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 A long stalemate since Italy's inconclusive election has left government departments in Rome becalmed until a new administration arrives and powerless to respond to increasingly desperate calls for action from business leaders. 

 Early in Christopher Castellani’s new novel, “All This Talk of Love,” Frankie Grasso wonders whether he and his family are “at the end of something.” Frankie is a 30-ish graduate student in English literature, still a long way from the end of (for one thing) his dissertation. An answer begins to take shape when his sister, an affluent stay-at-home mom who has never strayed far from their childhood home in Delaware, organizes a family trip to Santa Cecilia, the village in Italy where their parents grew up. 

 Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, buoyed by new opinion polls showing a lead for his center-right coalition, said on Friday Italy must return to the polls quickly unless the center left agrees to govern with him. 

 Italy's president has pardoned a U.S. Air Force colonel convicted in absentia by Italian courts for the CIA-conducted abduction of an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street.