You have to feel sorry for Silvio. While he was in government the European media went to town detailing his every infringement of the democratic norms (of which there were plenty). Since Romano Prodi has been in power scarcely a whimper – for example, how many people outside of Italy know that the current Prime […]
The disjuncture between what goes on and what is reported has rarely been so apparent. On Saturday, with little-to-no advance television publicity, an initiative got under way in Piazzas throughout Italy. The initiative was to collect signatures to propose a new law with three main clauses: 1) No-one fully convicted of a crime should be […]
Blaming the opinion pollsters (see earlier entry) is usually the resort of the washed-up but sometimes you have to wonder. In this weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza there are two articles concerning, among other things, mobile phones. Side by side they sit, contradicting each other. Polling agaency CBOS tells us that in a random sample of 903 […]
There’s an interesting short piece in this week’s Polityka, which I have started reading again on account of how they seem to know what the government/state prosecution office is going to do – and to whom – a week or two in advance of events. Because of a shortage of recruits to the intelligence services, […]
Global 24hr news stations, well-resourced and able to bring us in-depth, live coverage of epoch defining moments. Italy, like many other countries, has had its news media shaken ever so slightly over the last couple of years with the introduction of 24hr news channels. Rai 24, the news flag-ship of state broadcaster specialises in developing […]
… for the failure to post any of the deluge of comments over the last few months. This was due to a combination of spam and technical incompetence: in blocking spam to one post I somehow disabled all commenting. Your comments are now up on the relevant pages but I’ll post a few replies of […]
I stumbled upon an interesting dialogue on Bloggingheads.tv between Bruce Feiler and Reza Aslan, author of No God But God (and, apparently, the Brad Pitt of young Muslim commentators…). It’s a lengthy interview, throwing up some interesting points as the two talk about the Iranian community in America, and the political state of play in […]
An art exhibit, entitled the Madonna Cries Sperm, is causing political representatives on a local and national level to get hot under the collar. The exhibit, originally organised by the Yurta association as part of the S.Vitale neighbourhood summer festival, has been cancelled after various local and national politicians deemed it ‘unacceptable’ and ‘offensive’. It’s […]
Last night I managed to get around to seeing Le Rose nel Deserto, the latest film directed by Mario Monicelli. Monicelli’s career spans the history of Italian cinema, having made his first film back in 1934. Monicelli directed Le Rose nel Deserto, on location in the Libyan desert in 2005, an admirable feat in itself, […]
It seems that no news bulletin is complete, these days, without some reference to how wicked the internet can be. We’re consistently shown on lunch time news bulletins videos, of students behaving poorly, that have been posted on YouTube. TV journalists in Italy have yet to devote any time to a website that is proving […]
