■ United States
`Big Joey' sent to jail
Joseph "Big Joey" Massino, head of the Bonnano crime family and the last of New York's legendary Mafia dons, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday for his role in eight murders. While known for his old-school style of mob management, Massino's most enduring legacy will be as a top-ranking Mafia turncoat. After his conviction last year of seven murders, Massino stunned the organized-crime world by agreeing to co-operate with federal officials -- the first official boss of one of New York's five major crime families to do so. On Thursday, Massino pled guilty to ordering another murder -- that of Bonnano family captain, Gerlando "George from Canada" Sciascia, in 1999.
■ Germany
Nazi suspects in new probe
Authorities reopened investigations into 14 Nazi war-crimes suspects on Thursday, a day after a military court in Italy sentenced 10 of them to life imprisonment in absentia. The defendants, all in their 80s and in Germany, were also sentenced to pay legal costs. The Stuttgart probe involves nine of those 10 convicted men, plus five others. The massacre in Sant'Anna di Stazzema on Aug. 12, 1944, was perpetrated by SS officers of the "Reichsfuhrer" tank division. Most of the victims were women, children and elderly people.
■ Italy
`Playboy' PM irks Finns
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has put his foot in it again, this time with the Finnish President Tarja Halonen over the EU's food-standards agency. Berlusconi said he persuaded Halonen that the agency should be based in Italy, and suggested that he had flirted and charmed her into making the decision. "When you seek a result it is necessary to use all available weapons and therefore I brushed up all my playboy skills and I used a series of tender pleas to the president," Berlusconi said. He then made a derogatory remark about food in Finland, singling out smoked herring.
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