Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi gave a lesson on Islam and copies of the Koran to a few hundred young Italian women on Sunday as he arrived in Rome for his fourth visit in a year.
It was the second time the Libyan leader — who travels with female bodyguards and describes himself as a feminist — had staged such an event for Italian women, who were recruited by a modeling agency and paid an undisclosed sum to attend.
Michela, who asked that her last name not be used, said that three of the participants converted to Islam on the spot.
“It was a really beautiful meeting and went very well,” she said. “He is very easygoing and he gave us a copy of the Koran. Three girls converted themselves to Islam during the ceremony. It was a beautiful event.”
Other participants, though, identifying themselves as Roman Catholics in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, said Qaddafi had urged others to convert and had dismissed Christianity as unimportant.
Between 200 and 500 young women attended, arriving in 10 buses at the Libyan ambassador’s residence just as Qaddafi’s plane was landing at Rome’s Ciampino airport at the start of a two-day visit.
The visit, amid steadily improving business ties between Libya and its former colonial ruler, also marks the second anniversary of a friendship treaty in which Italy agreed to pay Libya US$5 billion as compensation for its 30-year occupation, which ended in 1943.
When Qaddafi was in Italy in November for a UN food summit, he hosted 200 young Italian women who had been recruited and paid 50 euros (US$75) by the same modeling agency to attend. Then, too, he gave a lecture on Islam and handed out copies of the Koran.
This time around, the women wouldn’t say how much they had been paid, only that they had received a small “reimbursement.”
During his first visit to Italy in June last year, Qaddafi invited 700 prominent Italian businesswomen and female politicians to listen to a lecture in which he criticized Islam’s treatment of women, but also suggested male relatives should decide if a woman can drive.
As part of the friendship treaty anniversary celebrations, some 30 Libyan horses were arriving in Rome to take part in a joint demonstration with Italy’s carabinieri equestrian forces yesterday, news reports said.
Qaddafi made his first visit to Italy in June, proclaiming a new era in relations following the friendship treaty. But that first visit also was marked by a symbolic demonstration that the wounds of colonialism still ran deep: He arrived wearing a black-and-white photo pinned to his military uniform of a Libyan national hero killed by Italian colonial authorities.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS