Word: palermo
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...brazen murders of Falcone (blown up on May 23, 1992 in his car along with his wife and three bodyguards) and Borsellino (killed in a similar attack two months later), organized crime experts say the Mob is quietly developing a very different look from the one on stage at Palermo's rowdy trials. If a similar mass roundup were mounted today - unlikely since evidence and turncoat witnesses have dried up - the usual ensemble of toughs with colorful nicknames and brass knuckles would certainly be on hand. But the modern Mob is transforming itself, and two new character types are emerging...
...University of Palermo has given out its share of degress to mobsters' sons in recent years. Professor Giovanni Santangelo, vice-rector at the university, said the Mafia's move into the mainstream makes it both more invisible and more powerful. "The sons of mafiosi today, with rare exception, are all white-collar. They are programmed to be so." Santangelo says that in the past, university degrees were turned into law careers to provide a small army of legal defenders. "They've already got enough lawyers. They're diversifying," he says, into public fund administrators (to dip into billions of dollars...
...pleasantly surveyed with a quick connect-the-squares walk (Piazza Castello to Piazza Vittorio Veneto on the banks of the Po River is a good starting route) that provides some satisfying food for the eyes. The architecture is largely 17th and 18th century Baroque that recalls Paris more than Palermo - many of the most splendid palazzi are the original property of the House of Savoy...
...European Union's ambitious but remote project of political integration. They have scant understanding of the inscrutable institutions of Brussels, which pour forth picayune rules on everything from bird hunting to the curvature of cucumbers. The debut of more than 10 billion new banknotes, legal tender from Helsinki to Palermo, has given 300 million Europeans their first concrete experience of union. An Austrian who stood in a long bank queue to get her first walletfull of euros could go home and see Spaniards doing the same thing on television. European Parliament elections just don't get this kind of saturation...
...papal property, and this carried implications that the high and mighty of Europe could hardly ignore. Gifts to San Francesco were gifts to the papacy as well as to the memory of St. Francis, and they poured in from all over Christendom: vestments made by Arabic textile masters in Palermo and presented by the crusader King of Jerusalem; illuminated manuscripts from Louis IX, King of France (and later a saint himself); sumptuous tokens from the rulers of England, Germany and Spain, as well as the various lay and ecclesiastical bigwigs of Italy and the successive Popes themselves. The last person...