In these five years sadly there have been major steps backwards including the intertwining of certain Mafia figures and certain politicians

In these five years, sadly, there have been major steps backwards, including the intertwining of certain Mafia figures and certain politicians."But her decision to run for governor gave the anti-Mafia movement another shot of life. "After the massacres," she said during the campaign, "my life changed fundamentally. I decided to come out of my private life and begin this voyage which has never ended, travelling around Sicily, Italy and other parts of Europe, telling what had happened."The anti-Mafia campaign subsequently ran out of steam. Rita Borsellino became a figurehead for the first mass anti-Mafia movement. Two months earlier, his close colleague, Giovanni Falcone, with whom he had been leading a wide-ranging investigation into the Mafia, was killed in the same way along with his wife and bodyguards on a Palermo motorway.The murders ignited the conscience of Sicilians, who came out on the streets in huge numbers to protest. It is a test Sicily has failed - though Ms Borsellino cut Mr Cuffaro's majority from more than 20 per cent to about 9 per cent.

Mr Cuffaro won 52.2 per cent of the vote, against 43 per cent for Ms Borsellino.A pharmacist whose family run a chemist's shop in Palermo, Rita was the sister of Paolo Borsellino, an investigating magistrate blown to pieces in 1992 by a huge Mafia bomb outside his mother's front door. He refused to resign when sent for trial, saying he would only do so if convicted. The decision by Rita Borsellino to run against him turned yesterday's election into a test of the island's readiness to unite and fight the Mafia that extorts protection money from around 80 per cent of tradesmen in Palermo, and makes huge sums through its corrupt domination of public works projects, rubbish disposal and hospital supplies. He was accused of tipping off a friend that his phone was being tapped by anti-Mafia investigators tracing links between Sicilian politicians, civil servants and the Mob. Sicily has confirmed its dubious reputation by enabling Salvatore Cuffaro, a Christian Democrat on trial for complicity with the Mafia, to trounce the sister of a murdered anti-Mafia judge and win a second term as governor of the island. Mr Cuffaro, nicknamed "Vasa Vasa" [Kiss Kiss] for his tendency to kiss all and sundry - he claims that he has kissed a quarter of all the people on the island - went on trial in Palermo last year. French campaigners argued that the directive would mean an influx of cheap labour from former Communist countries that joined the EU in 2004.In February, the European Parliament watered down the text and removed the controversial "country of origin" principle, under which firms could have operated in any of the EU's 25 member states as long as they abided by their home country's rules.Yesterday, EU member states agreed on a host of technicalities, including the degree of effort member states should make to ensure that existing national laws do not erect barriers to companies from other EU states offering services..

A deadlock was broken after the EU's new eastern European countries, which wanted to maximise the impact of the legislation, struck a deal with more cautious countries such as France. The so-called "services directive" is the EU's most controversial draft law for years, and worries about it fuelled the "No" vote in France's referendum on the European constitution last year. European ministers have backed a watered-down plan to boost cross-border competition in the EU's lucrative market in services, opening up a host of sectors, ranging from construction to private health care. The UK Government was ordered to pay its own costs today because the UK opted to support as a named individual country the defence mounted against the Euro-MPs' case by the European Commission and by the 25 EU governments acting as the Council of Ministers.. The European Parliament's assault on the legislation was far from unanimous - in a vote in March 2004, MEPs threatened by 229-202 to take the issue to the European Court.

They could face the threat of sanctions from Washington if they refuse to cooperate with the US electronic passenger information requirements - and sanctions from their national data protection authorities if they do. And the verdict could pose a big headache for individual European airlines. That would mean any passenger data transfer agreement would not be subject to the current restrictions of the EU rules identified by the judges today. The fact that the verdict was based on a legal argument about the scope of EU data protection laws paves the way for a possible attempt to negotiate a similar, but "intergovernmental" EU deal with the US. Washington had warned that failure to agree a deal on passenger data would mean prolonged delays for air passenger from Europe, as more processing would be required on arrival in America. And the court decision almost certainly means more queues and long hold-ups for Europeans at American airports once the current system is scrapped at the end of September.