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Finire in bellezza!
Maintaining some semblance of justice in Italians public life depends largely on leaks from wiretaps, legal and illegal - it's all part of the system… Now, as reported in the International Herald Tribune on May 31, Silvio Berlusconi's government is "pushing a contentious new law that would severely restrict magistrates' ability to wiretap and journalists' ability to publish the results."
Unity through diversity
Last month 136 of Belgium's 138 lower-house legislators (who agree on little else, leaving their country in near paralysis) voted to outlaw the burqa. Burqa-wearers number only a few dozen in the country. But a parliamentarian in Brussels said it created a rare moment of "pride in being Belgian".
A bit of history…
The International Herald Tribune ran a piece late-May on the upcoming Dutch elections. It made the point that "over the formative centuries of European history the two words that most succinctly signalled 'otherness' were Jew and Turk. 'Turk' meant Muslim, Arab, infidel, the threat from without; a Jew was the enemy within…"
