Opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti has been admitted to hospital in northern Italy, a hospital spokesperson said on Thursday. The spokesperson said Pavarotti had been taken to the Policlinico of Modena hospital on Tuesday for medical checks and has been there since.
A Sicilian mother took away her 61-year-old son’s house keys, cut off his allowance and hauled him to the police station because he stayed out late. Tired of her son’s misbehaviour, the pensioner in the central Sicilian city of Caltagirone turned to the police to ”convince this blockhead” to behave properly, La Sicilia reported on Thursday.
Director Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the last great figures in Italian cinema, has died at the age of 94, Ansa news agency reported July 31, quoting his family. Antonioni, who made only about 20 films, died at his home on July 30, the report said.
South-eastern Europe was a tinderbox on Wednesday in the grip of an unrelenting heatwave that has claimed hundreds of lives as wildfires swept southern Italy and bit into a national park in Slovakia. Southern Italy is sweltering under a heatwave that has brought temperatures often exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.
The former Ferrari employee at the centre of the Formula One espionage saga says he is ready to name names in a bid to prove his innocence. Nigel Stepney has been the subject of an investigation by Italian police after being accused of supplying McLaren chief designer Mike Coughlan with secret technical information on the Italian team.
South African amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius has been given the all-clear to compete with able-bodied athletes in the Rome leg of the IAAF Golden League Series on Friday, with a view to earning his ticket to next month’s World Athletics Championships in Osaka.
Amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius, known as the world’s ”fastest man on no legs”, is understandably nervous ahead of his first race abroad against able-bodied athletes, due to take place in Rome on Friday. But how he races, scientifically speaking, could be far more important than who crosses the finish line first.
Italy defender Marco Materazzi is taking legal action against three British newspapers over their reporting of the incident in last July’s World Cup final when he clashed with Zinedine Zidane, the BBC reported on Thursday. Zidane responded to verbal provocation by Materazzi by headbutting him to the ground.
Bags of blood. A code name taken from his dog, Birillo. A year of secrets and lies. It all came back to haunt Ivan Basso on Friday when he received a maximum two-year ban for doping. The 2006 Giro d’Italia champion became the first high-profile rider suspended for the recent scandals rocking cycling.
A man was arrested before dawn on Wednesday as he drove his Toyota Celica down the Spanish steps, one of Rome’s most popular tourist spots where visitors are usually banned from drinking and singing, let alone driving. Photographs showed police surrounding the sports car as it neared the bottom of the sweeping 18th-century staircase.
You are a leader who wants to move with the times and establish some green credentials; but your scope for installing wind turbines or rubbish-burning power stations is distinctly limited by your country being scarcely bigger than Pooh Bear’s 100-acre wood and made up largely of untouchable gardens and buildings of priceless historic worth. What to do?
Drought and high temperatures have resulted in the ”worst harvest” in Swaziland, leaving one in three people in need of food aid in the Southern African country. About 400 000 Swazis — about a third of the population -– will need about 40 000 tonnes of food between now and the next maize harvest in April.
AC Milan are desperate to atone for their Istanbul nightmare when they face Liverpool in next Wednesday’s Champions League final rematch in Athens. Milan looked certain to beat Liverpool in the 2005 final after taking a 3-0 lead at half-time. But Milan inexplicably imploded in a bizarre six-minute spell in the second half.
Italian cycling star Ivan Basso admitted to the anti-doping prosecutor of the Italian Olympic Committee (Coni) on Monday that he was involved in the Operation Puerto blood-doping scandal. Coni said the 29-year-old rider came to its offices of his own accord and offered to cooperate with its investigation and clarify his part in the scandal.
Four Italians were among six employees of the United States oil company Chevron who were abducted on Tuesday in Nigeria, Italy’s Ansa news agency reported. The other victims were a US national and a person from Croatia, the report added. The Foreign Ministry in Rome has confirmed the abduction of the four Italians.
Authorities in Milan have enforced a blanket ban on the sale of alcohol this Wednesday in a bid to stave off the threat of trouble between Manchester United and AC Milan fans. AC Milan host United for the second leg of their semifinal a week after United won the first leg 3-2 at Old Trafford.
Three people were hanged in Japan on Friday; one was executed in the United States a day earlier. Not good news for those campaigning for abolition of the death penalty. "The execution of the three people in Japan and one in Texas shows that even if significant steps have been taken towards abolition of capital punishment worldwide," says Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan.
Judicial executions dropped sharply in 2006, but at least 19 000 people remained on death row at the end of the year, Amnesty International said in its annual report published on Friday. A total of 1 591 people were executed, most of them in China, down from 2 148 in 2005, the London-based rights group said.
A new <i>Spider-Man</i> film swings into cinemas soon, but an Italian researcher said on Thursday he was working on a project that could lead to real-life versions of the comic book character. Nicola Pugno, a 35-year-old researcher at the Polytechnic University of Turin, said he has worked on a form of adhesion for about 10 years.
Luigi Comencini, one of Italy’s best known and prolific film directors, has died at the age of 90, the Lucherini film studios announced on April 6. Comencini was best known for his 1953 hit, Bread, Love and Dreams”, which starred Gina Lollobrigida and Vittorio De Sica and spawned two sequels.
Two Manchester United fans who were stabbed during clashes before a Champions League match with AS Roma remained hospitalised on Thursday but are expected to live. Rome prefect Achille Serra said the two fans were stabbed in the groin or backside during clashes with Roma supporters.
Italian researchers have found the skeleton of a 10m-long prehistoric whale in the Tuscan countryside, a discovery that could help shed light on the ancient environment of the sea, officials said on Tuesday. The skeleton dates to four million years ago, to the Pliocene epoch, and was found in almost perfect order.
The late pope John Paul II will move a step closer to sainthood next week when the Vatican receives proof of his miraculous intercession to cure a French nun of Parkinson’s disease, diocesan officials said on Tuesday. The ”miracle” will qualify the charismatic Polish pope for beatification, the main stepping stone to becoming a saint.
After decades of indifference, soccer-mad Italy is finally falling in love with its rugby team after they managed two Six Nations wins in the same season for the first time. Their 23-20 win over Wales on the weekend — two weeks after a 37-17 victory against Scotland — sealed their most successful campaign with one home game against Ireland still to come.
Mauro Bergamasco scored a dramatic late try as Italy beat Wales 23-20 in Rome on Saturday to record an unprecedented second win in a Six Nations campaign. However, the match ended in controversy when the full-time whistle blew just after Wales had declined an opportunity to kick what could have been a score-levelling penalty.
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.
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/ 28 February 2007
Developing countries, including emerging economic giants China and India, are not prepared to take the blame for climate change, the head of the G77 group of developing nations said on Tuesday. Some countries want developing countries to accept limits on their emissions of greenhouse gases when the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012.
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/ 27 February 2007
A Milan schoolteacher lost her job after slashing a seven-year-old student’s tongue with a pair of scissors to punish him for talking too much, the Education Ministry announced on Tuesday. "Faced with such grievous actions there is only one possible response: zero tolerance," Education Minister Giuseppe Fioroni said in a statement.
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/ 6 February 2007
Soccer fans won’t be allowed into stadiums in Italy unless security measures are met, the country’s Interior Minister said on Monday. The decision comes only days after riots broke out during and after a Serie A match in Sicily in which a police officer was killed.
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/ 1 February 2007
Fiat on Wednesday unveiled its new Bravo saloon car, a week after announcing a bumper 2006 during which car sales were in the black for the first time in six years. "In 2007 we are turning the page, and Bravo is the car that embodies this change," CEO Sergio Marchionne told reporters at the launch.
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/ 10 January 2007
Carlo Ponti, a producer who was known both for classic films such as Doctor Zhivago and for his long marriage to the film star Sophia Loren, died early on January 10 at a hospital in Geneva. He was 94. Ponti started out in life as a lawyer, going into film production in the late 1930s.
Giovanni Viglione of northern Italy took turning 100 in his stride, passing his driver’s test with flying colours, the Ansa news agency reported on Wednesday. Viglione, who lives alone, needs to drive his Fiat 500 to his watercolour class in Rovereto, near Verona.