Word: primed
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...there anyone who has any questions about underage females?" Not the typical way for the leader of a G-8 nation to begin a formal news conference. But this is Italy in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, the land of a flamboyant billionaire Prime Minister whose ambiguous relationship with an 18-year-old aspiring showgirl has dominated public debate for most of the month of May. Welcome to springtime in Berlusconistan...
...Prime Minister rules over this reality-show republic by virtue of his political persistence and surprising popularity (this is his third term), with his control of the airwaves (he owns the three main private TV channels) and, perhaps most intriguingly, with his ability to transform his personal whims into a disturbingly entertaining public discourse in a democracy of 58 million people. But his critics - and they do manage to get airtime in Berlusconistan - believe that the 72-year-old master manipulator may have triggered a news cycle that could actually lead to his political demise. (See Berlusconi's worst gaffes...
...operates, Berlin has appeared thus far to favor the plan presented by the Austrian billionaire Frank Stronach, whose Magna group is a major worldwide supplier of components to GM. Stronach has teamed up with Russian carmaker OAO GAZ Group and the state-controlled Russian financial group OAO Sberbank. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has been lobbying Merkel to support the Magna bid. Stronach told reporters on the sidelines of Wednesday's meeting in Berlin that Magna "could run Opel as a global brand." (Read "Can Americans Learn to Love Fiat? Chrysler Hopes...
...loud protests in Germany in the run-up to the nation's general elections have raised fears that GM's European plants outside Germany, such as those in Antwerp and several Vauxhall facilities in the U.K., could become easier targets for closure. British unions are urging Prime Minister Gordon Brown to prepare an aid package for Vauxhall to give the U.K. a voice at the table, but so far London has proffered no numbers...
...unearthed the new documents say there was no evidence in the files to suggest that Kurras was acting on direct Stasi orders to kill Ohnesorg. But the discovery that it was a Stasi spy who shot him has raised new questions about the history of the student movement. Prime among them: how might the student protest movement have developed if Germans had known at the time that Kurras was in the pay of the East German secret police? The question is all the more sensitive since that movement spawned the Red Army Faction, postwar Europe's most deadly terrorist organization...