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 [...]
It was without a doubt a media coup, when Berlusconi announced on Friday that he would be pushing forward a special decree to intervene in the case of Eluana Englaro. And, not just a media coup, for some.
The Englaro case been in the media spotlight for months, since a definitive sentence was handed out by [...]
As happened in various European cities over the last fortnight, in Italy a number of high-profile protests took place against the Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza which to-date has resulted in the death of up to 1,3001 Palestinians.
In cities like Rome, Bologna, Milan, and Florence, amongst others, parades took place that included the [...]
Fannulloni is a word much in vogue in Italy at the moment, in part because of a headline-grabbing crusade by the Minister for the Public Sector, Renato Brunetta, against this seemingly large and well-deployed group. Fanulloni put simply means a layabout - and there’s plenty of evidence that the public sector is full of them. [...]
What was Silvio Berlusconi thinking, when he described the newly-elected Barack Obama as ‘young, handsome, and suntanned’, during a press conference in the Kremlin on Thursday? If Russian President Dmitry Medvedev knew, his face was giving nothing away, sitting impassively beside the grinning Italian.
There are two different perspectives, in Italy, regarding the Prime Minister’s [...]
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 [...]