Rome - Italy's conservative government approved Tuesday the deployment of 500 troops in a mafia-infested area near the southern city of Naples where six African immigrants were gunned down last week.

On Monday, police arrested a 29-year-old man - a convicted member of the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the mafia - in connection with last Thursday's killings in Castel Volturno.

The attack shocked Italy and Interior Minister Roberto Maroni, speaking following a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, said the state had promptly replied to the "massacre."

"First we dispatched an extra 400 police, now we have taken the decision to deploy the troops," he said.

Rome - Pope Benedict XVI spoke Saturday about the "emptiness" of modern times and called for a "New Europe" in which people, especially the young, could approach the "spiritual treasures" of religion.

Today's world was characterized by a "dangerous culture of emptiness and senselesness," the pope said in an address at the general meeting of the Benedictine order in Castel Gandolfo.

The men and women of the religious orders were asked to present suggestions for possible new ways of spreading the world of God.

Rome - Six people were killed in two separate shooting incidents in southern Italy late Thursday, according to police officials.

Five Africans were killed and two others injured by gunshots in Castel Vultorno, 35 kilometres north-west of Naples, ANSA news agency reported, indicating that the shootings were linked to drug trafficking.

Three of the immigrants were from Ghana, one from Liberia and one from Togo.

Rome - Italian author Giorgio Bettinelli, who clocked up hundreds of thousands of kilometres travelling the globe on a Vespa scooter and then recounting his adventures in books, has died in China. He was 53.

Bettinelli who together with his wife had been living in southern China since 2004, died on Monday, a spokeswoman for his publisher, Milan-based Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore said Wednesday.