My piece on the Kate Middleton scandal has just been published by Time.

In Paris, the British royal family were seeking an injunction against the further publication of pictures of Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, topless on a terrace during a vacation in southern France. On Tuesday, they got their wish with the French court ordering the publisher of Closer to hand over all digital copies of the topless photos and blocked further publication of the images. In Ireland, the tabloid that ran the grainy photographs risks being shut down by its furious owner. In the U.K., no paper has dared send the images to the printers.

Compare that with the situation in Italy, where “Scandal in the Court: The Queen Is Naked” is the headline on the cover of Chi, a tabloid magazine owned by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and managed by his daughter Marina. In the country that gave the world the word paparazzi, the publication of the pictures has largely been greeted with a shrug. “In Italy, public figures have a reduced amount of privacy,” says Candida Morvillo, a columnist for Italy’s RCS media group and former editor of the Italian tabloid magazine Novella 2000. “It’s not so important to us if it’s in the public interest. For us, there’s only a single question: Were the pictures taken legally or not?” Few Italian lawyers would believe the snaps, taken from a public location, were illegal.

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My piece on Mario Monti’s struggles has just been published by Time.

If there was one thing Mario Monti should have been able to count on, it was the markets. Seven months into his term as Italy’s Prime Minister, a period in which he has muscled through tough pension reforms and painful tax hikes, it’s not surprising that his public support has dropped to half of the more than 70% approval rating he enjoyed shortly after taking office. Nor is it a shock that, with elections to replace him expected in less than a year, the country’s politicians have begun to balk at some of his proposed measures.

The bigger blow is Italy’s rising cost of borrowing — an indicator that investors are starting to lose confidence that the country will be able to pay them back. In the early days of the Monti government, bond yields plunged. From 7%, a number many economists see as unsustainable, they briefly touched down at just under 5% in March before resuming a steady rise. Last week they broke 6%, leading many to wonder once again if Italy might be the next domino in the euro-zone crisis.

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Time has just published my story ab out the conflict between the Vatican and American nuns.

The meeting had been billed as a showdown. In reality, it had more the flavor of two opponents sizing each other up. Afterward, the Vatican press office described the encounter, between top officials in the Catholic Church and a group of American nuns the Vatican has accused of straying from official Catholicism, as having taken place “in an atmosphere of openness and cordiality.” For the nuns, representatives of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), an umbrella organization that represents some 80% of Catholic nuns in the U.S., the meeting was “an opportunity to express our concerns” directly to officials at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican office charged with policing church doctrine now headed by the American Cardinal William Levada.

It’s not surprising that little was decided. The standoff is a long-standing one, dating back to the period following the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, when the Holy See instituted a series of reforms and liberalizations, among them a call for religious orders, including nuns, to renew themselves. In the following years, many orders began allowing their members to shed the severe habits that date back to medieval times, to work outside of traditional church institutions, like schools and hospitals. Increasingly, nuns began to get involved in social movements, joining the battles for civil rights, setting up AIDS hospices and launching antipoverty campaigns. “Suddenly the lid was off,” says Kenneth Briggs, author of Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church’s Betrayal of American Nuns. “Sisters were deciding for themselves what to do. And back at headquarters, the Vatican and bishops in particular got very nervous.”

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My profile of the Greek radical leftist Alexis Tsipras was the European cover of Bloomberg Businessweek.

The headquarters of the Greek political party that could bring down the European economy lies in a rundown neighborhood in central Athens. Not far away in one direction, a municipal soup kitchen feeds the city’s rising number of poor. Around another corner, a medical charity caters to illegal immigrants and the newly uninsured. The décor inside party headquarters is similarly modest.

Neon tubes shine down on worn blue linoleum. The walls are streaked with age. The only room in the building with a fresh coat of paint is the office of the party’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, the 37-year-old radical leftist who has campaigned on renegotiating Greece’s debt deal. “Sometimes we have television cameras in there,” says Maria Kalyviotou, one of the chain-smoking young volunteers who man the party’s media operations. “That’s why we painted that room.”

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Bloomberg Businessweek just published my short take on the mood in Athens.

In Greece, the lighting of the Olympic torch is normally a moment in the sun, a reminder of the country’s contributions to Western civilization. As the torch began its journey from Athens to London, this year’s host city, dark rain clouds cast a pall over the proceedings. Many Greeks no doubt watched the torch’s departure and wondered if they shouldn’t follow.

Even when the sun breaks through in Athens these days, it shines on sparsely attended cafés, on beggars lying on sidewalks, and on a tourism industry that’s all but collapsed. So many locals have traded in their cars for bikes that it’s disturbingly easy to find a parking space. One in five Greeks is looking in vain for a job; among the young, it’s one in two. The failure of Greek political parties to form a government after the May 6 elections has deepened the gloom. “It’s like being on a ship in the middle of a storm,” says Giorgia, a 29-year-old civil servant who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid trouble at work, “and there’s no captain.”

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Time has just published my essay on Italy’s dysfunctional political scene.

It says something about Italian politics that the most potent political figure to enter the arena since scandal-ridden former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a frizzy-haired bombastic comedian named Beppe Grillo, best known for organizing nationwide protests against government corruption called “Go F Yourself” days. And what it says is this: that as a desire for change sweeps the European electorate, Italians are feeling starved for choice. Indeed, with the exception of Grillo, Italy doesn’t have a single national leader who wasn’t already in politics in 1994, the year Berlusconi first came to power

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My piece on Italy’s No TAV movement has just been published by Businessweek.

On a day in late winter in a valley in the Italian Alps, about a hundred people set off on a walk. Their path took them by steeply terraced vineyards, through a small village, and over the crest of a hill to where the riot police were waiting for them. The officers stood in small knots, behind a fence topped with razor wire, spread out across a patch of cleared land where the government plans to break ground on an €8.2 billion ($10.8 billion) project to connect Italy and France by high-speed rail. Soldiers clustered nearby. A camouflage-painted Lince—Italy’s answer to a Humvee—moved in a lazy patrol. A medic’s jeep squatted under a concrete overpass.

The protesters had come to this part of the Val di Susa to make sure the project never gets off the ground. As part of a two-decade battle to impede the construction of a new train tunnel through the Alps, they have at times walked the roads of the valley in thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands. The No TAV movement (named for the Italian initials for high-speed train) has invaded construction sites, blocked highways, and battled police. “Our objective is to let them know we’re here,” says Alberto Perino, the movement’s longtime leader. “And that we plan to keep on coming.”

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Time has just published my story on “How Corporations Want to Help Italy’s Crumbling Treasures — For a Price.”

When famed polish movie director Roman Polanski signed up to make the film Pompeii in 2007 — a now stalled big-budget epic about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 — Italy, home of the Pompeii ruins, was his first choice for shooting. But the production ended up moving to Spain, since tough-minded Italian officials typically object to film crews’ trampling over the archaeological site and the Spanish government beat out Italy with a cheaper offer.

In today’s feeble economy, Italian officials might have tried harder to cut a deal. As the euro-zone crisis..

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Time has just published my story on Italy’s fight against fast-driving tax evaders.

A fast car is supposed to be a means of escape. In Italy, it’s become one of the best ways to get caught. The land of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati is getting tough on tax evaders, and police have taken to stopping drivers of high-end SUVs and luxury cars and forwarding their information to the tax authorities to make sure the income they’ve declared (and paid taxes on) matches their expenditures. “It’s become invasive,” says Alessandro Zaffarani, a Rome resident. While driving his wife’s car — a BMW SUV — in December, he was pulled over twice in the course of half an hour. “They can stop you at any moment, not to ask you for the documents of the car, but for yours, as a person,” he says.

According to Zaffarani, who runs a Chevrolet dealership in Rome, the scrutiny has also cut into business. Faced with a new tax on cars with powerful engines, a still stumbling economy and some of the highest gas prices in the world, buyers were already more reluctant to enter the lot. Now tax evaders don’t want to risk getting caught either. And honest car buyers often don’t want the hassle of additional attention. “At this moment, the market is paralyzed,” says Zaffarani. In January, he suspended a promotion for the Chevy Camaro when demand dried up.

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Time has just published my piece about the Italian government’s effort to clarify the Catholic Church’s tax status.

Much of the coverage of a controversial new law winding its way through the Italian Parliament has portrayed the measure as a Nixon-to-China moment. It takes somebody like Prime Minister Mario Monti, the thinking goes, who is not only a practicing Catholic but also a graduate of a Jesuit school, to take on the Catholic Church in Italy and make it pay taxes on its commercial property.

In truth, however, the proposed law would do very little to change the existing legal situation. While the current legislation is muddled in many ways, one thing is clear: religious organizations have been required to pay taxes on property used for commercial purposes since at least 2005, when the country’s high court issued a ruling to that effect. The problem is that with the law currently on the books, it’s not always clear what is and what isn’t a commercial property. Monti’s proposal doesn’t upend the status quo — it merely reinforces it, cleaning up the legislative language and eliminating gray areas. “It’s not a new law,” says Marco Tarquinio, the editor of Avvenire, a daily newspaper owned by the Catholics Bishop’s Conference. “It’s a clarification of law that already existed.”

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