Tag Archives: Italy

The Washington Post reports: Inside the high walls of the Holy See, Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu — former head of the office of “miracles” that minted saints — was considered papabile, a possible next pope. Then his career collided with church prosecutors, who charged the 75-year-old Italian and nine other officials with corruption, setting up the Vatican’s trial of the …

Reuters reports: Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Friday she had separated from her television journalist partner Andrea Giambruno, who has drawn criticism in recent weeks for sexist comments. The split comes as the 46-year-old prime minister celebrates her first year in office at the head of a right-wing coalition government that has defended the traditional family as one …

CNN reports: The northern Italian city of Padua has started removing the names of non-biological gay mothers from their children’s birth certificates under new legislation passed by the “traditional family-first” government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. These birth certificates belong to 33 children of Italian women who underwent artificial insemination abroad and then registered their children under the city’s center-left …

Reuters reports: Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a billionaire businessman who created Italy’s largest media company before transforming the political landscape, died on Monday aged 86. Berlusconi, who was prime minister during 1994-5, 2001-6 and 2008-11, had been suffering from leukemia and had recently developed a lung infection. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party is part of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing …

The Catholic news site Crux reports: A new sexual abuse scandal in Italy, featuring a prominent former official of the country’s largest Catholic organization, has raised questions both about responsibility when the alleged offender is a lay person rather than a cleric, and also about when suspicions should be publicly disclosed in an effort to prevent further abuse. Mirko Campoli, …

The Local Italy reports: An anti-vax campaigner on Friday assaulted Italy’s former premier Giuseppe Conte, who imposed strict restrictions at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, his political party said. The Five Star Movement, the opposition party led by Conte, wrote on Facebook that Conte had been “attacked by an anti-vaxxer in Massa”, a small Tuscan city where he was …

The Associated Press reports: The Florence museum housing Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece the David on Sunday invited parents and students from a Florida charter school to visit after complaints about a lesson featuring the statue forced the principal to resign. Florence Mayor Dario Nardella also tweeted an invitation for the principal to visit so he can personally honor her. Confusing art …

Reuters reports: Italian police on Monday arrested Matteo Messina Denaro, the country’s most wanted mafia boss who had been on the run since 1993, swooping on a private hospital in the Sicilian capital Palermo where he was undergoing treatment. Prosecutors say Messina Denaro, 60, is a boss of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra mafia. He had been sentenced in absentia to a …

Reuters reports: Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told players of his Monza soccer team he would bring them a bus full of prostitutes if they managed to beat a top Serie A rival, a video published on social media showed on Wednesday. Berlusconi, who often uses colourful language, was accused in 2011 of having sex with an underage prostitute …

Vice News reports: A militant neo-Nazi group raided by Italian anti-terror police this week was ready to carry out violent attacks and had numerous transnational connections, including a member who claimed to have met with Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, according to media reports citing police. Italian police said they had arrested five members of a white supremacist terror …

Agence France-Presse reports: Italian doctors and nurses suspended over their refusal to be vaccinated against Covid-19 can now return to work, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said Monday. Italy was the first European country to be hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, and has since registered nearly 180,000 deaths. Meloni’s post-fascist Brothers of Italy railed against many …

The Associated Press reports: Several thousand black-clad fascist sympathizers chanted and sang in praise of Benito Mussolini as they marched to the slain Italian dictator’s crypt Sunday, 100 years after Mussolini entered Rome and completed a bloodless coup that gave rise to two decades of fascist rule. The crowd of some 2,000 to 4,000 marchers, many sporting fascist symbols and …

The Associated Press reports: Giorgia Meloni, whose political party with neo-fascist roots secured the most votes in Italy’s national election last month, was sworn in Saturday as the country’s first far-right premier since the end of World War II. She is also the first woman to serve as premier. Her Brothers of Italy party, which she co-founded in 2012, will …

Posted today to Franklin Graham’s Facebook page: Pray for incoming Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. I like her boldness. She has some important things to say in this video about the attack on our identity, which really boils down to our freedom. Communist thinking has very cleverly invaded our culture—and we need to be on guard. She said, “And so …

Reuters reports: The LGBT community has “very real fears” after a conservative bloc dominated by the far-right won Italy’s general election, a leading gay rights campaigner told Reuters. The nationalist Brothers of Italy group, led by Giorgia Meloni, emerged as the largest party in the ballot and will lead the most right-wing government in Rome since World War Two. Meloni, …

Media Matters has the transcript: American families are facing the very same onslaught from the very same poisonous ideologies. The difference is that in this country it’s rarely acknowledged, except on the fringes. Meloni is not on the fringes. She’s the new Prime Minister of Italy — she will be — and she’s saying it out loud. Contrast that to …

Mediaite reports: The hard right in the United States celebrated on Monday as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni appeared to win Sunday’s election with some 26 percent of the vote, which would make her both Italy’s first female prime minister and the first leader of a far-right Mussolini-admiring party to come to power in the country since World War II. While many …

The Associated Press reports: A party with neo-fascist roots, the Brothers of Italy, won the most votes in Italy’s national elections, looking set to deliver the country’s first far-right-led government since World War II and make its leader, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s first woman premier, near-final results showed Monday. Italy’s lurch to the far right immediately shifted Europe’s geopolitics, placing a …

The Associated Press reports: Pope Francis has dismissed rumors he plans to resign anytime soon and that he hopes to visit Moscow and Kyiv after traveling to Canada later this month. Francis also told Reuters in an interview published Monday that the idea “never entered my mind” to announce a planned retirement at the end of the summer, though he …

Politico Europe reports: A yacht worth $700 million with alleged ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin has been impounded as part of the European Union’s ongoing sanctions against Russia, according to a statement from Italy’s Economy Ministry. The boat — the Scheherazade, located in the Italian town of Marina di Carrara, north of Pisa — had “significant economic and business …