Silvio Berlusconi

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is fighting back in a scandal feeding on his reported fondness for young women, with his lawyer acknowledging Saturday that the media mogul has moved to block publication of hundreds of photos taken of guests at his sumptuous Sardinian villa. The wife of the 72-year-old Berlusconi, Veronica Lario, 52, announced a few weeks ago that she was seeking a divorce, in part because of what she lamented was her husband's infatuation with young women.

ROME -- Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was given a one-year jail sentence Thursday for breach of confidentiality after the publication of illegally obtained wiretaps by a newspaper controlled by his family. Berlusconi remains free pending appeals, and it's considered unlikely that the jail sentence will ever be enforced. But the verdict by a Milan court adds to a mounting number of legal tangles faced by Berlusconi, whose political coalition came in second in elections last month.

A judge Tuesday ordered Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to stand trial on charges that he paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl, then abused his authority by trying to get her released from custody after police picked her up on suspicion of stealing. It was a major setback for the 74-year-old premier, whose personal entanglements for months have overshadowed the business of governing Italy. Berlusconi denies any wrongdoing and says there is a plot by left-wing judges and his political foes to force him from office.

ROME - Weeks before Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation because of failing health, Italians were already bracing themselves for a change at the top. But the elections to pick a new Italian government this month have been overshadowed and potentially thrown for a loop by Benedict's shocking decision to be the first pontiff to step down in almost 600 years. The 85-year-old's final Mass on Wednesday, which drew the kind of cheering fans to St. Peter's Basilica that politicians dream of, dominated pages of newspapers that Italy's political candidates had hoped to fill with dramatic campaign promises and choice insults aimed at their opponents.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on Monday said he had not resigned as head of his weakened center-right government, hours after a Cabinet member said the prime minister would quit. Berlusconi met with President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, to whom he would have to submit any resignation, as he tried to find a way out of the worst political crisis of his four years in power.

The future belongs to global television. But that future will be a long time coming. Not years, but many decades, maybe more than a century, depending on how long it takes for the world population to become uniformly English-speaking. My company has prospered, among other things, because I have always been able to take the long view.

Silvio Berlusconi's term as prime minister in 1994 lasted only seven turbulent months, but never mind. That matters as little now as his three subsequent convictions--overturned on appeal--for false business accounting and bribing the tax police, and the four indictments he still faces. Nor does it matter much that Berlusconi, Italy's richest person, wants to govern again without giving up control of the country's three largest private television networks and the rest of his corporate empire.

LONDON - Prime Minister Mario Monti, the technocrat who guided Italy through economic turbulence for 13 months after scandal-plagued Silvio Berlusconi left office, resigned Friday to make way for new elections. Monti, a former economics professor and European Union commissioner, was appointed to the office, with a Cabinet of academics and economists and broad support to bring the country back from the brink of financial disaster. "A year ago this government was launched, and today - not because of a Maya prophecy - we must bring it to an end," Monti quipped as he spoke to colleagues at an annual reception.

The trial of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on charges of sexual misconduct and abuse of power opened Wednesday in Milan and almost immediately was adjourned until May 31. It was one of the most anticipated courtroom events in Italy's history, including testimony allegations of orgy-like parties at Berlusconi's villa and phone-tap transcripts featuring females who were said to be paid handsomely to entertain male guests. It began with an anticlimactic 10-minute hearing.

Federal agents have raided the home and business of a longtime Hollywood producer in connection with Italy's ongoing tax fraud, embezzlement and false accounting investigation of its former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

LONDON - First, Silvio Berlusconi, who was driven from power last year by Italy's economic woes and his own scandals, said he wanted back his old job as prime minister. Then Mario Monti, an appointed technocrat who succeeded him at the head of an unelected government, kept the nation guessing for weeks before suddenly declaring that he would dive into politics and seek to lead the next government. They're only part of a perplexing lineup of political candidates voters will face in February's elections as political parties begin a frantic search for coalition partners.

LONDON - Prime Minister Mario Monti, the technocrat who guided Italy through economic turbulence for 13 months after scandal-plagued Silvio Berlusconi left office, resigned Friday to make way for new elections. Monti, a former economics professor and European Union commissioner, was appointed to the office, with a Cabinet of academics and economists and broad support to bring the country back from the brink of financial disaster. "A year ago this government was launched, and today - not because of a Maya prophecy - we must bring it to an end," Monti quipped as he spoke to colleagues at an annual reception.

LONDON - Turmoil engulfed Italy on Monday as the country braced for the imminent resignation of its prime minister, the intended comeback of his disgraced predecessor and the prospect of months of political and financial instability after a period of relative calm. Elections originally expected to be held around April are now likely to take place in February, cutting short the present government's time to enact measures aimed at reviving Italy's moribund economy and bringing down its enormous public debt.

As a studious girl in a small Italian town, Giulia Giupponi drew no inspiration from the women on the glowing box in her living room. The ones who giggled and jiggled while wearing next to nothing. Who simpered and cooed over male TV hosts more than twice their age. Who strutted, bent over, kneeled, pouted, blew kisses. "If I think about women I could see when I was 15 or 16 on television, I can think only of showgirls," says Giupponi, who's 23 and about to earn a master's degree in economics.

Italy's Parliament is pressing hard to ratify reforms clearing the way for Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to resign, but it will be left to his successor to solve structural problems decades in the making that are central to the debt crisis now dragging down the European — and the global — economies. The nation's $2.6-trillion public debt is the result of low productivity, corruption, suffocating bureaucracy and poor tax policies. Its economic performance between 2000 and 2010 was so bad, according to some estimates, that only Haiti and Zimbabwe fared worse in average annual growth.

It was but a glance, a little smirk that the German and French leaders shared in public when asked about Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and his country's economic woes. But that moment at a recent crisis meeting made it very clear where Italy — and everyone else — stands in the Eurozone pecking order. Many Europeans realize that their futures are being increasingly dictated by Germany and France — in that order of importance — personified by a mashup of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy dubbed "Merkozy.

ROME -- Against rancorous but impotent opposition, the Italian Parliament on Wednesday granted immunity from prosecution to the country's top five officials, in effect liberating Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from an embarrassing corruption trial. Berlusconi's right-wing coalition, which controls both the upper and lower houses of Parliament, sponsored the legislation and rushed it into the law books at an unusually swift pace.

When Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi emerged from his bribery trial one recent day, a crowd awaited. "You'll end up like Ceausescu!" a heckler cried out, alluding to the reviled Romanian dictator who was summarily executed after a brief trial. His famous temper flaring, Berlusconi demanded that his aides get the man's name, and he promised to sue.

Even a politician with the survival skills of Silvio Berlusconi proved, in the end, to be no match for the power of global financial markets. The beleaguered Italian prime minister bowed to the reality of international pressure and withering domestic support Tuesday, promising to resign once Parliament passes a reform package of cuts aimed at reining in a runaway debt crisis. The question now is whether Berlusconi's departure would be enough to arrest the decline in Italy's perilous financial condition, which has moved the front line of Europe's debt crisis from peripheral countries such as Greece and Ireland to one of its central economies.

Italy's beleaguered prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has survived more than 50 no-confidence votes and multiple accusations of criminal and sexual impropriety, including charges he paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl. But the 75-year-old billionaire may have finally met his match in the bond market. With dwindling confidence in Berlusconi's ability to manage Italy's affairs — and the Eurozone's debt crisis hanging in the balance — investors Monday pushed up Italian bond yields to a euro-era high of 6.63%.