‘Does Italy have a new opposition leader in Gianfranco Fini?’ asks Italian news blog L’Antefatto.

After yesterday’s televised comments, it would appear so.

Italy’s Speaker of the House and longstanding Silvio Berlusconi ally, Gianfranco Fini, was caught trashtalking about the Italian Prime Minister yesterday during an off-camera moment. Gianfranco Fini is one of the leaders of the National Alliance party, a reformed political continuation of the Fascist party.

While in conversation with a magistrate, Fini made a snippy comment about PM Berlusconi’s trouble with the law and disdain for Italy’s judicial system: ‘He confuses electoral consent with absolute monarchy… I told him that he cannot continue this way.’ Fini also declared allegations that Berlusconi had Mafia ties to be an ‘nuclear bomb’ for the Prime Minister’s reputation.

While L’Antefatto hypothesizes about the rise of a new opposition figure, Euronews writes that Fini has been called upon to explain his comments criticising the Italian prime minister. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that Fini telephoned a television show late on Tuesday to make it clear he believes “Berlusconi has nothing to do with the Mafia.”

But he refused to take back his comments about the prime minister’s autocratic style, saying Berlusconi “has the right to continue governing because he was given a wide popular mandate, but he must respect parliament and the judiciary bodies.”

Nonetheless, Berlusconi’s grasp of Italy’s national political scene appears to be slipping as a string of sex scandals and judicial proceedings involving the PM’s alleged ties with the Mafia have deteriorated his public standing. To many, Gianfranco Fini appears to be a likely successor.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Silvio Berlusconi’s ally Gianfranco Fini overheard criticising PM’s ‘regal’ style (guardian.co.uk)

A trio of young Swedish entrepreneurs will on Friday launch what it calls the first-ever brand of North Korea-made jeans, says The Local.

“The first 1,100 individually numbered jeans” will initially be sold in a Stockholm department store and on the Internet, and then in selected stores elsewhere, Noko Jeans said.

Jakob Ohlsson, Jacob Åström and Tor Rauden Källstigen — all under the age of 25 — said their project stemmed from a desire to make contact with the isolated communist state.

The trio first contacted North Korean officials in mid-2007 by email, after finding an official website about outsourcing production to North Korea.

“The first year, we spent time trying to gain access to the country,” Ohlsson explained, adding that the trio visited North Korea twice, once to choose a factory and the second time to oversee production.

Production of Noko’s two models of jeans began in mid-2009 after a series of obstacles that included “being turned down by the biggest garment company in North Korea.”

While made in a communist country that has all but been cut off from foreign influence — and business — for the past 60 years, the jeans, not available for purchase in North Korea, will not come cheap.

Shoppers will have to fork out around 1,500 Swedish kronor ($226) for a pair of dark denims.

Read more here.

November 1 marked the beginning of France’s annual winter ban on housing evictions, which ends on March 15. The measure is iconic of France’s highly protective housing laws, which make it particularly difficult for landlords to evict tenants who can’t pay their housing bills.

Charitable groups representing homeless people hail the measure as one which protects tens of thousands of crisis-stricken families but stress that the total number of evictions in France rose by 150 percent in the past 10 years to reach a total of 11,294 registered evictions in 2008.

On Saturday, the rights group “Jeudi Noir” (Black Thursday) squatted an empty private townhouse on the elegant Place des Vosges in central Paris to mark the beginning of the winter ban and protest the number of disused real estate space in the French capital.

“It’s scandalous that properties like this remain empty for years”, a protester told Agence France Presse. “Sleeping here, even temporarily, could get a homeless person off the cold streets,” he added.

According to the Abbé Pierre Foundation, named after a French Catholic priest who devoted his life to securing better housing conditions for poor families, there are more than 1.8 million families in France who struggle to pay their housing bills. At least 500,000 of them owe one or several belated monthly rent payments.

Read more here.

NATO has significantly changed its military strategy in Southern Afghanistan since the alliance-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployed into the region in 2006. Dutch Major General Mart de Kruif told Radio Netherlands that rather than massive offensives against the Taliban, as was the case in the early days, ISAF now plans major operations that include strong elements of local governance and reconstruction.

Talking about the Taliban,  the Dutch general claimed that “now, the Taliban reacts to what we do, not the other way around”. He described the movement as being in a phase of uncertainty, and said that internal tensions had been noted in the movement’s leadership, the majority of which is based in Quetta, Pakistan.

However, he added that the Taliban movement, in a military sense, is not centrally controlled and led. “If the Quetta Shura of the Taliban were to disappear tomorrow, that would not mean the end of the Taliban”. But Major General De Kruif warned that violence may continue, as ISAF moves into Taliban-held regions and the insurgents increasingly use improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and intimidation of the local population as military tools. Still, looking back, the general says ISAF has made a ‘major step forwards’ in the past twelve months.

Listen to the interview here.

As borders come down within and beyond Europe, it is not only legitimate businesses that are benefiting, but those businesses that produce drugs, traffic in humans, manufacture fake luxury goods and counterfeit euros – businesses better known as organised crime – are profiting too, according to a new report from the EU’s criminal intelligence agency.

Liberalisation, low-cost airlines, and China’s low-wage economy are all helping Europe’s gangsters to thrive while the rest of the economy remains in crisis, says Europol’s 2009 organised crime threat assessment.

Foremost amongst the agency’s predictions based on current data is the emerging threat from west African groups, which Europol singled out in the report as one of the main new developments.

Morocco is a major source of marijuana for EU markets, and cocaine “trafficking via countries in West Africa has dramatically increased,” the report warns.

“West Africa now acts as a key transit zone, due to its strategic location between the cocaine producing countries and Europe.”

The report breaks up Europe’s gangs into five ‘hubs’, the most important of which are those from the northwest, centred on the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Belgium.

Read more here.

Onias is among the average 110 Zimbabweans deported by Botswana every day, a small fraction of the 100 000 Zimbabweans believed living illegally in the country, according a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Like most of the deportees, he simply can’t afford a passport, which costs $143, slightly less than Zimbabwe’s per capita gross domestic product last year, which was $200.

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) runs a centre just inside the Zimbabwean border, where Botswana authorities take the deportees in clean white trucks.

Some have little more than the clothes they’re wearing, but others unload an astonishing cache of plasma televisions, kitchen appliances and overstuffed sacks of clothing — whatever the authorities would allow them to pack.

IOM gives them a meal, medical care if needed, a place to spend the night, and helps them organise transportation to their homes in Zimbabwe. Minors like Onias are given an escort for their trip home, explained Andrew Gethi, who manages the centre.

Botswana’s migration problem is small compared with the estimated 1,2-million Zimbabweans living in South Africa, but has an outsized effect on a nation with only 1,9-million people.

The exiles are among the at least two million Zimbabweans who have fled their country’s daily hardships, forming a lifeline to their families back home.

Read more here.

Until a few months ago, most people in Holland had never heard of Machangulo, Mozambique. But the remote peninsula has been making headlines ever since Dutch Crown-Prince Willem-Alexander announced plans to build a holiday home there. The Dutch media have reported allegations of corruption, threats and even shots being fired. But how much of this is true? RNW’s Eric Beauchemin travelled to Machangulo to investigate.

Read here.

A detailed membership list of the British National party containing names, addresses and telephone numbers was published on the internet this morning.

The list, which contains thousands of names, was published on Wikileaks, a website that purports to be a clearing house for information to be published anonymously.

The source of the data remains unclear but it appears to show details of the BNP’s members and supporters at 15 April this year, as well as data about members whose subscriptions to the party had lapsed.

A Guardian analysis of the data suggests the BNP had 11,811 members as of April, including several doctors and military personnel. The party appears to have benefited from a surge in female recruits, with one in eight party members now women.

The list reveals that the highest concentrations of members are in Leicestershire, Lancashire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire, while membership is growing fastest in places such as Wiltshire and East Sussex, outside the party’s traditional heartlands.

Read more here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Thousands of BNP members named in document posted on internet (telegraph.co.uk)
• Guardian Politics: Second BNP membership leak expected (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

Thomas Becker, who has been instrumental in international negotiations up to the COP15 summit, resigned last week. The precise reason for his resignation remains unclear, although there have been suggestions of disagreements and competition between the Climate Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office and issues arising from alleged messy expense reporting.

The 21 Søndag programme says that there have been complaints about a lack of resources as well as over-zealous voucher checks.

Climate Minister Connie Hedegaard is now calling for an end to the mud-slinging of the past few days, following the resignation of the country’s top civil servant negotiator for the U.N. Climate Summit which Denmark hosts in December.

”I would be lying if I didn’t admit that there have been various controversies. There have been. Among other reasons because there are two very different cultures. I had some people with me from the Environment Ministry who do things in a certain way. In the Climate and Energy Ministry people come from many different cultures,” Hedegaard says.

Read the full story here.