Wednesday's court decision caps a wretched few months for Mr Berlusconi.

Ever since the incendiary comments in April from his wife, Veronica, that he needed help because of his unhealthy interest in young women, he has been ricocheting back and forth between a series of personal scandals.

Claims that he spent the night with an escort have been one of the higher-end allegations.

Mr Berlusconi never quite denied the nature of the woman's profession, but has insisted he never parted with a cent of his multi-billion euro fortune.

The new French culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand, is fighting to save his brief ministerial career after opposition politicians expressed disgust at his autobiography, in which he justified sex tourism and admitted "paying for boys".

Mr Mitterrand, 62, the nephew of the late president, François Mitterrand, was thrown on to the defensive after rival MPs homed in on memoirs in which he described his delight in visiting Asian brothels.

The revelations, in his 2005 best-seller La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life), were unearthed by far-right politicians angered by his outspoken defence of the film director Roman Polanski, who was arrested in Switzerland for extradition to Los Angeles to face charges of having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

Waving banners scrawled with "Berlusconi is bad for Italy's health," more than 100,000 people rallied to protest for a free press in Italy over the weekend. Not surprisingly, Italy's newspapers and television barely covered the event in Rome's Piazza del Popolo.

The Italian Press Federation organized the gathering after nearly two decades of growing interference in free journalism within and around the media empire owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

The protest capped a summer in which Berlusconi's wife dumped him for allegedly having an underage girlfriend and pornographic video and pictures surfaced from his Sardinian party house.

Last week, journalists on one of the government-owned broadcasting channels, RAI 2, interviewed a woman, Patrizia d'Addario, who claimed she took money to have sex with the Italian leader. The government promptly withdrew the journalists' contracts, even though d'Addario's tell-all book about her romp with the septuagenarian has been covered widely in Europe.

While half of Italy apparently still supports the randy PM, the firings are only the latest in a long history of incursions against press freedom by the Berlusconi government. Italy's journalists are not in fear for their lives as are reporters in Zimbabwe or Russia, but they are in fear for their jobs.

Many leading broadcasters and writers have been fired or quietly relieved of work over the years for criticizing the prime minister. They, and their commentary, have been replaced by young women whose rise in broadcasting is related to their ability to perform the "stachetto" -- a kind of partially clothed pole dance, without the pole, that is the chief entrance test for women who want to join Berlusconi's television empire.

http://www.alternet.org/story/143093/has_prime_minister_silvio_berlusconi_created_titillating_tv_fascism_in_italy__

from the BBC

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has described himself as the most persecuted person "in the entire history of the world".

Mr Berlusconi also said he was "the best prime minister we can find today".

In an impassioned statement, he then mistakenly told reporters he had spent millions of euros on "judges", before correcting himself to say "lawyers".

Mr Berlusconi was speaking two days after Italy's top court lifted a law granting him immunity while in office.

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la persona più perseguitati and il miglior primo ministro che possiamo trovare oggi... martyrdom of course... See toon at top.

A television channel owned by the media empire of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, has been accused of an extraordinary attempt to harass the judge who earlier this month ruled against his business empire in a bribery case.

Within days of magistrate Raimondo Mesiano ordering Berlusconi's Fininvest group, his financial holding company, to pay €750m (£680m) in compensation to a rival company, the prime minister's flagship Canale 5 channel began secretly filming the magistrate in the streets of Milan as he went about his business.

The results were beamed to millions on the Mattino 5 programme, accompanied by a voiceover that ridiculed Mesiano for his "extravagant" and "eccentric behaviour", his "impatience", and, most bizarrely, the fact that he wore turquoise socks. Mesiano appeared to have done nothing stranger than go for a shave, and smoke cigarettes outside the barber shop while awaiting his turn.

The video has raised tensions between Berlusconi and the judiciary even further following the Constitutional Court's decision earlier this month to strip thePrime Minister of his immunity from prosecution – thus making it likely that he will have to return to court on corruption charges.

Nearly 100,000 Italian women have signed a petition expressing anger over an insult by PM Silvio Berlusconi to a female politician on live television.

Mr Berlusconi said the woman, 58-year-old Rosy Bindi, was "more beautiful than intelligent".

The prime minister says his comments were a joke, but he has been accused of chauvinism.

Some view the backlash as a new feminism taking root in a traditionally conservative country.

Others say that it is another example of Mr Berlusconi's ability to offend women, whether he means it or not.

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read comment above...

The world financial crisis has hit Italy quite hard... News, from my contacts there, are grim. Well the sky is not about to fall but apparently the neat and happy italian demeanor of recent years has been replaced by the gloomy faces and grubby streets of yesteryear...

Dozens of Italian judges have walked out of courts in protest at PM Silvio Berlusconi's judicial reforms, which they call destructive.

The judges left ceremonies to mark the start of the judicial year as a government official began speaking.

They say they are fed up with Mr Berlusconi's "threats" against them.

The prime minister, who faces two court cases, says judges are "communists" who are trying to depose him through the legal system.

The Italian parliament - dominated by Mr Berlusconi's supporters - is currently examining the legislation, which includes provisions to curb the length of legal cases.

Opponents say it would in effect stop these two trials, but the prime minister denies it is tailor-made to do this.

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see toon at top... and for those who don't know: a fidola is a viola played like a violin is played like a fiddle...

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has reacted angrily to the publication in Spain of photographs showing topless women and a naked man at his villa.

He has threatened to sue Spain's El Pais newspaper, calling the photos an invasion of privacy.

The photos - banned in Italy on privacy grounds - were taken from outside Mr Berlusconi's villa in Sardinia during a party for a Czech delegation.

He also faces a probe for using state aircraft to fly guests to Sardinia.

The prime minister is said to have used Italian aircraft to ferry guests to and from Villa Certosa, "almost every weekend" between the summer of 2007 and January of this year, El Pais reports.

Mr Berlusconi is being investigated for misuse of public funds, and confirmed on Thursday that he had been formally placed under investigation by prosecutors.

But he said the probe would be "swiftly shelved", insisting he was allowed to transport "people he needs" for security reasons.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8084694.stm

see toon at top...

Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into a suspected attempt to falsify the birth records of the teenager at the centre of the underage sex scandal engulfing prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Judicial sources said the investigation had been opened against unknown individuals who were alleged to have tried to bribe a Moroccan official to change the birth records of Karima El Mahroug, better known under her stage name Ruby.

Mr Berlusconi has been charged with paying for sex with El Mahroug last year when she was under the legal age limit of 18 and with abusing the powers of his office by intervening with police in a bid to cover up his connection with her.

His trial is scheduled to begin on April 6.

Mr Berlusconi has denied having sex with El Mahroug, who has admitted receiving 7,000 euros from the premier.

He has said he gave her the money because he merely wanted to help someone in difficulty.

According to the left-wing daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, two Italian men approached a registry official in the Moroccan town of Fkih Ben Salah last month and offered her thousands of euros to change records showing El Mahroug was born on November 1, 1992.

Prostitution is not illegal in Italy but it is an offence to pay for sex with someone under the age of 18.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/03/15/3163984.htm?section=justin

Italy's cabinet has approved a 45.5 billion euro ($A62.2 billion) austerity budget, its second in weeks in a bid to calm investors, with measures including more taxes on high earners.

"It's 20 billion euros in 2012 and 25.5 billion euros in 2013," Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi told reporters after the government meeting on Friday.

He said the measures were in line with demands from the European Central Bank in return for massive support given to Italy's bond markets this week.

"This program goes in the direction of what the ECB recommended," Berlusconi said.

The 74-year-old centre-right leader said the plan included a five-per cent tax for two years on people with an income of between 90,000 euros and 150,000 euros a year, and 10-per cent on those earning more than 150,000 euros.

After more than 26 months, 50 court hearings and countless breathless column inches from journalists worldwide, it took just four minutes for the sentence that Silvio Berlusconi had feared to be delivered. At 5.19pm, before a fascist-era sculpture showing two men struck down by a towering figure, the judges swept into the courtroom and pronounced their damning verdict for Italy's longest-serving postwar prime minister. By 5.23pm, it was all over.

At the culmination of a trial that helped strike the final nail in the coffin of the playboy politician's international reputation, the judges found Berlusconi guilty both of paying for sex with the underage prostitute nicknamed Ruby Heartstealer and abusing his office to cover it up. They even went beyond the prosecutors' sentencing requests, ordering him to serve seven – rather than six – years in prison and face a lifetime ban on holding public office.

Perhaps fittingly for a case that cast a spotlight on the murky nexus of sex and power that prosecutors argued was at the heart of his premiership – in which young women were procured, they said, "for the personal sexual satisfaction" of the billionaire septuagenarian – all three judges were female.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/24/silvio-berlusconi-guilty-underage-prostitute

I hope the Guardian regrets this last remark... 

See toon at top...