By INSIDER REPORTERS
ROME -- Navy officers aboard an Italian merchant vessel opened fire off the south coast of India killing two Indian fisherman, mistaken for pirates.
The navy said in a statement that “the attitude of the vessel was judged clearly hostile, typical of pirates,” and that the crew followed international protocols.
ROME -- The United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has been ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of euros in damages to a senior executive who was wrongly dismissed without appropriate redundancy provisions. The Fund claimed that she was not technically an employee of the Fund, but of a sub organisation, the Global Mechanism, this claim was defeated by the International Court of Justice last month.
By JAN FILIPOWICZ
ROME– As Graziano Da Silva prepares for his inauguration as new Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina has cautioned that the Brazilian economist’s policies at the helm of the UN agency will “encourage land grabbing” and reinforce big corporations’ control of global agriculture.
ROME – Captain Charles Ridley, a soldier and top foreign correspondent for UPI, climaxed an extraordinary career with a worldwide scoop by breaking the news of the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, and was a colourful inspiration for his fellow reporters.
ROME -- Foreign lecturers have expressed hope that the new Monti government will give a boost to forthcoming round table negotiations to end more than 25 years of discrimination. Several British and European government officials have reiterated their support for the campaign and their determination to pursue the issue with the technocrats.
Currently, foreign lecturers in Italy are denied equal pay and pension rights to Italian lecturers, a law which the European Court of Justice has also ready ruled is illegal six times.
CIVITA D'ANTINO -- Just over a century ago, a remote Abruzzo village became a flourishing art centre for Scandinavian artists, but the story of the colony was largely forgotten after the tragic Marsican earthquake in 1915. Could the experiment be repeated today?
The Distinction between ‘Voting’ and ‘Representation’. Voting is a mechanical process. Representation is a dialogue.
There is a confusion is between 'voting' and 'representation'. I explain by reference to the work of a GOOD constituency MP in Britain. [‘he’ is used generically throughout to include both male and female MPs and voters.]
ROME -- The World War II British Army veteran Harry Shindler recently presented his latest book ‘My war is not over’, co written with Marco Patucchi, at the American University of Rome (AUR). The book tells dozens of stories of people who Mr Shindler has helped truly 'end their war' by discovering what happened to their loved ones, and also covers Mr Shindler's own memories of the war, where he participated in the landing at Anzio and the Liberation of Rome. Patucchi, a journalist from La Repubblica newspaper, collaborated with Shindler in his research.
ROME --The ongoing eurozone crisis is putting an unexpected squeeze on The Monte dei Paschi Bank, an institution that was set up to protect the needy from usurers and that has been run with admirable caution and social conscience for more than five centuries.
The Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, Italy's third-largest lender, needs to raise around 3 billion in fresh capital to compensate for its exposure to Italian sovereign debt and satisfy the stress test demands of the European Banking Authority.
