An Italian court handed down sentences Thursday in Genoa against 13 police officers accused of violence against protestors at the 2001 G8 summit in the city but acquitted several high-ranking officers in the case.

Shouts of "shame, shame!" from many of those in the courtroom's public gallery accompanied the late evening reading of the verdicts and sentences, which came after some 11 hours of deliberations by judges.

Among those attending the evening court session were people who were beaten when police raided a school that was being used as a headquarters by anti-globalization groups during the Group of Eight summit.

Prosecutors had asked for a combined total of more than 100 years of jail for the 29 defendants, many of whom had been indicted on charges of assault and causing grievous bodily harm related to the raid at the Diaz school.

Judges acquitted 16 of the defendants, including three who currently serve as top police and security officials in Italy.

A day before the European Union heads into partnership talks with Russia, its major energy supplier to the east, Brussels has unveiled an strategy outlining how it hopes to wean the 27-country bloc from the fickle oil and gas dealer.

"We will not stand idly by while we sleep walk into Europe's energy dependence crisis," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said as he presented a detailed, multi-faceted scheme every bit as ambitious as the EU's very much related climate and energy package.

"We must shield European citizens from the risk that external suppliers cannot honour their commitments," he said, without mentioning Russia.

The EU's Energy Security and Solidarity Action Plan, issued on Thursday (13 November) by the European Commission, primarily proposes a diversification of energy sources towards central Asia, the Mideast and Norway.

The EU currently depends on foreign sources for almost 54 percent of its energy consumption, including 61 percent of its gas. According to the commission, this figure will climb to 84 percent by 2030.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU concerns about Russia's nuclear safety and human rights standards will not get much attention in Nice on Friday (14 November), as French President Nicolas Sarkozy celebrates his role in ending the Georgia war.

Two internal documents on EU-Russia relations prepared by the European Commission and EU diplomats ahead of the summit point to mounting environmental concerns about Russia's defunct nuclear submarines and ageing power plants.

Here come the Russians: but a decrepit army and a tottering economy stand behind President Medvedev's ambitions

"More than 200 nuclear reactors and some 20,000 spent fuel elements coming from dismantled submarines and icebreakers are stored in poor conditions," in north west Russia, the EU analysis - seen by EUobserver - says.

"Russia has prolonged the lifetime of its first generation nuclear reactors, some of which are of the Chernobyl type and close to the EU's border," it adds, noting that an EU-Russia nuclear safety group last met in 2005.

The EU has earmarked €40 million to help Russia control the spread of chemical weapons and fissile materials, including retraining some 30,000 weapons scientists at the International Science and Technology Centre in Moscow.

But Russia says the centre has already "fulfilled" its task, with financial contributions going down in 2008.

A top Italian court has allowed doctors to cut life support to a coma patient, though euthanasia isn't legal in the country. Meanwhile in Britain, a 13-year-old won the right to refuse a potentially life-saving surgery.

Italy's top appeals court on Thursday, Nov. 13, upheld a July ruling allowing for the removal of feeding tubes supporting a woman who has been in a coma for 16 years.  

Thirty-five-year-old Eluana Englaro's case has fuelled controversy over euthanasia in mostly Catholic Italy where church authorities have spoken out against her elderly father Beppino's wish to terminate her life. Eluana fell into a coma after a 1992 car accident.  

Many of the world's up-and-coming new powers neither embrace nor aspire to the Western model of liberal democracy. This makes the idea of an "alliance of democracies" a nonstarter. The new powers include authoritarian regimes and they demand a role in global governance. Russia is ready to cooperate, if the West is ready to take it seriously.

Compete, confront, or cooperate. One of these verbs will define the next era of Russia's relations with the West. The new industrial revolution in Asia, above all in China and India, has led to the redistribution of the world's wealth in favor of new leaders. In the 1980s and 1990s, globalization favored developed nations, but now the tables have turned. Still more critical in the long term is the West's declining moral and intellectual authority in defining the international agenda. It has made too many mistakes and has used too much self-serving rhetoric. At the same time, thinkers from "the second new world" are not being listened to or are too shy to speak up. Thus an intellectual vacuum has emerged. As people and their leaders fail to understand what is happening and where to go, they often resort to outdated recipes.

All of these changes clearly mark a new stage in international development. The Cold War was followed by 12 to 14 years of the post-Cold War era. The dawn of the 21st century saw the end of this period and the beginning of a new one that I call NEC -- a New Era of Competition, Confrontation, or Cooperation. This will be a period of transition, uncertainty, and competition.

The weakening of the traditional democratic model of development has dealt a serious blow to the ideal of political democracy, which has suffered from the economic success of authoritarian nations. China is doing much better than the more democratic -- but far from fully democratic -- India. A partially democratic Kuwait is lagging behind the monarchies of the Persian Gulf. A democratic Lebanon and the Palestinian state ruled by democratically elected radicals are in the throes of civil war. Their more authoritarian neighboring Arab states are doing better.

The new labelling scheme has been proposed by Britain to put pressure on Israel to fulfil a broken promise to stop developing settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Consumers in supermarkets across the EU would be made aware their purchases were giving financial support to the Israeli occupation.

Israel's policy of building Jewish communities on the occupied West Bank is illegal under international law.

The plan has echoes of the labelling system for South African fruit and vegetables during apartheid which led some British consumers to deliberately shun produce from white-run South Africa.

But Israel feels the labelling idea is part of a broader attempt by left-wing elements in Britain to ostracise the Jewish state.

Kilometre-long queue appears as developer sells homes at cost price

A Spanish property developer has been cast as an unlikely Robin Hood for his plan to sell thousands of flats to youngsters and divorced people at cost price. Since Jose Merino announced he would allocate 2,000 cheap homes tomorrow to those who applied on a first come, first served basis, an impromptu campsite has sprung up in Fuenlabrada, south of Madrid, of those who hope to exchange chilly canvas for four walls.

The kilometre-long tent city reveals the deep desire among Spaniards to own their home, even in these credit crunch days when getting - still less paying for - a mortgage is a mighty challenge. Flats and houses soared to exorbitant heights during the recent property and credit boom. Now the bubble has burst, and sales are paralysed, but prices are falling only slowly as vendors prefer to hold on rather than sell cheap. Property is still largely out of reach for the young or separated, but Spain remains a country where renting is seen as tantamount to throwing money down the drain.

But the frenzy in Fuenlabrada seems something of a dream. Mr Merino's houses are not built yet. He does not even have the plots on which to build. "For the moment, there's no building land," he admits. "There are various options with other developers to buy land around Toledo, or in some town or other south of Madrid."

He plans to build 2,100 flats of between 70 and 90 square metres, which would cost between €120,000 (£103,000) and €168,000 (£145,000) each, prices not very different from flats already on offer in Fuenlabrada. Tomorrow at 10am, he will start to sign up members of a future co-operative, who must each contribute €120 euros to a management fund, then wait. Only those between 18 and 35, or who are divorced singles with no home of their own, may apply.

A key weapon in the fight against wildlife crime could be lost because of changes to European agricultural policy, the RSPB has warned.

Landowners and farmers currently lose EU cash if they use "non-selective" methods of bird population control, such as poisoning.

However, the EU wants to break the link between Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments and wildlife laws.

The RSPB said a change in the rules would be a blow to Scottish wildlife.

The multi-millionaire owner of the Glenogil estate in Angus, John Dodd, recently had a record £107,650 in CAP payments withheld by the Scottish Government after police found poisoned baits and illegal pesticides on the estate in 2006.

Leaders of the Group of 20 richest economies and emerging economic heavyweights meet in Washington to craft a joint strategy to deal with the rapidly spreading global financial crisis. No quick fixes are expected.

The summit is expected to set down a number of economic targets and a dateline to prevent the ongoing financial meltdown from turning into a long recession.

The G20 leaders will be debating the best way of tackling the on-going fallout from the crash last year of the US real estate market and how they can work together to save the global financial sector which has been swamped by subprime mortgage debt. They'll also look at solving the cash crunch in the banking sector which has dried up the credit market.

During the summit, which starts on Friday evening and ends with a working dinner at the White House Saturday, Germany will present its contribution to the global efforts: a brief calling for a revision of the way banking executives are paid and the creation of a worldwide loan registry.

Compiled by German financial experts, the brief was commissioned by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck.

The global financial crisis will top the agenda at a key EU-Russia summit on Friday, overshadowing rifts between Moscow and Brussels following the August war in Georgia.

Disagreements between the EU and Russia, particularly those connected to the August war in Georgia, will take a back seat to discussion of the current financial crisis, diplomats have said ahead of the EU-Russia summit in Nice on Friday, Nov. 14.

 

"The number one key element will be the global financial and economic situation," Russia's EU ambassador Vladimir Chizhov told a news briefing in Brussels on Wednesday. "A certain coordination of approach will be the best outcome of Nice."

 

The meeting, to be hosted by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who currently holds the EU's rotating presidency, and attended by his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, comes two months after EU leaders condemned Russia's recognition of two breakaway Georgian regions as "unacceptable" and demanded in vain for it to be reversed.

On the eve of the financial summit in Washington D.C., Chancellor Angela Merkel told a German newspaper that it is time for systemic reform. Warnings that the state should stay out of financial markets, she says, are unwelcome.

How radically is the world ready to change the global financial markets? That is the question many are asking on Friday as heads of state and government from teh world's 20 leading economies head to Washington D.C. for this weekend's financial summit. And German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for her part, seems ready to push for far-reaching change.

 German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants financial reform. In an interview published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Friday, Merkel said that she was expecting difficult negotiations -- talks, she said, which would last far beyond this weekend's meeting. But it was time, she told the paper, for greater oversight on the financial markets. "For a long time, we had a situation where very few understood the risks aside from those who wanted to earn money from (complicated new financial) products," Merkel said. "That won't happen again; that can't be allowed to happen again."

To make sure that it doesn't, Merkel is heading to the US armed with a sheaf of proposals and ideas developed for her by a team of Germany's leading economists, headed up by Otmar Issing, the former chief economist at the European Central Bank (ECB). She is expected to float the idea of creating a global risk map which will collate national data on large bank loans and investments as a tool to identify concentrated risk. The paper also argues for greater transparency when it comes to ratings agencies and for complex, structured financial products. International oversight, Merkel says, must be strengthened.

Hedge fund 'masters of the universe' face Congressional grilling over their role in the global credit crunch

The five best-paid hedge fund managers - who between them made $12.6bn last year, even as the financial world began to crumble around them - were hauled before the US Congress yesterday and assailed over their huge salaries, their tax perks and their contribution to the credit crisis that has engulfed the globe.

In a piece of public theatre that reflected not just the present crisis, but also a decade or more of vastly increased income inequality, the five men declared themselves innocent of causing the market meltdown and insisted that their riches reflected hard work and investment insight.

As one Congressman, Elijah Cummings, put it, "these are five citizens who have more money than God", and he proceeded to tear into them over rules that have allowed them to pay a fraction of the tax an ordinary teacher, firefighter or plumber might pay.

Philip Falcone, whose Harbinger Capital is one of the world's biggest hedge funds, stressed his humble beginnings as one of nine children living in a three-bedroom home in Minnesota. "My father was a utility superintendent, my mother worked in a local shirt factory," he said. "I take great pride in my upbringing and it is important for people to know that not everyone who runs a hedge fund was born on Fifth Avenue."

The news from Brussels was as bad as had been expected. The European Union's statistics office announced on Friday that the euro zone economy had slid into recession after another quarter of negative growth. Inflation, meanwhile, has stopped completely.

The bad news keeps coming. After Europe's biggest economy, Germany, announced it was in recession on Thursday it was the turn of the euro zone on Friday. The European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, said that the economy in the 15 states that use the euro shrank in the third quarter. With negative growth having been measured in the second quarter as well, the contraction now meets the commonly accepted definition for a recession.

 A sign reading in Italian "Everything 50% off" in a shop in Rome. Recession has hit Italy. It marks the first ever recession to hit the euro zone since the common European currency was introduced in 2002. The economy contracted by 0.2 percent in the July-September period, the same amount as it had declined from April to June.

WASHINGTON: It is not clear how much the leaders of 18 countries plus the European Union, gathering to discuss a fast-moving financial crisis with a soon-to-depart leader of the United States, can hope to accomplish.

But summit meeting by the Group of 20 may clarify one thing: how completely the crisis is reshaping the economic map -- rendering obsolete the old club of powers that fashioned the financial pillars of the post-World War II era at a conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.

While President Nicolas Sarkozy of France proposed this meeting, and President George W. Bush agreed to play host, the most sought-after country at a gathering some have called Bretton Woods II may prove to be China.

With close to $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves and an economy that is still growing, albeit more slowly than before the crisis erupted, China is one of the few participants with the financial wherewithal to come to the aid of countries in distress, either directly or by swelling the coffers of the International Monetary Fund, so that it can make more emergency loans.

Gordon Brown today said that tax cuts aimed at low-paid workers and support for green technology had to be key parts of the response to the financial crisis, and also suggested that UK interest rates would be cut again soon.

In a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, the prime minister called on other world leaders to join a global fiscal and monetary stimulus package to address the financial crisis.

A key part of this package, Brown insisted, had to be a cut in taxation - especially for the poorest in society, who would help the economy by spending the extra money.

"What we have learned in the past is that when we cut taxes only half the money is spent, the rest is saved. Public works take time to come online," he said. "Those on low incomes are more likely to pass on the benefits of a tax cut."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Ahead of the G20 meeting of the world's leading industrialised and emerging economies this weekend, the president of the United States and the president of the European Commission have laid down their markers for what should be the solutions to save the global economy.

On Thursday, US President George W. Bush made an impassioned plea for laissez-faire capitalism and warned against turning away from free markets, while commission President Jose Manuel Barroso extolled the virtues of public intervention and the European welfare state model built at the end of World War Two.

The European 'social market' model has been celebrated by President Barroso

"In the wake of the financial crisis, voices from the left and right are equating the free enterprise system with greed and exploitation and failure," said the US leader in a speech on Friday (14 November) at the Federal Hall National Memorial.

He conceded that there had been failures, but the blame for these should be pinned on borrowers, financial firms and regulators, not capitalism.

Kashkari as Paulson's 'chump'?
3:02 PM, November 14, 2008 LA Times Money & Co. blog

Whatever Neel Kashkari is earning to head the Treasury's financial-system bailout program, he surely must be thinking that it's not enough.  At a hearing held by the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee today, one congressman questioned whether Kashkari was Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson's "chump."

Another congressman, firebrand Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), lambasted the Treasury for unilaterally deciding this week to junk its original rescue plan of buying bad mortgages from banks.

"Maybe this is some kind of game to some people in the administration," Kucinich lectured the 35-year-old Kashkari. "They're on their way out of office and they just feel they can do whatever they want."

Even a Republican, Darrell Issa of San Diego County, joined in. "I don't know whether to call this 'fire, ready, aim' or something more pejorative," he said of the rescue program's shift.

siegestate: I don't know if I read, or heard or just presumed that after factories are closing that people are going back to their native towns. I believe that I had heard it on a BBC report yesterday, but I should remember to take all news with a grain of salt. It is not atypical for migrants to flood cities in time of woe.

For decades, the steamy Pearl River Delta area of southern Guangdong Province served as a primary engine for China's astounding economic growth. But an export slowdown that began earlier this year and that has been magnified by the global financial crisis of recent months is contributing to the shutdown of tens of thousands of small and mid-size factories here and in other coastal regions, forcing laborers to scramble for other jobs or return home to the countryside.

Factories Shut, China Workers Are Suffering - NYTimes.com

siegestate: But I had also remembered from several years ago that the government was also trying to put a lot of money into farming communities, in terms of communication and roads for example...an effort to uplift them from primitive conditions as well as keep some percentage of people on farms.

Once in the interior, the workers will have less incentive than in the past to return to the coastal provinces. Rising grain prices have made farming more profitable. The Chinese government announced a rural land reform policy last month that could spur some farmers to stay on their land and make better use of it.

A growing number of factories have opened in the interior provinces as well. Wages are still lower than on the coast, but have risen quickly in recent years.

Factories Shut, China Workers Are Suffering - NYTimes.com

And on a tragicomic note, looks like my friend was right about factory owners and managers skipping town, but not necessarily on who they were and where they were doing runners to:

Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children's school tuition.

But the plans of Mr. Wang and thousands of co-workers unraveled at noon on Nov. 1, when the Taiwanese chairman of their ailing shoe factory climbed over a factory wall to flee the country and his debts. That left several American shoe companies with unfilled orders and 2,000 workers without jobs. <...>

As was the case with the Weixu shoe factory, Smart Union closed without any notice, and hundreds of angry workers poured into the streets to demand that the local government pay them back wages. Many such factories were run by Taiwanese or Hong Kong managers who fled the mainland. Chinese police and courts have limited reach in Hong Kong, which has a separate legal system, and they have almost no ability to prosecute people in Taiwan, which is treated as a renegade province and does not have formal political or diplomatic relations with the mainland.

Factories Shut, China Workers Are Suffering - NYTimes.com

On a brighter, and perhaps related note:

The wave of factory shutdowns is taking place at a time when migrant workers are more aware than ever of their legal rights and know how to put pressure on local governments. Two national labor laws were enacted in January that, among other things, require companies to pay severance and give out more long-term labor contracts. The laws could lead to more labor disputes and protests, said Mary Gallagher, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan.

"Increasingly, the migrant workers know their rights," she said. ...

Factories Shut, China Workers Are Suffering - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON: The Russians want him to hold off on installing a missile defense shield in Poland. The Europeans want him to renounce the idea of "regime change" when it comes to Iran, while the Israelis want to be sure he does not give Iran a pass when it comes to nuclear weapons.

The Taliban also issued a statement this week urging him to "put an end to all the policies being followed by his Opposition Party, the Republicans, and pull out U.S. troops from Afghanistan and Iraq."

There is a world of advice out there for President-elect Barack Obama. Within minutes of his election Nov. 4, the calls from foreign governments began, Obama aides say, and have still not stopped.

While the first telephone exchanges between Obama and foreign leaders have been limited to pledges of future cooperation and invitations to visit, those leaders and their underlings have also been targeting Obama's advisers and their surrogates with suggestions for how the Obama administration should conduct, and change, American foreign policy.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev plans to travel this month to Cuba and Venezuela, which have increasing military and trade ties with Moscow.

The U.S. has objected to Russia's greater links with the two countries that have antagonistic relations with Washington.

Medvedev will visit Cuba on Nov. 27, the Kremlin press service said. He will also visit Brazil during the trip.

Israel's chief negotiator with the Palestinians said on Thursday Israel did not need any "dramatic" intervention in the peace process from U.S. President-elect Barack Obama when he takes office in January.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who could become prime minister after Israel's general election in February, told Jewish leaders in New York the international community should limit itself to backing the talks according to parameters set out at a peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, nearly a year ago.

The talks have been hobbled by violence and bitter disputes over Jewish settlement building and the future of Jerusalem.

Livni said she welcomed the outcome of a meeting she attended last weekend in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with the Quartet -- the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States -- and Arab and Palestinian leaders.

In a 1968 plane crash, the US military lost an atom bomb in Greenland's Arctic ice. But this was no isolated case. Up to 50 nuclear warheads are believed to have gone missing during the Cold War, and not all of them are in unpopulated areas.

It was a little early to be swimming in the Mediterranean that year. But in early March 1966, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the Spanish information minister at the time, and Biddle Duke, the American ambassador in Madrid, together with their respective families, plunged into the chilly waters off the Costa Cálida. Journalists from around the world had gathered on the beach of the small village of Palomares to report on the two families' spring bathing outing. Their interest would have been surprising, if it hadn't been for the hydrogen bomb lying on the ocean floor only a few kilometers away, a bomb with more than 1,000 times the explosive force of the one that flattened Hiroshima.

Only a few weeks earlier, on Jan. 17, 1966, the worst nuclear weapons incident of the entire Cold War had taken place off Spain's southeastern coast. During an aerial tanking maneuver, an American B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanking aircraft collided in mid-air at 9,000 meters (29,000 feet), and both planes exploded in a giant fireball over Palomares. There were four hydrogen bombs in the hold of the B-52. One landed, unharmed, in tomato fields near the village. The non-nuclear fuse detonated in two others causing bomb fragments and plutonium dust to rain down on the impact site. The fourth bomb fell into the water somewhere off the coast, burying itself in several meters of silt. But where exactly did it fall?

Climate change and property values  L.A. Land: latimes.com   LA Land Blog  Posted by Peter Hong on November 13, 2008

Eroding beaches, disappearing snowpacks, subdivisions decimated by wildfires. Climate change in California could be expensive.

Now the costs of global warming's projected effects in the nation's largest state have been quantified. According to a new report authored by UC Berkeley researchers Fredrich Kahrl and David Roland-Holst, about $2.5 trillion of real estate assets in California are at risk from extreme weather events, sea level rise and wildfires with a projected annual price tag of $300 million to $3.9 billion.

The report includes an assessment of climate change's impact on California real estate.

--Margot Roosevelt

A 200-year-old church building has disappeared from a village in central Russia, officials from the Russian Orthodox Church say.

The building had stood near the village of Komarovo since 1809.

It was intact in July but some time in early October thieves made off with it brick by brick, they said.

Local prosecutors had been informed and an investigation was under way, a spokesman for the local Russian Orthodox Church said.

The disappearance of the Church of the Resurrection, some 300 km (186 miles) north-east of Moscow, was not immediately noticed.

A new offer from German power company RWE allows consumers for the first time to select a zero-carbon energy scheme fueled mostly by nuclear sources. But as Germany erupts in anti-nuclear protests, the company may be courting a backlash.

Germany's nascent nuclear renaissance is going commercial. Earlier this week, on the same day that police clashed with thousands of protesters trying to block a delivery of nuclear waste headed for a radioactive dump near the northern German town of Gorleben, a power company released a new energy product designed to capture the business of what it claims is a growing community of pro-nuclear consumers.

German consumers of electricity will now be able to choose a "Pro-Climate" package heavy on atomic energy. "Pro-Climate Power" is the name of the new electricity service available from RWE, one of Europe's largest electricity providers and based in the western German town of Essen. The service provides consumers with an electricity cocktail that derives 68 percent of its power from nuclear sources and 32 percent from hydroelectric energy sources. Although the plan is slightly more expensive than traditional packages, RWE is betting that consumers concerned about global warming will be willing to spend a little more to shrink their carbon footprint.

Back in 2000, when Germany was governed by ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder's coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, the government pledged to phase out the country's nuclear reactors. Some have already been shut down, and the final reactor is scheduled to go off line in 15 years. Recently, though, a number of politicians in Germany, many of them from Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), have said they want to slow down the phase-out. Power industry lobbyists, in particular, would like to see reactor lifetimes extended because, once the costs of construction are paid off, nuclear power plants can generate huge profits.

Europeans will soon be able to buy their own XO laptop.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation is planning to sell the devices via online store Amazon's European outlets from 17 November.

The machines will be sold under the Give One, Get One scheme that the OLPC organisation has already run in the US.

Under that scheme, buyers get one machine for themselves and the other is donated to a school child in a developing nation.

An anti-rape poster showing a naked woman lying on a bed in a Christ-like pose has been condemned by angry Italian politicians as blasphemous.

The poster, in which the woman's groin is discreetly covered by a white sheet but her breasts are bare, was commissioned by Italy's rape crisis helpline to persuade more victims of sexual assault to speak out.

But the poster, designed to publicise the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on Nov 25, has been condemned as sacrilegious by conservative politicians in Milan, who have vowed to stop 500 copies from being posted around the northern industrial city.

"I'll do everything in my power to stop this poster going up," said a city councillor, Maurizio Cadeo.

He and other right-wing councillors said the poster was "blasphemous" and would offend the religious beliefs of many Italians.

"We're calling for the poster to be withdrawn because an important day like this should not be debased by such a sexual provocation," said councillor Carlo Fidanza, a member of the right-wing National Alliance party.