Attacks on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in the British press have hit an especially raw nerve as he hosts this year’s G8 summit and some Italian newspapers have had enough.

The summit has come at a particularly sensitive time for the beleaguered Italian leader, who has been dogged for weeks by salacious scandals involving allegations he has a soft spot for underage women and has entertained escort girls.

Britain’s irreverent media have had a field day, delving into his exotic personal life and publishing lurid cartoons of the veteran Berlusconi cavorting with naked women.

Adding insult to injury, the British press have also led the charge in accusing Berlusconi of chaotic organisation of the annual G8 knees-up, with a fanciful story in the Guardian suggesting Italy might be ejected from the rich nations club.

In an image-conscious country where looking bad is a unpardonable sin, that was the final straw for some Italians and a counter-offensive is underway.
   
Unsurprisingly, Il Giornale newspaper, owned by Berlusconi’s family, has led the charge.

“The attack on Italy? These English are still racist,” the paper wrote on its front page on Friday, taking umbrage at a cartoon showing a grinning Berlusconi holding up a bra.

But other papers have also decided to put their foot down.

Rome’s Il Messaggero daily, taking aim at the “spoilt Anglo-Saxons”, dedicated a whole page on Friday to criticism of the British economy.

“One must say, once and for all, that on the real economy you can’t give lessons to anyone, least of all Italy,” it wrote.

Italy’s television, which has paid little attention to the Berlusconi scandals, has meanwhile presented the l’Aquila summit as an international triumph of heroic proportions.

Italian diplomats have also been drafted to the cause, with embassies abroad phoning up major media companies to pass on praise from U.S. President Barack Obama for the meeting.

Certainly Berlusconi has defied his critics in putting on a smooth, sleek show amidst the rubble of the April earthquake.

But while the Italian style is, as ever, impressive, the substance is perhaps less striking.

Unlike previous G8 hosts, Berlusconi seems to have focused his attention more on logistics than the issues, leaving other leaders to take charge of the toughest dossiers.

Obama chaired the crucial global warming talks, French President Nicolas Sarkozy led discussion on Iran and when it came to discussion on Africa, Italy was in the embarrassing position of being the meanest aid provider at the table.

But don’t expect to see such diplomatic details to get prominence in the Italian press!

And while many analysts have questioned the outcome of the talks, suggesting for example that the climate accord fell far short of what was needed, the Italian press is once again accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative.

And of course, it is all thanks to Italy. “Tired but satisfied, Berlusconi showed once again how he can achieve the best results in these occasions,” Il Messaggero said.

Photo: POOL New/Reuters

Abolish money. Punish the  looters. Eat the bankers.

Ageing 1960s hippies and their youthful anti-globalisation descendants joined in an angry  anti-capitalist protest at the Bank of England on Wednesday, waving placards and shouting slogans reflecting  a common fury at perceived corporate greed.

With worldwide recession destroying jobs by the week, protesters at the G20 protest in the City of London demanded an end to what they see as a global, predatory system that robs the poor to benefit the privileged.

"Welcome to Pig City: One war -- class war" was the placard held up by a masked man standing on the doorstep of the central bank.

As hooded protesters scrawled "Peace and Love" on the walls of the Bank, Drogo, an elderly man in flowing multi-coloured robes and carrying an orb on a wooden stick, pointed at staff peering out of the Bank of England's windows and said:

 "I am here to tell these fat bankers to get off their arses and save the planet.

"They have to do it because they are still in charge -- for now. But of course capitalism has to go down. We have had enough."

One man strolled along Threadneedle Street dressed as a white-faced corpse in top hat and tails with a placard round his neck that read: "Their greed is killing our planet."

Some windows were smashed. Protesters hurled paint bombs and empty bottles and occasionally threw punches at police, who responded with baton blows. 

Police said they had deployed one of Britain's biggest security operations to protect businesses, the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange and other financial institutions.

But the clashes were almost desultory, if briefly dramatic. There was no general looting.

This was not Seattle, 1999, when demonstrators successfully disrupted a World Trade Organisation meeting, or London's anti-Iraq war demonstration of 2003, when hundreds of thousands joined together in an impressively unified march for peace.

The G20 meeting was due to take place several miles away in the Docklands area of east London on Thursday.

On Wednesday, there were just 4,000 demonstrators, and the range of causes they espoused was  varied in the extreme, bringing together anti-capitalists, environmentalists, anti-war campaigners and conspiracy theorists of various stripes.

For much of the day the mood was carnival-like. The police managed to seal off the handful of streets around the Bank from the rest of the City, where workers went about their business normally.

A brass band played for several hours. And as the day wore on, protesters peeled away from the knots of angry young men taunting riot police to dance to a mobile disco set up on the steps of the Bank.

Above the disco, someone had fixed a large poster which read: "Hundreds of Architects and Engineers Demand a Real 9/11 Investigation."

The hard core of violence-prone protesters were a tiny minority. Some masked and hooded young men belied their mysterious appearance by being friendly and talkative.

One, 19-year-old student Francis, explained: "Bankers have made bad gambles and we are all paying for it. They must take responsibility for that."

There was even a good-natured counter-demonstration by pro-capitalists. One of them, Simon Richards, 50, from Gloucester, western England, said: "We have come to stage a counter-demonstration to show we are not intimidated by the terror tactics of these  protesters.

"We are in favour of free market rather than state control."

Protester Mia, 21, a student from Denmark, waving an anti-war banner, said the range of causes on offer was a  strength, not a weakness.

She said she wasn't just angry about international conflict.

"We're here to protest about all of it. All these crises are linked," she said.

"The U.S. has to borrow lots of money from China and other places to pay for all these wars, meaning they have less money for housing and other parts of their economy. It's vital to demonstrate about it, provided it's peaceful."

 Here are a selection of placards and graffiti seen at the demonstration.

 "Capitalism isn't working"

"Drop books, not bombs"

"Banks are evil"

"People will stop robbing banks when banks stop robbing people"

"Make love, not leverage"

"Resistance is fertile"

"Housing is a right, not a privilege"

"You can rent the house you used to own"

"Eat the bankers"

"Banker, rhymes with ?"

Stopping off in New York during a marathon, 18,000-mile diplomatic offensive before next week’s G20 summit in London next week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown recalled a conference held in eerily similar circumstances in London 76 years ago.

Sixty-six nations gathered for the June 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference which was aimed at lifting the world’s economy out of the Depression.

But amid American opposition to European plans to return to a system of fixed exchange rates, the conference collapsed and the world put up trade barriers, jobless ranks swelled and the rise of Fascism took the world into war.

“There was no further progress other than a resort to protectionism for the rest of that decade,” Brown told a business audience during a five-day pre-summit tour that has taken him to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, New York, Brazil and Chile.

Brown must be hoping desperately that history will not repeat itself when he hosts a meeting of leading industrial and developing economies in London on April 2 to try to chart a way out of the worst global financial crisis since the 1930s.

Again there have been signs of transatlantic division in advance of the summit, with many Europeans resisting U.S. pressure for more fiscal stimulus to boost the economy, while the Europeans put the emphasis on tightening regulation of the financial sector.

Mirek Topolanek, prime minister of the Czech Republic which holds the current European Union presidency, was quoted this week as saying U.S. President Barack Obama’s huge economic stimulus plan was “the road to hell”.

Many countries are suspicious that their neighbours are resorting to protectionist policies to try to safeguard jobs at home.

Currency questions have caused friction between the United States and China, whose economies are now closely inter-dependent. Paul Volcker, a senior Obama adviser, gave short shrift to China’s proposal for a new world currency when asked about it at a New York roundtable with Brown this week.

Volcker said he understood restiveness about the “lopsided nature” of the current international monetary system but he said pointedly that the Chinese “didn’t have to buy those dollars in the first place”. A new international monetary system which suddenly devalued the dollar’s role was not practical, he said.

As Brown jetted around the world to bolster support for concerted action to lift the economy, he came up with a variety of ambitious and expensive proposals to revive trade and get the economy going again.

But he runs the risk of setting expectations for the London meeting too high, perhaps bringing crushing disappointment in its wake.

“If the G20 becomes a meeting just to set another meeting, we’ll be discredited and the crisis can deepen,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said at a press conference with Brown in Brasilia.

Brown’s G20 envoy, Mark Malloch-Brown, voiced similar fears earlier this month. "If indeed we get anodyne committee conclusions where all substance has been taken out of them, the markets on April 3 will be something of a disaster zone, I have no doubt," he said.

Brown has called for a doubling of IMF resources to $500 billion and for a $100 billion trade financing facility to help reverse a slide in exports. He has also called for an insurance policy for countries with big foreign currency reserves, such as China, so that they will feel able to use some of their reserves to boost the economy without fearing a run on their currencies.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who Brown met in New York, urged the G20 to support a $1 trillion stimulus plan for developing countries.

With so many other demands on their cash, it is doubtful that even the powerful G20 economies will be able to find the vast sums needed for all of these programmes.

The huge media focus on the gathering of Obama and other world leaders in London, and the big protests that are expected to accompany it, will only heighten the anticipation.

British officials are trying to dampen expectations that a big new fiscal stimulus package will be approved at the G20 summit, saying they do not expect countries to put their national budgets on the table next week and suggesting that the results of the summit will be seen over the next year, rather than on the day of the summit.

Harsh economic reality may also force Brown to rein in his own wish to pump more resources into the British economy.

While he was away cheerleading for the G20, events back home kept intruding.

First -- in a move one opposition lawmaker described as a “coup” -- Bank of England Governor Mervyn King warned the government on Tuesday that its soaring budget deficit meant it would have to be cautious about any new stimulus for the British economy.

On Wednesday a sale of British government bonds failed for the first time since 2002, sending a warning to Brown that the markets may balk at financing ever higher British government deficits.

Then on Friday, Brown was given a lesson in economic management by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet who described how the money Chile had put aside in good economic times had enabled it to pump more cash into the economy during the downturn.

Brown’s Conservatives opponents at home say this is exactly what he failed to do during the years of prosperity – reduce the budget deficit so he had more financial firepower to help people through a recession.

As his ambitions clash with harsh reality, Brown may have to lower his sights both for the G20 summit and for the British economy.

[Photo: Prime Minister Gordon Brown (L) listens to Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a news conference at the Alvorada Palace in Brasilia March 26, 2009. REUTERS/Roberto Jayme]

The European-Mediterranean summit in Paris might have produced grand projects ranging from cleaning up the Mediterranean sea to using North Africa’s sunshine to generate power. But that is is not what it will be remembered for.

It will be remembered for the glorious welcome it bestowed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who until yesterday was persona non-grata in the West, an autocrat leading a pariah regime, which many believe orchestrated the 2005 killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.  

Assad was the star of the show, which sealed a new detente between Syria and Europe, with the Syrian and Israeli leaders sitting at the same table for the first time.

So what happened? And why are things finally looking up for Bashar? What lay behind this sudden turn in his fortunes? Are Bashar and his government really off the hook?       Is it all forgotten because Assad relaunched indirect peace talks with Israel and gave his blessing to a Qatari-mediated accord that ended Lebanon’s political crisis, allowing the election of a Lebanese president? After all, the new government was in Syria’s favour.

Or is it as some experts commented because Assad proved once again, like his father late President Hafez al-Assad before him, that there won’t be any stability or peace in the region without Syria, that Syria –  with its strong links with Iran, Lebanon’s Shi’ite Hezbollah, the Islamist Hamas movement and a string of hired guns — still  calls the shots and could act as a spoiler if ostracised? 

Some observers even speculated that there was collusion in Damascus for the killing in February of Imad Moughniyah, the chief of Hezbollah’s security network and an agent of Iran who topped the U.S. most wanted list for 25 years.

Those familiar with Syrian techniques joked that Syria keeps resorting to the same old get-out-of-jail-free-cards and dodges to get out of crises with the West.

In the 1980’s,  for example, Syria was shunned by the West for its alleged links to an El Al bombing plot in London, its alliance with Iran against Arabs in the Iran-Iraq war, and because of its support for Shi’ite Islamist bombings of U.S. and French targets in Lebanon.

Yet it regained its place in the Arab fold –  and the good grace of Washington – by joining the U.S.-led alliance that ended Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Syria was well rewarded - the US gave it a free hand to operate in Lebanon and Arab states gave aid and investment.  
Syrian journalists accompanying Assad were delighted by their leader’s confident performance at the Elysee Palace. He shared a table with Sarkozy, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and the Qatari ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Yet most journalists directed their questions to Assad.

Heading out of the palace one Syrian journalist joked with a colleague: “Our Lebanese friends will be upset because the story is no longer the Hariri tribunal”.

Assad and his glamorous wife Asma savoured their moment of glory. Both were invited to stay on for Bastille Day.

“Bashar is here to stay…It is a very different situation. We saw lots of self-assurance and self-confidence. He was conducting himself with a statesman-like appearance,” one analyst said.  

Is Syria back in the fold or is full rehabilitation a long way off? Has Assad outsmarted Syria’s critics?