WELCOME TO CHEWIE EDITION NUMBER 26   PARIS HILTON MAY BE PUTTING UP HER HAND FOR PRESIDENT! GO PARIS. AND WHY NOT HAVE, SAY, WHAT'S HER NAME AS A RUNNING MATE (WITH, IT SEEMS, AN EMPHASIS ON THAT SEEMINGLY INNOCENT "MATE")    PLUS, ONCE AGAIN WONDERFUL GLOBAL REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SPIRITUAL...   ON OUR MARKS, GET SET, GO... OLYMPICS eat your heart out - if you have a heart, that is. Here's yet another CHEWIE with PICTURES, opinions (aren't we so over opinions?) STUFF. Even poems (sooo sorry about that but you know, your average poem is so much shorter than even your average article about the breeding cycle of the butterfly). And, yep, you may well find more contributions from  COLIN McKELLAR, PHIL DAY, TIM BOCQUET (who is off to Japan, Tim and just about everybody else). Oh yes, very sorry but more from Hartmann Wallis who is supposed to live in the freezing (but now gradually warming) wastes of Northern Canada. (Some can drink a case of Canada and still be on their feet.)   SOCIAL COMMENTATOR, MISTER CHEWIE HIMSELF!  reflects upon the EUROPEANS' hatred of GYPSIES   present day Italy’s plan to fingerprint all Gypsies. The Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, Italy's top-selling newsweekly, said the plan was evidence of a "creeping racism" and, in fact, meant that the children were being "enrolled in a list of 'probable future criminals.'" The magazine expressed concern over the fact that several government ministers who ran as faithful Catholics have not opposed the scheme. It was not surprised that Alessandra Mussolini, the head of the Italian Parliament's commission for children, and granddaughter of the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, did not oppose it because "ethnic and religious indexing are part of her family's DNA." Sixty years after the fascist dictatorship ended and Italy's racial laws were abolished, "Italy still hasn't faced up to its tragic responsibility -- we are not ashamed enough," the magazine said. The fingerprinting and cataloguing of the Gypsy children is "like when the Jewish children were identified with the yellow star on their sleeves."  Just as the debate was beginning in mid-May, the president of the Sant'Egidio Community, a Catholic lay movement based in Rome, published a book of essays about the Roma and Sinti in Italy. The Sant'Egidio Community provides education, pastoral and material assistance in the Roma camps. In his book, Marco Impagliazzo said the history of European Gypsies is a centuries-long story of persecution. "It is not easy to identify another minority -- other than the Jews, with obvious differences -- who for such a long time and in a constant way" have been the object of violence, discrimination and repression, he said. Writing about the book in the Vatican newspaper, Anna Foa, a historian specializing in European Judaism, said the use of the term "anti-Gitanism" describes the attitude of hostility toward all Gypsies in the same way that anti-Semitism refers to hostility toward all Jews. "The Gypsies have in common with the Jews the fact of being a people without a territory in addition to having shared their fate in the Nazi concentration camps where somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Gypsies were exterminated," she said.  THE SLEEPING GYPSY    GYPSIES - FROM CRETE TO AUSTRALIA 1322 near Candia in Crete: 'There also we saw a race outside the city, following the Greeks' rite, and asserting themselves to be of the family of Chaym [Ham]. They rarely or never stop in one place beyond thirty days, but always wandering and fugitive, as though accursed by God, after the thirtieth day remove from field to field with their oblong tents, black and low, like the Arabs', and from cave to cave. For after that period any place in which they have dwelt becomes full of worms and other nastinesses, with which it is impossible to dwell.'    Tom Taylor wrote to me:--'The only Gypsy I ever knew who had travelled among "the people" was one Jones, who used to drive a knife-grinding wheel at Cambridge. Having "left his country for his country's good" in the old transportation days, he had made his escape from Australia, and, the ship aboard which he had stowed himself putting into a Spanish port, had landed, met with some of the Zincali, and travelled with them for some time. He was looked on as a master of "deep Rommany" among the Gypsies round Cambridge.' Mr. MacRitchie has a letter containing a longish list of wealthy Australian Gypsies, whose grandsires were bitchadé párdel ('sent over').     In 2007 Slovakian Jewish and Gypsy communities  criticized a Roman Catholic archbishop for praising the country's authoritarian wartime rule by pro-Nazi priest Jozef Tiso. Archbishop Jan Sokol said in a TV interview that Tiso's rule was a "time of well-being. I remember him from my childhood. We used to be very poor and under his rule, the situation greatly improved," the archbishop said.Most of Slovakia's Jews perished in concentration camps during World War II, an era when Slovakia served as a puppet state to Nazi-run Germany and was headed from 1939-1945 by Tiso, a Catholic monsignor. Tiso was executed for treason by Czechoslovak authorities in 1947. An association of Slovakia's Jewish religious communities said Sokol "had failed to mention the fate of over 70,000 Slovak Jews who were deported by the Slovak government" to Nazi concentration camps, where most of them perished. Only about 4,000 Jews still live in Slovakia. Slovakia's Council of Roma Communities pointed out that mMany of Slovakia's Gypsies, perished in Nazi camps. About 70 percent of the 5.4 million Slovaks are Roman Catholic.        AND HERE'S A SET OF STEPHEN SONDHEIM LYRICS FROM GYPSY Funny, you're a stranger who's come here, come from another town. Funny, I'm a stranger myself here. Small world, isn't it? Funny, you're a man who goes traveling rather than settling down. Funny, 'cause I'd love to go traveling. Small world, isn't it? We have so much in common, it's a phenomenon. We could pool our resources by joining forces from now on. Lucky, you're a man who likes children. That's an important sign. Lucky, I'm a woman with children. Small world, isn't it? Funny, isn't it small and funny and fine?  Above, that's Natalie Wood, in GYPSY (the film of the musical) it's right at the end and Natalie is about to act out the start of the stripping career of Gypsy Rose Lee.           CHEWIE ISN’T A PROPER WEB SITE, RATHER IT’S A WAY OF… WHATEVER, OR WE DON’T KNOW… SOMETHING.