| January 15, 2012 | - At least six people were killed and 64 injured when the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized off the coast of Tuscany. Hundreds of passengers jumped into the water and swam to a nearby island; at least a dozen others remain missing. Captain Francesco Schettino was indicted for manslaughter after authorities came to suspect that he had steered too close to the island in an attempt at showmanship, then fled the sinking ship five hours before the passengers were evacuated.
| Source 1:
Los Angeles Times
Source 2:
Reuters
|
| November 13, 2011 | - Silvio Berlusconi, who during the 17 years since he was first elected prime minister has been accused of tax fraud, mafia collusion, bribery of law-enforcement officials, and solicitation of an underage prostitute, stepped down after Italy’s parliament passed austerity measures seeking to contain the impact of the country’s $2.6 trillion debt, which he had been denying was a problem. Italians shouted “Fool! Fool!” outside Quirinale Palace, where Berlusconi submitted his resignation, while a makeshift orchestra played the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s “Messiah.” “He leaves an Italy that is more poor,” said Democratic Party politician Livia Turco, “and was made a joke by everyone.” Economist Mario Monti was named interim prime minister.
| Source 1:
Los Angeles Times
Source 2:
New York Times
Source 3:
New York Times
Source 4:
Washington Post
|
| November 2, 2011 | - Amid sex scandals and corruption allegations, and ahead of a key budget vote, Silvio Berlusconi denied rumors he would step down as Italian prime minister. Berlusconi was also reported to have delayed the release of his Greek-folk-influenced album, “True Love,” over concerns about the European financial crisis. Available online was the lead track, “Music,” which begins, “Listen to these songs, they are for you/ Listen to them when you have a thirst for caresses/ Sing them when you are hungry for tenderness.”
| Source 1:
LA Times
Source 2:
Guardian
|
| October 18, 2011 | - Christian Louboutin fought Yves Saint Laurent over red-soled shoes, and Patrizia Reggiani, who has been in prison 13 years for contracting the murder of her ex-husband, the heir to the Gucci fortune, turned down work release, telling an Italian court, “I've never worked in my life.” Reggiani said she would prefer to live in her cell, which she shares with other prisoners, two evergreens, and a replacement ferret for her first, Bambi, who was hanged. “Living with her cellmates is not easy,” said her lawyer.
| Source 1:
Women's Wear Daily via New York Magazine
Source 2:
La Stampa via Worldcrunch
Source 3:
Guardian
|
| October 3, 2011 | - King Abdullah declared that Saudi women, who require permission from a male guardian in order to travel, work, marry, be admitted to hospitals, or live independently, could be granted the right to vote and run in elections. Saudi officials set a trial date for Najalaa Harriri, who is accused of violating the country’s ban on women driving, and an Italian court overturned the murder convictions of American college student Amanda Knox and her co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, and ordered them freed after nearly four years in prison.
| Source 1:
Businessweek
Source 2:
New York Times
|
| September 23, 2011 | - Neutrinos blasted from Switzerland arrived in Italy sixty billionths of a second earlier than expected, apparently outpacing the speed of photons and threatening to upend Einstein’s theory of relativity. Physicists advised caution. “The constancy of the speed of light essentially underpins our understanding of space and time and causality,” said Oxford University’s head of particle theory. “If we do not have causality, we are buggered.”
| Source 1:
Science
Source 2:
Guardian
Source 3:
BBC
|
| April 11, 2011 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi denied accusations that he paid a teenage runaway for sex, explaining that he gave $65,000 to a bellydancer who goes by the name of Ruby the Heartbreaker to help her escape a life of prostitution by launching a beauty parlor, and that he thought she was Hosni Mubarak's granddaughter.
| Source:
Guardian
|
| February 13, 2011 | - Thousands of Italian women chanting “Italy is not a brothel” marched against Silvio Berlusconi.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| January 19, 2011 | - A police trade union was upset that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's “bunga bunga” parties, held at his villa near Milan, featured women wearing sexy policewomen's outfits.
| Source:
guardian
|
| January 5, 2011 | - Thousands of dead birds fell from the sky in Arkansas, Louisiana,and the Italian town of Faenza; millions of dead fish washed ashore in Maryland and Brazil; and 40,000 dead devil crabs, along with smaller numbers of whelks, sponges, and anemones, washed up on the English coast in Kent.
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Mediate
Source 3:
Long Island Press
Source 4:
Gather News
Source 5:
Associated Content
Source 6:
The Daily Mail
|
| November 30, 2010 | - One of the 250,000 American diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that, after Googling themselves, China’s leaders pressured Google to censor its Internet search results last year. Other cables revealed that U.S. diplomats believe Canadians feel “condemned to always play ‘Robin’ to the U.S. ‘Batman,'“ and refer to Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin as Batman to President Dmitry Medvedev's Robin. It was also disclosed that Putin has a close financial and personal relationship with Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a revelation that prompted Berlusconi to fly to the Black Sea to see him. French president Nicolas Sarkozy was described as seeing ”his own rise in the world as reflecting an American-like saga“ but also as needing to channel his “impulsive proposals into constructive directions.”
| Source 1:
NYT
Source 2:
NYT
Source 3:
BBC
Source 4:
Guardian
Source 5:
The Age
Source 6:
NYT
|
| November 5, 2010 | - A teenage belly dancer who was given a diamond bracelet and more than $19,000 by Silvio Berlusconi revealed that the Italian prime minister has a marble statue of himself as Superman, and two years after hiring a waste-disposal company to search through 12,000 gallons of sewage, a British woman was reunited with the diamond ring she had flushed down the toilet. “Two of the smaller diamonds had fallen out,” said company employee Jule French, “but apart from that, it was just in need of a good clean.”
| Source 1:
Daily Mail
Source 2:
Ananova
|
| October 23, 2010 | - The European Commission declined to take France to court over its recent expulsion of 8,000 Roma but threatened to impose sanctions on Italy if the country fails to remove piles of trash accumulating in the streets of Naples.
| Source 1:
Euronews
Source 2:
AP / Google
|
| September 9, 2010 | -
Italian mattress company Sogniflex released a mattress for lovers, which includes straps, handles, extra-strong springs, and a trench near the foot of the bed where knees can be placed. “I wanted to invent something that could really help them,” said company president Paolo Tonelli, “because most beds are designed for sleeping, not for making love.”
| Source:
Ananova
|
| May 6, 2010 | - Opera workers in Italy launched wildcat strikes to protest pay cuts, and public-health authorities in Iowa reported eight cases of mumps, possibly spread at a “root-beer kegger” in Sioux Center.
| Source 1:
AP via Boston Globe
Source 2:
Des Moines Register
|
| March 5, 2010 | - A Nigerian member of the Vatican choir admitted to having procured male prostitutes for an Italian government official working as a papal usher.
| Source:
CNN
|
| February 24, 2010 | - An Italian chef's television show was canceled after he shared a recipe for cat, telling viewers that the feline meat could be tenderized by running spring water over it for three days.
| Source:
CNN
|
| January 27, 2010 | - It was announced that the U.S. economy grew 5.7 percent in the last three months of 2009, the largest expansion in six years, and that the Italian mafia's profits grew an estimated 8 percent last year.
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
reuters
|
| January 25, 2010 | - An Italian 16-year-old stabbed his father in the neck with a 15-inch knife over PlayStation etiquette.
| Source:
reuters
|
| 0, 2009 | - Two fingers and a tooth of Galileo's, stolen by admirers in 1737, were recovered and will be put on display in Italy.
| Source:
MSNBC
|
| 0, 2009 | - About 100,000 Italian women signed a petition of protest after Silvio Berlusconi made fun of a homely lady.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| December 30, 2009 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that “Thank God that Silvio exists” would no longer be the anthem of his People of Freedom Party.
| Source:
Christian Science Monitor
|
| December 28, 2009 | - The Turkish government was considering asking Italy to return the bones of Santa Claus, stolen by Italian sailors in the eleventh century.
| Source:
BBC
|
| December 14, 2009 | -
Italians were angry over a nativity displayed in a Verona courthouse that features a black Jesus.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 10, 2009 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi vowed not to step down after the country's highest court overturned a law granting him immunity from prosecution. “I am the best prime minister ever,” said Berlusconi, who is embroiled in corruption and bribery scandals. “I am absolutely the politician most persecuted by prosecutors in the entire history of the world throughout the ages.” He added that he had spent “200 million euros on judges... excuse me, on lawyers.”
| Source:
NY Times
|
| May 31, 2009 | - Photos of topless women and of one naked man at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's private villa were published in Spain, causing Berlusconi to threaten to sue and further dampening the odds that he will win a Nobel Peace Prize, despite the best efforts of the Berlusconi-for-Nobel committee. “I find it strange that a man like that,” said Nobel laureate Jose Saramago, whose Italian publisher has refused to release his latest book because it describes Berlusconi as a “delinquent,” “hasn’t produced a social movement of revulsion in protest at the simple fact that he’s ruined the prestige of his country.”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
BBC News
Source 3:
The Independent
|
| April 6, 2009 | - A 6.3 earthquake in the Abruzzo region of Italy damaged buildings in 26 towns, destroyed numerous historic monuments, left tens of thousands of people homeless, and killed at least 92 people, including an 82-year-old nun who died of shock. Seismologist Giampaolo Giuliani, who for weeks had warned of the earthquake, demanded an apology from the Italian government, which had forced him to remove his predictions from the Internet. “Every time there is an earthquake there are people who claim to have predicted it,” said Enzo Boschi, the chairman of Italy's National Institute for Geophysics and Vulcanology. “It is not possible to predict earthquakes.”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
New York Times
|
| December 11, 2008 | - The Italian government bought 100,000 wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and donated them to charity.
| Source 1:
Telegraph
Source 2:
WSJ
|
| December 1, 2008 | -
Venice flooded.
| Source:
CNN
|
| November 6, 2008 | -
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev warned Obama against continuing Bush's plans for missile-defense systems in Eastern Europe and threatened to move short-range missiles into the Baltic near Poland and “to neutralize, when necessary” American installations there, but Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi insisted, “I don't see problems for Medvedev to establish good relations with Obama who is also handsome, young, and suntanned.”
| Source 1:
Washington Post
Source 2:
Reuters
|
| October 30, 2008 | - Author Erica Jong told an Italian interviewer, “If Obama loses, it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets.”
| Source:
New York Observer
|
| September 11, 2008 | - An Italian prosecutor sought to charge actress Sabrina Guzzanti with “offending the honor of the sacred and inviolable person” of Pope Benedict XVI; Guzzanti had suggested that “within 20 years the Pope will be where he ought to be--in Hell, tormented by great big gay
devils, and very active ones, not passive ones.”
| Source:
The Times of London
|
| July 10, 2008 | - The European Parliament censured Italy for preemptively fingerprinting gypsies in a measure designed to reduce crime.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 27, 2008 | -
Italy planned to fingerprint all Gypsy children.
| Source:
Guardian.co.uk
|
| May 3, 2008 | - An Italian police officer shot herself in the head outside a stadium during a second-division soccer match.
| Source:
Sports Illustrated
|
| April 24, 2008 | - Seven hundred and fifty thousand people made reservations to visit the exhumed corpse of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy. Padre Pio, who exhibited the stigmata, and who once wrestled with the devil, died in 1968.
| Source:
News Daily
|
| April 12, 2008 | - A woman hitchhiking from Milan to Tel Aviv dressed as a bride in order to promote world peace was raped and strangled in Turkey. “Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of peace and trust,” said the artist's sister, “but not everyone deserves trust.”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
BBC
|
| December 2, 2007 | - Fears about the American economy had reportedly slowed sales of recreational vehicles, with the exception of the “biggest, baddest” models, which get seven miles to the gallon, cost up to $1.7 million, and include such amenities as Italian marble floors and a lock with an electronic palm reader.
| Source:
Housing Crisis? Try Mobile McMansions
|
| November 9, 2007 | -
Italian police discovered the Mafia's Ten Commandments. “Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty,” reads number five, “even if your wife's about to give birth.”
| Source:
BBCnews.com
|
| September 21, 2007 | - FOX talk-show host Bill O'Reilly ate a meal in Harlem. “There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'M-Fer, I want more iced tea,'” said O'Reilly. “You know, I mean, everybody was--it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun.”
| Source:
Talking Points Memo
|
| August 12, 2007 | - The United States denied approving the Iraqi Interior Ministry's $39.7 million purchase of 105,000 Russian-made assault rifles from the Italian Mafia. A senior official of the Iraqi Interior Ministry, which has backed Shiite death squads in the Shiite-Sunni civil war, said “most” of the Russian guns were meant for its police in the Sunni-majority Anbar province; Iraqi officials also complained that U.S. gun deliveries are slow.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| June 11, 2007 | - Researchers revealed that Otzi the Iceman, a 5,000-year-old frozen hunter who was found in the Italian Alps in 1991, was killed by injuries suffered from an arrow to his left collarbone.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| June 4, 2007 | - Hundreds of men serving life terms in Italian prisons demanded to be put to death. “We are tired of dying a little bit every day,” said the inmates in a letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano. “We have decided to die just once.”
| Source:
The News (Pakistan)
|
| May 31, 2007 | - An Italian
doctor built vaginas for two women who lacked them due to Mayer-von Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome.
| Source:
Reuters via ABC (Australia)
|
| April 3, 2007 | -
Italy banned reality programming on public television.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 1, 2007 | - A woman in Naples found a live World War II-era hand grenade in a bag of potatoes.
| Source:
BBC
|
| February 27, 2007 | - Mothers in Rome were leaving unwanted babies at a hospital booth that resembles an ATM.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 6, 2007 | - A “fascist climate” settled over parts of Italy as soccer fans were banned from local stadiums.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| November 20, 2006 | -
Tom Cruise married Katie Holmes in a Scientology ceremony in Italy.
| Source:
Canada.com
|
| November 1, 2006 | - Iran criticized Australia, Bahrain, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States for carrying out a practice naval exercise in the Persian Gulf, then announced ten days of “Great Prophet II” war games.
| Source 1:
AP via International Herald Tribune
Source 2:
Breitbart
|
| October 17, 2006 | - Two subway trains collided at a station in Rome, killing one person and injuring more than 100.
| Source:
AP via Yahoo
|
| October 13, 2006 | - An Italian sociologist moved into a cave, where he plans to spend the next three years.
| Source:
BBC
|
| August 8, 2006 | -
Spain,
Sicily, and North Africa were on jellyfish alert, with over 30,000 people stung so far this summer. The jellyfish explosion, a researcher explained, is due to overfishing and global warming.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| August 4, 2006 | - hotel owners in Italy made plans to open women-only Muslim beaches.
| Source:
Breitbart.com
|
| July 31, 2006 | - Hot weather killed 141 people (as well as 25,000 cattle and 700,000 fowl) in California, at least 170 people in France, Italy, and Spain, and dozens of racing dogs in Oregon, and shut down MySpace.
| Source:
CBS
|
| July 22, 2006 | - An influential Italian banker and member of Opus Dei was found dismembered under a bridge in Parma.
| Source:
Independent (U.K.)
|
| July 12, 2006 | -
Scientists in Bologna, Italy, disinterred the eighteenth-century castrato Farinelli in the hope of finding what made him such a powerful singer.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| July 9, 2006 | -
Italy won the World Cup after France's Zinedine Zidane was ejected from the game for head-butting Marco Materazzi.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| July 7, 2006 | - An Italian judge ruled that former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi should stand trial for fraud.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 20, 2006 | - An Italian prosecutor said the Mafia was “down on its knees” after police arrested 45 organized criminals in Palermo, Sicily.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 16, 2006 | - Prince Victor Emmanuel, the son of Italy's last king, was arrested for allegedly helping guests at a casino to procure prostitutes.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 14, 2006 | -
Rome was troubled by seagulls and lice.
| Source 1:
Wanted in Rome
Source 2:
Wanted in Rome
|
| June 13, 2006 | -
Italian
scientists said that they had developed a technique for isolating potent sperm.
| Source:
PhysOrg.com
|
| June 7, 2006 | - A report by the Council of Europe charged that European countries (including Germany,
Spain,
Sweden,
Greece, and Italy) served as a “global spider web” for the CIA's secret abduction and unlawful transfer of terrorism suspects to its network of torture camps around the world.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 1, 2006 | - It was reported that Umberto Billo, a Venetian hotel porter, had slept with 8,000 women.
| Source:
New York Daily News
|
| May 31, 2006 | - Archaeologists in Rome
dug up a 3,000-year-old female skeleton.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| May 4, 2006 | - In New York City, an Italian tourist was attacked and suffered a broken arm after he sat down on a motorcycle that was parked outside the local Hells Angels clubhouse.
| Source:
The New York Post
|
| April 11, 2006 | - In Italy, Bernardo Provenzano, also called The Tractor, the alleged head of the Italian mafia, was arrested near Corleone in Sicily.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| April 7, 2006 | - A translation of the Gnostic Gospel of Judas was released. In the text, originally written in Greek and translated into Coptic around 300 A.D., Jesus Christ asks his favorite disciple Judas Iscariot to turn him over to the Romans for sacrifice.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| March 3, 2006 | - An Italian commission found that the Soviet Union organized the shooting of Pope John Paul II in 1981.
| Source:
|
| February 17, 2006 | - The Supreme Court of Italy, considering the case of a man who forced his 14-year-old stepdaughter to perform oral sex, ruled that molesting girls who have already had sexual experience is not as bad as molesting virgins. “The real problem,” commented Mussolini's granddaughter, “is that there are no women in the supreme court.”
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| February 16, 2006 | -
Scientists in Italy found that the effects of Ecstasy on rats were intensified when the rats were made to listen to loud music.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 13, 2006 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said that he was "the Jesus Christ of Italian politics." "I sacrifice myself," he said, "for everyone."
| Source:
BBC News
|
| February 3, 2006 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi performed a love ballad on Rome radio. "You are chocolate and coffee," he sang. "The samba that you have within you comes to me as I come to you."
| Source:
The Scotsman
|
| January 29, 2006 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi promised not to have sex until elections were held on April 9.
| Source:
AP via Forbes
|
| January 3, 2006 | -
Russia shut down a natural-gas pipeline to Ukraine; as a result, natural-gas supplies were diminished in Hungary, France, Italy, Poland, and Germany.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| December 7, 2005 | - Veterinarians in Rome inserted 50 24-karat gold pellets into a lion named Bellamy to treat his arthritis. “The lion,” explained a veterinarian, “is getting old.”
| Source:
AP
|
| December 6, 2005 | - The supreme court of Italy ruled that it is not necessarily racist to call someone a “dirty negro.”
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 31, 2005 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi claimed that in 2003 he repeatedly attempted to talk President Bush out of invading Iraq. "He told Bush?" asked the leader of an opposing political party. "Well, it means he doesn't count for anything at all."
| Source:
The Guardian
|
| October 6, 2005 | - A Sicilian man woke from a more-than-two-year coma and said that he had heard everything that happened around him while he was unconscious.
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| August 5, 2005 | - An estimated $400,000-worth of cocaine was flowing through the Italian River Po every day.
| Source:
Yahoo! News
|
| June 22, 2005 | -
Italy sentenced ten former Nazi SS officers to life in prison in absentia.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 20, 2005 | - A bar of soap allegedly made from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi sold for $18,000.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| June 6, 2005 | - An Italian court ruled that Sicilian authorities had acted improperly when they took away a man's driver's license because he was gay; the man's lawyer said that the arrest had caused his client to suffer hair loss.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| May 11, 2005 | -
Zapatista spokesman Subcomandante Marcos challenged Italy's Inter Milan soccer team to a match against a team of Zapatista soldiers.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| March 25, 2005 | - It was reported that when American soldiers in Iraq shot at the car of Giuliana Sgrena, an Italian hostage who had just been released, they shot from behind, without warning, far from any checkpoint, and within the Green Zone.
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| March 4, 2005 | -
Italy paid the ransom for a journalist kidnapped in Iraq; U.S. forces then fired on the journalist's escape car, killing an Italian military intelligence agent and wounding the journalist.
| Source:
BBC News
|
| January 28, 2005 | - police in Rome were cracking down on unlicensed tour guides,
| Source:
The New York Times
|
| January 22, 2005 | - Hours after an Italian man killed himself because his wife had been in a coma for four months, she woke up.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| December 30, 2004 | -
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi explained his numerous plastic surgeries to reporters, saying "I need to feel that my external appearance reflects my inner youth."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 26, 2004 | -
Italian police used computer software to create a composite sketch of Jesus Christ at age 12, based on the Shroud of Turin. The sketch shows that Christ had blue eyes, fair skin, and dirty blond hair.
| Source:
New York Timesimes
|
| November 3, 2004 | - Much of Venice was flooded by a high tide.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 4, 2004 | -
Korean and Italian researchers developed a tiny robot with multiple legs designed to crawl through a patient's guts.
| Source:
New Scientist
|
| September 22, 2004 | - In Italy, an old woman was killed by a falling crucifix.
| Source:
Independent
|
| August 21, 2004 | - President Silvio Berlusconi of Italy underwent a hair transplant.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| July 31, 2004 | -
Italy was upset about a poster campaign in the London subway urging people not to eat smelly food; the posters show an overweight man sitting on a train surrounded by parma hams and salamis and strings of garlic.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| July 24, 2004 | - An Italian city banned the practice of keeping goldfish in bowls.
| Source:
Agence France-Presse
|
| April 17, 2004 | - In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's corruption trial resumed; three months ago the Constitutional Court ruled that the law that was passed to protect Berlusconi from bribery charges was unconstitutional.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 17, 2004 | -
Italian scientists discovered a new form of mad cow disease that could be the cause of some cases of "sporadic" Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| January 18, 2004 | - There were reports that Berlusconi had a bit of work done around the eyes, and some liposuction to the abdomen.
| Source:
London Times
|
| January 14, 2004 | -
Italy's constitutional court struck down a law that gave Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi immunity from prosecution, a ruling that will revive the corruption charges the law was written to nullify.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| December 28, 2003 | - Parmalat, the Italian dairy company, went bankrupt and its founder, Calisto Tanzi, was arrested on suspicion of fraud.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| December 5, 2003 | - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, currently serving as president of the European Union, declared that Europeans have a duty to support the American war in Iraq, even if it means "a change in international law, which previously held that the sovereignty of a single state was inviolable." Berlusconi also denied that he is short; "I'm as tall as Aznar," he said, referring to Prime Minister José María Aznar of Spain. "I'm the average Italian," he continued. "Right?"
| Source:
New York Times
|
| November 13, 2003 | - Twenty-six people were killed in the car bombing of the Italian paramilitary headquarters in Nasiriya; seventeen Italian military policemen died along with nine Iraqis, including three ten-year-old schoolgirls who happened to be driving by in a minibus.
| Source:
New York Times, Nelson Report
|
| October 31, 2003 | - and Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, released a new CD of love songs.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| October 24, 2003 | - Lightning struck the actor who plays Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson's current film project, "The Passion of Christ," during a shoot in Italy.
| Source:
CNN
|
| September 11, 2003 | - Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, claimed that Benito Mussolini's dictatorship was "much more benign" than Saddam Hussein's.
"Mussolini did not murder anyone," he said.
"Mussolini sent people on holiday to confine them."
| Source:
Times of London
|
| September 9, 2003 | -
Italian babies, it was found, are the fattest in Europe.
| Source:
Reuters
|
| September 5, 2003 | - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy said that judges are lunatics and are anthropologically different from other people.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| July 12, 2003 | -
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder cancelled his Italian vacation in retaliation for insulting remarks about German tourists made by Italy's tourism minister; regional officials asked the Italian government to declare a "state of calamity" to compensate for the anticipated loss of German tourist business.
| Source:
New York Times, BBC
|
| July 7, 2003 | -
Fishermen in Italy were using live kittens to catch giant sheat fish in the Po River.
| Source:
Independent
|
| July 4, 2003 | - Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy created an uproar when he said that a German member of the European Parliament (who challenged Berlusconi's use of a new immunity law to avoid corruption charges) would make a good Nazi concentration-camp commander.
Berlusconi later refused to apologize to Germany but said that he was sorry that his ironic little joke had been misunderstood.
| Source:
Daily Telegraph
|
| July 23, 2002 | -
Officials in Catania, Sicily, bolted iron underwear onto a local statue of a stallion, covering its shame in preparation for a religious procession during which a statue of the Virgin Mary would pass the horse.
| |
| February 12, 2002 | -
Two Sicilians, a man and a woman, were diagnosed with the human form of mad cow disease.
| |
| December 18, 2001 | - Quite a few illegal immigrants turned up dead, apparently suffocated, in cargo containers in Italy and Ireland. Many Taliban prisoners died the same way.
| |
| December 18, 2001 | - An Italian lost part of his penis while watching a porno movie after he inserted it into a vacuum cleaner.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Members of the Liguria parliament in Genoa, Italy, banned the use of the word “member” to describe one another because it also means “penis,” which “is likely to cause a certain uneasiness among women”; henceforth, members will be known as “components” of parliament.
| |
| November 20, 2001 | - Two hundred members of the Italian Association of Cuckolds gathered in Ruviano.
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| November 6, 2001 | -
Police in Milan, Italy, arrested seven homosexuals who were found sexually linked together next to a highway.
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| October 2, 2001 | - Prime Minister Berlusconi of Italy defended his remarks that Western civilization is superior to Islam and that it “is bound to occidentalize and conquer new people.” He said that criticism of his views was “artificial” and “based on nothing.” Benito Mussolini was enjoying a renaissance in Italy; portraits of Il Duce were showing up on wine bottles in Rome, as were pictures of Hitler.
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| September 25, 2001 | - A vial of Saint Gennaro's dried blood liquefied in Naples, Italy. The miracle, which typically occurs twice each year, is thought to be a very good omen.
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| August 7, 2001 | - Two hundred couples were selected by an Italian embryologist to take part in a human cloning project; the human clones will be made using a technique similar to that which produced Dolly the sheep.
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| July 24, 2001 | - A Roman protester was shot twice in the head and killed by a 20-year-old paramilitary officer at the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy; the Land Rover in which the police were riding then backed up and ran over the body before speeding away.
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| July 3, 2001 | -
Researchers found that Italian mothers are the most anxious mothers in Europe.
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| July 3, 2001 | - A three-year-old Italian boy was fined for peeing on a tree in a park in Rome; the traumatized boy, fearing another arrest, was said to be having a difficult time going potty.
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| June 26, 2001 | -
Communists in the Italian
senate protested the upcoming Group of 8 summit, which will be held in Genoa next month, by holding up little signs that read, “Let's throw the G-8 into the sea.” Afghanistan's Taliban agreed to let the World Food Program employ local women to survey food needs there even though this would seem to violate God's
Law.
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| June 19, 2001 | - Silvio Berlusconi was sworn in as Italy's prime minister.
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| April 10, 2001 | -
Italian
police
arrested two men for stealing the body of a dead investment banker to protest the recent drop in the stock market; the body was found under a pile of hay near Turin.
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| March 27, 2001 | -
Italy's environment minister threatened to cut off power to the Vatican's radio station because it emits too much electromagnetic radiation.
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| February 27, 2001 | -
Italy confirmed its third case of mad cow disease and ordered an autopsy of a fifty-seven-year-old man who had displayed symptoms of Creutzfelt-Jakob disease.
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| January 23, 2001 | -
Italy discovered its first mad cow.
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| 0, 2000 | - The Italian container ship Jolly Smeraldo, at sail off Somalia, was able, through evasive maneuvers, to ward off pirate attacks twice in successive days, despite taking on bazooka fire.
| Source:
Lloyd's List
|
| 0, 2000 | - Oenological investigators concluded that five Italian vintners had passed off unauthorized grapes as authentic brunello di Montalcino of the 2003 to 2007 vintages.
| Source:
NY Times
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| December 0, 2000 | - President Obama shook Muammar Qaddafi's hand at the G-8 summit in Italy, then went on to Africa, singling out Ghana, an oil state, for a visit (because of its strong democracy); in Accra he spoke to the parliament on the topic of good government and promised U.S. support in prosecuting (African) war crimes. “Yes you can,” he said.
| Source 1:
Obama speaks of hopes for Africa
Source 2:
Fox News
Source 3:
Obama Visits Africa's "Oil Gulf"
|
| November 21, 2000 | -
Italy banned the importation of French beef.
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| November 21, 2000 | -
Italian
sheepfarmers in the village of Abruzzo started an adoption program whereby people become parents of a sheep, which entitles one to a year's supply of merino wool and fresh cheese, and a photograph of the beast.
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| November 21, 2000 | - An Italian man found a wire sticking out of an egg and soon discovered that it was filled with explosives; a tube of tomato paste blew up a woman's hand in a nearby town.
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| November 7, 2000 | - An Italian cargo ship was leaking 6,000 tons of toxic chemicals into the English Channel.
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| October 3, 2000 | - An Italian
television station broadcast selections from child
pornography videos after investigators, in an Internet sting operation, arrested eight Italian perverts.
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| September 26, 2000 | - The Sons of Italy, a local civic group in Denver, Colorado, decided to call their annual Columbus Day parade the March of Italian Pride after a band of Indians, for whom Columbus is a hated symbol of their conquest, threatened to disrupt it.
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| September 5, 2000 | -
Agriculture department inspectors were asked to spend more time looking for rotten meat and less checking to make sure that Italian sausage was properly spiced with either fennel or anise.
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| August 1, 2000 | - Luciano Pavarrotti agreed to pay the Italian government over $12 million in back taxes.
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| April 0, 2000 | - Guided by the Obama Administration, Chrysler filed for a bankruptcy from which it plans to emerge in two months, when it will be purchased by the United States, Canada, the United Auto Workers union, and Italian manufacturer Fiat, which plans to merge with Opel, part of General Motors Europe, to create a massive new car conglomerate. The new company will be rechristened Chrysler but will probably not honor its outstanding car warranties.
| Source 1:
The Detroit News
Source 2:
The Guardian
Source 3:
New York Times
|
| April 0, 2000 | - Veronica Lario, wife of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, announced plans to file for divorce after learning that her husband had attended the eighteenth birthday party of a budding lingerie model to whom he has given jewelry and who calls him “Daddy.” “That surprised me,” said Lario, “because he never attended the eighteenth birthday parties of his own children, even if he was invited.”
| Source 1:
New York Times
Source 2:
New York Times
|
