Milan’s top security official has been tapped to run Rome after the mayor was forced to step down by fellow party leaders worried he could not turn around the city, plagued by corruption and inadequate public services.
The Italian Ministry of the Interior on Saturday said Milan Prefect Francesco Paolo Tronca would be in charge until elections for a new mayor of the Italian capital are held, likely in the spring.
Tronca, a native Sicilian, helped ensure security during Milan’s hosting of the World Expo, which ended on Saturday.
Tronca is to take Rome’s helm a few weeks before the first of as many as 30 million pilgrims arrive for the Holy Year declared by Pope Francis.
Italian Minister of the Interior Angelino Alfano said Tronca was chosen “because the Holy Year must work like Expo worked.”
“We succeeded in pulling off a mafia-free Expo” by keeping at bay more than 100 businesses that could have had connections with mobsters, Alfano told an Italian radio station.
When elected mayor in 2013, Ignazio Marino inherited an administration in which corruption over the award of public works contracts and political patronage in dishing out jobs had been rife for decades.
Marino called an anti-mafia prosecutor, Alfonso Sabella, to Rome to help ensure legality.
Sabella on Saturday said that for years many public works contracts were awarded without bidding, and that Marino stopped that practice.
However, on Friday, Democratic city council members quit en masse in what amounted to a no-confidence measure against the mayor, and Marino was forced to step down.
Already skeptical that Marino, a transplant surgeon who jumped into politics a decade ago, had the skills to heal Rome, many rebelled after he came under investigation for allegedly using city funds for family dinners.
Marino denied wrongdoing and said his anti-corruption campaign won him political enemies.
Dozens of Democrats and opposition politicians and businessmen are under investigation over allegations of systematic payoffs and kickbacks or for using mafia-like intimidation methods to win public contracts under previous administrations.
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, a Peruvian presidential hopeful, gathered hundreds of supporters in Lima on Tuesday and gave authorities 24 hours to annul the first round of the country’s election over allegations of fraud. Lopez Aliaga is locked in a tight three-way race with two other candidates for second place in Sunday’s vote. The election runner-up wins a ticket to June’s presidential run-off against front-runner Keiko Fujimori. “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” said Lopez Aliaga, surrounded by a crowd of several hundred supporters. “If it is not declared null and void tomorrow,
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