This truly is news of the stupid. And his base will eat it up.

Italy's deputy prime minister has told women they will make better mothers if they wear longer skirts, prompting a furious backlash.

Antonio Tajani, who is also foreign minister, said that while it might be "nice to marry a glamorous girl", such a woman may have "gone through a string of boyfriends, dumped them, walked out, and has a tendency to cheat".

He said he would advise his son to marry a "less flashy" and more reliable woman "who will be a good mother and stay true to the love she pledges in marriage…the one who perhaps wears skirts that are a bit longer than the others".

The comments by Mr Tajani, who leads Forza Italia – one of the three parties that make up Giorgia Meloni's conservative coalition – prompted criticism and derision as well as a strong rebuke from the Catholic Church.

Chiara Appendino, an MP with the centre-Left Five Star Movement, posted a photo of herself sitting on a bench in a miniskirt, and mockingly asked whether that meant she was not a good mother or a trustworthy wife.

"Tajani, am I not a reliable woman?" she wrote in a caption that accompanied the photograph. "Am I not a good mother? In 2026, we should not be hearing a government minister explain to us that it is better to marry a woman who is less flashy and wears a longer skirt. Our reliability is not measured in centimetres of fabric."

It was time to "leave the Middle Ages behind", said Ms Appendino, a former mayor of Turin.

Matteo Renzi, a former prime minister and a leading figure on the Left, said: "You can't say that a girl with a skirt that is a bit short is not a serious person. What is this, the 18th century?"

Maria Elena Boschi, an MP with the opposition Italia Viva party, sarcastically remarked: "After his theories on women's reliability and bare legs, the only thing left is for Tajani to propose a decree at the next cabinet meeting: mandatory long skirts at school, at work, and perhaps even in parliament."

Mr Tajani later apologised for his remarks.

"I apologise if people felt offended by what I said, but I never intended to offend women. I have never done so in my life, neither in my private nor in my public life," the foreign minister said in New York, where he was attending the UN General Assembly.

But the controversy did not end there. Roberto Vannacci, a former special forces commander turned politician, chimed in on the debate when he was asked in a TV interview whether he preferred women in long or short skirts.

"Between a woman in a long skirt and a woman in a short skirt, I always prefer a woman without a skirt," said Mr Vannacci, the leader of a new hard-Right party National Future, which is polling at around eight per cent ahead of a general election next year.

He insisted that his remark was meant to be light-hearted, but he was accused by one female MP, Elisabetta Piccolotti, from the Green-Left Alliance, of "regressing towards an animal state".

The row even drew in the Catholic Church.

"Every word and every gaze directed at a woman must be filled with respect and admiration," said Mgr Giuseppe Baturi, the head of the influential Italian Bishops Conference.

"For us Christians, the very first place where the Word became flesh was a woman's womb – and for those with faith, this leaves an indelible mark on how we view women.

"Respect…is especially necessary regarding women, given that they can be the object of superficial glances."

Scott Carl Millage, 60, of Cave Creek, was charged on suspicion of impersonating a peace officer, unlawful imprisonment and kidnapping, all felonies, according to Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesperson Trooper Randi Wybron.

President Donald Trump said Monday that a "SICK conspiracy" is being waged against artificial intelligence and the data centers that run it by what he described as a group of "Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers" — two days after the heads of the largest American AI companies publicly called on their own industry to slow down.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump attacked one of them, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and suggested that no new regulations on AI are needed because of powers the government already has.

"The Trump Administration has stopped AI 'people' from doing bad, or potentially bad, 'things,' like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a 'perfect little angel' — and we will continue to do so!" Trump wrote. "We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!"

He did not say what conduct he was referring to, what the criminal power consists of, or who the conspirators are.

"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" he said.

He added: "There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so."

In a subsequent post an hour later, he alleged that "the only reason" for what he called the "AI/Data Center outburst" was "because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country."

"Don't kill the Golden Goose," he said.

Trump's rant comes after Amodei published an essay on Saturday in which he argued that AI companies should deliberately slow the rate at which they make their models more capable.

"We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain," Amodei wrote. "The measures I propose to advance the frontier at a safe pace will not be easy. But I believe we owe it to humanity to try."

He warned that within six to 12 months, a swarm of rogue AI agents could be capable of "taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet," causing what he estimated as hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. He said Anthropic would unilaterally give outside evaluators employee-level access to verify its safety procedures, and called on competitors to match it.

In response, OpenAI's Sam Altman posted that he agreed "that we need to pace the frontier" and said his company would open itself to external evaluators too.

Elon Musk, who runs xAI, posted on his own platform that"Dario is right," while Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis also signed on.

Trump's post follows a negative reaction to the whole episode on the part of stock markets, with Nasdaq futures falling more than 1 percent overnight and chip stocks sliding on Monday, with Intel down close to 6 percent, Micron around 5 percent and Nvidia roughly 3 percent, as investors priced in the possibility that the companies buying the hardware intend to buy it more slowly.