Italy’s Treasury said it will “intensify” structural changes in the economy and push ahead with measures to balance the budget by 2014 after Standard & Poor’s said its debt rating is at risk of a downgrade.
Nearly 2,000 African migrants, many of them Eritrean and Somalis, have arrived on Italy's tiny, overcrowded Lampedusa Island in the past 24 hours. It is one of the biggest migrant waves to reach Lampedusa this year.
Italy is urging other European countries to take a greater share of the immigrants pouring across from North Africa. The tiny island of Lampedusa is just south of Sicily and only 150 kilometers from the Tunisian coast and has borne the brunt of the flood of refugees.
Chilean President Sebastián Piñera arrived in Italy this week for a three-day visit to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the Vatican. It comes at a difficult time for Berlusconi, who is in the middle of a scandal and allegations of tax fraud and consorting with under-age prostitutes.
In an extensive report, the Task Force Argentina (TFA)—which represents Italians holding some 4.5 billion US dollars in defaulted Argentine sovereign bonds—gave an ambiguous declaration over Argentina's debt-swap plan.