Silvio Berlusconi faces parliamentary crisis as speaker refuses to resign
Rebel lawmakers announce they have signed letter of resignation from Freedom People's parliamentary party
John Hooper in Rome
Friday 30 July 2010

Silvio Berlusconi's ruling Freedom People (PdL) movement was on the verge of a split last night that would pitch Italy into a political and constitutional crisis after a group of rebel lawmakers announced they had signed a letter of resignation from the PdL's parliamentary party and delivered it to their leader, the lower house speaker, Gianfranco Fini.

The move came after the party leadership issued a vehement statement denouncing Fini, the co-founder of the PdL, for stirring up internal dissent and "devastating criticism of decisions taken by the party". The statement brought to a head long-simmering tensions between the prime minister and the former neo-fascist who had been his principal ally since entering politics 16 years ago.

An unlikely convert to David Cameron-style conservatism, Fini has increasingly argued for more progressive policies, greater internal democracy in the PdL and a less tolerant attitude to suspected corruption among government and party officials.

The prime minister told a press conference afterwards: "We've tried everything to make it up with Fini. It hasn't been possible. I am no longer prepared to accept dissent."

Berlusconi demanded his former partner leave his job as speaker. But Fini was quoted by associates as having said the post was not in the gift of the prime minister and that he had no intention of going. ...

A senior Vatican cardinal is under investigation for corruption, dragging the Catholic church into a public works scandal that has sent shockwaves through the Italian government.

Italian media reported today that Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, the archbishop of Naples, was suspected of striking cosy deals while head of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Vatican congregation that uses proceeds from a property empire including 2,000 Rome apartments to fund missionary efforts.

Sepe allegedly oversaw the sale in 2004 of a building in Rome to the then transport minister, Pietro Lunardi, for the suspiciously low price of €4.16m, newspapers reported, adding that magistrates wanted to know why Lunardi then freed up €2.5m in state funding the following year for the congregation to create a museum in its headquarters, and why that museum never opened.

Lunardi, who is also under investigation, said he would contact the magistrates looking into the deal "as soon as possible... to clear everything up". ...

Turin police raid Scientology chapter
Sect suspected of inappropriately using sensitive personal data
20 May, 13:45

Turin police raid Scientology chapter (ANSA) - Turin, May 20 - Police raided a local Scientology chapter here and discovered a hidden archive which contained not only information on the group's members but also on the sect's 'enemies', the Turin daily La Stampa reported on Thursday.

Police were acting on a warrant issued by magistrates who have opened a probe into the religion which is suspected of violating laws governing the handling of personal information.

According to La Stampa, police searched the chapter on Via Bersezio for some nine hours and in the basement, behind a locked door, found the sect's secret archive which had files on magistrates, policemen, journalists and relatives of former members. La Stampa said magistrates were now examining these documents which were "chock full" of sensitive information dealing with sexual habits, health and political inclinations.

In 2000, the Italian supreme Court of Cassation recognised Scientology as a religion but said it was organised as a business and thus subject to taxation. ...



Ta much, dear Glenn321

April 6, 2010
Italy's quake town marks anniversary with candles and and whistles at PM
Richard Owen, Rome

A message from Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, to survivors of the Abruzzo earthquake was greeted with whistles of protest as the first anniversary of the tragedy was marked by a candelit nighttime procession through the deserted streets of L'Aquila, many still strewn with rubble.

Mr Berlusconi, who visited the stricken area repeatedly after the earthquake to oversee rescue efforts and meet survivors, did not attend the vigil. However he sent a message of greetings to a packed town meeting held at a church on the Cathedral square as residents assembled for the procession.

Franco Gabrielli, the chief of police, dismissed the protesters as "four or five scoundrels”. However Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, said there was “more whistling than applause”. ...

Pope faces fresh wave of child abuse scandals in Italy
The head of the Catholic church is bracing himself for a new round of allegations by victims of paedophile priests — in Italy
Tom Kington in Rome and Henry McDonald in Dublin
Sunday 28 March 2010

Pope Benedict XVI is facing growing pressure over his handling of paedophile priests as new cover-ups come to light in Italy, the country with the greatest concentration of Roman Catholic clerics.

After the latest allegations – that Benedict took no action in the US when he was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's enforcer – the church is now "terrified" as more victims stand up to be counted in Italy, according to Roberto Mirabile, head of La Caramella Buona, an Italian anti-abuse group. "With the scandals erupting abroad, we will see a huge growth in victims' groups in Italy in coming weeks," said Mirabile yesterday. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict handled abuse cases at the Vatican for 24 years before he became pope in 2005.

"We are likely to discover that the Vatican worked even harder in Italy with bishops than elsewhere to hide cases, simply because the contact was closer and the church is so powerful in Italy," Mirabile added.

Sergio Cavaliere, an Italian lawyer who has documented 130 cases of clerical paedophilia, also believes that the Vatican's backyard could follow Ireland, the United States and Germany in producing a wave of abuse revelations. "The cases I have found are just the tip of the iceberg given the reluctance of many victims to come forward until now," said Cavaliere. "And in no single case did the local bishop alert police to the suspected abuse."

Another startling development is how recent most of the allegations are, unlike the decades-old cases in Munich and Milwaukee that Benedict was last week accused of failing to act on.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who investigates abuse accusations passed on to the Vatican, denied this month that abuse had reached "dramatic proportions" in Italy, but he was concerned about "a certain culture of silence" among Italy's 50,000 priests.

In February, the Vatican opened an investigation into allegations by 67 former pupils at a school for the deaf in Verona that 24 priests, brothers and lay religious men abused pupils from the 1950s to the 1980s. Three of the accusers repeated their claims on Italian prime-time television on Friday. ...

Well done the looney.

A convicted hitman-turned-supergrass told a court yesterday that Silvio Berlusconi has had ties to the Mafia and that a crime boss once boasted that this relationship had “put the country in our hands”.

Gaspare Spatuzza was testifying in Turin in the appeal of Marcello Dell’Utri, an associate of Mr Berlusconi and co-founder of the Forza Italia party. He is appealing against a nine-year sentence for association with the Mafia. Mr Berlusconi and Dell’Utri deny involvement with the Mafia.

Spatuzza told the court about a meeting in Rome in 1994 with Giuseppe Graviano, a godfather from Palermo, Sicily, who was convicted later with his brother Filippo for bombings in Rome, Milan and Florence. “Two names were mentioned, one of them was Berlusconi’s,” he said.

“Graviano told me that thanks to the seriousness of these people we had the country in our hands.” He had referred specifically to Mr Berlusconi, giving the other name as Dell’Utri. ...

... D'Addario also gives her version of the two candle-lit dinners at the residence on October 16 and November 4 - she only stayed the night on the second occasion.

Both events, she said, were attended by dozens of showgirls and would-be actresses and gave the lie to Berlusconi's claim that the evenings were party political gatherings.

"First of all, such a political club would have to consist only of young, beautiful women dressed only in skin-tight black dresses, because they were the only sort of person I saw," she writes.

"Secondly, the party members let themselves be caressed, kissed and touched in an unequivocal manner by their boss? If this is how politics is now conducted, I'm well qualified." ...

T'row da bum out, I tells ya!

oth Silvio Berlusconi and his predecessor Romano Prodi have issued denials following the report in the Times yesterday that 10 French servicemen died in Afghanistan last year because their superiors did not realise the Italians who preceded them had been bribing the Taliban not to attack.

As The First Post reported yesterday, the French underestimated the Taliban threat as a result and suffered a brutal attack on one of their convoys. Insurgents later paraded trophies taken from the dead solders, to the disgust of the French.

A statement from the Italian prime minister's office said the Berlusconi government had never authorised or allowed payments to insurgents, and nor was it aware of "any such initiatives set in motion by the previous government".

Prodi himself told the Times: "This is the first time I have ever heard such accusations and I can say that there is no base for them. I know absolutely nothing of this."

Ignazio La Russa, the Italian defence minister, dismissed the claim as "rubbish" and said he was taking steps to sue the Times.

However, the Times today quotes a Taliban commander, Mohammed Ishmayel, confirming that Italian forces paid protection money. Ishmayel said a deal was struck last year so that Italian forces in the Sarobi valley, east of Kabul, would not be attacked.

Ishmayel told the Times that it was agreed that "neither side should attack one another. That is why we were informed at that time, that we should not attack the Nato troops".

However, he said, the Taliban were not informed when the Italian forces left the area to be replaced by the French and so they assumed the deal had been broken. ...

Women MPs fight back as Berlusconi lashes out
You are increasingly more beautiful than intelligent, PM tells furious Bindi
By Jack Bremer
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 9, 2009

Amid warnings that Italy is on the edge of a constitutional crisis after Silvio Berlusconi was stripped of his immunity from prosecution, the man himself has been flailing around like a bear with a thorn in its foot. Taking part by phone in a late-night television discussion, he struck out at President Giorgio Napolitano saying he should have used "his influence" to get a different ruling from the Constitutional Court.

When a studio guest, Rosy Bindi, a former family minister in Romano Prodi's centre-left government, expressed shock at this suggestion, Berlusconi replied: "I recognise you are increasingly more beautiful than intelligent".

Even coming from Berlusconi, this was over the top and Bindi answered that she was "not a woman at your disposal", alluding to the call-girls and television showgirls at the centre of the long-running Berlusconi sex scandal.

Among the first to leap to Bindi's defence was another former minister under Prodi, the American-born Italian MP Giovanna Melandri. She said the remark summed up "the Berlusconi philosophy towards women". The diminutive prime minister, she went on, had shown himself to be "taller than he is well-mannered". ...



He has also shown himself to have more height than integrity - and wisdom.

Silvio Berlusconi defiant as court throws out immunity law

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi laughs off legal proceedings against him as he loses immunity from prosecution ...



T'row da bum owt!

In an Italy abuzz with claims of subversive plots and speculation about a snap election, the judges of its constitutional court today began deliberating whether to strip Silvio Berlusconi of his immunity from prosecution.

Italy's prime minister, already on the defensive because of a lurid sex-and-drugs scandal, could go back on trial in two cases if an act passed last year to shield him from the law is thrown out. ...



T'row out da law an' da bum wid it!

The woman at the centre of the sex scandal involving Silvio Berlusconi has claimed the Italian prime minister knew she was an escort when she spent the night with him last November.

In her first live interview on Italian television, Patrizia D'Addario, 42, said: "Certainly he knew that I was an escort."

She added she was not the only escort present at two parties she attended at Berlusconi's Rome residence. "When I arrived it seemed like a harem," she told the current affairs programme Annozero last night.

Berlusconi has denied ever paying for sex and has said he was unaware escorts were brought to his parties by Gianpaolo Tarantini, a Bari businessman being investigated for drug dealing and prostitution. Berlusconi is not under investigation. ...

He needs to be ridden outta politics on a rail.

If Silvio Berlusconi thought he'd shaken off the furore over his alleged use of escort girls, he was in for a nasty surprise today.

The Italian prime minister has successfully deflected and sidestepped lurid allegations about his supposed liaisons in recent weeks, helped by some timely international summitry which let him demonstrate his statesmanship, not to mention his commitment to dealing with the aftermath of the L'Aquila earthquake.

But today it was all about call girls, giant beds and the suggestion of a menage-a-trois, after a left-leaning news magazine, L'Espresso, posted "pillow talk" recordings that an escort said she made during a night with the septuagenarian Italian leader.

The escort, Patrizia D'Addario, claims the tapes relate to the night of 4 November last year, when the leaders of the world were holding their breath, waiting to see if Americans would elect their first black president.

Berlusconi, apparently, had other things on his mind. ...



I've never been able to understand why as soon as men get power, they want shedloads of whores. Were I rich and powerful I'd pay off all our bills first, (and then I'd want books, a laptop, some nice moisturis/zer, and someone from World Wildlife Fund [among other great charities] to relieve me of some of my ca$h) not buy a buncha whores.

Calls grow within G8 to expel Italy as summit plans descend into chaos

While US tries to inject purpose into meeting, Italy is lambasted for poor planning and reneging on overseas aid commitments

Silvio Berlusconi hits back at criticism over G8 summit

* Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 6 July 2009

Preparations for Wednesday's G8 summit in the Italian mountain town of L'Aquila have been so chaotic there is growing pressure from other member states to have Italy expelled from the group, according to senior western officials.

In the last few weeks before the summit, and in the absence of any substantive initiatives on the agenda, the US has taken control. Washington has organised "sherpa calls" (conference calls among senior officials) in a last-ditch bid to inject purpose into the meeting.

"For another country to organise the sherpa calls is just unprecedented. It's a nuclear option," said one senior G8 member state official. "The Italians have been just awful. There have been no processes and no planning."

"The G8 is a club, and clubs have membership dues. Italy has not been paying them," said a European official involved in the summit preparations.

The behind-the-scenes grumbling has gone as far as suggestions that Italy could be pushed out of the G8 or any successor group. One possibility being floated in European capitals is that Spain, which has higher per capita national income and gives a greater percentage of GDP in aid, would take Italy's place.

The Italian foreign ministry did not reply yesterday to a request to comment on the criticisms. ...

OooooooooOOOOOOOoooooo!

'Oo's a nawty boy then, eh?

Whoops, Italy's national airline wipes Sicily off the map
Passenger told her island destination was missing from Alitalia's inflight magazine due to printing error
Fiona Winward in Rome
Wednesday 17 June 2009

Italian airline Alitalia has apologised after a passenger browsing a route map in its inflight magazine spotted that Sicily was missing.

The passenger told the Corriere della Sera website she was particularly alarmed since she was on a flight from Rome to the Sicilian city of Catania at the time.

Smaller islands such as Sardinia, Malta and Ibiza were all in their correct places on the international map, making the disappearance of Sicily - Italy's largest region and the biggest island in the Mediterranean - even more bewildering. ...





PS: I had a sticker in the 1970s that said "Genitalia is Not Italy's National Airline."

WTF, you idiot? You gonna sue 'em for "making" your long-suffering wife leave you, too?

"Delusions of grandeur" is the phrase for which you're searching.

On the basis of the frequency and intensity of past earthquakes, 45% of the land area of Italy is divided up into 3 earthquake zones: Category 1 (red) is the most severe, and Category 3 (yellow) the least severe zone of seismic activity:


Note that nearly all of La Marche and Umbria, and over half of Tuscany lie within one of these earthquake zones. In fact, 40% of the Italian population live in them.

The rest of the country, coloured white on the map, is unclassified - which means it is considered low risk. Note that this area includes all of the Piedmont wine region.

Well done the lady!