If there's one thing that you come to count on when living in italy is the extensive amount of news dedicated to their international superstar, the pope.
Perhaps it's like Coca-Cola, instantly recognizable, homegrown, legendary, and (for the believers) just plain good.
And it's about to get better, pope fans. This is a far cry from the days of reach-out campaigns like "The Papa Boys" or the Jubilee. Ratzinger is going global (as if the Catholic isn't already) but this time he's also going virtual. The pontiff of anti-relativism and the dictator of good and bad opened a "new era" of evangelizing on the internet a few days ago and thus began the era of "cyber-priests".
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A limit of thirty percent for every class in the nation, starting next year. This is the audacious proposal of the minister of instruction, Mariastella Gelmini. And who says women can't be racist?
The attacks on immigrants continue in italy, even after the squalid event of Rosarno. Contrary to article 45 of the presidential decree on integration in instruction, Gelmini wants to reduce the number of immigrants in each classroom to just 30 percent. The rationale is to eliminate the "ghettoization" of some classrooms that in their opinion offers Pure Italian Education to people on Non-Italian backgrounds.
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Sometimes it helps to have a media mogul as a dad. Sometimes you risk going to prison. It's kinda a heads-or-tails sort of thing. Well for Piersilvio Berlusconi, the son of of the prime minister, it looks like the coin is coming up tails this time.
Silvio and Piersilvio are both among the people being investigate; For Daddy it improper use of company funds, ie. embezzlement. But for Piersilvio it's Fraud. Along with the dynamic father-son team there are 12 other rich and/or famous italian, including Fedele Confalconieri and Frank Agrama, three other managers from Mediaset and two citizens of Hong Kong.
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Recent News on Radio Jumbo
Urban Warfare as Immigrants Stand Up to be Counted
Around 100 immigrants took to the streets this afternoon, yelling "you're all racists!" while knocking over trash bins, destroying cars and neighborhood fences. Armed with metal bars and bats. The terrorized onlookers yelled "shoot them all" to the police, but the rage had already turned into violence. The schools and businesses were closed for the day, as residents locked themselves inside their homes, watching their cars get trashed, waiting for the police to interviene.
"Smoggy" Moratti to Inaugurate Street to Honor Craxi "the Corrupt"
Letizia Moratti (member of the powerful and mysterious holding company the Carlyle Group) wants Milan's image to shine. When the city's name is mentioned, she want's people to breathe a breath of fresh air. That's why she's so hip on getting a new street named after an illustrious politician from Italy's troubled and corrupt past, Bettino Craxi.
Pure Artisan Sound From the Countryside of Pisa
The sounds of violins from the Seasons of Vivaldi come in waves from the ground floor room of an antique hunting shack. It takes one more step to discover what's spinning around aren't CDs, but LPs in vinyl fresh from being printed, unwrapped from packages with stamps from Japan. Something new coming from old roots.
Rosarno and the Mafia go Hand in Hand
Two thousand people took to the streets to say "we're not racists" in a town dominated by organized crime. Calabria is a bomb ready to explode and the fuse is called Rosarno.
Mafia (Don't) Go Home! Judges Confirm Life Sentences
All appeals by All of the 24 convicted for mafia were overruled. A higher court in Italy recently confirmed all 16 life terms for the clan of Casalesi. A few days ago the widely unreported but hugely important "Spartacus" trial closed the bars on one of the bloodiest clan of the Camorra.
Danger, Danger Will Robinson - The Government's New "State of Emergency"
When you hear about the italian prisons, one word is consistently uttered: "Overfilled". Why are the prisons overfilled? Why are prisons in most of the western world overfilled? Is it because there are too many criminals? Guess again.
When Silvio wants his trials eliminated, he gets it!
The Bill was approved with 163 votes in favor and 130 against, with two people abstaining. This means that the govnernment used its numerical majority to pass a widly unpopular bill.
The "Brief Trials" bill of Silvio Berlusconi was rammed through the parliament yesterday. The Bill completely eliminates trials with a sentence less then 10 years. In Italy that includes like 80 percent of trials, including those for Mafia and Terrorism. This is not only a gift for the current prime minister Berlusconi, but it's a gift to the mafia, who will see their trials go up in smoke. The Italia dei Valori (the only voice of opposition in italian politics) say "Maybe some day they'll apologize to the citizens, but by then it will be too late. This is legislation that doesn't exist in ANY part of the world and is in line with all the other laws "ad personam" that are approved only in the interest of Berlusconi." Outside a group of people from the No-B-Day held a protest, while members from Italia dei Valori occupied the senate, holding up signs of protest.
Old Government Employee Gets Job Back at 77
From the town of Chieti.
Justice is slow in Italy. Actually it's really fucking slow. It's not surprising that in the case of this civil engineer Antonio Ambrosini, a court took 15 years to come to a decision.
The thing that's stranger in this case is that this guy is relishing the sentence, and he's going back to work tomorrow, just like they said he could. He works at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles in Cheti at the ripe old age of 76. Actually he's just shy of 77, since he was born Feb. 12th 1933.
Ambrosini is going back to work like an old timer, happily. Public Administration minister Renato Brunetta, who constantly whips his hobby horse of the public administration being lazy asses would be super happy with this guy.
He's only going back for three months, just the time to make up, according to the sentence. The suspension was due to an investigation "out of which" highlights the engineer "I came out with the greatest form of acquittal.
During the 10 year, Ambrosini didn't just sit on his ass, he found the time to write a history of the Electric Railway of Abruzzo, from it's beginning in 1929 until 1963.
The war is ON! This spring the topic of nuclear energy in Italy could be one of the most heated debates over energy policy in the last 20 years.
In 1987 there were three referendums that eliminated public funding for the construction of new reactors. The next year Nuclear Energy died in Italy. Good riddance. But not really, since much of the energy that Italy uses comes from the Reactors in France.
So many politicians, tired of buying from the french and tired of not being self-reliant in terms of energy, have decided to relaunch Nuclear energy in italy.
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Radio Jumbo is an Italian News source for English Readers. It's made for people with a limited knowledge of the Italian language but who are interested in what's going on with Italy.
That being said, we're getting hits from people in Italy. I imagine that means that Italian readers are kicking out google searches looking for what the foreign press is saying about them. That would be plausible, since a lot of news analysts look at trends of how Italy is perceived in the world at large. It might also be english speakers in Italy who are looking for articles in english, while they themselves might be able to speak italian. Whatever the case, we're happy to have you.
This is kind of the Beta form of the website. I'm concentrating on content and not spending much time on presentation. You might notice a few quirky things with the site, and that's okay for now. It'll get better as the viewers start coming in. Right now we have about 10-15 original articles and we get about 10 viewers a day. Not a bad beginning.
Now, enough of the website. Let's talk about Italy. Italy is a nice place to live. It has a lot of things going for it. The winters are a little annoying (it's January, forgive me) but for the most part things are swell. Then when you start thinking about the "big picture" things start really quickly to precipitate in a miasma of depression. Our town recently privatized their water. I'm not very happy about that. In 2009 Italy gave way to big interests and allowed the privatization of their water resources nationwide. Some towns have privatized, some haven't. Our town took a swing to the right and so we were unfortunate enough to have a super pro-industry government.
So that's the water we drink. Not very big picture, but still not so wonderful to relate. I'll widen the vision next time and talk about corruption. Oh the corruption...
