Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Saturday his centre-right bloc may withdraw its support from the government of Mario Monti, a move that could throw Italy into political chaos ahead of next April's national elections.
"We have to recognise the fact that the initiative of this government is a continuation of a spiral of recession for our economy," Berlusconi told a news conference in northern Italy a day after he was convicted and sentenced to four years for tax fraud related to his Mediaset media empire.
"Together with my collaborators we will decide in the next few days whether it is better to immediately withdraw our confidence in this government or keep it, given the elections that are scheduled," he said.
The Monti government of non-elected technocrats is supported by the centre-left, the centre-right and the centre. It would lose its majority and have to resign if the entire centre-right, including Berlusconi's PDL party, withdrew support.
Monti took office as prime minister last November when Italy's bond yields were soaring. He has pushed through tax hikes, spending cuts and a pension overhaul to cut public debt which is running at 126 percent of gross domestic product, according to the International Monetary Fu
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#1
Herr Dokter Geus is on to something about the Prophet.
It is amazing that a book so full of hate, perversion, and advocating wanton murder can be the basis of a religion is amazing...well until you study the Aztecs, Mayans, Philistines, and Assyrians...
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
10/27/2012 13:59 Comments ||
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[Iran Press TV] Official data show that Spanish unemployment rate has exceeded 25 percent in the third quarter of 2012 as the country continues to grapple with economic woes.
New figures released by Spains National Statistics Institute on Friday showed that the countrys unemployment rate climbed to 25.02 percent in the third quarter, up from the previous 24.63 percent.
The institute also pointed out that a total of 5.78 million people were out of work in the July-September quarter, up 85,000 from the previous three months, while the number of Spanish households in which every member is unemployed rose to 1.74 million.
#3
I was in Spain in May on business. Their situation is worse than here. Remember that proportionally fewer women in Spain try to enter the workforce. Among young adults the unemployment rate is now 1/3 or more.
[Jerusalem Post] A politician for Greece's neo-Nazi and thus by definition hard-left
Golden Dawn Party has reportedly read out in parliament a passage from the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Ilias Kasidiaris, a spokesperson for Golden Dawn, read out Protocol 19 from the book: "In order to destroy the prestige of heroism we shall send them for trial in the category of theft, murder and every kind of abominable and filthy crime," according to Panayote Dimitras of the Greek Helsinki Monitor.
Kasidiaris was addressing parliament Oct. 23 at a discussion on lifting his immunity in connection with suspicions of assault. "There was absolutely no reaction" to this in parliament, Dimitras said, which, makes "all parties held as accomplices."
In a written statement Friday, the Foreign Affairs Network of B'nai B'rith Europe called the manuscript's reading in an EU parliament "a sign of moral corruption and degradation which must not be overlooked." The silence with which the reading was received was "doubly worrisome," the network wrote in its statement.
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[An Nahar] Amateur, indecisive and gaffe-prone: the accusations are growing ever louder against Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault as he struggles to steer La Belle France through its worst economic crisis in decades.
"He's making error after error, this prime minister. We've never seen such a level of amateurism and lack of preparation," Jean-Francois Cope, the leader of the opposition UMP party, said after Ayrault's latest blunder.
That came on Wednesday -- Le Gay Pareeien newspaper dubbed it his "Black Wednesday" -- when the prime minister announced that the French Constitutional Council was about to scupper the government's new housing bill.
It was bad enough that the bill -- a key promise in the election campaign that brought Francois Hollande ...the Socialist president of La Belle France, and a fine job he's doing of it... to the presidency in May -- was being thrown out after complaints from the UMP that it was being forced through parliament.
But Ayrault brought heaps of scorn on himself by announcing the council's decision hours before the body had even sat down to deliberate and ultimately decide that the government had not respected parliamentary procedure.
"The episode reveals a certain feverishness" on the part of a prime minister suspected by both the opposition and certain members of his own government of not being up to the job, said political analyst Philippe Braud.
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Posted by: Fred ||
10/27/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
A "gaffe" is nothing but the truth told accidentally.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[An Nahar] Amateur, indecisive and gaffe-prone: the accusations are growing ever louder against Socialist Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault as he struggles to steer 
