Word: scelba
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Italy's Reds dislike Mario Scelba with a special fervor. For Premier Scelba is a double threat: he leans to the left with a program that competes for the workman's allegiance, he is also the tough-minded Interior Minister who in 1948 cowed Italy's rioting Reds with his jeep-riding celere. Last week, as Scelba prepared to ask the Senate and Chamber to confirm his new government, the Communists took after him in the piazza and in Parliament...
Italy's biggest trade union, the Red-led C.G.I.L.. called 24-hour general strikes on the pretext of demanding an overdue wage increase. But several days before the strikes, the new government of Mario Scelba had cut the ground from under them by promising a raise. That did not stop the Reds: they surged into downtown Rome and massed for a march on the Chamber. Scelba was ready: thousands of his celere rushed in, quietly hustled 500 toughs off to jail...
Time to Stop. In Milan and Bologna and elsewhere, despite all the Red threats that they would paralyze the economic life of the country, strikes were only partly effective. And even the minor dislocations irritated more than they impressed. Remarks like "It's time Scelba put a stop to this sort of thing" could be heard as commuters waited for delayed buses...
...small mountain village of Mussomeii, 47 miles from Scelba's Sicilian birthplace, 900 threadbare townspeople gathered to demonstrate against a new $8-a-year water tax. Egged on by agitators, the crowd tried to storm the town hall; the police, ordered not to use firearms, tossed tear-gas bombs. Mistaking the missiles for hand grenades, the crowd stampeded into a blind alley. In the crush, three women and a boy were trampled to death. The Reds had the martyrs they wanted. They quickly ordered a "National Demonstration of Mourning and Protest," a series of leapfrog strikes in the north...
...Italy was alive with theories about who killed Pisciotta. The fascist and Communist press did their best to put it on newly appointed Premier Scelba's administration, but had no evidence to go on. Others whispered the dread and legendary name of Mafia. But in Sicily, where the ways of bandits are better understood, the people cared little for such sophisticated argument. For Sicilians, it was enough that an informer had been killed...