Poor Gordon Brown - he must look with no small amount of envy across Europe to Italy, where Silvio Berlusconi looks set to romp home in this weekend’s European Election vote with his Popolo della Liberta party expected to win somewhere around 40% of the vote (which combined with their righ-wing alliance partners the Lega [...]
There are chilling moments in the life of any straniero when they realise that, with all the reflection, study, and will that certain ways of thinking, produced by local culture, tradition, and a very different history, will always be beyond them.
These are moments, more often than not, conjured up out of hot-air when politicos [...]
You know you’re getting spammed in the comments when you receive a gushing tribute, to a post you wrote about Walter Veltroni, saying that the topic is ‘quite trendy on the net at the moment’. You can say many things about Walter Veltroni - and many do - but to the best of this blog’s [...]
Errol Morris, the documentary-maker whose films include The Fog of War, and Standard Operating Procedure, is a man who is interested in images, and in particular photographs. To mark the end of the Bush administration, at the end of January, Morris invited three photo editors to discuss a selection of images of W. ranging from [...]
Facebook gets more free publicity as the debate rages around the company’s decision to enforce strict guidlines regarding what can and can’t be shown in breastfeeding photos posted by users to their personal pages. A storm in a prurient teacup, according to many given the other issues cropping up with the popular social network platform, [...]
Last week, seemingly against the odds, Vladimir Luxuria won the Italian reality-tv game show L’Isola dei Famosi (a type of ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here’). What makes her victory worth discussing - outside of the tv pundity columns - is that she is a) transgender, and b) a former member of parliament [...]
It’s not everyday that this monkey, or indeed the various journalists and commentators who are also writing about this case, finds it in his heart or logic to defend Rupert Murdoch or his business interests. He’s a big boy who can look after his own extensive interests - interests that are not necessarily conducive to [...]
This blog has already spent some time dealing with the paternalistic Italian laws that govern what you can, and can’t say. We’ll remind readers that, in a political context, one is entitled to call Silvio Berlusconi a buffoon but to suggest it in general may be another kettle of slanderous fish (although, one has to [...]
The Lega Nord have often been accused of xenophobia - a charge that is too general to hold. The party, which is playing a legislative blinder at the moment, bludgeoning through various reforms as if they personally had the support of the majority of Italians (rather than their actual 8% in both the lower and [...]
There’s an interesting campaign, launched by the European Women’s Lobby, called ‘50/50 No Modern European Democracy Without Gender Equality‘. The idea is to pressure political parties to put forward electoral lists that with a balanced number of male and female candidates for the next European Parliament elections in 2009, and to persuade Governments to correct [...]