Word: rome
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...outraged enough by Sarkozy's climb-down on Petrella, their fury was presumably further stoked at learning the back story of the move: Sarkozy's Italian-born wife, Carla Bruni, and her sister, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, had lobbied the President not to extradite the gravely ill Petrella to Rome - it even fell to the sisters to personally break the news of that reprieve to the former terrorist. "We could not let this woman die," Bruni told the daily Libération Monday in explaining her intervention in Petrella's case. "The situation had become intolerable, dangerous...
...summer advanced. Even as he wrote Italian authorities in July promising to deliver Petrella once her French administrative appeals had been exhausted, Sarkozy urged clemency in light of the prisoner's perilous health - a suggestion swiftly rebuffed by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Rome. Less than a month later, a French appeals court ordered Petrella's release from custody at the request of French justice officials who fear she'd die otherwise - resulting in her police guards halting their surveillance of her hospitalization in the intensive care unit where she remains bed-ridden. Because of that...
...spearhead the so-called "Letter of Eight" public declaration of support from some European leaders for Bush's Iraq policy in the weeks before the invasion. Following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Berlusconi sent 3,000 Italian peacekeeping troops to southern Iraq. During Bush's June 2004 visit to Rome, the two leaders were the target of a massive anti-war rally. But Berlusconi, who at the time was growing increasingly unpopular with Italian voters, did not play down his kinship with the President during an interview then with TIME. "We have the same roots. He was in business...
Berlusconi's failed reelection bid in 2006 meant a two-year parenthesis of somewhat cooler Washington-Rome relations, as center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi, an opponent of Bush's Iraq policy, came to power in Italy. By the time Prodi's government collapsed and Berlusconi returned to power last spring, Bush was already registering dismal approval ratings, and heading toward the lower rungs in the historians' presidential ratings game...
...tendency to forge ahead with what he thinks is right for his church. In diplomatic terms, perhaps the cause for sainthood for a still controversial Nazi-era pontiff could use a somewhat longer "period of reflection." And maybe a Pope from another country. - With reporting by Francesco Peloso / Rome...