Word: silvio
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When leaders understand the nature of their followers, they can get away with an awful lot. My friend Beppe Severgnini, a columnist at Corriere della Sera, says Italians forgive Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's many--how shall we put this?--lapses in judgment because they think, He's one of us. Berlusconi, Severgnini wrote this year, is "not only Italy's head of government, but the nation's autobiography." By contrast, when a leader gets out of sync with her followers, all the brilliance in the world doesn't amount to much. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher found that...
...work, I mentioned the calendar to one of my colleagues. She wasn’t the least bit surprised, mentioning that some of her friends thought Mussolini wasn’t half bad (she, of course, completely disagreed with them). She reminded me of something Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said in 2003. In an interview with English magazine The Spectator, he was quoted as calling Il Duce a “benign” dictator, saying “Mussolini never killed anyone” and “Mussolini just sent people on holiday to confine them...
...believe Italians can do better. They can do better than Silvio Berlusconi, better than the Lega Nord (a xenophobic political party that is currently part of the coalition that forms the government), and better than the new anti-immigration laws, which criminalize illegal immigration, allow citizen brigades to comb the streets for illegals, and harshly penalize renting a room to an undocumented individual. They can certainly do better than a tasteless calendar of Il Duce, a celebration of one of Italy’s darkest moments. The question is: will they...
When the G-8 summit begins in Italy on July 8, it will undoubtedly garner a flood of attention for its host. But while Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was planning to bask in the results of his bold, last-minute decision to switch the site of the meeting from La Maddalena on Sardinia to L'Aquila, the central city still reeling from April's deadly earthquake, it is the stories of Berlusconi as a party guy that are capturing the imagination...
...members (a new term begins on January 1) with that country responsible for planning and hosting some lower-level meetings, which serve as the build-up to the mid-year three-day event attended by the major players. As this year's G-8 president, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has the honor of hosting Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso, Russia's President Dimitri Medvedev, U.K.'s Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the U.S.'s President Barack Obama in L'Aquila, the town...