Italy’s highest court has upheld the jail sentences handed down to seven police officers and prison doctors for the brutal treatment of protesters during the G8 summit in Genoa 12 years ago. More than 250 protesters were held at a barracks in the city after riot police stormed the school they were using as a dormitory during the summit. They endured days in detention where they were physically humiliated and threatened with rape. All of them were innocent of any crime and were eventually released. Alan Johnston reports from Rome.
The days of mayhem in Genoa are most vividly remembered for one particular assault-- riot police stormed a school where peaceful anti-globalisation activists were sleeping and many people were subjected to appalling beatings. A number of the activists were then taken to the Bolzaneto barracks where in detention they endured more brutality. And this latest court case relates to what happened there.
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The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that the young and unemployed in Europe should be prepared to move to find work. A quarter of all people under the age of 25 in the eurozone are jobless. And in Spain and Greece, the figure is around 60 per cent. Steve Evans reports from Berlin.
Chancellor Merkel in her interview with the BBC was adamant that the policy of broadly balancing budget, sometimes called austerity, was the right one, but conceded that the unemployment of young people was what she called a huge crisis. Chancellor Merkel suggested that more mobility was needed. She said that in her own area of East Germany when communism collapsed and unemployment soared, many young people from her region only had jobs because, as she put it, they moved to the south.