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"Milan cannot turn into an Islamic city, a zingaropoli [Gypsytown] full of Roma camps, besieged by foreigners to whom the left wants to give the right to vote," Mr Berlusconi said on his People of Freedom party website. "Milan is... one of the most important capitals in Europe in terms of intelligence, creativity and entrepreneurialism," he said. "A city like this will surely not want to hand itself over to the far left with the risk of becoming a disorderly, chaotic and unsafe city." Mr Berlusconi is understood to have taken first-round defeat in Milan - his home town and...

Having confronted travellers cutting down trees on her farm, terminally-ill Tracy St Clair Pearce found herself subjected to a terrifying ordeal. Some of the group pelted her with rocks while a youth threatened to slit her throat and slaughter her cattle. When she dialled 999 she expected the full weight of the law to be on her side. Instead, however, police officers criticised her for inflaming the situation and confiscated her legally held shotguns – even though they had been locked away in a cabinet at home throughout the incident.

The European Commission is to launch legal proceedings against France over its expulsion of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma (Gypsy) migrants. Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said France had failed to respect European rules on freedom of movement. The controversial expulsions of thousands of Roma led to a serious row between Brussels and Paris. Recently Ms Reding compared France's action to events during World War II. The accusation drew a sharp rebuke from French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "France is not enforcing European law as it should on free movement, so we are launching an infringement process against France," Ms Reding told France...

France has begun expelling approximately 700 Roma to Romania and Bulgaria on Thursday, AFP reported. The first 79 Roma to participate in what has been termed a "voluntary return procedure" agreed to leave France on a flight headed for Bucharest later in the day. Another 132 Roma are expected to leave France for Romania this Friday. Each adult to participate in the repatriation program is to receive 300 euros from the French government, and 100 euros for every minor that leaves the country.

Officers moved in before dawn to seal off the squatter camp, where the local authorities had installed water standpipes and chemical lavatories near the central city of Saint Etienne. The operation took several hours. Shortly after launching his measures aimed at gipsies, Mr Sarkozy announced plans to target members of other minority groups, promising to strip French nationality from certain categories of foreign-born criminals. Opinion polls this week showed that 79 per cent of voters approved of measures to dismantle the camps. Similar majorities backed other aspects of his law and order policy. Mr Sarkozy has pledged that those foreign...

About 50 travellers (gypsies) armed with iron bars and hatchets have rioted in the small town of Saint-Aignan in central France after police shot a man dead. Violence erupted when the crowd, some of them masked, tried to force their way into a police station in the town in the Loir-et-Cher region. In the ensuing riot, a bakery was trashed, three cars torched and trees, traffic lights and road signs damaged. Related stories Four held after French shooting France country profile Three hundred soldiers were brought in to restore order. Nobody is believed to have been hurt during the incident,...

*Editor's Note: The Western Front does not condone train hopping. The activity is often romanticized, but, in fact, is illegal and dangerous.The train began to stop. Mike Talbott, 25, woke up to the sun beating down and the sound of crushing steel ahead. Talbott, lead singer of Bellingham band Muppet Fetish, missed his first train, and against his better judgment, took the only other train heading out of Cincinnati. Talbott did not buy a ticket. Instead, he hopped on a freight train. “This train was built up of a bunch of cars with giant spools of steel and open tops,...

Scotland Yard and Romanian police have busted 30 suspected mobsters who allegedly ran a child trafficking ring which kidnapped children from poor Gypsy communities and forced them into a life of crime in Britain as reported by the Daily Mail: Police estimate that more then 170 youngsters as young as seven have been trafficked to the UK by the gang. * * * Police say the modern-day Fagins forced their young victims - snatched from poor gypsy communities - to beg in Britain and go on pick-pocketing and shoplifting sprees. Mob bosses set them up with bogus documents and homes...

"We would die rather than move," says Hasco Rustic, proudly showing guests into the metal container in which he lives. Mr Rustic is a spokesman for the 350 Bosnian gypsies in the Tor De Cenci camp that they share with a small group of Macedonians on Rome's southern fringes. Tor De Cenci stands in the way of a planned race track for Rome's first grand prix, scheduled for 2013. It is also one of many settlements that Gianni Alemanno, mayor, aims to close under a grand scheme to group some 6,000 foreign gypsies in a dozen "villages of solidarity" outside...

gyp Slang vb gyps, gypping, gypped, gips gipping, gipped (tr) to swindle, cheat, or defraud n 1. an act of cheating 2. a person who gyps [back formation from Gypsy] Someone call the PC police. At a town hall in Allentown, PA today, Pres. Obama said he is seeking to regulate health insurance companies to make sure that people don't get "gypped." Perhaps PBO thought the term would appeal to the crowd. This was Pennsylvania, after all, the state PBO imagines to be filled with bitter people clinging to "antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment." View...

BUCHAREST, Romania - At first, fans politely applauded the Roma performers sharing a stage with Madonna. Then the pop star condemned widespread discrimination against Roma, or Gypsies — and the cheers gave way to jeers. The sharp mood change that swept the crowd of 60,000, who had packed a park for Wednesday night's concert, underscores how prejudice against Gypsies remains deeply entrenched across Eastern Europe. Despite long-standing efforts to stamp out rampant bias, human rights advocates say Roma probably suffer more humiliation and endure more discrimination than any other people group on the continent. Sometimes, it can be deadly: In...

All through the night they stood at the gates, ready to repel the invasion. The old RAF camp had never seen an army like this, not in all its years of proud service. There was a nurse, a lorry driver, a shopkeeper and ambulanceman, several young mothers with children at their side – and a Staffordshire bull terrier called Kandie. It might not have looked like a task force assembling for action. But yesterday, in the drenching rain of a West Country morning, it became the front line in a war against a formidable new enemy – the traveller. In...

A respected jeweller has been given a police warning for 'racially offensive' conduct after banning gipsies from his shop in the wake of a series of raids by an Eastern European crime gang. Michael Plant, 62...reacted to the string of thefts with a sign in his shop window reading: 'Sorry, we do not serve Eastern Europeans or Gypsies.' Shortly after posting the sign, he was served with a warning from a senior police officer demanding he take it down, or face prosecution for possible race hate charges.Despite inquiries police have been unable to trace the thieves.... ... 'I've got a...

Speaking for the European Union presidency, Swedish migration minister Tobias Billström said on Wednesday that the EU supported requiring visas for Canadians travelling to the EU in response to Canada’s decision to impose visa restrictions on Czech nationals. "As the presidency of the EU, we are in favour of this reciprocity," Swedish Migration and Asylum Policy Minister Tobias Billström told AFP. "But it's up to the Commission to handle the proposal, because the Commission is responsible for the reciprocity mechanism," he added. Canada imposed visas on Czechs to stave off what it said was a steady influx of Roma asylum...

First he encircled them with an 8ft metal fence. And when that failed to move the gipsy camp off his land, he dug a moat. Builder Francis Shiner resorted to the measures when two gipsy families set up home on the disused car park of a building site in Bedford.He asked them to move but they didn't. So he went on the offensive and managed to evict them within 48 hours. Mr Shiner said the gipsies were hindering work on the site owned by Bedford construction company SDC construction and action had to be taken. He said: 'We went...

Homeowners could be forced to sell part of their land so travellers and gypsies can have permanent sites Homeowners are facing the prospect of being forced to sell their own land to make space for gypsy campsites under orders from the government. ... the Government is launching what has been described as a 'land grab', which could see fields and even private gardens converted into pitches for mobile homes. One local authority is now warning its residents that their land could be brought under compulsory purchase if they refuse to sell up to make way for hundred of travellers setting...

Jail sentences were handed down today to an Irish family, who had netted tens of millions of pounds worth of goods in a series of burglaries dating back 20 years.Yesterday, after a crime spree that spanned 20 years and targeted the homes of the rich and famous, five members of a notorious Irish gypsy gang were finally locked away. The Johnsons, famed for stealing antiques worth tens of millions of pounds from stately homes, were known to reside on caravan sites across the south-west of England. It was from these poor man's homes that they meticulously researched and planned their...

"(CNN) -- Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Romany gypsy girls were laid out on the sand." "Two of them were pulled to safety but rescuers failed to reach the other two in time to save them. The Web site of the Archbishop of Naples said the girls were cousins named Violetta and Cristina, aged 12 and 13. Their bodies were eventually laid out on the sand under beach towels...

Italy to fingerprint all Roma gipsy children By Malcolm Moore in Rome Last Updated: 9:20PM BST 26/06/2008 Around 80,000 gipsy children are to be fingerprinted by the Italian authorities under a new scheme that has drawn comparisons to the policies of Benito Mussolini. Unicef said it was 'shocked and deeply worried' by Italy's plans to fingerprint all Roma children The Italian government has blamed immigrants, and particularly Roma gipsies, for the country's crime problems. Since Silvio Berlusconi became prime minister in April, gypsy camps in the south and north of the country have been burned by vigilante mobs. The home...

The gipsy mother who forced her daughter of 13 to marry a 14-year-old boy yesterday dismissed British values as irrelevant to her. Renata Gural said she was unconcerned by the outrage over the teenagers' Romany wedding ceremony at a pub in East London. Mrs Gural, 31, who is pregnant with her sixth child, said: "I'm not bothered what anyone thinks. "I'll be the one who decides if my daughter is old enough to marry. I got married when I was 14 in such a ceremony and it hasn't done me any harm. "Just because I live in Britain doesn't mean...