Migrant charity ship spurned by Italy heads to France
Rome, ItalyReuters A migrant rescue ship with more than 200 people on board headed to France on Tuesday after Italy refused it permission to dock as its new right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni attempts to crack down on migration across the Mediterranean. Meloni’s two-week-old government has told charity vessels to take rescued people to other […]
Parthenon fragment returns to Greece, rekindling campaign for UK to hand over marbles
Athens, GreeceReuters A marble fragment of the Parthenon temple has been returned to Athens from a museum in Sicily, a move officials hope will advance efforts to have the British Museum send back ancient sculptures from Greece’s most renowned ancient landmark. Athens’ Acropolis Museum presented on Monday the “Fagan fragment”, a 35-by-31-centimetre marble fragment showing the […]
Dozens of migrants rescued off Spain’s Gran Canaria
Gran Canaria, Spain Reuters Spain’s coast guard rescued 45 migrants off the coast of Gran Canaria on Sunday including 24 women and eight children. The migrants, from sub-Saharan Africa, were spotted in a boat by a passing ship around 61 kilometres south of Gran Canaria, local media reported. Migrants wait to disembark from a Spanish […]
Judge slain in Sicily by mafiosi put on path to Catholic sainthood
Rome, ItalyAP A magistrate slain by mobsters in Sicily and praised by two popes has been beatified by the Roman Catholic church on Sunday in the last formal step before possible sainthood. Rosario Livatino was gunned down on a Sicilian highway outside Agrigento as he drove to work in 1990. Three years later, during a […]
As pandemic ensues, Italy’s south turn to faith for sustenance
Vatican CityRNS Positive coronavirus cases have started to grow in Italy’s very religious south, where high levels of unemployment and organized crime complicate the application of stringent rules to prevent the spread of the pandemic. In some southern cities, fights have started to break out and people have been robbed while leaving the supermarket. While […]
POSTCARDS: SICILY LURES VISITORS WITH ‘ETHICAL TOURISM’ FREE OF MAFIA TAINT
ELENA BARTON, of Thomson Reuters Foundation, reports…
Foreigners stage “positive invasion” of Sicily in one-euro home sale
RomeThomson Reuters Foundation Bargain hunters from Argentina to China swooped on a one-euro-auction and snapped up 16 abandoned Sicilian homes in a foreign buying frenzy that was heralded on Thursday as a positive invasion of a dying hilltop town. Selling homes for token sums has become a popular, last-ditch strategy for tumbledown towns in Italy’s […]
God and the mafia not compatible, says Pope
God and the mafia are not compatible, Pope Francis said on the weekend during a visit to the city of Palermo on the Italian island of Sicily. “You cannot believe in God and be a member of the mafia,” the Pope was quoted as saying during a Mass. “Those belonging to the mafia are not living […]