, biological or improvised radiological weapons. Not for the first time I fear that the US may have underestimated its opponent.

Known as a "Fifths Tuning" because you are tuned in perfect fifths from the bass string upwards. Some tenor banjo players recommend using C.G.D.A instead - they say the fingerings flow slightly more naturally if you are playing fiddle tunes.

Texan singer Sarah Jarosz performing an Appalachian style version of ‘Ireland’s Green Shore’ by Tim O’Brien, with Sam Grisman (son of David Grisman) on bass, and virtuoso Alex Hargreaves on fiddle - something of a dream team if you happen to be a modern country/bluegrass music fan.

In China there is conflict between the modern day economic pressures that drive younger people to leave their native villages to seek work in far-flung megalopolises, and a core Confucian value called Xiao 孝 meaning ’filial piety’ which enjoins a deep reverence for one’s parents and ancestors. One of the Confucian classics is called the Xiao-Jing 孝經 which enjoins a three year period of mourning and ancestor veneration rituals like the spring Qingming festival 清明 节 (’Tomb Sweeping Day’). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_of_Filial_Piety These traditional values remain highly influential even within the Communist PRC, and the emphasis they lay on caring for your parents in their old age has led some Chinese communities to counter the social dislocation of modern urbanization by introducing support contracts for elderly parents. In Confucian thought, children owe an "eternal debt" to their parents for the gift of life, and the years of protection and care they received, especially in the first three years of their life when they were wholly dependent on them (hence the three year period of mourning). The ideogram for xiào (孝) depicts a child (zǐ, 子) below an elder (lǎo, 老), symbolizing a son supporting or carrying an older person.

I think the viral spike in this app’s popularity is related to a number of cultural trends in mainland Chinese society. The average age of the population has been rising quite rapidly for some years because of the “one child per family” rules enacted in the PRC between 1979 and 2015 which has led to a rise in ‘4-2-1’ family structures, and growing numbers of seniors living alone. Throughout the past decade, hundreds of millions of younger people have migrated from their hometowns to find work in distant megalopolises like Shanghai, Chengdu, Wuhan, and Guangzhou leaving behind emptying rural villages and isolated elderly parents who feel particularly vulnerable when they become widowers. There has also been a dramatic decline in the number of new marriages in China which fell to a new low last year: This coupled with a plunging birth-rate has meant that unusually large numbers of younger people are living alone too, and up to 19.6% of those aged between 16 and 24 are also likely to be unemployed according recent job stats : https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/30/economy/china-youth-unemployment-intl-hnk All of which adds to a pervasive sense of anomie - depression, anxiety and isolation among younger Chinese people - along with a morbid fear of living and dying alone.

Sileme (Chinese - 死了么 - “Are They Dead”) A viral mobile phone app created by developer Moonscape Technologies Inc. which recently leapt to the #1 spot on Apple’s paid download charts has been renamed Demumu according to a company Weibo post today. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/14/chinese-app-are-you-dead-to-change-name-after-surge-in-popularity It’s a lightweight social safety tool aimed at an estimated 200 million people who may be living in one-person households in China by 2030. The online tool which costs 8 Yuan ($1.15), or £0.99 on the UK Apple Store encourages users to log in once a day to confirm that they are still alive. If the user fails to log in on 2 consecutive days, then an automatic notification is sent to a designated emergency contact. In a country with a population of around 1.4 billion, where a growing a number of seniors are living alone, the app has been welcomed by many social media users - “For the first time, someone is concerned about whether I’m dead or alive,” one wrote on the blogging platform Weibo. The new name Demumu has no Chinese character equivalent. It is derived from a word play on the English word “Death” and the syllabic pattern of “Labubu” - a plushie monster and popular collectible toy from the Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung's "The Monsters" series, known for its mischievous grin, pointy ears, and big eyes, often sold as a furry elf in blind boxes by Pop Mart.

Bon Appetit ! I can recall my great-aunts brewing up this mixture in a large preserving pan (aka ‘Maslin Pan’) creating a real reek of vinegar as it boiled down, before bottling it, and storing the jars in a dark pantry chill room.

Back in those days they used to serve enormous oven-roasted turkeys at Xmas which took forever to cook and ages to carve, and they invariably wound up with such a tonnage of left-overs after stripping the carcass, that you would be eating cold cuts and hot vegetables for the rest of the week. Apples by the way do play a significant role in Indian cuisine, though usually in the more northern Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir regions. https://applesandpeople.org.uk/india/ Which would be consistent with the ‘Cashmere’ theme of this chutney.

As far as I can recall the chutney was placed on the dining table in a cut glass decanter with a stopper, and was mainly consumed with cold cuts of meat served with hot vegetables - e.g the usual Boxing Day repast. Some ppl also liked to add a dollop to their biscuits and cheese - if taken as a third course. It’s basically quite a sweet-tasting apple chutney with a pervasive tang of root ginger. The recipe that I found is written in my mother’s hand, but I strongly suspect that she herself copied it out from an older recipe written by one of her own paternal aunts who was an excellent cook. Quite where she originally got it from is anyone’s guess. At least one of my distant relatives on that side of the family was a clipper captain who sailed the world in the second half of the 19th century - so the recipe could well have come from the Raj.