Silvio Berlusconi has always vaunted two major talents - an ability to control the media (both his own - a substantial slice of tv and print - as well as those supposedly independent), and a masterful ability to keep together seemingly shakey partnerships. It’s against this backdrop that his second wife, Veronica Lario, dropped a [...]
Responding to some ill-defined public outrage (in part manafactured by newspapers owned or close to the Berlusconi family), both Prime Minister Berlusconi and the speaker of the house of deputies, Gianfranco Fini, called for swift and decisive action - not against builders responsible, in Abruzzo, for using shoddy materials and cutting costs, nor against civil [...]
A state of emergency has been declared, funds are being allocated, and politics has been set aside momentarily in order to respond to the devestating earthquake which hit Abruzzo yesterday. It’s not a time for reflection, as Silvio Berlusconi pointed out in his press conference yesterday brushing aside the suggestions that this earthquake had already [...]
In the same week that Berlusconi’s much contested minister for education, Mariastella Gelmini, took a leaf out of Obama’s book and created a youtube channel to address students directly*, Silvio Berlusconi announced to the world that he would be seeking to sort out the internet at next year’s G8 summit which will be held (disgracefully [...]
Has Barack Obama had it too easy from foreign correspondents jaundiced by 8 years of George W. Bush? Perhaps, but ready to put things to right is Corriere della Sera journalist Lorenzo Cremonesi, who puts Obama’s foreign policy credentials under renewed scrutiny in today’s newspaper.
His main question is, what would Obama have done had he [...]