As we all await the Prodi vote of confidence tomorrow, it is another news story which has caught my eye today:
In Love and War...In 1999 a Salerno man read his wife's diary and realised that she was having an affair with her brother-in-law. He then planned and carried out a prolonged campaign to "shame" her, threatening her and sending letters to her teaching colleagues. In 2005, he received an eight-month sentence for defamation, threatening behaviour and abuse and was ordered to pay damages to his wife, the judges having decided that too much time had elapsed since the man discovered the affair for a plea of "acting in extreme anger" to be accepted. Later, on appeal, the sentence was reduced to one for defamation only. Today, however, the
Cassazione, Italy's Supreme Court of Appeal, has declared that no time limit can be put on a betrayed spouse's anger and hurt; if your wife cheats on you, you have the right to "shame" her.
La Repubblica assures us that the decision would have been the same had the wronged partner been a woman!
La Regina Mirren
Martin Scorsese's Oscar has headlined here but there has also been plenty of coverage of La Regina Mirren, as Dame Helen is being called. Yesterday I used part of her acceptance speech in a lesson: analysed grammatically, there is a lot that a teacher can use in that sentence thanking Her Majesty: use of present perfect + for, negative subjunctive in a conditional phrase, and then the idiomatic use of the verb "give" to mean "toast". The students liked the quip about the royal hairstyle and the fact that it was OK to make it!
La Beckett
