Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Wednesday his coalition has averted a full-blown government crisis and vowed to remain in power until the next general election. Berlusconi was speaking in the Senate after holding days of emergency talks with his centre-right allies.
Several mortars were fired on Thursday at the Italian embassy in Baghdad, causing some Iraqi deaths, the Foreign Ministry in Rome said. No Italians were hurt in the attack, it said. The attack came hours before the arrival in Italy of United States President George Bush for talks with Premier Silvio Berlusconi.
A 102-year-old Italian woman survived unscathed a fall from the fourth floor of her Turin retirement home, Italian newspapers said on Tuesday. Her fall was broken by a plastic playground house destined for a neighbouring preschool that had been temporarily placed alongside her building by workers.
Of all the world’s great writers, Petrarch is the best known for losing his head. On Good Friday in 1327, the then 23-year-old writer and scholar fell madly — and forlornly — in love with a woman he saw in a church congregation.
Islamic extremists had planned a bomb attack on Milan’s main railway station similar to that which rocked Madrid on March 11, Italian media reports said on Thursday. The daily Corriere della Sera newspaper said the attacks were planned between 1997 and 2001.
More than 20 years after the death of the banker Roberto Calvi was dismissed as suicide, four people, including a jailed Mafia boss, went on trial on Tuesday in Rome, charged with his murder. The case of the man known as ”God’s banker” remains one the most extraordinary of recent decades — a whodunnit involving the Vatican, Cosa Nostra, rogue freemasons, financiers and politicians.
Pope John Paul II does not consider Mel Gibson’s controversial movie The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic, Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in an interview published on Thursday. Navarro-Valls said the Vatican would not issue an official statement distancing itself from the biblical epic about Christ’s crucifixion.
The number of smokers is expected to decline in rich nations but will rise in developing countries by 2010, according to a report published on Thursday by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
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/ 30 December 2003
Parmalat founder Calisto Tanzi has admitted to fraud of €500-million, press reports alleged on Tuesday as investigators hunted for billions of euros missing from the insolvent giant Italian food company’s accounts. Tanzi was arrested on Saturday after returning to Italy.
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/ 29 December 2003
Italian prosecutors are accusing Calisto Tanzi, the founder of insolvent Italian food giant Parmalat, of stealing €800-million from the company for his own use, Italian press reports alleged on Monday. Tanzi, arrested in Milan in the north of the country on Saturday, was interrogated at length in prison on Sunday.
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/ 12 November 2003
At least 16 Italians were killed in a bomb attack on an Italian base in Iraq on Wednesday, the country’s defence minister said. Hospital officials said seven Iraqi civilians also lost their lives. Italian intelligence services blamed supporters of deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein for the attack.
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/ 10 October 2003
Workers in Rome were busy dividing up a 170-year-old granite obelisk on Friday ahead of its return to its place of origin in Ethiopia. The Axum Obelisk, originally a tomb monument, was looted by Benito Mussolini’s troops in 1937, during the Fascist occupation.
European leaders are divided on several issues as they start 10 weeks of final negotiations on Saturday for the European Union’s first constitution, a blueprint meant to ready the bloc for expansion next year. Some countries, including Austria and Finland, have demanded major revisions of the constitution.
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/ 29 September 2003
Several parts of Italy were still without electricity early on Monday well over a day after the worst blackout in the country’s history, as debate raged over who was to blame for the devastating power failure. The cut left 50-million of Italy’s 57-million inhabitants without power.
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/ 29 September 2003
If Romeo and Juliet’s love story unfolded in Verona today, chances are that the young maiden would not hail her lover with a cry from the balcony but with a text message sent from her mobile phone: ”Romeo, where 4 art thou?!!”
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/ 1 September 2003
Vicious storms that lashed through northeast Italy, triggering massive landslides and killing two people, have caused between €500-million and €1-billion in damages after months of drought and heat waves.
A race to find out who won Europe’s biggest lottery prize to date got under way in Italy on Thursday after a €1 ticket bought in a small town bar outside Milan in Italy won the €66-million jackpot.
Rebels besieging Monrovia will withdraw immediately from the Liberian capital once west African peacekeepers arrive on Monday, rebel leader Sekou Damate Conneh said in Rome.
Armed conflicts and adverse weather conditions are causing food emergencies in 23 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation warned on Wednesday.
A UN food agency warned on Friday that hundreds of thousands of people in Liberia are cut off from aid and risked starvation unless a peaceful solution to the country’s civil war is reached quickly.
Art restorers in Pisa have found that a bacterium can do the job no chemical
has managed to achieve: reveal part of a vast medieval fresco that was
covered with a layer of glue during an unfortunate restoration attempt half
a century ago, writes Sophie Arie in Rome.
Scientists have developed an ”electronic nose” that can detect lung cancer simply by sniffing a person’s breath, researchers say. The creators of the e-nose at the University of Rome hope it will one day be used as a new method of diagnosing the disease.
Fueling fears of a comeback of domestic terrorism, a passenger on a train to Florence on Sunday fatally shot a policeman in the head and wounded another when the officers checked the identity papers for himself and a companion.
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/ 20 January 2003
Italy’s Fiat enthusiasts on Sunday held a ”National Day of Fiat pride” to show their support for the crisis hit automaker by exhibiting some of the models which made the Turin-based company famous.
For Ethiopians, it is a revered symbol of a glorious past empire. For some Romans, it is just an eyesore they can’t wait to get rid of.
A Libyan linked to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network, arrested three weeks ago in London for possession of false identity papers, was planning an attack on an Italian church with a 15th-century
fresco showing the prophet Mohammed burning in hell.
A customer reaches out of his car window and squeezes Cristal’s bare flesh like a shopper testing fruit. Without a word, he drives on. Another car pulls up, and Cristal purrs ”Ciao, ciao,” and grabs for the door.
”Finito!” to fake mozzarella. Down with pesto ground by agro-industrial giants who don’t know their basil from parsley. Say ”adio” to sickly sweet tomato sauce.
President Joseph Kabila backed moves to renew the mandate of UN peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), but said failure to deploy sufficient forces would be ”a waste of time.”
The Roman poet Ovid may have put it best when he said ”Rident stolidi verba Latina” – Fools laugh at the Latin language. Indeed, after centuries of decline and declarations of being dead, Latin as a living, spoken language is making a comeback of sorts.
A baby weighing 285 grams at birth has been released from a Florence hospital, with doctors calling her good health a miracle and saying she was the tiniest baby known to have survived.
The World Food Program appealed on Tuesday for 1,3 million tons of emergency food to help up to 13 million people in six southern African countries avoid famine.