Even though the final results of Italian Parliamentary elections are not yet available, there is little doubt that the center-left coalition Unione has won. The Italians do not want Silvio Berlusconi in power any longer.

It is not certain yet how large the new majority of the Left will be, particularly in the Senate. Because of the change in the electoral law (the Berlusconi administration introduced a shift from a majoritarian to a proportional law with a premium for the winning coalition that is calculated on a national basis for the Chamber, and on a regional basis for the Senate) the Left might end up with a tight majority, or even a minority, of Senators.

Nevertheless the political significance of the elections is pretty clear: Exit Berlusconi.

Last December the European Commission released a green paper on obesity [pdf], in which it promoted healthy foods and physical activity. According to the Commission 14 million Europeans are obese. “It is estimated,” says the green paper, “that in the European Union obesity accounts for up to 7% of health care costs.” Areas for action include consumer information, consumer education, and a focus on children and young people. While the Commission claims it would prefer self-regulation from industry, it has also made it clear that if necessary it will consider “other options,” i.e. regulatory steps. Such steps might include government or EU sponsored propaganda, mandatory labelling about the “threats” of “junk food,” bans on advertising, or limiting the availability of snacks and drinks in vending machines (as a few member states already do in schools).

I have heard some people say that Western popular culture will destroy Islam. That is possible, but we need to remember that this is not a one-way street. What if the opposite happens? Sometimes the barbarians also influence the civilized people, and there is a disturbing amount of “understanding” for terrorists in Western movies and media these days. Creeps come crawling out of the woodwork, more or less cheering for the terrorists who are trying to bring society down. There are probably always people who are drawn to blood and mayhem. They would like to destroy the current political order, but are not capable of doing it themselves, so they end up as cheerleaders for those who are attempting to do so. Let’s call them “terrorist groupies.” I’m not just talking about the Oscar-nominated suicide bomber film Paradise Now. There are others examples of this mentality.

Today’s leader in The Economist exhorts the Italians to sack Silvio Berlusconi in next Sunday’s elections. According to The Economist – the weekly that calls itself a “newspaper” – Italy needs economic reform and Berlusconi is not ready to push it. The magazine certainly has a point. There is no denying that il Cavaliere has failed to liberate the Italian economy from the shackles of state interference. However, there is no reason to believe that his rival, former EU Commission president Romano Prodi, will do a better job. Berlusconi was a disappointment, but Prodi will not be the “bold economic reformer of the kind that Italy desperately needs.”

A major banking scandal is rocking the Austrian political elites – left and right. A bank owned by the Socialist trade union (which is close to the Socialist Party SPÖ, currently in opposition) loses billions in shady hedge deals while the union strike fund evaporates in the Caribbean and the bank gets implicated in a corruption case in Israel. Meanwhile the bank is financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB), and an Austrian Finance Ministry official (married to the Socialist ex-chief of the bank) ignores a crucial report and is appointed to the Executive Board of the European Central Bank (ECB). The Conservative Finance Minister claims to know nothing – after just having sold the Government-owned Post Office Savings Bank (PSK) to the socialist bank. Welcome to Austria, presently presiding the European Union council of ministers.

An Estonian soldier on his way home after having served with the coalition forces in Afghanistan, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates and will be flogged. Andrei Korol was accused of being drunk and harassing a local policewoman while he was in transit at Sharjah international airport where they “make your life easy.”

In the past, several nations have attempted and failed to control with their national means the region that is labeled “Europe.” Regardless of the difficulty of the endeavor, states have been trying repeatedly. This was the case with religion based entities (medieval Papacy and Islam), non-national monarchies (Habsburgs), national monarchies (France), radical republics (revolutionary France), and ideological empires of the national and international type (National Socialism, the USSR). Regardless of their differences they shared the same craving and ultimate failure. The Continent’s history having been pasted together of interlocking wars, after the last “Big One” a remedy was sought. The cases listed above were attempts to forge unity through conquest. After 1945 an effort was made to use voluntary unity as an antidote to further predatory wars. With millions killed the new goal, not war and then unity but unity followed by peace, had an understandable appeal.

The teachers of a German college, the Rütli-Hauptschule in the Berlin borough of Neukölln, have asked the authorities to close down their school. Last Thursday the school called in the police to protect the few native German students remaining in the predominantly immigrant school, where over 80% of the students are not of German origin. The German students and the teachers say that they are being terrorised by armed and violent thugs, who call them “racists” and treat Western girls and women as if they are “whores” and “sluts.” Last week, after several serious incidents, the teachers wrote an open letter asking the Berlin authorities to close down the college and distribute the students among other schools.

Sharon Dijksma

Sharon Dijksma, a leading parliamentarian of the Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) wants to penalise educated stay-at-home women. “A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” she said in an interview last week. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished.”

Hence her proposal to recover part of the cost of their education from highly-educated women who decide not to seek paid work. Between 2001 and 2005 the number of Dutch women aged between 15 and 65 who were out on the labour market rose from 55.9 to 58.7 per cent. Dijksma says she wants to stimulate more women to join the work force. In the municipal elections earlier this month the PvdA became the biggest party in the Netherlands thanks to the Muslim vote. The PvdA is generally expected to win the general elections next year, when the 35 year old Dijksma, who has been an MP since she was 23 and is a leading figure in the party, might become a government minister.

In an age when respect for the property and freedom of others is in decline and liberty is under assault and threatened, even by democratic governments, a new initiative is being launched: the Property and Freedom Society (PFS).

The PFS aims to promote “Austro-Libertarianism,” the economic and social philosophy most prominently represented during the 20th century by Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and his leading American student Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), and tying back to the 19th century French economists Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) and Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912).