Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi resigned yesterday after a no-confidence vote in parliament that was, to say the least, contentious, the New York Times reports: ROME — Italy’s government finally fell Thursday, after Prime Minister Romano Prodi lost a confidence vote that made it clear that Italy’s leaders know they face a deep political and economic crisis but are venomously divided over how to solve it. Emblematic of those divisions, during the debate one senator rushed in fury to the desk of a colleague, Stefano Cusumano, and taunted and apparently tried to attack him. Mr. Cusumano, 60, reportedly cried, then [...]
Apart from “foreigner crime” (see the previous WPR report), the other issue that has been dominating the headlines in the German media in the run up to important regional elections on Sunday is the decision of the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia to shutter a plant in Bochum in North Rhine-Westphalia and to transfer the production capacity to the Romanian city of Cluj. In an interview with the public television network ZDF, the Christian Democratic governor of North Rhine-Westphalia, Jürgen Rüttgers, went so far as to describe Nokia as a kind of “locust”: namely, for having benefited from public subsidies [...]
Although Western attention has focused on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a potential threat to Western influence in Eurasia, another institution, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), currently represents a more serious near-term challenge. Last October, the leaders of the CSTO convened one of their most important summits in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan. The assembled presidents and senior staff reached several important decisions that testify to the CSTO’s expanding regional security ambitions. First, they adopted procedures formally authorizing members to conduct joint peacekeeping operations. Second, by reaffirming Moscow’s willingness to sell arms to its CSTO allies on a [...]
