Word: ils
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...printed press has its own conflicts of interest. The Fiat holding group has controlling stakes in Milan daily Corriere della Sera and Turin-based La Stampa. Daily La Repubblica is owned by Carlo De Benedetti, a business rival of Berlusconi's with interests in energy, automobiles and health care. Il Sole 24 Ore, the country's financial paper, is owned by Italy's main industrial lobby. "Italian entrepreneurs tend to depend largely on Italian politics," says Ricardo Franco Levi, an opposition parliamentarian and the former editor in chief of L'Indipendente, a short-lived 1991 attempt at a truly independent...
...spent four years as a propaganda artist, portraying North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in unvaryingly heroic poses, but now the painter Sunmu is having fun with the form. Since arriving in the South in 2001, 38-year-old Sunmu - it's an assumed name - has been lampooning his old master from a musty studio in a run-down suburb of western Seoul. In the eponymous work Kim Jong Il, the North Korean supremo is shown in a pink tracksuit, grinning and fat. In Please Have Some Medicine (pictured), he is a dying hospital patient being offered Coca-Cola...
...Diplomats and expatriates are among Sunmu's best customers, because curiously his work meets with a mixed reception from many South Koreans. Tough national security restrictions govern any display of North Korean imagery, and pictures of Kim Jong Il are no laughing matter to some gallery owners and officials, even if the satire is leaping off the canvas. Organizers removed a Sunmu painting of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il's father and the founder of North Korea, from an international festival in Pusan last year. (See pictures of Kim Jong Il...
...feels defamed," says the aide. "He has faced daily attacks for months and has decided not to take it any more." And so the prime minister apparently decided it was time to double down. On July 29, in news that then got scant attention, the Berlusconi family newspaper, Il Giornale, hired back its former attack-dog editor-in-chief Vittorio Feltri, the first move in what has turned into a major end-of-summer counter-offensive by Berlusconi that has raised the stakes on his political destiny, and risks spiraling out of control. (See Silvio Berlusconi's worst gaffes...
...came to a head this past week after Il Giornale published a series of articles alleging that Dino Boffo, editor of Avvenire, the Italian Bishops Conference daily newspaper, was a "homosexual known to the Italian secret services" and had paid damages to a woman in a 2004 harrassment case. Feltri wrote that he was publishing these accusations against Boffo, who had criticized Berlusconi's private life, as a response to his "moralistic campaign" against the Prime Minister. Il Giornale also hammered away at the Church for past scandals involving pedophile priests. After repeatedly and vehemently denying Feltri's charges, Boffo...