Geopolitical take-away and executive summary of the week:
Italy
- (this is important, please read carefully and share around this TRUE story I just heard from a friend of mine) Yesterday morning a (probably) north-american traveler made a complete, utterly ridiculous ass of himself in the Fiumicino airport, interrupting service and thus harassing everybody else around who (who would have imagined it) couldn’t risk to lose their plane for a kid’s tantrum. Why? Simply because he went to one of the bars in the airport, asked “a LATTE” and got just what he had asked for: one glass full of MILK straight out of the fridge and nothing else.
Italian newspaper Repubblica reports that Italy really is in dire economic crisis. How dire? Well, it turns out that both proving spouse infidelity as preparation to divorce, and tolerating absent employees have become stuff that only the richest can afford. A representative of a federation of italian private investigators said:
- I recently read on an italian newspaper that Rome is the great favourite for the 2020 Olympics. Frankly, as an Italian living in Rome, I don’t know if Rome should be happy about this, or what I should think, in general, of the selection process. Yes, I know that hosting the Olympic Games is supposed to give great visibility to a city and create local jobs, but I’m still confused. Here’s why:
- Since this hasn’t probably got outside of Italy all the attention it deserves, here’s the story: ten days ago Unione Nazionale Consumatori (UNC) that is one of the biggest consumers associations of Italy, announced that YouTube has shutdown their official channel on YouTube.com (unioneconsumatori) for copyright violation. As you can see from the snapshot here, as of July 2, 2011, 1520 GMT, that account is still blocked. From what UNC says, the only “violation” is that they had put on YouTube (among many completely original videos) short excerpts of… interviews to UNC representatives aired from the Mediaset and R.
- According to italian newspaper Terra, Asbestos continues to kill in Italy. The current toll is 800 victims each year only in Lombardy (the northern region where Milan is) and is expected to rise, since this substance continues to be present in some areas and acts very slowly. A chilling detail of this story is that future death will also happen among people for whom current law doesn’t provide any compensation. As the Terra article puts it “the new law gives the right to claim for compensation to people who were exposed to asbestos in their work.