An Italian court has convicted 22 CIA operatives and one Air Force colonel of kidnapping. The CIA grabbed Egyptian imam Abu Omar in Milan and flew him to Egypt to be tortured. This is "illegal" under Italian "law."

Did you know that our President and his wife are black? Well, they are, and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi finds that endlessly humorous.

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has been on a rampage against newspapers he doesn't own who bring up his naughty relationship with an 18-year old alleged prostitute mistress. And now his tabloid war has taken an unholy, hell-baiting turn.

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is suing a left-wing newspaper in Italy, along with papers in France and Spain, and he's looking into a couple in Britain. Why? Because they keep asking him slanderous questions about his ridiculous private life!

Silvio Berlusconi slept with escorts, and his only excuse is that he didn't pay. His wife wants a divorce unless he seeks sex addiction treatment. How is he still Prime Minister? Because Italy is basically a chauvinist wonderland!

[Madonna leads her troupe of children (including boyfriend Jesus Luz) through the streets of Italy earlier today. Apparently she is in mourning for her 51st birthday. Image via Bauer-Griffin]

You should really look at the New York Times' slideshow (and read the article) about a highly-acclaimed Italian theatre troupe that operates out of a prison. Good-looking Europeans convicts in drag and loving it! All we got was Oz. [NYT]

Yes, there are audio recordings of Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi with prostitutes, and yes he asks one to participate in a three-way, but the most amusing fact here is that Berlusconi named one of his beds after Vladimir Putin:

Well this settles it: Italian PM and noted insane corrupt horndog Silvio Berlusconi says "I've never paid a woman." So the whole "fucked an escort" thing can't possibly be true, right? Or, uh...

Hilarious Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was already in a spot of trouble for sleeping with an 18-year-old model. And now he is promising to "hang tough," despite new "sleeping with prostitutes" allegations. Way to go Italy!

Man, Europe. We elected this classy guy after you made fun of us for years about that "cowboy" (btw: here in America, only morons thought he was a "cowboy"), and now your leaders are all running around with naked ladies.

Just like some straight boys like a tomboy and others like a girly girl, some gay guys prefer their men femme and others like 'em butch. Openly-gay Italian TV host Alfonso Signorini likes them real butch. Dictator butch, in fact! When asked in an interview to name the sexiest man in Italy, Signorini was a bit stumped. But he did know who the sexiest man in the world is: Russian president-for-life Vladimir Putin! Signorini fell for Putin when he saw shirtless photos of the thuggish martial-arts aficionado taken during a Siberian fishing trip:

What ineffable mists of strangeness were those that wafted o'er The Hills last night? Ah yes, they were summoned by the fact that Lauren, the star of this muddled reality show about Angeleno fashion zombies, was away in Italy, leaving the lesser characters to rush in and fill her void. And fill it they did (metaphorically speaking, ain't nobody up in LC's void foreal). Audrina and Lo palled around, Audrina and Heidi palled around, and Spencerina went on a verboten date with Doug the Frozen Burrito Heir. Yes, Lauren zipped off to Italy for reasons unknown, leaving Audrina and Lo—not the best of friends!—to their own devices. Evidently they decided to: drink strawberry mojitos and tan, eat lumpch at Fred Segal, and go to Goa. So they decided to lie down, drink, and eat. That is exactly what I do with my enemies. And my friends. And myself. Perfect. Though at Goa they "ran into" Spencer and Heidi, Lauren's tiresome enemies, so Audrina chatted up Heidi and talked about way too serious stuff to be shouted at a bar and Lo looked disgruntled and the music "nnyyuhh nyyuhh nyuhhh"d like it does and we went to commercial. Oh! Oh! Before that, Audrina was all blissed out in her kitchen, chopping aimlessly at some sort of food product, when Spencerina, Spencer's angular sister, showed up for a visit. "Um... Lauren's not here" Audrina said awkwardly when Spencerina first rang. But the pointiest Pratt was there to speak deliberately with Audy. About Doug the Burrito King. Lauren's Doug the Burrito King. See they'd been hanginnnn' out and Doug asked Spencerina to dinner. So, zoms, should she go? Audrina sort of dodged giving an answer. Rather she just stared dimly off at some unknowable fixed point and issued an inaudibly high call towards the seas, hoping her dolphin friends would come rescue her. Sadly for Audrina, they did not. Because Audrina does not have the ability to talk to dolphins. But she won't believe it. No matter how many times Justin Bobby tells her. Nicely. So Spencerina took Audrina's "episode" to heart and decided to go on with her bad self and agree to the producers' romantic invitation to go on a date with ol' Douglas Rice 'n Beans. So there they were, minding they business, when a great rumbling came up throughout the restaurant and the floor opened up and out skibbled some stretched and tanned creature of the night. "It's Brody's mom," Spencerina intoned. Busted! They chatted for a while and then when the mom and her friend left, Spencerina looked glum. Glum because she knew she'd been caught. Not caught by the mom but caught by the producers. It was a setup. It had all been a trick. None of it was real. Doug didn't like her. And Evan Conners probably doesn't really want to take her to prom. He's just going to throw eggs at her and laugh and laugh and laugh. Well she'll show 'em. She'll go to art school and become famous and no one will play tricks on her anym— Hi! Sorry! I, like Audrina, sometimes have episodes. But it's over now. What's important is that Lauren came back from her trip and got all the skinny, after informing us that the whole of Italia was "like a construction site." In that the men whistle a lot. Anyway, she got the details on what went down and she was not happy. Not happy that Audrina spent time with Heidi and Spencer, and especially not happy that Spence's sister may have gone a'courting with Doug the Microwave Prince. So she went to dinner with Brody and he told her about what his mom saw and Lauren looked furious and sad and I wonder just what she was thinking. I wonder, and I hope, that she thought of Italy. Of that first exhilarating bite of real gnocchi or parmigiana. Of the hum and glitter of lights and people in the Piazza Navona. Of the slow glide of the pontoon planes skimming Lake Garda. And I hope that on her trip she took time, as her bus rumbled over the shadowy hills of Umbria, to realize what a beautiful and heartbreaking world this is. Maybe, at that moment with Brody at dinner, she was deciding to send the producers a letter. And all that would be on it would be the Verdi quote "you may have the universe, if I may have Italy." And that would be that and these particular Hills would fade in the distance and a villa, and un ragazzo named Giovanni, would await her on the other side. And at least one of these people would be saved. But, somehow I doubt it.

One good way to create a website is to pay a single agency just enough money to do the job, put them on a tight deadline, fact check the content, and then publish it. Easy! Many people who are incompetent in several vital areas of life-human interaction, for example-have nevertheless managed to start and run successful websites with few start up costs at all. But the nation of Italy decided, hey, why don't we do the opposite of all that, and see how much money we can burn through in pursuit of a conceptual online fiasco? So they did! Italy wanted to build a website to market the nation to prospective tourists. The cost so far: $66 million over five years. And it doesn't even exist yet! Among the problems: Too many cooks in the kitchen ("Several government ministries — in two administrations — and each of Italy's 20 regions were involved in creating the portal"), a product that went live in 2007 full of embarrassing errors, databases that weren't compatible with each other, and a logo purchased for $150,000 that was eventually discarded for sucking too much. A consultant tells the WSJ that the government could have had an agency complete the entire project by now for around 2% of what's been spent. Try Blogspot.com, yo. [WSJ]

While out burning rubber with his motorcycle gang in Italy, popular actor/director/producer George Clooney was hounded by an aspiring writer. The writer had been waiting for face time with the Oscar winner for nearly four days, during which time she completed four rewrites of her blockbuster script. The woman described her spec as Mad Men meets Silent Running by way of Judd Apatow and believed it to be the perfect vehicle for the Cloonester. The woman said, "Nobody has pushed the limits of the science fiction genre quite this hard and I think George is the perfect individual to bring this unique vision to the screen." Clooney instructed the woman to leave a copy of her script at a nearby coffee bar and he'd pick it up right after his ride.

Some observers said that when Google bought YouTube, it was buying a lawsuit. The total damages claimed in various copyright infringement cases against YouTube are now more than Google paid for the company back in 2006. On top of Viacom's $1 billion suit still pending in New York, Mediaset — the Italian media empire of irascible tycoon Silvio Berlusconi — wants €500 million ($777 million) for "immediate damages," and may ask for much more based on lost advertising opportunities.The suit was filed in Rome civil courts, and will certainly test the Italian implementation of the European Union Copyright Directive — a law similar to the DMCA in the U.S., but considered a little more friendly to copyright holders. It can't help YouTube that the case will be argued in a country where Berlusconi was just reelected to another term as prime minister after being acquitted last year of corruption charges stemming from allegations of bribing judges. (Photo by AP/Andrew Medichini)

Ever since Rome elected a straight-up neo-fascist mayor, they've been a little on edge about things. So when Google sent their magic creepy photo-van around town to capture every block for their wonderful Street View feature, Italians naturally fled "into shops and bars, hoping to be out of view of the camera's lens." Because they thought it was government surveillance, not the good, benevolent private surveillance we Americans know and love. Or at least don't give a shit about. Silly Italians! [Times of London]

In Italy, amusingly corrupt right-wing media mogul Silvio Berlusconi has just returned to his old position of Prime Minister, after a bitterly contested election that also put a straight-up fascist in charge of Rome. Berlusconi welcomed the country's rightward turn by invoking the name of Francisco Franco's Spanish fascist party. On the way out of power, the departing center-left government "published every Italian's declared earnings and tax contributions on the internet." They didn't even play it off as an accident, either: "The finance ministry described the move as a bid to improve transparency." Hah. Stay classy, Italy. We'd check to see what an Italian professional blogger makes, but we're kind of terrified of the whole country. [BBC]

An Italian circuit court ruled Friday that reporting gossip in Italy will be illegal "unless it helps make a larger point about the figure in question." The new rules will "apply only to television, print and radio media." Whoa, and this is the country that gave us the word 'paparazzi.' [Hollywood Reporter]

Yesterday, someone sent me a seemingly spammy message to Bill Gates in Italian. Thank you to everyone who translated it. Here is one of the many stellar submissions.