Hasta La Gadget!

ROME (AP) — Italian lawmakers elected Sergio Mattarella, a Constitutional Court justice widely considered to be above the political fray, as the nation’s new president on the third day of voting Saturday.

Mattarella’s election as head of state was clinched when he amassed 505 votes — a simple majority. The 73-year-old former minister with center-left political roots went on to garner 665 votes from the 1,009 eligible electors. Known as a man of few words, Mattarella cemented that reputation with his first remarks to the nation.

“My thoughts go, above all, to the difficulties and hopes of our fellow citizens. That’s enough,” he said, referring to the grim economic situation, in comments made at his court office just down the street from the presidential palace.

Italy is mired in recession and unemployment has hovered about 13 percent nationally. Young Italians are increasingly seeking work abroad.

Renzi pushed hard for Mattarella’s election, and some of Renzi’s rebellious Democrats resented the premier’s imposing his choice on them. So Mattarella’s victory signals that Renzi for now succeeded in closing fractious ranks, including former Communists, in the governing coalition’s main party.

“Thanks for being serious,” Renzi and some loyalists wrote in a text message to Democrats during the balloting, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Former Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right opposition vowed to cast blank ballots. While acknowledging Mattarella’s credentials to be guarantor of the Constitution and arbiter in political crises, they complained Renzi didn’t decide to reach agreement first with Berlusconi on the candidate.

Mattarella raised conflict-of-interest concerns when media mogul Berlusconi jumped into politics two decades ago. He also resigned as education minister in 1990 to protest legislation that helped Berlusconi transform several local TV channels into a business empire including Italy’s three main private TV networks.

Mattarella, a Sicilian, was first elected to Parliament in 1983. His Christian Democrat party collapsed in corruption probes of the 1990s, but Mattarella was unscathed. His older brother, Piersanti Mattarella, governor of Sicily, was killed in 1980 by the Mafia.

The silver-haired Mattarella, a widower with three grown children, lives in the modest quarters of Constitutional Court justices in Rome. He was expected to start the seven-year term next week.

A year ago, Berlusconi pledged his support for the electoral reform agenda of Renzi, who had just assumed the Democratic Party leadership. Buoyed by the deal, Renzi quickly pushed fellow Democrat Enrico Letta out of the premiership. Berlusconi lost his Senate seat because of a tax fraud conviction but is keen on keeping political influence.

Reforms include changing Italy’s electoral law to make governments more stable. Whether Berlusconi, irked over Renzi’s picking the presidential candidate, will renege on the reforms deal is unclear. A pro-Berlusconi lawmaker, Maurizio Gasparri, predicted the media mogul’s center-right lawmakers might be “less generous” with support.

Former Berlusconi allies now in Renzi’s coalition chafed at the unilateral choice of the Mattarella candidacy. But the government’s short-term survival seemed little threatened. Politicians are generally uneager to provoke a crisis that could bring early elections, with voters exasperated over their leaders’ failure so revive the economy.

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Follow Frances D’Emilio at www.twitter.com/fdemilio

BERLIN (AP) — German Chancellor Angela Merkel has underlined the refusal of Greece’s European creditors to consider forgiving part of the debt-ridden country’s rescue loans, though she stressed in an interview published Saturday that Berlin’s aim is to keep Greece in the eurozone.

Greece’s new government insists it will honor pre-election promises to seek a cut on the country’s rescue debt and scrap painful budget measures that were demanded in exchange for the loans. Merkel said in an interview with the daily Berliner Morgenpost that Europe will continue showing solidarity with Greece and other nations hit by Europe’s debt crisis “if these countries undertake their own reform and saving efforts,” and fended off a question about the new Greek government’s moves to reverse reforms and rehire suspended workers.

“We — Germany and the other European partners — will now wait and see what concept the new Greek government comes to us with,” she was quoted as saying. She was clear, however, about prospects of a debt cut.

Athens already was forgiven billions of euros by private creditors, Merkel said. “I don’t see a further debt haircut.”

As for demands that have surfaced in Greece for Germany to pay more compensation for Nazi crimes during World War II, Merkel said that “this question doesn’t arise.”

Merkel said she wants Greece to be successful and acknowledged that “many people there have hard times behind them.”

“The aim of our policies was and is for Greece to remain a part of the euro community permanently,” she said.

DEBALTSEVE, Ukraine (AP) — Outgoing heavy-caliber fire boomed incessantly, shaking the ground and rattling windows around the besieged town. Residents of Debaltseve, seemingly inured to the racket, listened impassively as they mustered at the town hall on Saturday to be evacuated with as many belongings as they could carry.

The government-held town has been without power, water and gas for at least 10 days, prompting many to flee from an intense artillery duel between government and Russian-backed separatist forces. Almost every one of the largely deserted streets in the center showed signs of having been struck by projectiles.

A month of relative quiet in eastern Ukraine was shattered in early January by full-blown fighting as the separatists attempted to claw back additional territory from government hands. Rebel leaders accused Ukraine of mobilizing its forces in advance of an imminent offensive.

Ukraine’s emergency services said Saturday that almost a thousand residents have been evacuated in the past three days from Debaltseve. But the number of crammed civilian vehicles seen speeding out of the town’s rutted, icy roads over the past few days suggests official figures may be on the conservative side.

“City police officers cannot go out to the scenes of destruction because of the ceaseless artillery strikes,” Vyacheslav Abroskin, head of police for the Donetsk region, said in a statement Saturday afternoon.

“Volunteers and police are traveling under fire to evacuate entire families.”

Abroskin said 12 people had been killed by shelling in Debaltseve, which hosts a strategic railway hub. He did not specify over what period the deaths had taken place.

With the government apparently unable to handle all the people wishing to leave, volunteer groups are trying to fill the gap.

“We are evacuating people from this hotspot, so they don’t have to deal with what is going on, because this is not their war after all. This has nothing to do with them,” said Andrei Vasilyev, a worker with a charitable organization based in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

As Vasilyev’s minibus was being loaded, a small child held in her mother’s arms cried and pleaded plaintively to leave as soon as possible. Infirm and elderly passengers needed to be lifted into the tightly packed transport.

Leaving Debaltseve carries its own risks because of the encroachment of separatist forces on all sides. Roads running west and east are controlled by rebels, leaving the northbound road the only remaining corridor of relative safety. But fresh, scorched shell craters alongside that road testify that it is dangerous too.

Fighting inched toward Debaltseve this week when separatists burst through government lines to occupy part of the town of Vuhlehirsk.

The towns are separated by 13 kilometers (eight miles) of road and railroad. When Ukrainian troops were overrun by formidably armed rebel attackers Thursday, some soldiers were forced to retreat to their positions in Debaltseve on foot.

Despite claiming to rely solely on military equipment poached from the Ukrainian army, separatist forces have consistently deployed vast quantities of powerful weapons, some of which military experts say is not even known to be in Ukraine’s possession.

Since the conflict started in April, it has claimed more than 5,100 lives and displaced more than 900,000 people across the country, according to U.N. estimates.

Ukraine’s Defense Minister Stepan Poltorak said on Saturday that 15 soldiers had died and that another 30 were injured over the previous day’s fighting.

“This happened along the entire line of conflict, starting from the Luhansk region and ending in Mariupol,” he said.

The United Nations on Friday voiced concern about the deteriorating situation in Debaltseve and other densely populated areas where intense fighting is going on. Neal Walker, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, has called for an immediate humanitarian truce to allow humanitarian assistance and evacuation of civilians.

Efforts to hold talks on halting the escalating violence have to date been unsuccessful.

Rebel representatives arrived in Minsk, Belarus, on Friday but left shortly thereafter because of what they said was the failure of Kiev’s negotiators to turn up. Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevhen Perebiynis reiterated his government’s consistent line, which is that Ukraine will send its envoy to talks only if the rebel leaders are there.

By early Saturday afternoon, representatives for the rebels, Russia, Ukraine and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe had all met in Minsk for talks, but no details were immediately available.

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Associated Press journalists Yuras Karmanau in Kiev, Ukraine, and Sergei Grits in Minsk, Belarus, contributed to this report.

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Five centuries after burning thousands of Jews at the stake, forcing them to convert to Christianity or expelling them, Portugal is granting citizenship rights to their descendants as part of an attempt to make amends.

The Portuguese Cabinet on Thursday approved a law offering dual citizenship to the descendants of those Sephardic Jews — the term commonly used for those who once lived in the Iberian peninsula. The effective date of the law will be made public soon and similar legislation in Spain is awaiting final legislative approval.

The Portuguese rights will apply to those who can demonstrate “a traditional connection” to Portuguese Sephardic Jews, such as through “family names, family language, and direct or collateral ancestry.”

Like Spain, Portugal says its sole reason for granting citizenship is to redress a historic wrong.

“There is no possibility to amend what was done,” Portuguese Justice Minister Paula Teixeira da Cruz said. “I would say it is the attribution of a right.”

The measure is the latest step in Portugal’s modern efforts to atone for its past harsh treatment of Jews, whose ranks once numbered in the tens of thousands, but have been reduced to only about 1,000 today.

In 1988, then-president Mario Soares met with members of Portugal’s Jewish community and formally apologized for the Inquisition. In 2000, the leader of Portugal’s Roman Catholics publicly apologized for the suffering imposed on Jews by the Catholic Church, and in 2008 a monument to the dead was erected outside the Sao Domingos church where the massacre of thousands of Jews began at Easter in 1506.

Jose Ribeiro e Castro, a lawmaker who was involved in drafting the legislation, sees the persecution of Sephardic Jews as a “stain” on Portuguese history.

He said he was contacted on social media by Sephardic Jews abroad who suggested granting citizenship rights to descendants of their persecuted ancestors.

“We wish it had never happened,” Ribeiro e Castro said. “Given that it did happen, and that it can be put right, we thought we ought to do so.”

Applicants will be vetted by Portuguese Jewish community institutions, as well as by government agencies. They will have to say whether they have a criminal record. Jewish community leaders say they expect the application procedure to take four months.

“We regard it as an act of justice,” Michael Rothwell, a delegate of the Committee of the Jewish Community of Oporto, which is one of the vetting organizations, said of the new law. He described it as “another important step toward reconciliation with the past.”

Rothwell said the Portuguese legislation appears simpler than Spain’s plan, which would require testing of candidates for their knowledge about Spain.

The Jewish Community of Oporto has received about 100 requests from all over the world for certificates attesting ties to a Sephardic Jewish Community of Portuguese origin and say they expect to receive many more.

There is no accepted figure for the global Sephardic population.

James Harlow, a descendant of Sephardic Jews who lives in San Jose, California, intends to apply for Portuguese citizenship because his Silicon Valley business is looking to expand abroad. Portugal, a member of the 28-nation European Union, offers an entry into a huge market.

“Citizenship makes travel, talent recruitment and operations easier,” the 52-year-old said in emailed replies to AP questions.

Harlow says his ancestors were advisers to the royal family when Portugal established an empire that would stretch from Brazil to Africa and India. His ancestors refused to convert and left Portugal in 1496.

Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, and historians that some 80,000 of them crossed the border into Portugal.

In 1496, King Manuel I, eager to find favor with Spain’s powerful Catholic rulers, Ferdinand and Isabella, and marry their daughter Isabella of Aragon, gave the Jews 10 months to convert or leave. When they opted to leave, Manuel issued a new decree prohibiting their departure and forcing them to embrace Roman Catholicism as “New Christians.”

Many converted, but kept their true beliefs and Jewish religious practices hidden.

The “New Christians” adopted new names, inter-married and even ate pork in public to prove their devotion to Catholicism. Some Jews, though, kept their traditions alive, secretly observing the sabbath at home then going to church on Sunday. They circumcised their sons and quietly observed Yom Kippur, calling it in Portuguese the “dia puro,” or pure day.

The New Christians were at the mercy of popular prejudice. In the Easter massacre of Jewish converts in 1506 in Lisbon, more than 2,000 Jews are believed to have been murdered.

The Portuguese Inquisition, established in 1536, could be more cruel than its Spanish counterpart. It persecuted, tortured and burned at the stake tens of thousands of Jews.

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Associated Press writers Helena Alves in Lisbon and Alan Clendenning in Madrid contributed to this report.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Some Indiana residents could get a religious exemption from having their photographs on state identification cards under legislation passed Wednesday in a House committee.

If the measure passes, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles could issue a photo-less ID to applicants who have sincere religious objections to having their pictures taken.

Bill sponsor Rep. Robert Morris, R-Fort Wayne, said it was created to give Indiana’s Amish population — which is the third largest in the country behind Ohio and Pennsylvania — more access to outside businesses like banks and pharmacies that require a state-issued ID.

Other states have passed similar legislation, including Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, although many laws indicate that the department of motor vehicles has discretion on whether or not to issue the IDs.

Supporters of the bill said the current photo requirement conflicts with the Biblical prohibition against the making of “graven images.” The bill would allow those with religious objections to instead have a digital image using facial recognition technology kept on file at the BMV.

Some Roads and Transportation Committee members expressed concerns it would increase the use of false or fake IDs and businesses would have no way of determining the ID’s authenticity.

Committee chairman Rep. Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, said businesses would still have the same discretion they have now when deciding whether to accept an ID. Soliday also said he doubts the exemption will attract other applicants besides those with strict religious beliefs because it’s so restrictive.

The photo-less ID would list the same details as a real ID, including height, weight, gender, birth date, address and a unique number. However, those with this kind of ID cannot fly commercially, enter a federal building, legally drive or vote.

“If you choose this over a driver’s license, you are choosing a very restrictive lifestyle,” Soliday said.

The bill will now go to the House floor.