Politics News Event

(ANSA) - Palermo, November 12 - Police on Thursday busted what they consider to be a major drug trafficking ring and arrested four people, all members of the same family.

The four are believed to have run the illegal drug trade here in the Sicilian capital as well as the city of Agrigento.

They were named as: Pietro Cannata, 54; Antonio Cannata, 34; Daniele Cannata 26; and Nicolo' Cannata, 34, who was already in custody.

The investigation allowed police to undercover a network of dealers in the two cities and identify two main sources of supply, the most important one for hashish and cocaine from Naples. The probe, code-named Michelangelo 2, was a follow-up to one which last June led to the arrest of 12 mafiosi and the seizure of 10kg of cocaine.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - The government hopes to involve the opposition in passing a new bill placing a six-year cap on trials, Infrastructure Minister Altero Matteoli said Wednesday

The bill, agreed upon after a two-hour meeting on Tuesday between House Speaker Gianfranco Fini and Premier Silvio Berlusconi, would limit first trials and later appeals to two years each for a maximum of six years.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - A Milan appeals court which upheld a jail term for British lawyer David Mills for taking a bribe to hush up evidence in trials involving Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi provided its motivation in a written report on Wednesday.

In a report on its October 27 sentence, judge Rosario Spina said the bribe was paid after and not before Mills took the witness stand in trials involving Berlusconi's Fininvest group in 1997 and 1998.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - Former minister and ex-Rome mayor Francesco Rutelli on Wednesday founded a new centrist movement after splitting with Italy's main centre-left party, the Democratic Party (PD)

The small Alliance for Italy movement is made up of a handful of unaffiliated moderates and former PD members who are unhappy with recently elected leader Pierluigi Bersani, a former Communist.

Rutelli, 55, led the centrist Catholic wing of the PD and claims Bersani's election has tilted the PD back towards a kind of socialism, allegedly making it less attractive to moderate voters.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - Former minister and ex-Rome mayor Francesco Rutelli on Wednesday founded a new centrist movement after splitting with Italy's main centre-left party, the Democratic Party (PD)

The small Alliance for Italy movement is made up of a handful of unaffiliated moderates and former PD members who are unhappy with recently elected leader Pierluigi Bersani, a former Communist.

Rutelli, 55, led the centrist Catholic wing of the PD and claims Bersani's election has tilted the PD back towards a kind of socialism, allegedly making it less attractive to moderate voters.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - Over 1,000 gypsies and North African immigrants were forced out of their encampments on Wednesday during police operations in Rome and Salerno.

Some 200 officers from various law enforcement agencies dismantled a camp occupied by around 800 immigrants in Eboli a town in the southern Campania region.

Citing risks to health and hygiene, police said they were also checking the primarily North African occupants for documents.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - European Union leaders will pick their first standing president and new foreign policy chief in Brussels next week, the Swedish duty presidency said Wednesday.

Italy's Massimo D'Alema, a centre-left former premier and foreign minister, is a frontrunner for the EU foreign affairs job.

The two new top jobs were created under the Lisbon Treaty, the EU's new beefed-up ruling charter, which goes into effect on December 1.

The special summit on Thursday, November 19, will take the form of a working dinner, a Swedish spokesman said.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 11 - Nuclear disarmament "is no longer a political mirage but a concrete goal the international community has set," Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Wednesday.

Evidence of this, the minister added, was United Nations Resolution 1887 on non-proliferation which was unanimously passed by the Security Council at the last UN General Assembly.

(ANSA) - Genoa, November 11 - Five police officers convicted of fraud, false arrest, assault and slander against demonstrators during the 2001 Group of Eight summit have seen their sentences reduced.

The Genoa Court of Appeal on Tuesday reduced from 27 months to 12 months the term of the most senior defendant, the former deputy head of the Genoa security police, Alessandro Perugini.

The convictions for false arrest, assault and slander, handed down in December 2008, were set aside entirely as a result of the limitation period.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 10 - Over 520 people have been arrested and 2,950 reported since a new anti-stalking law was adopted in April, police said Tuesday.

The law upgraded stalking from a misdemeanour to a crime punishable by up to four years in prison and provided a hotline and support system for victims.

Applauding the legislation, police spokesperson Chiara Giacomantonio said it gave thousands of victims ''the means to combat the daily threats and persecution that make their lives impossible''.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 10 - High food prices continue to penalize the world's poor despite a boost in world food production, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported Tuesday.

The organization said that a bumper year for world cereal production has failed to bring prices down in nations dependent on food imports, cementing famine and food shortages in the world's 31 poorest countries.

(ANSA) - Avellino, November 10 - Police on Tuesday arrested four people on suspicion of fraudulently obtaining public funds to build wind farms in Sicily and Sardinia.

Another 11 people were informed that they may face prosecution and nine wind farms were impounded, for a total of 185 turbines, the estimated value of which was put at over 153 million euros.

According to investigators, a complicated scheme was used to obtain development funds from Italy and the European Union.

(ANSA) - Rome, November 10 - An MP in Premier Silvio Berlusconi's People of Freedom party has been accused of illegal dealings with the Camorra, the Naples Mafia.

A Naples prosecutor wants to arrest Nicola Cosentino, 50, who is economic undersecretary in Berlusconi's government, and has sent his warrant to the Italian parliament.

Under Italian law, warrants against MPs have to be cleared by the house to which he belongs, in this case the Chamber of Deputies (Lower House).

(ANSA) - Palermo, November 10 - Police in Palermo on Tuesday seized assets worth some 15 million euros traced back to two dead bosses. The real estate, land and shops were fronts for the empire of the late Francesco Madonia, who died in jail in 2007, and Francesco Di Trapani, who died in 1992, police said.

The pair were respectively head and No.2 of one of the Sicilian capital's most powerful families.

(ANSA) - Ischia, November 10 - A landslide which struck a port town on the island of Ischia killing one and injuring 20 ''seemed like the end of the world,'' the town's mayor said Tuesday.

Vincenzo D'Ambrosio said he had just walked his daughter to school in the port of Casamicciola on the island's north end, when ''a river of dirt and rocks flooded the whole area''.

The mayor confirmed one death so far, a 15-year-old girl washed out to sea in a bus when the mud poured down the slopes of Mount Epomeo, the island's volcanic peak.