Rosa Luxembourg, the Polish-German socialist famously theorised ‘you lose, you lose, you lose, you win’, and that will be of a certain consolation to Walter Veltroni, the first leader of the new left-wing party Partito Democratico, particularly given the shock news last night that the party’s ‘sure-fire’ Mayoral candidate for Rome, Francesco Rutelli, has been […]
Sunday night and off with me to the theatre for some art. “Art,” as far as I can tell from the Polish theatre, means never saying. Shouting, sobbing, laughing (never for any apparent reason), whispering, moving from table to chair to settee to chair to table – all these are fine and acceptable but merely […]
On Friday, the 25th of April (liberation day), an estimated two million people gathered in over 40 cities in Italy to protest about the state of journalism (print and television) in Italy. Over 500,000 people in one day queued up to sign a petition calling for three specific referenda to change the way information is […]
On Friday, the 25th of April (liberation day), an estimated two million people gathered in over 40 cities in Italy to protest about the state of journalism (print and television) in Italy. Over 500,000 people in one day queued up to sign a petition calling for three specific referenda to change the way information is […]
Today is a national holiday in Italy, though not one that everybody celebrates. The 25th of April comemorates the liberation of the country from the Nazi occupying forces, and from the Fascist rump government of Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana. Luckily for Berlusconi his new government won’t take office officially until the end of the month, […]
There’s been widespread news coverage in Italy regarding the recent decision in Canada to ban polycarbonate baby bottles containing bisphenol-a, a chemical that has been linked to hormonal changes in animals tested. Risks related to the use of the chemical were identified as early as the 1930’s but its use has been widespread nonetheless. Amongst […]
Adam Hochschild, in his 1994 New York Review of Books review of Ryszard Kapuściński’s Imperium, writes (this is a back-translation from the Polish) “His latest book is less fantasmagorical than the previous ones because he does not have to hide behind allegories” — as was the case when he was writing under communism. Much has […]
So the post-mortem sets in, with the ‘extreme’* left wiped out in this election. They’re blaming the ‘moderate’ PDs, who were undoubtedly the main challengers to Berlusconi. The theory is, put simply, that PD leader Walter Veltroni’s strategy of excluding them from any possible coalition consigned them to the wasted vote category – meaning that […]
Tree huggers, eco-warriors, and stuffy scientists pushing for aviation taxes were all celebrating last night at the news that Silvio Berlusconi and his right-of-centre party the Pdl had won a landslide victory in the Italian elections. Or at least they should have been. A central plank in Berlusconi’s election campaign was the refusal to sell […]