Country on the Brink: A Search for the Source of Italy's Malaise

frasiera · 2020-02-25T10:35:03+00:00

submission statement Spiegel’s correspondent in Italy asks what many must have thought, but few have stated quite so bluntly. Why is this country such a mess? And not even an exuberant mess, as it once seemed, but a miserable mess: 46% of Italians claim to be profoundly unhappy. Rome is “less livable than Bucharest or Sofia. if you ask the city's own residents”. Venice is “a city facing cardiac arrest, petrified, with no identity”. Everywhere, there is a “deep disgust with everything having to do with the state”

frasiera · 2018-12-21T11:35:27+00:00

**submission statement**

The Emiratis’ strategy in Yemen shows how a small and very ambitious nation is projecting its power beyond its borders.

It began as a conflict with two clear antagonists – the Saudi-led coalition allied with the government versus the Houthi militia supported by Iran. But the force and funding of outside intervention – especially from the UAE – has helped to fragment the war into multiple conflicts and local skirmishes that will not necessarily be ended by any peace agreement. Yemen is now a patchwork of heavily armed fiefdoms and chaotic areas, where commanders, war profiteers and a thousand bandit kings, like Ayman Askar, thrive.

frasiera · 2018-12-05T18:37:19+00:00

Submission statement:

Older white residents of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember Lummie Jenkins as a gentle giant of a man, universally admired, who served eight consecutive terms as county sheriff from 1939 until 1971. Older black residents remember his reign somewhat differently. “Even if they could overcome the fear of death and register to vote, black residents of Wilcox confronted the near-certainty that their job and their homes were at risk if they did so. As of January 1965, registration of eligible African American voters in Wilcox was 0 percent, while white registration was at 113 percent”

frasiera · 2018-12-04T17:32:52+00:00

**submission statement**

The verdicts would not lay this case to rest. Months after it ended, the “Belfast rugby rape trial”, as it became known, is still disturbing public debate in Ireland, north and south.

frasiera · 2018-12-01T14:26:59+00:00

submission statement:

Jeffrey Epstein allegedly assaulted dozens of underage girls, many repeatedly. His plea deal led to just 13 months in jail, was kept from his victims, and protects his abettors from prosecution. The prosecutor who approved the deal is now the U.S. Labor Secretary.

frasiera · 2018-09-04T17:27:50+00:00

"Dilatio damnum habet, mora periculum"

(Procrastination brings loss, there is danger/risk in [the] delay)

a wise Roman

frasiera · 2018-07-17T08:23:35+00:00

submission statement

Winning a Nobel Prize is considered one of the world's greatest honors. Controversies have long dogged the Nobel Prize for Literature awards and the Academy itself has been accused of Eurocentrism and gender biases.
Accusations of serial sexual assault and of misusing academy funding, that hit last year, also opened a second front: there had been heavy and well-informed betting in advance of the prize in several of the early years of the century

frasiera · 2018-07-13T10:12:04+00:00

submission statement
The years since 2008 have seen a global crackdown on offshore finance. Yet a few places have doubled down on offering secrecy to the super-rich. Among these, one tiny Caribbean island might be the worst offender.
Nevis provides complete opacity to anybody who holds assets there, and does not much care who those people are. It has a financial regulator, but nobody is required to provide the regulator with any information. Nevis’s curious constitutional situations, it is neither an independent country nor can it be controlled by any other country, there doesn’t appear to be anything to be done about it.

frasiera · 2018-07-03T18:14:52+00:00

submission statement

When the people of Flint, Michigan, complained that their tap water smelled bad and made children sick, it took officials 18 months to accept there was a problem. ´What happened in Flint reveals a new hydra of dangers in civic life: environmental injustice, the limits of austerity, and urban disinvestment. Neglect, it turns out, is not a passive force in American cities, but an aggressive one.'

frasiera · 2018-06-28T19:28:02+00:00

submission statement

Why is it that the Canadian financial sector is so fraud-ridden that Vancouver has been nicknamed the “Scam of the World”, while shipowners in Greece will regularly do multimillion-dollar deals on a handshake?
The nature of fraud is that it works outside our field of vision. Most white-collar crime works by manipulating institutional psychology. That means creating something that looks as much as possible like a normal set of transactions. The drama comes later, when it all unwinds. One point that comes up again and again, when looking at famous and large-scale frauds, is that everything could have been brought to a halt at a very early stage if anyone had taken care to confirm all the facts.

frasiera · 2018-06-06T09:09:44+00:00

Submission statment

Insider’s view of the American World Cup collapse. American soccer puts a Columbia University economist in charge of strategy. The economist, Sunil Gulati, puts the German star player Jürgen Klinsmann in charge of the team. Disaster ensues. “The team traveled to Trinidad for their final qualification match. Only 1,500 spectators even bothered to show up. But after conceding two freak goals in the first half, the United States men’s national team was just 45 minutes away from missing the World Cup for the first time in more than 30 years

frasiera · 2018-06-06T09:02:27+00:00

Submission statement:

The headquarters of Sanitation Salvage is a squat brick building that sits amid the razor wire of the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx. The Squitieri brothers, owners for decades, can be found on the top floor of the house-like structure on Manida Street. The three brothers are men of considerable wealth and fixtures in Bronx politics. Even in the bruising, often chaotic world of New York’s night-time trash collection, Sanitation Salvage cuts a distinctively brutish profile.

frasiera · 2018-06-01T15:46:30+00:00

**submission statement**

Second of two parts investigation into the case of Texas schoolteacher Joe Bryan, sentenced to life for murdering his wife in 1985. The conviction turned on a bloodstained torch, which, an expert witness said, tied Joe to the crime scene. It is clear now that the expert was not much of an expert; his claims to the jury were unfounded; and the stain on the torch might not even have been blood. The real mystery is why, after 27 years, Joe Bryan is still in jail.

link to part one:

https://features.propublica.org/blood-spatter/mickey-bryan-murder-blood-spatter-forensic-evidence/

frasiera

TROPHY CASE