A man attacked Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi this evening at a rally, striking the 73-year-old politician with either his hand or an object and bloodying his face.

Berlusconi was knocked to the ground by the blow, and then hastily helped into a car by aides. He appeared slightly dazed after the incident, left the car immediately and attempted to climb onto it to show supporters that he was not badly injured. As Berlusconi climbs up, handlers try to shield his bloodied face from the crowd with jackets.

Berlusconi was greeting supporters in a square in Milan when the attack occurred. There were reportedly confrontations between supporters of the Italian PM and hecklers, and the BBC reports that Berlusconi addressed the detractors at the rally, saying:

“They paint me as a monster, but I don’t think I am one – firstly because I am good-looking and secondly because I’m a decent chap.”

Berlusconi was reportedly taken to a Milan hospital and is said to be under observation for 24 hours. No information was released on the extent of his injuries.

Remember this sweet looking machine?

Well it was a custom built 560hp 5.2-liter V10 Lamborghini Gallardo that was delivered back in October to the Italian State Police. Not counting the sweet paint job it also sported everything from real time wireless video recorder to GPS. In other words a car every cop would drool and beg to get their hands on.

Here’s a couple of other shots of it as well as a video of it going through a test run.

Well that was then and this is now

Today, a bandaged and bruised police driver may have had a tough time explaining how he managed to write off one of the force’s prized Lamborghinis when he rammed it so hard into a line of parked cars that one of the stationary vehicles ended up on the police car’s roof.

According to the police, the crash was caused by the driver of a slow-moving Seat Ibiza who emerged without looking from a service station, clipping the Lamborghini and sending the vehicle swerving into the parked cars.

The front end of the Lamborghini was crushed in the accident, near Cremona, and the driver and a passenger were injured, although not seriously.

Source: Guardian Online

And as they say – film at 11 ….

hat tip for pre-crash Lamborghini: Hypebeast
hat tip for broken Lamborghini: Arbroath

A woman has been charged by an Italian court for pimping her 7 year old daughter for money to support her drug habit.

The woman, known only as Ines B., was found guilty in court in Milan, Italy yesterday, of locking her 7 year old daughter in a room with men who raped her. The junkie mother then used the money the men paid her to buy drugs. The repeated incidents happened in 2004.

According to the Croatian Times, social workers immediately took the 7 year old girl into protective custody. The mother was sentenced to 14 years in jail and ordered to pay damages equivalent to $211,500 US.

Hopefully social workers can ease the child’s mental pain and place her in a home where she’ll spend the rest of her childhood as normal as possible. Poor kid.

The Italian Senate has passed a law that will force Internet providers to block access to sites if they incite or justify criminal behavior.

While the law provides the right to block any site, Facebook is squarely in the firing line, after Italian prosecutors began looking into Facebook groups dedicated to convicted Sicilian Mafia bosses Bernardo Provenzano and Salvatore Riina last month, according to Bloomberg.

“The Internet must be free, but it can’t be a jungle where good people and murderers are indistinguishable,” Senator Gianpiero D’Alia said “It’s indecent that Facebook said that it won’t allow pictures of mothers breastfeeding while there are no rules about removing groups of delinquents…It’s only right that Facebook be blacked out.”

The bill allows for the Government to first demand that inappropriate content be removed, and then if it isn’t, for a ban to be put in place.

The measure must pass in the Chamber of Deputies before formally becoming law.

Typical though of censorship regimes: they always start with a basic premise, but end up blocking a whole lot more. Coming soon to the internet in Australia I might add.

The Vatican has condemned the sculpture as blasphemous, and demanded that the museum take it down, but the board of the Museion museum in Bolzano decided by majority vote to keep Zuerst die Fuesse” (Feet First) by German artist Martin Kippenberger up.

The artist who passed on in 1997 considered it a self-portrait illustrating human angst.

Personally all I see is a green frog on a cross, and the mug he’s holding to be representative of a storm in a tea cup, but having said that I’m no artist.

Details of the Museum and exhibitions can be found here.

(via)

Raw AP footage of a Unicorn…or is it a deer with a horn…but that would make it a brown unicorn, or would it? The Italian Deericorn is believed to be suffering from a genetic mutation as his sibling has two horns.