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Posts matching tags 'silvio berlusconi'
2010/1/19
In Italy, the Berlusconi government is planning to introduce regulations requiring anyone uploading videos to the internet to obtain government approval. The government claims that the regulations (which can be passed without a vote) are an enactment of an EU directive on product placement; conveniently, they also outlaw a lot of competition to established media, such as, for example, the Mediaset group owned by the current Italian Prime Minister.
Article 4 of the decree specifies that the dissemination over the Internet "of moving pictures, whether or not accompanied by sound," requires ministerial authorization. Critics say it will therefore apply to the Web sites of newspapers, to IPTV and to mobile TV, obliging them to take on the same status as television broadcasters.The regulations follow an earlier attempt by the Italian government to regulate bloggers by subjecting them to the same rules as newspaper publishers. Italy also requires all users of internet access points to register their identity, under an "anti-terrorism and anti-paedophilia" law.
2009/12/24
There is growing speculation that the recent attack on embattled Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi was staged, to give his flagging popularity a sympathy boost and allow his allies to push through useful restrictions to civil liberties:
A video sequence posted on YouTube shows television footage in which Berlusconi immediately covers the lower part of his face with a black plastic bag after the attack and keeps it there while being bundled into a car with no blood visible.
The first video asks why Berlusconi emerged from the car a few minutes after the attack, showing his bloody face to the cameras, including a deep wound below his left eye which did not appear in the first images.
2009/9/6
There's a new documentary which looks at how Italian president and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi has, over the past three decades, changed his country's culture, society and politics. Videocracy, by Swedish-based Italian filmmaker Erik Gandini, starts 30 years ago, when Berlusconi's channels started introducing gratuitous female nudity to mainstream programming, ramping up the amount of vacuous, vaguely pornographic titilliation, and culminating with their owner becoming president, twice. The film interviews a number of characters symbolic of the system, including a hapless, fame-hungry talent-show contestant, a fascist-sympathising media fixer, and a paparazzo and convicted extortionist turned celebrity. There are more details here, and (with a trailer) here.
Beginning with a young Berlusconi’s arrival on the commercial Italian TV scene three decades ago, the film opens with archive footage of a stripping housewife quiz show – proving that this Italian TV gem is not the urban legend some assume it to be – and segues into a montage of busty variety show starlets (one of whom is now minster for gender equality in Berlusconi’s government). Videocracy then introduces us to the three main characters whoare used as benchmarks for the moral madness that the director sees as being induced by the dumbed down world of Italian commerical TV.Videocracy is screening at the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, both Berlusconi's private TV channels and the Italian state broadcaster RAI have refused to run advertisements for it.
2008/7/7
An argument has erupted between Italy's brusquely right-wing Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and archtitect Daniel Libeskind (best known for the Berlin Jewish Museum, New York's planned Freedom Tower and the Metropolitan University student union building in Holloway Road), after Berlusconi criticised Libeskind's design for a tower in Milan for not being straight enough, and emanating "a sense of impotence":
"In Fascist Italy, everything that was not 'straight' was considered 'perverse art'," said Libeskind. "My tower is inspired by the work of Leonardo da Vinci, and great Italian culture. [Mr Berlusconi] does not have the time or intellect to study these.
"As an American and Jew brought up in Poland, I find Berlusconi abominable. His concept of nationalism, of closing borders and denying what's different, is repugnant. He hates foreigners."Some are now speculating that Berlusconi will have planning permission for the project revoked. (Which suggests that in Italy, rule of law is sufficiently feeble to allow the prime minister to override local decision-makers out of pique.)
2008/2/1
The Independent lists the musical pasts of various public figures:
Silvio Berlusconi: Politician
The Italian media magnate and former prime minister paid his way through university by singing and playing the piano on cruise ships. He has been known throughout his colourful political career for his habit of breaking into song unexpectedly.
The article mentions a number of other famous people who had played music in their pasts (such as comedian Ricky Gervais, who was a new-romantic sensation (though only in the Philippines), Jamie Oliver's third-division Britpop career, and Tony Blair's infamous student rock-band past. One notable example not mentioned, though, is US Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan's former career as a calypso singer.A C Grayling: Philosopher
Grayling, a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of a biography of William Hazlitt and other books, was once part of the expat rock scene in Northern Rhodesia – now Zambia – where he was born in 1949.
He says: "From the ages of 14 to 16, I was in a group called the Rebels – three guitars and a drummer. I started as the bass guitarist but then it turned out that not only could I not sing well, I couldn't sing at all and play the bass guitar, so I graduated to the rhythm guitar. I wore a pair of black, plastic-sided, high-heeled 'Beatle' boots that were two sizes too small. I thought I was the bee's knees."
2005/12/22
Italian Prime Minister and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi has made statements defending a footballer, facing criticism for using the Fascist salute as "a bit of a show-off". That, in itself, is not particularly shocking for a conservative politician; however, he followed it up with a defense of the legitimacy of Fascism:
"Fascism in Italy was never a criminal doctrine. There were the racial laws, horrible, but because one wanted to win the war with Hitler," Mr Berlusconi told foreign journalists.Of course, given that Berlusconi has near-total control of Italy's television (owning the largest private TV network and controlling state-run TV, which, presumably, is not funded by a BBC-style license fee), he stands a chance of getting away with it and winning the next election (which he is confidently boasting that he will).
2005/9/29
From this week, anybody wishing to use an internet cafe or public telephone or fax machine in Berlusconi's Italy will have to produce their passport or identity papers. Furthermore, the managers of internet cafes and communications centres will be obliged to keep records of the times customers enter and leave the premises and which computers or telephones they use.