Word: italianizer
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...Vespa Girls used to be an institution at the University of Indonesia (UI). Back in the 1970s, these daughters of ?lite families would take breaks from their studies at Indonesia's best university by cruising on Italian two-wheelers, their miniskirts grazing their upper thighs. Sometimes, certain Vespa Girls wore no underwear. Today's UI, still the state-run breeding ground for the nation's future leaders, is a very different place. Half the female student body striding across the campus near Jakarta wear the jilbab, a Muslim scarf that covers the head and neck. Student politics is dominated...
...combines organic practices--like the banning of pesticides and chemicals--with somewhat mystical ideas such as basing planting and harvesting schedules on the position of the moon, sun and stars. It's full of colorful details like burying a cow horn filled with manure at the autumnal equinox. One Italian biodynamic vintner has even placed loudspeakers around his vineyards. Although he claims that playing Mozart makes his vines grow quicker and healthier, the more perceptible result of blaring Symphony No. 40 in G Minor is that it scares the bejesus out of grape-stealing deer, boars and birds...
...More damaging, an Italian judge has decided to go ahead with the trial of 25 CIA employees, an Air Force officer, and six Italian intelligence officials for kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The Americans aren't going to show up for the trial. And it's unclear whether the Italians really are going to end up in jail. But you can count on the Italian intelligence service thinking twice before helping the Americans with another sensitive counter-terrorist operation...
...speaking softly is the best way for a dissenting voice to be heard. Most recently, in an interview published Sunday in the Rome-based daily La Repubblica, he politely challenged both Benedict and Cardinal Camillo Ruini, head of Italy's bishop conference, for their repeatedly strong condemnations of an Italian government proposal to legalize civil unions for homosexuals and heterosexuals who don't want to marry. Though no supporter of gay marriage, Martini nevertheless decided it was time to register his opposition to the Vatican's hammering away on family-related issues. "The family is the cell of society...
...Church traditionalists, Martini remains a bete noire of liberal leadership. One conservative website described his recent remarks about an Italian euthanasia case as "another subversive blow." L'Espresso's veteran Vatican correspondent Sandro Magister, a supporter of the Pope's clear doctrinal lines, acknowledged Martini's continued weight. His dissent on moral issues, Magister wrote, "pits the highest leaders of the worldwide Church against each other with conflicting positions...