Comments by French health minister Olivier Véran came the day after Rome invoked European Union powers to block the export of 250,000 Covid-19 AstraZeneca vaccine doses to Australia.
Proposed merger of Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri with French rival Chantiers de l’Atlantique has been pushed by both governments as the way to create a dockyard standard-bearer for Europe to better compete in global markets.
Italy has lodged a formal complaint with France over environmental protection restrictions imposed by the latter in the Alps, where the two countries share a common border, overlap an area that is Italian territory.
“The end justifies the means” is a well-known phrase that for many represents the height of political cynicism, a notion that justifies any crime, and is very often thought to have been first used by Italian Renaissance diplomat, political philosopher and writer Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. Indeed, to be “Machiavellian” is to be underhand, cunning, unscrupulous and scheming. But, as Jean-Christophe Piot sets out here, the much-maligned Florentine thinker never wrote nor believed in the phrase that has been stuck to him.
The work stolen last year from the Bataclan music hall in Paris, and which depicted a young female figure with a mournful expression, created as a tribute to the 90 victims of the 2015 Islamic State group terrorist attack at the venue, has been found in a farmhouse in the Abruzzo region of Italy.
Pierre Mumber, a volunteer from the French Alps who came to the aid of migrants who crossed the nearby border with Italy, was last year convicted of 'helping a foreigner enter the country'. However, an appeal hearing against the verdict has been shown video footage from an Italian journalist which undermines the police version of events that led to the conviction. Meanwhile other cases confirm that the legal clampdown on French volunteers on the border who go out in search of migrants in distress is continuing. Michel Henry reports.
After the replacement earlier this month of Italy's populist and far-right government for one that is largely Left-leaning and pro-EU, the easing of a previously tense relationship between Rome and Paris was illustrated in a decision by the Italian culture minister to overturn an earlier refusal to lend France works by Leonardo da Vinci for an exhibition marking his death 500 years ago, while France will send paintings by Raphael for a similar exhibition next year in Italy.
A French couple are facing prosecution and a possible jail term of between one and six years after Italian police found 40 kilos of sand they took from a beach in Chia, southern Sardinia, crammed into plastic bottles in the boot of their vehicle.
Simon Gautier, who was studying art history in Rome, was last heard alerting emergency services in a call in which he said he had suffered a fall while trekking a remote area near Naples and had broken both legs.
