ROME - Italian and French civil military teams are working against the clock to contain a fuel spill. The collision between a Tunisian freighter and a Cyprus-based vessel occurred early Sunday morning, resulting in an oil leakage that spread some 27 kilometres into the Cetacean Sanctuary.
Patrick Middleton
ROME – Milan and Cortina d’Impezzo’s two-way bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics will compete against bids from Sweden and Canada, the International Olympic Committee has confirmed.
The cities of Calgary and Stockholm in Canada and Sweden, respectively, have also announced their intentions to challenge for the right to host the Games in 2026.
The Swedish capital had previously announced a bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics, before withdrawing a year before the decision was made. The country has never hosted this version of the Games before.
10 Oct 2018
Patrick Middleton
ROME – The record-breaking Ryder Cup partnership of Italian golfer Francesco Molinari and Englishman Tommy Fleetwood have been drawn in the same group for the first two rounds of this year’s British Masters championship.
‘Moliwood’ provided the backbone for Europe’s storming Ryder Cup victory at Le Golf National in September, winning each of their four doubles matches against the Americans. Molinari also added another point during the Sunday singles, making him the first European to ever win a maximum five points in the competition.
10 Oct 2018
Patrick Middleton
ROME – An array of sporting stars will feature at Trento’s Festival of Sport later this week.
Spread over four days, the festival is presenting over one hundred events, from interviews with some of the biggest names in sport, to training sessions for athletics, volleyball and cycling, to name a few.
The theme for 2018 has been agreed upon by organisers as ‘Il Record’, examining what it takes for sportspeople to reach the very top of their respective fields.
9 Oct 2018
Francesca Halliwell
ROME - The murder of Bulgarian journalist Viktoria Marinova is yet another event indicating that journalists’ freedom of speech is under threat.
Ms Marinova’s body was found in a park in Ruse, a city in the north of Bulgaria, on Oct. 6. It appeared she had been hit on the head and strangled. Minister of the Interior Mladen Marinov said she had also been raped.
9 Oct 2018
Insider View
ROME - The results of an SWG survey, commissioned by the British Embassy, show that the traditional friendship between Italy and the UK is stronger than ever. This is especially the case among young Italians, with 93 percent of those interviewed aged 18 to 24 considering their experience of the UK to be positive.
Many of those young people spent time in the UK thanks to the wonderful Erasmus scholarship system that has allowed millions of young people within the EU to learn about the culture of another member state by studying abroad.
8 Oct 2018
Patrick Middleton
COSENZA – The Mediterranean Sea has the capacity to be a divisive force, a body of water that separates cultures. And so, we have gradually lost “the desire and the curiosity to understand what lies on the other side,” teacher stroke writer Enrico Galiano commented at the ‘Premio per la Cultura Mediterranea’. The implied invocation to rediscover the Sea’s unifying abilities was taken on throughout the 12th edition of the awards ceremony, as the power of cultural collaboration was asserted by prize winners and artistic presentations alike.
8 Oct 2018
Cesira Colleluori
ROME - Sophisticated communications programmes and social policies can defeat Daesh's insidious capacity for promoting its message, which was the most successful ever by a terrorist organisation, Professor Evgeny Pashentsev from the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation told an EGIC conference.
8 Oct 2018
JAN FILIPOWICZ
ROME — The FAO is having major cash flow problems because Brazil’s government no longer supports Brazilian Director General José Graziano da Silva and Brasilia has not paid Brazil’s contribution to the UN agency, nor has the United States, diplomatic sources say.
"It's getting more and more difficult to get anything accomplished at FAO,” a senior source at the agency told the Insider
“It takes sometimes over four months for consultants to be paid -- and only so as a result of continuous weekly reminders for payment with loads of bureaucratic reasons for the delay.“
8 Oct 2018