VENICE –- Fourteen people, including Giovanni Mazzacurati, have been arrested in an investigation into alleged corruption relating to Venice’s multi-billion euro ‘Moses’ water barrier.
The arrests took place at dawn this morning in locations ranging from Veneto and Lazio to Tuscany and Campania. According to the Venice police, a total of around 100 people were placed under official investigation.
ROME -- A bionic former Mailman may receive a "conduct card" from the foreign press circle in the Eternal City for evidently poaching on the turf of a respected female colleague, club sources say.
The Snail was at pains to defend its energetic Rome correspondent, Nicholas Pisa, as he then was, when it erroneously ran a report on its website under his byline claiming that Amanda Knox had been found guilty by a Perugia court of murdering British student Kercher.
ROME -- Britain could consider suspending the Erasmus scheme for Italy in retaliation for discrimination against UK lecturers, Minister for Europe David Lidington said Friday.
ROME – A ceremony planned to mark the opening of an assembly plant for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been cancelled amid a parliamentary row about the sky-high cost of the defence program.
Lockheed Martin Corp, the aeronautics company responsible for making the planes, announced that the inauguration had been scrapped at the behest of the Italian defence ministry. Joe LaMarca, spokesman for Lockheed, said that workers at the plant in Cameri would build the first aircraft despite the cancelled inauguration.
ROME –- The deportation of the wife and child of a well known Kazakh dissident has caused a storm amid accusations it was carried out by Italian authorities as a favour to the Kazakh president.
On May 29, a group of around 50 police officers dressed in black stormed a villa in the residential area of Casal Palocco in Rome. They ransacked the house in search of Mukhtar Ablyazov, wanted by the ex Soviet state for alleged embezzlement of over six billion dollars from the bank BTA, of which he was former chairman.
ROME -- Italian rights activists protested against the use of fur as more than 360 eager fashionistas lined up at the museum of Santo Spirito in Sassia for an AltaRoma fashion show.
Just before eight o’clock, crowds began to stream into the museum for an Haute Couture extravaganza. Their plans were put on hold when they were greeted by around fifty “Animalisti Italiani” and representatives of Femen, the notorious Ukrainian feminist group.
VATICAN CITY– Pope Francis signed a decree Friday approving the canonisation of his predecessors John Paul II and John XXIII by the end of the year. The signature followed a meeting of the Congregation for Causes of Saints approving a second miracle attributed to John Paul, launching the Polish pontiff's sainthood.
ROME-The English Theatre of Rome closed its spring season with Doug Motel's Shiva Arms, a smart, comedic play that had the audience both laughing and spell-bound by turns. The intimate space of the Arciliuto Theatre served the one-man play well as Motel addressed the audience as if we were the new hotel manager. The performer and writer of the play jumps back and forth between eleven unique characters to tell the story of one 1989 Hollywood apartment building: the Shiva Arms.
Rome—Vatican schoolgirl Emanuela Orlandi's family marked the anniversary of her disappearance with a procession to St Peter’s Square, tracing the figure 30 in candles and releasing Chinese lanterns into the dusk.
