Around 80,000 gipsy children are to be fingerprinted by the Italian authorities under a new scheme that has drawn comparisons to the policies of Benito Mussolini.

The Italian government has blamed immigrants, and particularly Roma gipsies, for the country’s crime problems.

Since Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister in April, gypsy camps in the south and north of the country have been burned by vigilante mobs.

The home minister, Roberto Maroni, has now announced that all the Roma will be fingerprinted, including children. “This is not ethnic cataloguing, this is the ultimate safeguard of their rights,” he said.

Article continuesadvertisement “We will take the children’s fingerprints in order to stop those occasions when parents send their children out to beg. It is a proper census to make sure that those who have the right to stay here can live in decent conditions,” he said.

According to the latest figures, there are 160,000 Roma gipsies in Italy, almost half of whom have Italian citizenship. The last census recorded that 80,000 of them are children.

The move has triggered memories of the segregation of Jews imposed by Benito Mussolini in 1938. “I remember when I could not go to school with the others,” said Amos Luzzatto, a former president of Italy’s Union of Jewish Communities.

“There is a latent racism in Italian culture and it manifests itself cyclically,” he added. “Taking the fingerprints of youngsters from one ethnic group implies that you consider them to be congenital thieves.”

Unicef, the United Nation’s children’s rights body, said it was “shocked and deeply worried” by the plans.

(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk 

We have new dreams. We dream of more peace, more progress, more democracy and more citizenship. We dream of a better world with more justice. In order to achieve this we need leaders who dream with us, who are capable to continue making the dreams come true.

A ll the world loves Italy because it is old but still glamorous. Because it eats and drinks well but is rarely fat or drunk. Because it is the place in hyper-regulated Europe where people still debate with perfect intelligence what, really, the red in a stoplight might mean.

But these days, for all the outside adoration and all its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is “malessere,” or malaise, and it implies a collective funk - economic, political and social - summed up in a recent poll: Italians, despite their claim to have mastered the art of living, report themselves the least happy people in Western Europe.

[more on IHT]

Guy Dinmore in Rome, Financial Times

Local authorities in Italy have started expelling Romanian immigrants under a tough decree that the government hurriedly issued in order to calm the public uproar concerning the brutal murder of a woman outside a Rome railway station.

The centre-left government is accusing an ill prepared European Union of failing to anticipate a “mass exodus” of Romanians since the country’s entry into the EU in January.

EU directive 38, which governed the free movement of citizens with criteria for residency and limited provisions for expulsions, was completely insufficient, said Giuliano Amato, the interior minister. Various statistics have been issued but Mr Amato spoke of a “historic phenomenon” of 500,000 poor Romanians flooding into Italy within a year. (more…)

Che ruolo può avere l`approccio multiculturalista e relativista della cultura mediterranea nello scontro di civiltà? Un saggio curato dal sociologo Franco Cassano e dal filosofo del diritto Danilo Zolo: L`alternativa mediterranea, riflette in chiave sociale, culturale, ma anche anche politica, sulla complessità della nostra area, e la propone, come una sorta di terza via, all`integralismo dei continenti e ai fondamentalismi. Sui pro e i contro della proposta (nell`area mediterranea molti diritti civili acquisiti in altre zone del mondo non sono riconosciuti), interviene anche il filosofo Massimo Cacciari.
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Acording to Vunet, travellers flying from Europe to the US will have their personal data kept on record by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) until 2022. Data could include political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership and sexual orientation. All these information will be useful for preventing terrorism and “other serious offences that are transnational in nature”. But it will be accessible by any US law enforcement agency in pursuit of ” serious crimes”.
Is this kind of data deemed important for preventing terrorism?

I though it was a joke, when Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told the National Assembly:

“France is a country that thinks. There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”

But it wasn’t a joke, and yoo can read on Herald Tribune an exhaustive article about this new anti-intellectual trend: New leaders say pensive French think too much

“Chi si oppone al G8 non combatte otto protagonisti eletti democraticamente nei loro paesi, ma combatte l’occidente, combatte la sua filosofia, combatte la libera iniziativa e il libero mercato” (Sivio Berlusconi, La Stampa 2001)

In 2001 Genoa witnessed the worst human rights violations in the short history of the young movement against capitalist globalisation. Two people were killed by the police on the 20th, one in Genoa and one at the border, and many others have been beat up in the most outrageous display of fascist state brutality in recent Western European history.

In one sense, a death in Genoa during the G8 in 2001 was predictable, practically predicted by Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian Prime Minister, who boasted of the military hardware to be deployed against protesters. In an environment of militarized repression, armed paramilitary squads, and good evidence of government-backed provocateurs inciting violence, death was nearly inevitable.

(more…)

According to the Daily Telegraph “The Roman Catholic bishops in England and Wales are resisting the Pope’s plans to liberalise the use of the traditional Latin Mass.”

XVI have signed a document that would allow priests to celebrate the 16th-century rite, despite the fact that a large number of believers concern about the Pope’s growing determination to reinforce conservative doctrines in his battle against the forces of secularism.

The Tridentine Rite, which dates back to the 1560 Council of Trent, includes also a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of Jews. But The Daily Telegraph reports that the the authorization for celebrating the Tridentine Mass will exclude such prayer.