By Barbie Latza Nadeau

(CNN) — Dual insults — one from the US president and another from a Russian commentator — flung at Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni appear to be uniting at least some of her critics behind her.

Last week, US president Donald Trump – who has historically had a close relationship with Italy’s conservative leader – decried Meloni as “unacceptable” after she stood up to him over his criticism of Pope Leo XIV.

“She is the one who is unacceptable because she doesn’t care if Iran has a nuclear weapon and would blow up Italy in two minutes if it had the chance,” he told Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera. “I’m shocked by her. I ⁠thought she had courage. I was wrong.”

The dispute spilled over beyond the US-Italy relationship this week, when Russian television personality Vladimir Solovyov called her a “certifiable idiot” and “disgrace to the human race” over her “betrayal” of Trump and support of Ukraine.

Italy summoned the Russian ambassador to formally complain and Meloni posted a cryptic response on X.

“By nature, a diligent regime propagandist cannot impart lessons in either coherence or freedom. But these caricatures certainly won’t change our ways,” she wrote. “We, unlike others, have no strings attached, no masters, and we take no orders. Our compass remains one: Italy’s interests. And we will continue to follow it with pride, much to the chagrin of propagandists everywhere.”

Rather than bruising the Italian leader, the barbs have appear to have won her support at home, even uniting those who vehemently oppose and criticize her.

“Her opposition has always said she was subservient to Trump. Now it has been harder for her opponents to attack her,” Giovanni Orsina, director of the department of Political Science at Luiss University in Rome, told CNN. “More or less the same goes with the attack by the Russian. It was really very harsh and somehow this has obliged the opposition and even the pPresident of the Republic to defend her.”

President Sergio Mattarella, a left-wing politician, has often disagreed with Meloni’s government’s policies, especially those dealing with reproductive rights and immigration.

The spats also appear to be helping her approval rating here in Italy, where she recently suffered a defeat in a national referendum over judicial reform. After losing more than 10 points in weekly polls following the referendum , her popularity has crawled back up to pre-referendum levels, according to SWG-La7 political polls.

“I think this is an advantage – bottom line,” Orsina told CNN. “Not unqualified advantage but certainly more positive than negative for her. For the Italian public opinion, that kind of attack on the pope was a bit too much – and Meloni was able to answer Trump on grounds that were inarguably in her favor, or at least in a way Italians perceived her to be right.”

That is no small feat. Meloni used to be criticized by her opposers for being Trump’s best friend in Europe. In January 2025, the so-called “Trump whisperer” flew to Mar a Lago before his inauguration, where he hailed her as a “fantastic woman,” thanks in part to her close relationship with Elon Musk.

And it’

By Maureen O’Hare, CNN

(CNN) — The dense forests, twisting rivers and granite peaks of Northern Ireland’s Mourne Mountains have lived many lives and assumed many names.

They’re Westeros in “Game of Thrones.” They’re “Krypton” in the Superman prequel.

They’re also Transylvania in “Dracula Untold”, Sherwood in the upcoming “Death of Robin Hood” and the Forgotten Realms in “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”

As part of the Mourne Gullion Strangford global geopark, this mountain region in Ireland’s northeast achieved UNESCO recognition in 2023, but relatively small numbers of international visitors come to explore.

However, the lyrically named Kingdom of Mourne — it was never a sovereign state — has been inspiring imaginations globally for more than 75 years.

This sea-lapped landscape of 220 square miles was the real-life inspiration for “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the enduring 1950s novels by Belfast-born writer C.S. Lewis soon to be revived once again. They’ll get their fourth film adaptation in “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig’s “Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew” later this year.

Small and compact

While Gerwig’s “Narnia” is being filmed in England, Northern Ireland has a booming local film industry. Production of Season 1 and 2 of the new “Game of Thrones” prequel, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” is estimated to have returned more than $80 million to the economy alone.

“We are a small and very compact country. In fact, we are effectively the size of Greater Los Angeles, but with about 10% of the population,” says Andrew Reid, chief content officer for Northern Ireland Screen.

Only 1.9 million people live in Northern Ireland, but at any one time there will be 1,200 people hard at work on live-action scripted projects.

Thanks to good road infrastructure, crews can head in any direction from a production base in Belfast and quickly access a diverse range of landscapes — as can the fans and tourists who come to the region in their wake.

“You can be on a beach in the morning,” and back in Belfast in the afternoon, says Reid, or “up a mountain one day,” and then on a river, lake or in a forest the next.

Soft hills and rolling farmland

The coastline north of Belfast, with its windswept vistas reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands, has some of Ireland’s most dramatic scenery, including the world-famous Giant’s Causeway.

An hour south of Belfast, the Mourne Gullion Strangford global geopark is a softer landscape, with rolling hills and shadowy dells in which it’s easy for the mind to conjure up magical beasties.

“I have seen landscapes, notably in the Mourne Mountains and southwards, which under a particular light made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge,” wrote C. S. Lewis in his essay “On Stories.”

He was more specific in a letter to his brother Warren, writing, “that part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.”

The Lewis boys spent childhood vacations in Rostrevor, a neat and gaily painted village, now dotted with literary murals, close to the Northern Irish border.

To its north rise the mountains, richly forested in towering sitka spruce, one of the world’s tallest trees, and at their feet lie the still waters of Lewis’s beloved lough, a glacial ford which opens into the Irish Sea.

Thrown by a giant

Lewis wasn’t the first to dream of giants here. From the village, you can saunter past the Fairy Glen (reputed haunt of the “wee folk”) and climb the mountainside to discover spectacular views and a peculiar 50-ton boulder perched unexpectedly almost 1,000 feet above sea level.

The scientific explanation is that Cloughmore (from the Irish for “big stone”) is a glacial erratic, thought to have originated in Scotland a

By Katia Hetter, CNN

(CNN) — A vaccine long framed as protection against cervical cancer in women is now showing clear benefits for men.

Boys and young men who received the human papilloma virus, or HPV, vaccine had about half the risk of developing related cancers compared with those who were unvaccinated, according to a large new study published in JAMA Oncology.

That’s why parents and young men should know more about what HPV is and what cancers it’s linked to. Why is the HPV vaccine important for boys and young men, and when should they receive it? What should parents be considering as they debate whether to give their children this vaccine?

To help with these questions, I spoke with CNN wellness expert Dr. Leana Wen. Wen is an emergency physician and adjunct associate professor at George Washington University. She previously was Baltimore’s health commissioner.

CNN: What is HPV, and how common is it in boys and men?

Dr. Leana Wen: HPV is an extremely common virus transmitted through intimate skin-to-skin contact. The vast majority of those who are sexually active will be exposed to it at some point in their lives.

This applies to both men and women. According to the National Cancer Institute, nearly all sexually active people are infected with HPV within months to a few years of starting sexual activity. About half of these infections are with a high-risk HPV type that increases the likelihood of developing cancers. Most infections go away on their own as the immune system clears them, but some persist and can cause cellular changes that can become cancerous over time.

CNN: What types of cancers are linked to HPV?

Wen: HPV is associated with a range of cancers in both men and women. In women, the most well-known is cervical cancer, but HPV can also cause cancers of the vagina and vulva. In men, HPV is linked to cancers of the penis, anus and the head and neck.

Over 90% of anal cancer is caused by HPV. Oropharyngeal cancer, also called throat cancer, is highly associated with HPV as well, with about 70% attributed to HPV. And more than 60% of penile cancer is caused by HPV.

CNN: What did this new study find about HPV vaccination in boys and young men?

Wen: This study included a global database of more than 615,00 males ages 9 to 26 who received the nonavalent HPV vaccine and over 2 million who did not. After adjusting the groups to make them comparable, the researchers analyzed about half a million individuals in each group.

They found that men who were vaccinated had a significantly lower risk of developing HPV-related cancers. Overall, vaccination was associated with about a 46% reduction in risk, meaning those who received the vaccine had roughly half the risk compared with those who were unvaccinated.

The benefit was seen across different groups studied. Those vaccinated between ages 9 and 14 had about a 42% lower risk, while those vaccinated between 15 and 26 had about a 50% lower risk.

CNN: Why has HPV vaccination historically been emphasized more for girls and women?

Wen:<