In further proof that seemingly nothing can bring Silvio Berlusconi down -- not even a potential jail sentence -- Italy's most colorful public figure has announced he could lead his country for a fourth time.

Another run at Italy's highest office would be just the latest chapter in the life of the charming, billionaire three-time former prime minister.

In October Berlusconi was sentenced to four years in prison for tax evasion, but has since appealed the verdict.

Until recently, Berlusconi appeared to be leading a charmed life. His vast business empire spanned media, construction and football, making him the 118th-richest person in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth of $6.2 billion, and he was Italy's longest-serving post-war prime minister before quitting in 2011.

But last year he became embroiled in charges that he had paid for sex with a 17-year-old girl; his coalition government became ever more fragile; and Berlusconi resigned his premiership as Europe's financial crisis threatened to embroil Italy.

Despite the many scandals that have dogged Berlusconi since he entered politics nearly two decades ago, the 75-year-old is indisputably one of life's survivors. In Parliament, opponents tabled 51 confidence votes in him in the past three years alone, but Italians have thrice elected him as prime minister.

Abby Martin takes a look at MSNBC's recent documentary about the lies leading up the Iraq war, and the closer look at the corporate media's complicity in selling war to the American people by highlighting multiple staged events.

Silvio Berlusconi, the three-time Italian prime minister, billionaire playboy and perpetual criminal defendant who was all but counted out of Italian political life when a debt crisis forced his resignation in 2011, shocked the country Monday by shooting back into a position of influence.

Even by the chaotic standards of Italian politics, the resurgence of Berlusconi's People of Liberty party, which seems to be in contention to win the most seats in the Italian Senate, along with the astonishingly strong showing of a naysaying protest party led by BeppeGrillo, a seething ex-comedian opposed to the euro, has cast the Italian government into confusion.

The results have created the remarkable possibility that Italy could find itself next week without a government or a pope.

"Going to Tehran" arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.

More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticise U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyse that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony.

Their national security state credentials are impeccable. They both served at different times as senior coordinators dealing with Iran on the National Security Council Staff, and Hillary Mann Leverett was one of the few U.S. officials who have been authorised to negotiate with Iranian officials.

Both wrote memoranda in 2003 urging the George W. Bush administration to take the Iranian "roadmap" proposal for bilateral negotiations seriously but found policymakers either uninterested or powerless to influence the decision. Hillary Mann Leverett even has a connection with the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), having interned with that lobby group as a youth.

The man expected to become Italy's next prime minister won't pound the bully pulpit like Silvio Berlusconi. He won't claim to be the Jesus Christ of politics, or praise Barack Obama's "tan", and it's highly unlikely you'll bump into him at an all-night bunga bunga party.

No, Pier Luigi Bersani is seen as a safe pair of hands -- and now, after a lifetime in politics, the 61-year-old leader of the center-left Democratic Party is hoping to hang on to a lead in the polls that bombastic three-time former premier Berlusconi had all but wiped out in the dying days of the campaign.

A cigar-puffing ex-communist and pillar of the Italian left, Bersani campaigned on the promise of "A Just Italy" -- but as he knows, it will take far more than words to fix Europe's fourth-largest economy.

Italy in crisis

From top to bottom, Italy is a mess. Berlusconi, its last elected prime minister, quit in disgrace in 2011 and is now on trial for allegedly paying for sex with an underage girl. Italy has the third highest debt-to-GDP ratio in the first world, and only Haiti and Zimbabwe grew less from 2000 to 2010.

Italy ranks 72nd in corruption -- behind Ghana and Saudi Arabia -- and at an estimated €140 billion euros in yearly turnover, organized crime is the country's biggest industry, according to one business association report. Italy ranks a woeful 73rd in the Ease of Doing Business index, 80th in gender equality, and income equality is growing.

Mario Monti, who was appointed to run the country after Berlusconi's departure, has forced through a bitter package of cost-cutting measures to save the country from financial ruin, snuffing out any hope of short-term growth. Italy's economy has shrunk for a staggering six straight quarters, and its 11.2% unemployment rate is the highest since they began keeping records in 1999.

And while Monti may have some say in the new Italian government, it is career politician Bersani who will bear the burden of pulling Italy out of the mire.

During upcoming visit, president will convey message that window for American military operation opens in June, TV report says

When he visits Israel next month, US President Barack Obama will tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a "window of opportunity" for a military strike on Iran will open in June, according to an Israeli TV report Monday evening.

Obama will come bearing the message that if diplomatic efforts and sanctions don't bear fruit, Israel should "sit tight" and let Washington take the stage, even if that means remaining on the sidelines during a US military operation, Channel 10 reported. Netanyahu will be asked to refrain from any military action and keep a low profile, avoiding even the mention of a strike, the report said, citing unnamed officials.

In London Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said an Iran with nuclear weapons was "simply unacceptable" and warned the time limit for a diplomatic solution was running out.

The five right-wing justices hand Obama a victory by accepting his DOJ's secrecy-based demand for dismissal

The Obama justice department succeeded in convincing the five right-wing Supreme Court justices to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 2008 law, the FISA Amendments Act, which vastly expanded the government's authority to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. In the case of Clapper v. Amnesty International, Justice Samuel Alito wrote the opinion, released today, which adopted the argument of the Obama DOJ, while the Court's four less conservative justices (Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) all dissented. This means that the lawsuit is dismissed without any ruling on whether the US government's new eavesdropping powers violate core constitutional rights. The background of this case is vital to understanding why this is so significant.

One of the most successful government scams of the last decade has been to prevent any legal challenges to its secret surveillance programs. Both the Bush and Obama DOJ's have relied on one tactic in particular to insulate its eavesdropping behavior from judicial review: by draping what it does in total secrecy, it prevents anyone from knowing with certainty who the targets of its surveillance are. The DOJ then exploits this secrecy to block any constitutional or other legal challenges to its surveillance actions on the ground that since nobody can prove with certainty that they have been subjected to this eavesdropping by the government, nobody has "standing" to sue in court and obtain a ruling on the constitutionality of this eavesdropping.

It was, in a sense, so expectable, so leave-no-child-behind. I'm talking about the arming of American schools. Think of it as the next step in the militarization of this country, which follows all-too-logically from developments since September 11, 2001. In the wake of 9/11, police departments nationwide began to militarize in a big way, and the next thing you knew, the police were looking ever less like old-style neighborhood patrollers and ever more like mini-anti-terror armies. The billy club, the simple sidearm? So Old School. So retro.

When it came to weaponry for the new, twenty-first-century version of the police, it was a matter of letting the good times roll: Tasers, flash grenades, pepper spray, incendiary tear gas, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, bomb-detection robots, armored vehicles and tanks, special-ops-style SWAT teams, drone mini-submarines, drone aircraft, you name it. Today, even school police are being armed with assault rifles. And with it all goes a paramilitary fashion craze that anyone who observed the police in the Occupy moment is most familiar with.

In addition, the U.S. military is now offloading billions of dollars worth of its surplus equipment, some of it assumedly used in places like Iraq and Afghanistan against armed insurgents, on police forces even in small towns nationwide. This includes M-16s, helmet-mounted infrared goggles, amphibious tanks, and helicopters. And now, the same up-armoring mentality is being brought to bear on a threat worse than terror: our children. Think of it as the reductio ad absurdum of the new national security state. First, they locked down the airports, then the capital, then the borders, and finally the schools. Now, we're ready!

But the seldom-asked question is: ready for what?

In 2010, as WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified documents relating to the conduct of the US government, government defenders dismissively claimed that they revealed nothing new. Among the many documents disproving that claim were ones relating to a US policy in Iraq set forth in "Frago 242", which ordered coalition troops not to stop or even investigate torture and other war crimes by the Iraqi forces they were training, but simply to "note" them.

And note them they did: the logs record thousands of cases of Iraqi forces severely beating, brutalizing and torturing Iraqi civilians while US forces, with rare exception, did nothing to stop it (when the documents were released, the Guardian detailed just some of the illustrative cases). As the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder wrote at the time, the documents contain "incredibly awful reports of systematized detainee abuse by Iraqi soldiers and security forces right under the noses of the American-led coalition, which appears to have had virtually no incentive to put a stop to them" (as usual, these documents were classified not to safeguard US national security but rather to conceal bad and embarrassing acts on the part of the US government: that is why it is not hard to understand why the US government is so aggressive about punishing Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks, and other whistleblowers and journalists who expose these secrets).

In Afghanistan on Sunday, President Hamid Karzai alleged that the US is doing something much worse: not merely standing by and watching their trained forces torture and kill, but actively and systematically participating. As the Guardian's Golnar Motevalli reported:

Colourful sportsman turns diplomat to visit communist country to engage in 'basketball diplomacy' as tensions remain high

Flamboyant former NBA star Dennis Rodman is heading to North Korea, to become an unlikely ambassador for sports diplomacy at a time of heightened tensions between the US and North Korea.

Rodman, three members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, and a film crew from Vice media company are visiting the communist country to shoot footage for a TV show set to air on HBO in early April, Vice told the Associated Press before the group's departure from Beijing.

It's the second high-profile US visit this year to North Korea, a country with which it remains in a state of war. The visit comes two weeks after North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test in defiance of UN bans against atomic and missile activity.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, made a surprise four-day trip in January to Pyongyang, where he met officials and toured computer labs, just weeks after North Korea launched a satellite into space on the back of a long-range rocket.

Washington, Tokyo, Seoul and others consider both the rocket launch and the nuclear test provocative acts that threaten regional security.

North Korea claims the satellite launch is a peaceful bid to explore space, but says the nuclear test was meant as a deliberate warning to Washington. Pyongyang says it needs to build nuclear weapons to defend itself against the US, and is believed to be trying to build an atomic bomb small enough to mount on a missile capable of reaching the mainland US.