From the judge’s bench to the witness stand, women are at the center of a sex trial for Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi starting today that has breathed new life into Italy’s feminist movement.
The trial revolves around allegations that Berlusconi paid for sex with an underage prostitute — just 17 at the time — and then committed abuse of office by getting her released from police custody in a separate incident.
The Moroccan girl, Karima El Mahroug — stage name “Ruby the Heart Stealer” — was questioned four times last year by prosecutors in Milan and made compromising statements about parties held at Berlusconi’s residence.
One of the organizers of the soirees was Nicole Minetti, a 25-year-old brunette and Berlusconi confidante who is accused in a separate case of incitement to prostitution of a minor and more than 30 other young women.
Considered by Milan prosecutors as a sort of madam working for 74-year-old Berlusconi, Minetti has had a meteoric career starting from when she was a dental hygienist and a starlet on one of Berlusconi’s television channels.
Last year she became a local councilor from Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in Lombardy — Italy’s wealthiest region. She has even confided to La Repubblica newspaper that she would like to be foreign minister one day.
That’s not an unlikely career move in Italy: Italian Equal Opportunities Minister Mara Carfagna was also once a show girl on one of the Berlusconi-owned channels.
The scandals have given Italy’s feminist movement a boost — with help from well-known personalities like Italian film directors Cristina and Francesca Comencini.
About 1 million people took part in rallies called by women’s groups across Italy in February to protest what they said was a political system that treats women as objects. Many participants voiced outrage against Berlusconi.
By 2027, Denmark would relocate its foreign convicts to a prison in Kosovo under a 200-million-euro (US$228.6 million) agreement that has raised concerns among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and residents, but which could serve as a model for the rest of the EU. The agreement, reached in 2022 and ratified by Kosovar lawmakers last year, provides for the reception of up to 300 foreign prisoners sentenced in Denmark. They must not have been convicted of terrorism or war crimes, or have a mental condition or terminal disease. Once their sentence is completed in Kosovan, they would be deported to their home country. In
Brazil, the world’s largest Roman Catholic country, saw its Catholic population decline further in 2022, while evangelical Christians and those with no religion continued to rise, census data released on Friday by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) showed. The census indicated that Brazil had 100.2 million Roman Catholics in 2022, accounting for 56.7 percent of the population, down from 65.1 percent or 105.4 million recorded in the 2010 census. Meanwhile, the share of evangelical Christians rose to 26.9 percent last year, up from 21.6 percent in 2010, adding 12 million followers to reach 47.4 million — the highest figure
LOST CONTACT: The mission carried payloads from Japan, the US and Taiwan’s National Central University, including a deep space radiation probe, ispace said Japanese company ispace said its uncrewed moon lander likely crashed onto the moon’s surface during its lunar touchdown attempt yesterday, marking another failure two years after its unsuccessful inaugural mission. Tokyo-based ispace had hoped to join US firms Intuitive Machines and Firefly Aerospace as companies that have accomplished commercial landings amid a global race for the moon, which includes state-run missions from China and India. A successful mission would have made ispace the first company outside the US to achieve a moon landing. Resilience, ispace’s second lunar lander, could not decelerate fast enough as it approached the moon, and the company has
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