Near Parabita, a town in the province of Lecce, in the heel of Italy’s boot (the region of Apulia, also spelled Puglia), a limestone cave holds a piece of Ice Age history. Two small bone figurines found there in 1966 belong to the group known as the Palaeolithic Venus figurines. Now a new survey suggests […]
The European Union is witnessing a full-blown social revolt. Governing political parties and their economic policies are held in open contempt as public protests and strikes escalate across multiple countries.
Protests, mass marches, and industrial strikes are spreading across the EU in France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, and other countries. The grievances are various, from students and teachers over woeful education services, to healthcare professionals and transportation workers denouncing crumby wages and pension cuts.
But at the core is a warmongering, dehumanizing system of capitalist inequality.
Unbearable living costs for basic needs, from food to housing, are driving millions onto the streets in desperation and anger at the lack of adequate political response to their concerns. As one French student said: “Too young to be listened to, old enough to be tear-gassed.”
The entire political system is being brought into disrepute for its dysfunction and indifference towards meeting rudimentary human needs. Then, infuriating all the more, are lies from the elite rulers and their propaganda media about “national defense and threat of war from Russia.”
In Spain this week, an 87-year-old frail woman known as Maricarmen died in hospital after she was evicted from her Madrid home because she could not pay the extortionate rent increase. Her plight has come to galvanize a nationwide protest against Spain’s housing crisis, a crisis that is repeated across every European country. Protesters shouted furiously that the pitiful old woman was “murdered by the state and corporations.”
In France, the brutality of police against student protests has shocked the nation and the world. Nearly 7,000 young people have been arrested, as riot police tear gas and shoot at largely peaceful rallies. Students gathering at the Place de la Bastille in Paris and other cities vow that they will not back down. One student had his hand blown off by a police stun grenade while another teenager lost an eye from a rubber bullet fired at close range.
The Place de la Bastille is where the French Revolution manifested in 1798 against a hated aristocracy amid abject misery. Today, the tensions are boiling towards another momentous rebellion, this time inspiring again similar movements across Europe.
These protests and the inhumane suffering that underlie them are channeling uprisings all over the EU.
There is a palpable sense that populations en masse have had enough of decades of inequality and chronic deprivation inflicted by capitalist policies that enrich a few and are enforced by governments slavishly serving the interests of capital over the needs of the citizen majority.
Western media reports talk about “cash-strapped” governments under pressure from bond markets to reduce record debt levels while workers, students and pensioners demand more public investment and relief from economic hardship.
That is a misleading partial portrayal of the problem. Omitted is the crucial backdrop that European governments are directing vast economic resources towards militarism and the proxy war in Ukraine against Russia. That is what is causing the “cash-strapped governments.” In other words, their declared fiscal straits are a policy choice, not some mysterious dilemma.
The social crisis sweeping across Europe is also seen in the United States and other Western-aligned nations. The background is a failed economic system that no longer provides a modicum of acceptable living conditions. The problem has been decades in the making from growing inequality and diminishing political representation. Today it is even questionable if Western states are democracies, controlled as they are by corporate oligarchies.
Nevertheless, the social crisis that is unfolding across Europe has been intensified and amplified by European political rulers operating in a relentless war mode against Russia.
The European Union has pumped hundreds of billions of euros into Ukraine over the past four years to prop up a NeoNazi regime run by a corrupt dictatorship – all for the objective of defeating Russia. The EU leaders – many of them unelected, like Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas and António Costa – are driven by an obsessive Russophobia. But that is only part of the explanation.
Other elected leaders and parties like France’s Macron and Germany’s Merz are also despised for their elitism and delusions of grandeur. Merz declares that he wants to make Germany the strongest military in Europe, in total tin-ear deafness to his nation’s economic and social problems and the sinister historical connotations of resurrecting Nazi Germany. Meanwhile, as his government suffers electoral defeat after defeat, European elites deprecate German voters as being blind because they dare to choose parties that are opposed to war with Russia.
There are many grounds for the Europe-wide contempt of ruling parties. Inequality, poverty, unemployment, soaring living costs, declining wages, deteriorating public services. Uncontrolled immigration amid the pressure on inadequate public resources is another cause for grievance. Europe’s complicity in the Israeli genocidal war on Palestinians, and Europe’s complicity in Trump’s aggression towards Iran, Yemen, Cuba, and so on, are other factors.
However, the bogus narrative that governments are “cash-strapped” is a cause for immense public disgust. There are plenty of economic resources to meet public needs. It’s a question of those resources not being permitted to create just and humane societies under the prevailing capitalist system with its priority of enriching a tiny elite class.
The conditions of “tight budgets” and “austerity for the masses” are created by deliberate policies of militarism and fuelling a proxy war in Ukraine.
European “leaders” and their NATO lobbyists like Mark Rutte demand hundreds of billions of euros to boost military industries while at the same time calling for draconian cuts in public spending and social welfare in order to pay for this reckless militarism. The EU is “lending” an additional €90 billion over the next two years alone just to prop up the corrupt regime in Kiev so that it can keep fighting a futile war with Russia. The perverse priority is driven by the military-industrial complex and its corporate investors. It is also driven by an ideological, propagandized mindset that demonizes Russia as an enemy. President Putin and other Russian voices have repeatedly stated that they do not want war with Europe. They say the conflict in Ukraine has root causes that can be resolved through diplomatic engagement. Why are European politicians implacably opposed to peace?
A major factor is covering for internal political and economic failure of the European system. The EU’s economies, as with those in the U.S. and other Western states, are bankrupt dystopias in terms of delivering on social and democratic needs. The failure has been compounded by the costs of war in Ukraine.
That failure is criminal and fatal for the politicians and governments who have overseen the policies. Thus, the political class, including the propaganda news media, cannot admit their criminal policies.
In the face of their own internal contradictions, the European political elites are seeking a solution by externalizing Russia as an enemy. This is the same modus operandi that European rulers have used for the past century and more, unleashing two world wars as a result.
These criminal politicians and their dysfunctional economic system are again pushing war as their escape plan for survival at the expense of millions of lives and at the risk of starting a third world war, one that this time around could involve catastrophic nuclear nemesis.
It is damning of virtually every European government, including primarily the British, that there are no calls for diplomacy and political settlement with Russia. They are committed to waging war on Russia to absolve themselves from the social devastation they are responsible for.
One positive thing, though, is that increasing numbers of people can see through the chicanery and lies. A German student placard summed it up: “We won’t fight your wars… Education not bombs!”
A day of reckoning is imminent. Criminal political leaders and their warmongering system are exposed like never before and in a way that demands total revolt as a proper solution. The consequences are not to be externalized this time. Chickens are coming home to roost, as Malcom X once said.
Any pediatrician has seen it: a baby who spends so many hours lying on their back that one side of the head ends up flat. The condition is called deformational plagiocephaly, from the Greek plagios (“slanted”) and kephalé (“head”). It comes from steady outside pressure on a skull that is still soft, not from a […]
When we think of Greek colonization, we think of Athens, Corinth or the cities of Euboea, which scattered new settlements across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Sparta hardly looked abroad at all. It founded a single colony, about 700 kilometres (435 miles) away in a straight line, across the Ionian Sea. And it did […]
In a cave on the Italian side of the Slovenian border, one layer of earth holds the remains of the first farmers. The layer right below it belongs to the hunters who lived there before them. The cave is called Tina Jama. It opens near the summit of Mount Lanaro/Volnik, in the municipality of Sgonico/Zgonik, […]
A bronze sword that spent more than three thousand years underwater has come out of an Italian lake with its edge still sharp. Underwater archaeologists from the Soprintendenza of Viterbo (the state body that protects archaeological heritage in each Italian province) recovered it from Lake Mezzano, a small volcanic lake in Lazio, the region around […]
An ox, a ram and a pig, surrounded by garlands, festoons and carved ox skulls, share a single block of stone. At some point in antiquity it ended up as paving at one of the main crossroads of Aquinum, a Roman city in central Italy. It is one of two finds that archaeologists from the […]
A 46-year-old man of Bangladeshi origin is accused of aggravated sexual violence against his minor daughter in Brescia province, Italy, after investigators say years of abuse left her pregnant before she turned 15.
According to Italian newspaper Giornale di Brescia, the preliminary hearing opened at the Palace of Justice in late September 2026. The defendant, held since February in Cremona prison’s section for those accused of sexual offenses, requested an abbreviated trial conditioned on a proposed compensation payment to the victim. That request is scheduled for discussion on Jan. 19. DNA tests and police interviews with the girl, assisted by social services, supplied further corroboration that the father had impregnated his daughter.
The case surfaced in early 2026 when the mother took the girl to the emergency room at Brescia’s Civil Hospital for severe abdominal pain. Doctors determined she was pregnant and notified police. Italian police arrested the father after initial checks. Italian newspaper Il Giornale described the allegations as prolonged abuse beginning when the girl was a child.
The paper stated that inside the hospital, she told staff that he “had forced her to undergo sexual acts since she was a child. First he would subjugate her, then he would move on to groping, finally he began full intercourse. It was precisely during one of these sexual relationships that she became pregnant.”
Laura D’Urbino, president of Brescia juvenile court, said the court becomes involved in such situations both because of the daughter’s age and because the pregnancy involves a close relative.
This is not the first serious case of sexual violence from a Bangladeshi man in the Italian city. A separate case in the Brescia-area from 2024 involved a different 29-year-old Bangladeshi man and a 10-year-old girl of sub-Saharan origin inside a reception center in Collio. He was sentenced to five years in prison, however, the victim was not his daughter.
A 15-year-old Italian student named Matteo was attacked by eight teens with a migrant background outside his school in Cesena, in the province of Forlì-Cesena, Italy, according to a report from the Italian news outlet Fuori dal Coro. During the attack, Matteo suffered life-changing injuries from machete and knife blows that left him disfigured, required more than 100 stitches, and left him unable to realize his dream of becoming a pilot.
His mother has since appeared on national television, stating that her boy “is no longer the boy he was before.”
Matteo was living in the school’s boarding facility while attending the Technical Institute of Aeronautics in nearby Forlì. He was exercising with two friends when a group of eight minors, aged 15–17 at the time and all from the Cesena area, approached. They arrived on four mopeds or scooters, some wearing hoods or balaclavas.
8 youths with a foreign background attacked 15-year-old Italian boy Matteo with a machete and a knife outside his school in Cesena.
During the attack, Matteo suffered life-changing injuries that left him disfigured, requiring 100 stitches.
Two of them initially demanded payment of a €45 debt for hashish that a “young foreigner” in the group had sold him. Matteo refused, saying the product was of poor quality. The rest of the group then joined in what prosecutors described as a premeditated punitive expedition.
CCTV footage captured the assault, which lasted under 10 seconds and has since been replayed on Italian news networks.
The group surrounded Matteo, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. One attacker used a machete on his face and hands; others used a large knife, described in some reports as a kitchen knife, and a telescopic baton. Matteo tried to protect himself with his hands. The attackers then fled.
Matteo suffered permanent damage to three fingers on one hand. He also suffered a deep slash starting near the ear, crossing the left cheek, and reaching the neck. This required maxillofacial surgery and damaged the parotid gland, requiring repeated drainage at Bufalini Hospital in Cesena. During a Fuori dal Coro report, the network interviewed Matteo’s mother and reported that he received more than 100 stitches in total, with the attack resulting in permanent facial scarring.
Doctors noted that covering his face with his hand likely saved his life by preventing the blade from severing a major artery. However, he is no longer medically eligible to become a commercial pilot, the career he had been training for.
Despite the serious nature of the attack, the host of Fuori dal Coro said, “The incredible thing is that these eight defendants are free.”
Matteo’s mother replied, “Yes, the eight defendants are awaiting trial while remaining free.”
2 second-generation young immigrants use sledgehammers on in Torino, Italy.
The store owner, Emiliano, says he has been robbed many times before.
He warned that criminals are getting young and younger.
She said her son is trying to move forward, but “he is no longer the boy he was before. He still suffers major physical and psychological consequences. The wounds on his face and hand are visible and disabling. Beyond those, there are deeper wounds: his fear, the loss of his peace of mind, and the difficulty in trusting others. He had to rewrite his future, completely upending all of his plans.”
Matteo’s mother conveyed this story while footage of her son’s attack was looped in the background of their interview, highlighting the horror he experienced at the hands of the youths of foreign origin.
Given that the attack happened at the boarding school, it is presented as an illustration of a deteriorating security situation in schools across Italy and Europe amid mass immigration.
Matteo was forced to change schools and left the boarding facility after four years there. He also lost a school year because of treatment and recovery. Because of ongoing psychological issues caused by the attack, his family has paid for private psychological care and medical expenses.
Fuori dal Coro openly uses the term “maranza,” a slang label in Italy for a street style often associated with second-generation immigrant youth, who frequently have a North African background. These gang youths often have Italian citizenship but are linked to petty crime or more serious violence.
They have not been held in pre-trial detention and remain free while awaiting proceedings. Neither they nor their parents have contacted Matteo’s family or apologized.
Prosecutor Simone Purgato of the Bologna Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office charged them with aggravated serious injuries, permanent facial disfigurement, carrying weapons, private violence, attempted extortion, and related drug offenses.
The mother has described the lack of any remorse from the attackers or their families and the ongoing trauma for her, her son, and their family. She emphasized that they seek accountability rather than revenge. Local officials, including the mayor of Medicina, condemned the “cowardice of the pack.”
A 46-year-old Nigerian woman stabbed an Italian police officer in the chest and was charged with attempted mass killing after she opened three gas cylinders in her apartment in Verdello, Italy.
The woman also flooded the rooms fo the apartment building.
Officers responded around 1:15 p.m. Sept. 18 to reports of a dispute at a building on Via Adua that houses 12 mostly migrant families. Officers detected a strong smell of gas and found the third-floor apartment flooded, with broken glass and exposed electrical wires.
Inside, the woman was completely naked, in an agitated state, and shouting incoherent phrases. She grabbed a 24-centimeter kitchen knife from a sofa and lunged at a corporal after one officer slipped on the wet floor, striking him in the chest. The officer was unharmed because he was wearing a bulletproof vest.
Additional officers and emergency medical workers arrived, sedated the woman and took her to Papa Giovanni XXIII Hospital in Bergamo. Tests showed she was positive for cannabis but found no psychiatric conditions. Doctors determined she suffered from acute substance intoxication.
Firefighters sealed the building and declared it unusable until it could be made safe due to the various exposed gas canisters.
When questioned, she said she opened an extra canister for cooking and kept a knife to “defend herself from black magic,” according to BergamoNews.
A tenant who entered the apartment after a power outage found the woman with a rope around her neck. The same tenant later said she attacked him with the knife, shouting, “I’ll kill everyone.”
After a 20-year-old Italian citizen of Egyptian origin allegedly raped a 12-year-old boy, the child’s relatives used convenience store surveillance footage to identify the suspect and later stabbed him in the legs. The Egyptian-Italian suspect was arrested and confessed to sexually assaulting the boy in a public park in Turin’s northern outskirts, authorities said.
The suspect, who is homeless and has a record of minor property crimes, was arrested Monday while riding an electric scooter in Turin’s Barriera Nizza neighborhood. He faces charges of aggravated sexual violence and remains in pretrial detention at Lorusso e Cutugno prison pending a judge’s review of the arrest.
A still from the video surveillance footage used by the family to track the suspect down. It shows the 20-year-old man of Egyptian origin with his alleged victim in the background, a 12-year-old boy.
According to police and the boy’s account, the assault occurred Friday afternoon, Sept. 18. The man approached the child in a courtyard of public housing in the Barriera di Milano district, offering a ride on his scooter and free candy. After traveling about a kilometer, he led the boy to an isolated wooded area of Parco dell’Arrivore along the Stura River and raped him for several minutes, investigators said.
The pair then stopped at a minimarket on Strada Settimo, where surveillance cameras recorded the man buying two bags of chips and two Monster Energy drinks for the boy.
“I bought you these things but, remember, you mustn’t tell anything to your family,” the suspect later told police he said to the child.
The boy returned home in tears and told his mother, who immediately contacted police. Relatives then circulated images of the man on social media and organized a search. On Saturday night, a group of men confronted and stabbed the suspect in the legs, according to his statements to investigators.
“There were at least ten people, I was afraid,” he told officers. Police are separately investigating the stabbing, according to La Repubblica.
The 20-year-old, who had been required to report regularly to police because of prior offenses but stopped appearing after Friday, admitted the rape during questioning.
“Yes, it was me, but I was under the effect of drugs, I wasn’t myself,” he said, according to Italian news outlet La Stampa. In a later court appearance, he expressed regret, saying he was “worn out, sorry and repentant” and could not explain how it happened.
A number of right-wing politicians expressed outrage over the incident, as Remix News reported yesterday. Members of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party held a vigil near the park without party banners.
“What happened should unite everyone in condemning an extremely hateful act, but above all in protecting a minor,” lawmaker Augusta Montaruli said. The League party called the case “a horror that leaves us stunned” and renewed its long-standing demand for chemical castration of convicted sex offenders.
A 20-year-old Italian citizen of Egyptian origin has been arrested in the Italian city of Turin on suspicion of repeatedly raping a 12-year-old boy in Parco dell’Arrivore. In response, major right-wing parties are calling for remigration, more security, and even chemical castration.
Officers from the Barriera Nizza precinct detained the suspect overnight on Monday, three days after the attack on Friday, Sept. 18. In police custody, the man confessed to all the crimes in the case, according to authorities. The man is charged with aggravated sexual violence and is being held in Turin prison pending a validation hearing.
BREAKING: An Egyptian-Italian man has been arrested for raping a 12-year-old Italian boy multiple times in Arrivore Park in Turin.
Police say the suspect lured the boy with a free scooter ride home before committing rape with intercourse against the boy's will.
Investigators say the boy was playing in the courtyard of the public-housing block where he lives in the Barriera Milano district when the older male approached him on an electric scooter and offered him a ride. The two traveled approximately a kilometer to Arrivore Park, a green strip along the Stura River that residents have long described as poorly patrolled by police after dark. There, in an isolated spot, the boy was raped with penetration.
Italian news outlet La Stampa reported that the suspect admitted luring the child with the new scooter, taking him to the park, and forcing him into sex against his will. He later told police he had been under the influence of drugs.
After the assault, surveillance cameras recorded the pair at a mini-market on Strada Settimo, where the suspect bought the boy bags of chips and Monster energy drinks. La Stampa said that footage, together with cameras along Via Botticelli, showed the child in a red T-shirt and shorts and the suspect in a black hooded sweatshirt. Shop staff also confirmed that the two had been in the store.
The boy told friends and then his mother, which led the mother to immediately call the police.
“My son did not know that person,” she said. “The fact that he had not yet been caught gave me no peace.”
The suspect is a second-generation Italian, unemployed and without a fixed address. He had prior convictions for property crimes and was under a reporting obligation, which he observed until the day of the attack. From Friday onward, he stopped signing in. Officers later found him riding the same scooter in the neighborhood.
Brothers of Italy politicians held a protest in the vicinity of the park where the rape occurred. There, a number of politicians from the party called for more funding for police and increased patrols in the area.
Enrico Forzese, of the right-wing Futuro Nazionale party, called for “sweeps, remigration and more checks” in areas he described as high-crime.
The League party separately renewed its demand for chemical castration of rapists and pedophiles.
In 1889, a team from the École française de Rome reached a circular earthen mound roughly 30 meters (about 98 feet) across, in the Polledrara necropolis on the southern edge of the ancient Etruscan city of Vulci, in central Italy. They identified it, named it the Tumulo Gsell after French archaeologist Stéphane Gsell, and left […]
In the mountainous interior of Sardinia, where the Gennargentu massif gives way to the valleys of the Flumendosa river, a site called S’Arcu ‘e is Forros has been surprising archaeologists for more than four decades. Its Sardinian name translates roughly as “the pass of the furnaces” — a fitting label, as it turns out. On […]
A 30-year-old Tunisian man charged with raping a jogger in a public park outside Turin has failed to appear at his latest court hearing and can no longer be located more than two years after the attack, Italian court officials reported.
The defendant, who has not been publicly named, missed a Sept. 17 hearing at a Turin court, where he is accused of sexual violence in the June 29, 2024, assault and rape in Luserna San Giovanni.
Italian media outlet Turino Today indicates that the man may have already left Piedmont and returned to Tunisia but his current whereabouts are unknown.
According to the prosecution’s account presented in court, the 40-year-old woman was running in a municipal park in late afternoon when a man grabbed her from behind. The struggle quickly turned violent. Prosecutors say he sexually assaulted her and fell onto her during the fight, fracturing her legs. She bit his arm through a red T-shirt. He then fled.
A carabinieri officer who responded testified that the woman could not stand.
“I was among the first to intervene,” the officer told the court. “I remember that the woman could not stay on her feet because of the fractures to her legs. I supported her while we waited for the ambulance.”
Police found the suspect after patrol officers noticed a man walking with his partner with a wound resembling a bite mark, leading the officers to suspect that the man may have been the rape suspect. Officers said he appeared nervous. At his home, he broke down in tears, showed the bite marks and handed over the clothing he said he had worn during the attack, including the red shirt the victim had described. Taken to the station, he confessed to the crimes in the case.
In court, the victim’s husband said that the rape and assault dramatically changed life for his wife, him, and their children.
“For at least a year, she could only walk on crutches. She suffered so much,” he said.
The woman’s sister told the court: “I was informed by phone of what had happened. My sister is a rock, but nothing is the same for her anymore. The same goes for us: these are things that mark you, there is no going back.”
The first judge did not impose pretrial detention on the suspect. Reporting on the ruling, the judge cited the man’s cooperation, the fact that he was not arrested in the act, the absence of a prior criminal record, and a finding that there was no concrete flight risk.
About 56 miles (90 km) from Brescia and 75 miles (120 km) from Milan, in the Lombard Alps, the forest of Naquane is still turning up surprises after seventy years of excavation. The latest field season, which resumed on August 31, 2026, has uncovered a rock surface that had never been recorded before: a panel […]
Some discoveries impress because of their size or value, while others do so because of the exact place where they appear. The one announced by Sapienza University of Rome belongs to the second group. At the Pyrgi archaeological site, on the coast of Lazio, archaeologists have found a fragment of an antefix bearing the face […]
A copper ingot cast somewhere in inland Sardinia during the Bronze Age might, centuries later, turn up in a Scottish tomb or a village in southern Sweden. That is the striking picture drawn by Serena Sabatini, an archaeologist at the University of Gothenburg, in a new paper that pulls together decades of isotopic analyses to […]
In the district of Monteleone Sabino, a town of under 1,300 people in Italy’s Rieti province, a team of cavers has made its way through a passage first cut into the mountainside more than two thousand years ago. On the other side, they documented a pre-Roman aqueduct, now walkable for roughly 100 meters (about 328 […]
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