Workaholic men take heart and neglected women take note.
An Italian court has ruled that a wife has no justification to cheat on her husband simply because he is always at the office. That was the essence of sentence number 10,977 issued on Tuesday by the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court. Italian newspapers dubbed it the Stakhanov sentence, after the Soviet industrial worker Alexei Stakhanov who received special recognition for exceeding production targets. Although adultery stopped being a crime in traditionally Catholic Italy 30 years ago, the sentence made clear that the courts still considered it morally wrong. The woman, Annamaria, from the eastern Adriatic city of Ancona, had contested a lower court ruling that said she should be held responsible for the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent separation.