No image available
/ 6 February 2008
Italy’s president dissolved Parliament on Wednesday and the caretaker government prepared to call a snap election, likely in mid-April, that could mark a return to power of media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. President Giorgio Napolitano’s bid for cross-party support to reform Italy’s messy voting rules before a fresh election met stiff resistance from Berlusconi.
No image available
/ 25 December 2007
Pope Benedict led the world’s 1.1 billion Roman Catholics into Christmas with a midnight mass on Tuesday, urging people to find time and space for God, the needy and the suffering. Benedict, marking the third Christmas season of his reign, said a solemn mass for about 10 000 people inside St Peter’s Basilica on a chilly night.
A 27-year-old German man described by the Vatican as ”clearly deranged” leaped over a barricade on Wednesday and tried to jump on to Pope Benedict’s open-topped jeep. The man took the pope’s bodyguards by surprise in St Peter’s Square, coming within a metre of the pontiff in an episode that brought back memories of the assassination attempt against his predecessor.
If you thought cracking The Da Vinci Code was tough, try unscrambling The Provenzano Code, the cryptic cypher of the Mafia’s ”boss of bosses”. Numbers, alphabet letters, Bible quotations, references to Jesus — they are all in a new book by Sicilian magistrate Michele Prestipino.
Pope Benedict was opposed to Bob Dylan appearing at a youth event with the late pope John Paul in 1997 because he considered the pop star the wrong kind of ”prophet”, Benedict writes in a new book issued on Thursday. Benedict makes the disclosure in a new book of memoirs about his predecessor, who died in 2005.
No image available
/ 22 September 2006
Pope Benedict will meet Muslim ambassadors to the Vatican and Italian Islamic leaders on Monday to try to calm lingering anger over his use of a medieval text that says their religion was spread by violence.