Word: northern
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Scientists have suspected the existence of a southern landmass that balanced the globe's northern continents since as early as 150 A.D., when Greek astronomer Ptolemy suggested the existence of a "unknown southern land." But no humans actually set eyes on Antarctica until 1820. In a great race to the bottom of the world, ships from Russia, Britain and the U.S. all spotted the landmass within months of one another in 1820. The first explorer to discover Antarctica is widely believed to have been Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, whose expedition first spotted land in January 1820. But further...
Italy's influential Northern League Party has stood out over the past decade for its particular knack in finding new (and not-so-new) ways of offending people based on country of origin and color of skin. In 2003, Umberto Bossi, founder of the party, which once espoused separatism, told an interviewer that police should open fire on the boatloads of undocumented Africans arriving on Italian shores, calling the would-be immigrants "bingo-bongos." Other Northern League pols have proposed everything from separate trains for immigrants to banning the building of new mosques and even prohibiting the serving of kebabs...
...latest swipe by the Northern League attempts some kind of holiday spirit. The league-led city council in Coccaglio, a small town east of Milan, has launched a two-month sweep - from Oct. 25 to Dec. 25 - to ferret out foreigners without proper residency permits. It has been dubbed Natale Bianco, or "White Christmas." (See portraits of Italians in America...
...census "was born to know the real number of foreign-born citizens present in Coccaglio so as to better manage the economic resources destined for integration projects." Local officials say the measure follows a national policy set forth by Italy's Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a member of the Northern League, to give local administrators more authority in monitoring the residency status of foreigners...
...Northern League, founded in 1991 on a platform to separate the richer northern regions from the rest of Italy, is as strong as it has ever been. It is now a key ally in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's majority in Parliament after garnering 10% of support in the last national election on a campaign focused on deepening worries about crime and the economy. Last week, the league floated (but then withdrew) a measure in Italy's budget bill that would have capped unemployment benefits for foreign-born workers. (See a story about how the Northern League roils even...