A gunman killed 26 people, 18 of them children in a shooting on Friday morning at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., about 65 miles northeast of New York City, a law enforcement official said. The gunman then shot and killed himself inside the school.

A proposal to remove Italian as a required language for high school graduation was passed unanimously Thursday night by the North Shore school board despite an impassioned plea from parents, students and educators to keep it. 

 Italy Wedding Planner, My Secret Italy launches a new beach wedding service for couples wishing to get married on an Italian Beach.The company, which has been organising Weddings in Italy for over 6 years has seen an upturn in the number of couples wishing to tie the knot with a beautiful Italian Beach Wedding and has taken a record number of bookings for 2013, despite many other service providers reporting a downturn in bookings due to the year.

  As Prime Minister Mario Monti prepares to exit the stage, he has burnished Italy's image — and his own — abroad, but he is less beloved at home. Italians are irate about higher taxes, while critics say that Mr. Monti failed to carry out the basic structural changes he said were needed, leaving a legacy more of austerity than growth.

 To get away from it all, I go to . . . Italy. If it’s good enough for Clooney, it’s good enough for me. I don’t speak Italian, so I just add a vowel and cop an attitude. So “when does the ferry arrive?” becomes “arrivey da boatie?” It really works! So one could say that I am fluent in Italian and they would “speaka da trutha.”

 On Wednesday morning, Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Terzi di Sant’Agata stood in front of Michelangelo's David-Apollo  in an atrium of the National Gallery of Art. The sculpture last graced the museum in 1949 as a post-World War II sign of friendship between the two countries. The statue — one of the master’s many unfinished works — was not the only unfinished project in the room.

 Filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke those words in his last interview, hours before he was clubbed to death and run over with his own car on Nov. 2, 1975. Best known as a director of stark, political, often violent and sexually explicit films, Pasolini would have turned 90 last March.