Tag Archives: Italy

The Daily Beast reports: Placebo guitarist and vocalist Brian Molki did not mince words when he told the crowd at a 2023 concert outside Turin what he thought of Italy’s far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “Pezzo di merda, fascista, razzista,” the British alternative rock star called out, earning a round of cheers from the locals. Meloni, none too pleased with …

The New York Times reports: The Vatican has approved new guidelines for Italy that say that an applicant for the seminary cannot be rejected simply because he is gay, as long as he remains celibate. The guidelines say that seminary directors should consider sexual orientation as only one aspect of a candidate’s personality. They do not change the Roman Catholic …

The Guardian reports: Italy’s government has granted citizenship to Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, on account of his Italian family roots, prompting outrage among opposition politicians who contrasted his treatment with that of the children born in Italy of migrant parents. Milei is in Rome to meet the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and to take part in her Brothers of …

The BBC reports: An Italian journalist has been ordered to pay Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni damages of €5,000 (£4,210) over social media posts making fun of her height. A judge ruled that two tweets by Giulia Cortese, who was also handed a suspended fine of €1,200, were defamatory and amounted to “body shaming”. It followed an exchange in which Ms …

NBC News reports: Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told her Brothers of Italy party on Tuesday that it should expunge from its ranks anyone who idolizes Italy’s fascist past. Her call came after an undercover media investigation last week released a video of members of her party’s youth wing making fascist salutes and chanting “Sieg Heil.” In a letter to party …

The New York Times reports: The pontiff’s image was everywhere. On cardboard cutouts adorned with flower necklaces, on glittery banners, on stickers. Romans came to the Pride parade on Saturday dressed like Francis, wearing papal hats and T-shirts that read, “There is never too much frociaggine,” a reference to an offensive slur against gay men that the pope has been …

Politico Europe reports: A brawl erupted in Italy’s parliament on Wednesday, with one lawmaker leaving the chamber in a wheelchair. The scuffle kicked off during a vote in the Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s lower house of parliament, on the government’s controversial bill paving way to give Italy’s regions greater autonomy. As seen in a video of the incident, Leonardo Donno, …

The Guardian reports: Pope Francis has apologised for using an offensive slur during a discussion with bishops about admitting gay men into seminaries, saying he “never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms”. The apology followed reports in the Italian press on Monday that, during the discussion in Rome last week, the pontiff, 87, had said there was …

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 …