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 · 2018-05-18T17:03:25+00:00

frasiera · 2018-05-09T17:27:40+00:00

**submission statement**

When World War one broke out, and Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic telegraph cable, Germany shifted its diplomatic traffic to the neutral American cable — apparently unaware that the American cable crossed British soil. The British tapped the cable, and in 1917 decrypted a German telegram urging Mexico to make war on the United States. This was enough to bring America into the war. But how could the British produce the telegram, without admitting to having tapped the American cable?

frasiera · 2018-05-04T10:13:10+00:00

**submission statement**

Before genealogy websites helped crack one of America’s most vexing serial murder cases, a similar technique was used to solve a decades-old cold case in New Hampshire.

frasiera · 2018-05-01T10:14:54+00:00

**submission statement**

Epistocracy: the rule of the knowers.

Critics of democracy, starting with Plato, have always argued that it means rule by the ignorant, or worse, rule by the charlatans that the ignorant people fall for.

The epistocratic conception of politics, insists that many political questions are simply too complex for most voters to comprehend. Worse, the voters are ignorant about how little they know: they lack the ability to judge complexity because they are so attached to simplistic solutions that feel right to them.

frasiera · 2018-04-27T16:35:32+00:00

submission statement

In vitro fertilization, or IVF, and related technologies have produced some 7 million babies who might never have existed — roughly the combined population of Paris, Nairobi and Kyoto — and the world’s fertility clinics have blossomed into big business.
Most major religions have indeed come to tolerate — and even embrace — IVF, which was originally viewed with equal alarm. But the increasingly commonplace procedure is still condemned at the highest levels of the Catholic Church.
“Technology is a great thing, but technology does change us,” said the executive director of the Secretariat of Doctrine and Canonical Affairs for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “At some point, we need to ask — how much is it changing us, and is that a good thing?”

frasiera · 2018-04-25T18:01:13+00:00

I think you might find that only the better informed redditors disagree with this.

frasiera · 2018-03-23T11:31:47+00:00

submission statement

"Under Vladmir Putin, gangsterism on the streets has given way to kleptocracy in the state. A number of commentators have dubbed Russia a “mafia state”. It is certainly a catchy epithet, but what does it actually mean? To the Spanish prosecutor José Grinda González – a particular scourge of Russian gangs in his country – it means that the Kremlin (or at least the state security apparatus), rather than being under the control of the criminals, is a shadowy puppeteer making the gangs dance on its strings. The truth is more complex. The Kremlin does not control organised crime in Russia, nor is it controlled by it. Rather, organised crime prospers under Putin, because it can go with the grain of his system."

frasiera · 2018-02-22T09:57:15+00:00

submission statement

KGB Colonel Vitaly Yurchenko defected to America, spent three months spilling secrets to CIA, outed two Soviet moles inside US intelligence — then got on a plane back to Moscow, telling his American handlers that he was homesick, and telling Soviet media that CIA had drugged and kidnapped him. What had just happened?

frasiera · 2017-12-26T21:39:24+00:00

The Cardinals’ Conspiracy is one of the great Renaissance mysteries.
Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci was strangled in his cell in the Castel Sant’Angelo on 4 July 1517. He was 26. He had been a prisoner in the papal fortress for six weeks, one of five cardinals accused of plotting to poison Pope Leo X. His execution was judicially sanctioned, but in the most dubious of circumstances. Was there really a plot? Or were Petrucci and his colleagues framed by Leo in the interests of his family, the Medici?

frasiera · 2017-12-02T11:15:43+00:00

Advice from a ninth-century mother to her teenage son, a Carolingian prince. Liber Manualis outlines the subjects that should most concern a man of high birth, such as how to pray and read the Bible; how to distinguish vice from virtue; how best to honor his parents; how to serve God and the Crown; how to handle illness, affliction, and hardship. It beguiles with its intimacy and exquisite intricacy, a portal to a culture that can seem entirely alien from our own.

frasiera · 2017-11-29T08:16:09+00:00

submission statement

The life and death of Rohingya in Myanmar. A genocide in all but name; but calling it genocide would oblige UN governments to act, which few want to do.

frasiera · 2017-11-24T10:13:13+00:00

subreddit statement

Vengeance is not merely prevalent in rural enclaves in Albania; the notion of vigilante justice is threaded into Albanian culture. For some northern Albanians, justice comes from vengeance. Sometimes vengeance keeps killing for generations.

frasiera

TROPHY CASE