There is bureaucracy everywhere you go - and I could give that to you in triplicate.

• A Russian officer faces charges that he failed to respond to four notifications for army reserve service. Since November, however, he has been orbiting earth in a space station…

• An Italian scholar interrupts an evening celebrating the writings of Kafka to say that, after the war, Italians were so disgusted with all the red tape there that they created a Department for the Streamlining of the Bureaucracy. The Department for the Streamlining of the Bureaucracy is now Italy’s biggest bureaucratic department.

• Czech joke: A man wishes to emigrate.
  The officials say, ‘You may have a meeting about your emigration on the 21^st April 2017
  ‘Morning or afternoon?’ the man asks.
  ‘Why morning or afternoon?’ The officials are understandably puzzled.
  The man explains: ‘It’s just that between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. the gasman’s coming’

Last week one of our researchers at Starlab received a letter from the tax authorities here in Belgium

‘Dear Sir

Despite repeated attempts on our part to obtain from you the stated amount owed by you - by way of taxation - you have not made good this debt as detailed below.

You are hereby notified, therefore, that if you do not settle this matter within EIGHT DAYS, bailiffs will call upon you to confiscate from your home goods amounting to the same monetary value.

• After the recent earthquake in Turkey, treatment was extremely slow to arrive.

• Hundreds, thousand lost their lives because of the loss of these precious days.

The relevant medical personnel had to get ‘authorisation.’