Word: austria
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...feel besieged," a Vatican official says of the Pope. Many offices within the Holy See, according to this source, are now working "in great fear" of making further missteps (which have recently included controversies in Brazil and Austria). "The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing," he says. The good news on Tuesday, at least, was that Benedict's Alitalia flight lifted off on time. (See pictures of the Supreme Pontiff...
...authorities in Sankt Poelten are making the most of their sleepy, baroque town's misfortune of being the venue for perhaps the most grotesque trial in Austria's history. A large marquee reminiscent of a beer tent, flanked by sausage stands and a mobile sweetshop, has been erected outside the courtroom to accommodate the hundreds of journalists who've arrived here to follow the trial of Josef Fritzl. The septuagenarian engineer is charged with repeatedly raping his daughter over the 24 years that he kept her locked in a prison beneath his house and fathering seven children...
...times one of his victims had called him on his scam. Sgarbi's usual ploy, according to investigators, was to prowl hotel bars. Not just any hotel bars, though. The soft-spoken man booked himself into exclusive spas in Austria and Switzerland, places that invite well-paying clientele to leave their normal life behind, to unwind and open up. Selling himself as someone in need of rest as well, Sgarbi would strike up conversation when his victim's guard was down. For some of his victims, the handsome man must have seemed just like part of the therapy...
...help Hungarians and Poles keep paying their foreign currency-denominated mortgages by pumping in euros. The fear now is that the region's banks could collapse, especially if Western banks yank credit lines to eastern subsidiaries. Such a move would be counterproductive. Western banks, particularly in places such as Austria, Belgium and Sweden, have huge exposure to emerging Europe's economies. If banks there crash, it could trigger a financial domino effect that ends up hurting everybody...
...systems that are too big to fail and also too big to be saved. If Ireland or Greece go bust, then there is already a commitment from the Germans and French to, one way or another, bail them out. But if you have to rescue on top of them Austria and Italy, Portugal and Spain, and Belgium and the Netherlands, then that is not going to be possible. I am still of the view that we can avoid a collapse of the monetary union, but this is really the very first true test of its stability...