Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's epically wealthy and willful prime minister, has long boasted of being a self-made man.
Has he now taken his dauntless odyssey in personal improvement further, becoming a re-made man?
Fueled by Berlusconi's disappearance from public view for much of the last month, that question has been the subject of whispers here that grew louder on Thursday, when an Italian newspaper quoted one of his doctors as saying the prime minister had had some "plastic surgery around the eyes."
A nip? A tuck?
"Don't ask me anything more, because I do not speak of such private things," said the doctor, Umberto Scapagnini, who had just spoken of them, according to an article in the Turin daily La Stampa.
Scapagnini, who is also the mayor of the Sicilian metropolis of Catania and a member of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, would not receive a telephone call on Thursday afternoon at his City Hall office.
An assistant to the doctor said all inquiries were being referred to Berlusconi's political aides here in Rome.
But one of those aides said he had no information on the matter and no time to investigate it.
Berlusconi's aides said he had spent most of the last month holed up in his villa on the island of Sardinia because it was time, after his tumultuous six-month stint as president of the EU, to take a break. They said he would re-emerge here within the next few days.
He will presumably look rested.
Or will it be more than that?
"He will be blond and tall," said one associate, mocking the current rumors while also seeming to acknowledge, ever so subtly, Berlusconi's tendency toward cosmetic gilding.
Without spending much time in the sun, the prime minister nonetheless manages to keep pastiness at bay.
He reliably looks either bronze or somewhat orange, depending on the moment and the lighting.
He also looks less short than he really is -- an estimated 1.67m tall -- thanks to special padding on his seats, sizable heels on his shoes and his aides' relentless patrol of the photographs taken of him.
Those aides regularly try to peel away some of Berlusconi's 67 years, often by having him travel back in time.
During his 2001 campaign for prime minister, for example, images of him on posters and in advertisements showed a younger, leaner man with a much fuller head of hair.
That was a matter not only of vanity, say his critics, but also of strategy.
He appeared to be trying to reassure Italian voters of his vim and vigor in light of news that he had battled prostate cancer.
His recent, nearly complete absence from public view since around Dec. 20 prompted speculation that he might again be ill, but aides and political allies have denied that.
Scapagnini's comments, as quoted in La Stampa, also seemed to have been prompted by a desire to quash that speculation.
Some of Berlusconi's political opponents privately floated the possibility that the doctor was operating in the realm of political spin and planting a fictive tidbit to divert Italians' attention from Berlusconi's numerous political woes.
But chatter about the prime minister's possible adventures in aggressive cosmetology preceded and transcended that tidbit.
It reached the point where another Italian newspaper simply took the surgery for granted and ran an interview with an expert on eye jobs.
That article, in Thursday's issue of the Milan-based daily Il Libero, talked about "a small surgical intervention" that had suddenly appeared "under the eyes of everyone, but mainly under the eyes of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi."
Whatever is happening, Berlusconi must indeed keep his eyes, altered or not, on an array of challenges, including June elections for the European Parliament that will test his and his party's appeal.
"He needs to look good," one associate said.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS