ROME: Milan airport is to be named after Italy’s scandal-dogged tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, a former three-time prime minister, despite protests Tuesday from the Italian city’s center-left mayor.
Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, who is also transport minister and head of the far-right League party, announced the name change Friday, just over a year after Berlusconi’s death.
“The final decision rests with the Minister of Transport and I am ready to sign it, with pride and emotion, in memory of my friend Silvio, great entrepreneur, great Milanese, and great Italian,” Salvini said.
Milan’s mayor Giuseppe Sala said Tuesday the decision to change the name of Malpensa, one of the biggest airports in Italy, should not have been Salvini’s alone.
“Can a decision of this kind be made in 24 hours?” he was quoted by the AGI Italian news agency as saying.
Billionaire Berlusconi, who died in June last year aged 86, had strong ties to Milan but was a highly divisive figure.
While some Italians saw him as a charming, self-made man, others slammed him as an international embarrassment, particularly due to his many legal woes and sexual scandals.
The former cruise ship singer was born in the northern Italian city and built his immense fortune there.
For over 30 years he chaired AC Milan, which won the Champions League five times on his watch.
But he was also dogged by accusations he paid young starlets for their silence over his notoriously hedonistic soirees, which he always insisted were elegant dinners.
Berlusconi was sentenced in 2013 to seven years in jail for paying for sex with a 17-year-old starlet known as “Ruby the Heart-Stealer,” though that conviction was later overturned.
His second wife, Veronica Lario, divorced him in 2014, saying at the time that she could no longer tolerate his “consorting with minors.”
The Milan division of Italy’s main opposition party, the center-left Democratic Party (PD), also assailed what the “inappropriate and wrong choice.”
“Our gateway to the world deserves to represent a shared memory and the unifying values of our country,” it said in a statement, saying it was collecting names of “non-divisive figures” for whom Malpensa could be named.
Left-wing trade union CGIL posted an online petition on Change.org to propose naming the airport instead after Carla Fracci (1936-2021), a renowned Italian ballet dancer from Milan.
It said Fracci “transmitted elegance, style and bravura throughout the world,” and appealed to authorities to “avoid choices that are sources of deep divisions.”
Milan airport to be named after former PM Berlusconi
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Milan airport to be named after former PM Berlusconi
- Matteo Salvini: ‘The final decision rests with the Minister of Transport and I am ready to sign it in memory of my friend Silvio, great entrepreneur, great Milanese, and great Italian’
- Milan’s mayor Giuseppe Sala said that the decision to change the name of Malpensa, one of the biggest airports in Italy, should not have been Salvini’s alone
Top Australian writers’ festival canceled after Palestinian author barred
SYDNEY: One of Australia’s top writers’ festivals was canceled on Tuesday, after 180 authors boycotted the event and its director resigned saying she could not be party to silencing a Palestinian author and warned moves to ban protests and slogans after the Bondi Beach mass shooting threatened free speech.
Louise Adler, the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, said on Tuesday she was quitting her role at the Adelaide Writers’ Week in February, following a decision by the festival’s board to disinvite a Palestinian-Australian author.
The novelist and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah said the move to bar her was “a blatant and shameless act of anti-Palestinian racism and censorship.”
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday announced a national day of mourning would be held on January 22 to remember the 15 people killed in last month’s shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach.
Police say the alleged gunmen were inspired by the Islamic State militant group, and the incident sparked nationwide calls to tackle antisemitism, and prompted state and federal government moves to tighten hate speech laws.
The Adelaide Festival board said on Tuesday its decision last week to disinvite Abdel-Fattah, on the grounds it would not be culturally sensitive for her to appear at the literary event “so soon after Bondi,” was made “out of respect for a community experiencing the pain from a devastating event.”
“Instead, this decision has created more division and for that we express our sincere apologies,” the board said in a statement.
The event would not go ahead and remaining board members will step down, it added.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, British author Zadie Smith, Australian author Kathy Lette, Pulitzer Prize-winning American Percival Everett and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis are among the authors who said they would no longer appear at the festival in South Australia state, Australian media reported.
The festival board on Tuesday apologized to Abdel-Fattah for “how the decision was represented.”
“This is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history,” it added.
Abdel-Fattah wrote on social media that she did not accept the apology, saying she had nothing to do with the Bondi attack, “nor did any Palestinian.”
Adler earlier wrote in The Guardian that the board’s decision to disinvite Abdel-Fattah “weakens freedom of speech and is the harbinger of a less free nation, where lobbying and political pressure determine who gets to speak and who doesn’t.”
The South Australian state government has appointed a new festival board.
