Worldcrunch
At 6 p.m. local time Wednesday in Rome, while much of the world was transfixed on Washington, D.C., Italian reporters were huddled in a vast room of the nation’s Parliament to witness another political crisis unfolding. Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi announced that his minor party would pull out of the government, plunging Italian […]
-Essay- PARIS — Changes, disruptions, earthquakes … We no longer know what word best describes the political events unfolding before our eyes. After former French president Nicolas Sarkozy lost in the conservative primaries, and current Socialist president François Hollande chose not to run, Matteo Renzi resigned as Italian prime minister, becoming the latest European leader […]
Many observers feared that yesterday would be the day that could rock the European Union to its core, six months after the Brexit referendum. Austria looked ready to elect Europe’s first far-right president since the end of World War II. Meanwhile, Italy, a founding member of the EU, was expected to reject a proposed constitutional […]
We can be judged by our own strength, but also by the relative strength of our adversaries. Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. election was also the defeat of Hillary Clinton, and all of what she represented. Last night’s unprecedented announcement that embattled French President Francois Hollande would not seek a second term will no […]
-Analysis- PARIS — Long live the people! For a few months now, referendums have been blooming all over Europe. In Britain, to decide whether or not to leave the European Union. In Hungary, to ban European Union refugee-sharing quotas. In the Netherlands, on the EU’s pact with Ukraine. Now in Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi […]
Two days after an earthquake tore through central Italy, the dust is settling on the razed buildings, and the hope of finding survivors in the rubble is fading away. The first burials of victims took place this morning, only hours after Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declared a state of emergency for the worst-hit areas and […]
SPOTLIGHT: EUROPE’S FATE, FROM ROME TO LONDON Italy’s 5-Star Movement won the mayoral races in Rome and Turin, where Virginia Raggi and Chiara Appendino will become the two major cities’ first female mayors. For Italian pundits, their victories, particularly Raggi’s landslide triumph in the Eternal City, is a major blow to center-left Prime Minister Matteo […]
ROME — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has chosen Italy as his first major Western destination since winning elections in 2013, and the first to come in the wake of the Vienna accords on Iran’s nuclear program and the lifting of international sanctions. Italian newspaper La Stampa first reported earlier this month that the president will […]
Il Messaggero, Oct. 9, 2015 The resignation of Ignazio Marino, Rome’s embattled mayor, dominated headlines in Italy on Friday after months of rising political tensions in the capital and within the center-left Democratic party of both the mayor and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. “Marino, A Surrender Amid Venom,” was the front-page headline in the Rome […]
Italian PM Matteo Renzi has obtained Washington’s blessing to pursue its own dialogue with the Kremlin. Could Rome be the bridge to resolving the Ukraine crisis?
Corriere della Sera, June 10, 2015 Hot on the heels of the recent — and Russia-less — G7 meeting in Germany, Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in Italy on Wednesday, highlighting the way that business ties could be a way out of Moscow’s standoff with the West. In an interview published Wednesday in Corriere della […]
FILICUDI — The most-hated man right now on the Aeolian islands wasn’t looking for trouble. A die-hard lover of deep-sea fishing and diving, Dario Lopes, 53, has taken and posted various videos of jellyfish in recent years. But then one clip, shot off the coast of the island of Filicudi, went viral around Italy. “It […]
ISLAMIST GROUP KILLS 106 IN NIGERIA Fighters with the Islamist group Boko Haram killed 106 people over the weekend in a small Christian village in northeastern Nigeria, bringing the death toll over the last few weeks close to 300, newspaper Punch reports. According to witnesses, the gunmen gathered a group of men and shot them […]