Nor did he, as some have claimed, press the "nuclear button". He could have threatened to walk out of the EU all together. More mischievously, and perhaps astutely, he could have agreed to formally sign the treaty but informed his partners that because of domestic political constraints it would have to be subject to a UK referendum. Instead he kept the launch keys in his pocket.

Despite their domination of the race, Filippo Pozzato was the last Italian to have triumphed in Sanremo (2006).

For nearly a century, the contours of the Middle East were put into place by World War I's victorious British and French empires. Their award: sharing the spoils of the dissolved Ottoman Empire. The lines drawn by Sykes and Picot in 1916 have become the borders of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. For the next one hundred years, these externally and arbitrarily drawn borders were held together by sheer force and, when available, legendary sums of oil money. The kings, put in place by the empires, and the authoritarian rulers who deposed them, were able to forge together in the fires of war and oppression new loyalties to King and Country. Tens of millions of people were no longer Ottoman subjects of varying backgrounds. They were now proud Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, and Jordanians.

"Napoli remind me of Benitez's Liverpool," Reina said of the Spaniard's influence on the side.

The applicants are already marking the locations in case the technology is rapidly switching from prototype phase to large scale production. In this regard, $37 million worth grants have been awarded by the Energy Department to companies close to providing commercial service based on "wavy" clean energy.The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has announced it is bringing forward the review of Renewables Obligation payments after 2013.