A top Italian court yesterday confirmed center-left leader Romano Prodi's slim electoral victory over Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, Italian Sky TV news said.
The reported confirmation by the Court of Cassation, a top Italian court in Rome, comes after the review of some 5,200 ballots that were not immediately included in the overall count because the voters' intentions were not clear.
The court said an official announcement would not be made until later yesterday.
Prodi said he would not comment until after the official announcement, the ANSA news agency reported.
Prodi won a razor-thin majority in the April 9-10 vote, winning control of both houses of parliament.
For days, the former prime minister and ex-EU chief has claimed victory, urging Berlusconi to concede defeat.
But the conservative leader has so far remained defiant.
The confirmation was widely expected after the Interior Ministry last week reduced the number of the contested ballots from more than 80,000 to 5,200, dashing Berlusconi's hopes of overturning the election result.
In any case, it will be weeks before Prodi can take over as prime minister.
It is up to the president to give the mandate to form a government. However, the current president's term expires mid-next month, and he has indicated he wants to leave the task to his successor.
Prodi has been meeting with allies in recent days, including yesterday, as he prepares to establish a new government.
In a statement on Tuesday, Berlusconi's center-right coalition contended that in the rush to get information to the high court for the ballot review, lower courts may have made errors. A leader of the prime minister's party warned of unspecified legal action if doubts over the ballots remain.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS