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 […]
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 […]
During a recent television debate between government spokespersons and students over the much contested educational reform decree, one of the students was briskly interuppted by his governmental interlocutor because he had not addressed her with the customary ‘Honourable’, a title automatically given to members of parliament (much like the British system). Respect for the institutions […]
Following on from Berlusconi’s recent re-positioning of Italy as a developing country, aligning itself not with the industrial giants of Britain, France and Germany in relation to the EU’s 20-20-20 Climate Change initiative but with countries like Poland (and a further 8 nations which have yet to be named), there is speculation* that Italy, troubled […]
In a bizarre mash-up, caught between Andy Warhol’s ‘famous for fifteen minutes’ dictum and the moment in Spartacus when Tony Curtis cries ‘No, I’m Spartacus’, Italy’s hugely unpopular Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini has confessed that she too is Obama – or rather that her ‘reforms’ are inspired by Barack Obama. Gelmini’s ‘reforms’, which are primarily cuts […]
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 […]
The Mayoral election in Bologna next year was always going to have a certain national relevance, despite the city’s relatively small size. The very real possibility that a centre-right candidate could be elected by this ‘red’ city would obviously be another blow to Walter Veltroni’s opposition PD party. The relevance of the race was bolstered […]
