Gil Botulino

The German Observer
dal 2001

responsabile: Pasquale Andreacchio - e-mail: info@gilbotulino.it - web: http://www.gilbotulino.it/

Clicca a destra per tutte le notizie di Marzo 2006

martedì 28 Marzo 2006

 
Bar sport, la puntata del 26 marzo

clicca per il video

Con un po' di ritardo vi trasmettiamo la puntata di "Bar Sport" girata sera di domenica dopo la partita Andreolese-Isca, vinta dal Badolato per 2 a 1. I commenti da bar e le riflessioni di alcuni dirigenti del Badolato.
   Un breve commento sulla partita. Le sostituzioni non azzeccate. I tifosi che fuori casa non 'erano.
   Per vedere il breve video cliccate sull'immagine a fianco o andate alla sezione video

(gilbotulino 28-3-2006)

 
 
I giovani badolatesi protestano

Oggetto: I Giovani Badolatesi Protestano: Diffondete & Aderite...

Cari amici, giovani calabresi vicini e lontani,

Il 3 gennaio di quest’anno, constatato lo stato sempre più grave di totale abbandono non solo infrastrutturale ma anche e sopratutto sociale e culturale del nostro comprensorio del basso jonio, di Badolato in particolare, abbiamo fatto appello alla nostra coscienza organizzando una marcia libera, una manifestazione di sostegno alla lotta di Franco Nisticò per la S.S. 106, introducendo inoltre un pizzico di provocazione per smuovere tutti i cittadini.

Potete vedere foto, comunicati, articoli al seguente link. http://www.badolato.info/gilbotulino/fotoservice/20060103_badolato_foto.asp

Ebbene, durante quei giorni di vacanze natalizie, ci siamo ritrovati in pochi, i cosiddetti giovani, gente che vive, lavora e studia lontano da Badolato a fare diretta esperienza del decadimento del ns comprensorio, un totale abbandono infrastrutturale e sociale, una totale apatia e nessuna voglia di partecipazione a nulla da parte della popolazione. Ci chiedevamo in cosa consisteva il progresso di Badolato, qualora ve ne fosse, ma ahimé era una domanda dalla risposta inesistente.

Ci veniva però in mente la lotta continua e smisurata di Franco Nisticò per l’ammodernamento della S.S. 106 e della ferrovia jonica, che seguivamo da lontano. Proprio in quei giorni la famosa strada della morte mieteva ancora vittime, e l’impegno di Nisticò ci sembrava sempre più senza sostegno e appoggio da parte della cittadinanza o istituzioni, che lo avevano isolato e reso ormai un predicatore nel deserto da diverso tempo, predicatore contro le istituzioni sempre più sorde e cieche. Per noi invece è diventato il pretesto per voler dire a tutti che noi, pur vivendo lontano, ci siamo, siamo presenti e che volevamo non solo sostenere chi già lotta per i diritti e per il bene del ns comprensorio, ma volevamo provocare e dare una scossa anche ai residenti e al torpore generale.

Se non siamo noi stessi a lottare per il nostro progresso socioeconomico, se non ci facciamo quanto meno sentire, se non addirittura rispettare, come fanno in altre parti d’Italia, chi volete che si occupi di portare avanti questa zona della Calabria ormai ultima in Europa? Siamo la soletta o sottoscarpa dello stivale d’Italia in tutti i sensi ormai!!

Ma chi siamo, noi cosiddetti Giovani del Comitato Gennaio 2006? Siamo innanzitutto liberi e puliti, e non abbiamo colore politico. Potremmo anche darci un nome e anzi chi vuole può proporlo. Siamo i “Ragazzi di Calabria” o i pacifici “Nuovi Briganti”. Fate voi! Siamo in sostanza il nostro stesso futuro e vogliamo costituire la coscienza sociale che le istituzioni e politici dovranno sempre più ascoltare perchè sempre più ci faremo sentire pacificamente. Vogliamo essere stimolo o meglio pungolo per i nostri amministratori.

Vogliamo comunicare come fanno i giovani facendo tam-tam con email e sms per raccogliere adesioni e spargere il ns grido di protesta, raccogliendoci in gruppo e costituendo quindi una forza, preparandoci ad essere una base sociale che richiama l’attenzione sui problemi del ns comprensorio, quei problemi, tanti e di diversa natura che soffocano ogni sviluppo. Vogliamo agire e già questa lettera/articolo è un invito ad aderire al nostro movimento e fare gruppo. Vogliamo coordinarci meglio e definire insieme le prossime azioni di protesta pacifica per contribuire a sollevare dal dimenticatoio la ns calabria. Vogliamo reclutare tutte le coscienze che hanno a cuore lo sviluppo di Badolato e andare oltre coinvolgendo tutti i paesi vicini.

ADERITE AL MOVIMENTO
Spargete quindi la voce e inviate la comunicazione ai vs amici e conoscenti. Uniamoci e diventiamo una forza. Sottoscrivete il ns movimento lasciando email e numero sms al sito che ci ospita, quello della consulta giovanile, www.galluccifausto.it/cgbulixes/giovani2006
Verrete cosi informati, coinvolti e invitati a partecipare alle nostre prossime azioni se lo volete.

Comitato Giovani 2006

(gilbotulino 28-3-2006)

 
 
Francesca Viscone nel suo saggio analizza mentalità e immaginario collettivo mafiosi come appaiono nei canti della 'ndrangheta
Come la 'ndrangheta danneggia la Calabria
Identità e valori popolari manipolati

Francesca Viscone, da non molto ha dato alle stampe La globalizzazione delle cattive idee. Mafia, musica, mass media (Rubettino, pp.252,   14): presentazione di Vito Teti, postfazione di Renate Siebert. Il saggio analizza i canti di 'ndrangheta e come in essi si riflettano mentalità e immaginario collettivo mafiosi. Dopo l'uscita di due cd all'estero la stampa internazionale ne ha approfittato per presentare i calabresi come "tutti mafiosi" e "tutti conniventi". Da qui le mosse per un'indagine sull'identità culturale calabrese.
   Francesca Viscone ha una risata allegra, i capelli nerissimi. Alle spalle, studi linguistici a Napoli, l'Orientale: poi viaggi ed anni di lavoro e studio all'estero per approfondire la conoscenza delle lingue difficili, quelle che, diceva Tommaso Landolfi, non parlano tutti: tedesco, ceco. In Calabria il ceco non lo userà tanto facilmente, ma lo studio, si capisce parlandole, deve essere valso per forgiare il carattere.
   [... segue una lunga intervista ...]

Vito Bevivino, Calabria News, anno III, n. 27
(gilbotulino 28-3-2006)

 
 
Why Silvio isn't smiling

Il settimanale americano Newsweek (comunista) ha dedicato l’articolo di copertina a Berlusconi con il titolo: “Why Silvio isn’t smiling (Perchè Silvio non ride più)”. Se lui non ride più adesso, gli italiani non ridono più da un pezzo.

The Rise and Fall of Berlusconi
is Italy's flamboyant leader going down in flames?

By Crhistopher Dickey
Newsweek international

April 3, 2006 issue - The lights were set up, the camera was ready. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi stood in front of the Italian and European Union flags, ready for a portrait, but he stopped for a second to chat with an American reporter. "You know," he said, practicing a line he would use before a joint session of the U.S. Congress a few days later. "When I see the American flag, I don't see just a symbol of a country, I see a symbol of freedom and democracy." He smiled, satisfied. "And the European flag?" thet reporter asked. Berlusconi seemed a little taken aback. He paused and thought. "Under construction," he said.
Listening to the 69-year-old billionaire turned politician's increasingly frenzied politicking against the euro and Brussels, one might think "under destruction" would be more accurate—especially if Berlusconi manages to win his uphill bid for re-election on April 9 against former European Commission president Romano Prodi. Right now, however, that seems unlikely. Berlusconi's political machine is in meltdown. The candidate's first televised debate was a disaster. His coalition and his cabinet are out of control. Instead of tending to allies, he's battling the big business interests that ought to be his core support—all of them alarmed by Italy's seemingly unstoppable economic slide. Along with much of the rest of Europe, they hope more and more for a Prodi victory. But while many of Italy's ills can justly be laid at the door of its flamboyant prime minister, those that matter most—and most threaten the rest of Europe—will persist no matter who wins this year's closest and most important election.
It wasn't supposed to be this way, at least in Berlusconi's eye. He imagined winning a second term by sheer force of personality, thrusting himself onto the public stage to showcase his natural advantages: ebullience, charm and take-charge personal confidence. But that strategy seems to have backfired. Tense and defensive, he looks these days like he probably feels—a man whose hopes for staying a step ahead of Italy's vindictive prosecutors (by running the country) are coming to a potentially ugly end. The latest polls show him behind by 3.5 to 5 points, a gap that has lately widened rather than narrowed. The winning smile that has long been his emblem looks increasingly like a rictus. Berlusconi's last best hope is that the Socialists' famously soporific Prodi will so thoroughly bore the electorate—or the extremist fringes of Prodi's cobbled-together leftist coalition so appall it—that at the last moment Italians will throw up their hands and return to the long-running political carnival that has been Silvio's Circus.
It would be premature to count him out, of course. As the longest-serving Italian prime minister since World War II, he has brought admirable political stability to a country notorious for its lack thereof. Yet Europe wants him gone, for good reason. Partly it's his government's uncanny knack for infuriating European leaders, which at times seems almost pathological. At the height of the controversy over Muhammad cartoons earlier this year, one Berlusconi minister donned a T shirt emblazoned with a particularly insulting caricature of the prophet. (The minister resigned, but not before 14 people were killed in anti-Italian riots in Libya.) Harking back to 2003, when Berlusconi likened a German member of the European Parliament to a "kapo" in a concentration camp, a member of his cabinet just last week compared the Netherlands' legalization of euthanasia to Nazi eugenics. Even the government of Berlusconi's ally Tony Blair has been rattled by accusations that the Italian magnate involved the husband of a British cabinet member in money laundering and tax evasion, a charge both men deny.
The real danger that Berlusconi's Italy poses for Europe, however, is economic. Over his tenure, Europe's fourth largest economy has become its weakest link. From an already anemic growth rate of 1.8 percent in 2001, Italy slowed to 0.0 last year. Niente! The country faces such "profound, serious problems," new Central Bank Gov. Mario Draghi said this month, that it has "run aground." And worries are growing that the country will be an increasing drag on the rest of the European Union. "There's no doubt that Italy is the sick man of Europe," says economist Tito Boeri of the prestigious Bocconi University business school in Milan.
Is Berlusconi to blame? Of course not, he trumpets, pointing an accusatory finger at the economic crunch following the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, a few months after he took office. "Europe probably suffered most, after what occurred, because of its inability to adjust," Berlusconi told NEWSWEEK last month. In his version of history, restrictions on debt and the rising strength of the euro are at the heart of the problem. "Four years ago," said Berlusconi, "to buy a euro, 82 cents of a U.S. dollar were enough. Today you need $1.20. What does this mean? That any European product is more expensive by 50 percent!" Thanks to Brussels, "our companies have their hands tied, are crushed, are squeezed between the hypervaluation of the euro, the many regulations they have to comply with, and competitions from new economic systems led by China and India which, among other things, resort to unfair competition."
Berlusconi doesn't go so far as to say he'd pull out of the euro zone, if re-elected. In his interview, he put it more obliquely: "I'll try to convince my colleagues to open their eyes and change, which is not very easy." Despite Berlusconi's hot rhetoric about the euro, he knows the cold realities. When Italy had the lira, sure, Rome could devalue whenever necessary to jump-start exports. But those tactics brought on double-digit inflation, forcing families and small businesses to become currency speculators if they wanted to survive. The sense of insecurity that created is one reason earlier governments were so shaky and short-lived. The EU stability pact that underwrites the euro has been in place the whole time Berlusconi has held office—and probably helped to keep him there, if only by forcing his government to keep its spending under some semblance of control. Berlusconi recognizes as well as anyone that Italy's economic decline would probably accelerate under more-populist policies. "Deficits would go sky-high," says Antonio Missiroli, chief policy analyst at the European Policy Center in Brussels. "You could end up with a sort of Argentina-like crisis."
In fact, Italy could end up there anyway, with or without Berlusconi. The man who made billions by building a private media empire likes to present himself as the paradigm of entrepreneurship and a great friend of business. And to be fair, he has introduced new flexibility into the labor market and managed to reform the pension system further. But while he talks about the bottom line, he's really about razzle-dazzle. What sounded like bold concepts for cutting taxes and government bureaucracy when he took office in 2001 now smacks of what some call "spaghetti economics." As Italy's economy has declined, Il Cavaliere has made almost no effort to introduce the sort of serious reforms that could reverse the slide. "In his five years there were neither big privatizations nor structural reforms," says Boeri. "His idea was just to raise public expenditure and cut taxes to revitalize demand." It didn't work. Many European businessmen now worry that, eventually, Italy's economy will deteriorate to such an extent that the country could be forced out of the euro zone even if Berlusconi doesn't really want to go that route—and even if Prodi, Mr. Europe, is elected.
In a sense, Italy is the proverbial apple that poisons the barrel. Consider the situation Prodi finds himself in. Even if he wins by a substantial margin, he will have a hard time taking the economic steps he considers necessary. Reason: thanks to changes in the electoral law pushed through by Berlusconi, Italy has returned to the old system of proportional representation that created such unstable coalitions in the past. "The country will be much less governable," says John Harper at the Bologna Center of Johns Hopkins University. Yet obviously, painful decisions must be made. Italy's trade deficit for 2005 surpassed ¤10 billion, a result of both skyrocketing energy costs and rising labor expenses. European budget deficits are supposed to be held to 3 percent of GDP annually. Several countries have exceeded that, but Italy, at about 4 percent, is among the worst. And its example makes it easier for other countries to justify slipping beyond the bounds.
Compare Italy's zero growth with other nations of Europe: Spain at 3.4 percent, the U.K. at 1.8 percent, France at 1.4 percent. Only by Italy's standards could such performance be considered anything but anemic. Yet at a time when Europeans need to believe in change, Berlusconi has actually helped discredit the kind of free-market reforms needed to make Italy's economy, and Europe's, more dynamic. He likes to cite the successes of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, but he has been utterly unwilling to walk their walk. Italian economic and industrial policies are so hapless, in fact, that the country's business class is in open revolt. One of Berlusconi's most aggressive critics is Diego Della Valle, chief executive of the global clothing and shoe behemoth most famous for the Tod's brand. After Della Valle took Berlusconi to task for his failures, Berlusconi denounced him as a businessman who'd "gone out of his mind and supports the left." Nor did he stop there. Della Valle "must have many skeletons in his closet, and many things that must be pardoned," Berlusconi went on to say, seemingly oblivious to accusations that he himself has misused his office and his power in the legislature to block or defeat criminal prosecution for his own business dealings. As for Della Valle, he dismissed the prime minister as "a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown."
Italy's prime minister thus looks increasingly isolated. "Berlusconi is running alone this time," says Gianfranco Pasquino, author of a dozen books on Italian politics. His coalition partners have not only distanced themselves, they've taken to sniping at him. Fellow conservatives in other European countries are clearly uncomfortable. Germany's former chancellor Helmut Kohl, a key architect of European construction and the mentor of current Chancellor Angela Merkel, recently endorsed Berlusconi's opponent as "my friend" and said that only Prodi is "capable of restoring Italy to its place in Europe." In case anyone missed the point, Kohl underlined it: "Let me be clear: I am here to support a great European. [Prodi] is an excellent example of cosmopolitan Italy, linked to his roots but capable of looking beyond borders."
Under the circumstances, it is perhaps natural that Berlusconi would seek solace elsewhere. President George W. Bush, for one, still calls him "my friend." For Berlusconi's vocal support of democracy, his talk of free enterprise and for committing thousands of Italian troops to support the 2003 American-led occupation of Iraq, he won a standing ovation from the Republican-dominated Congress in Washington last month. The moment probably marked the high point of his election campaign back home, if only because it's rare that Italians have seen that kind of homage paid to one of their leaders. For a day or so, he was called l'Americano in the press with some grudging admiration. Meanwhile, the mercurial prime minister began a pullout last year of all the Italian forces in Iraq, amid concerns that Italy will be targeted by terrorists just as Spain was in 2004 and Britain last year.
After Berlusconi came back to Italy, both friends and enemies expected him to come on strong in the first televised debate with Prodi. But his performance went flat. Since then he's complained of back pain, and even taken enforced time off. Can Berlusconi recover his élan as well as his health? Only a few days are left in the campaign. April 3 brings another TV debate, in which the prime minister will be fighting for his political survival. The battle will be watched intently, at home and abroad. Detractors rooting for his fall cannot help but be mindful, however, that Berlusconi's passing would in many ways be only a prelude to further trouble. His escapades and pratfalls have been a diversion from Italy's grave, and growing, problems for far too long. Indeed, the country's difficulties are so formidable that any successor would have to be almost superhuman to overcome them. Is Prodi that man? Or will he find that, in his struggle to do the job that Berlusconi ducked, Italians do not want to follow? The stability that Berlusconi brought to the landscape might very well give way to the fractured, internecine politics of yore, with little agreement on where the country should go or how it should get there. This, ultimately, might be Berlusconi's legacy. Win or lose, Europe will be dealing with him and his works for many years to come.

With Jacopo Barigazzi in Milan, Eric Pape in Paris, Barbie Nadeau in Rome and Friso Endt in The Hague

Newsweek, 3 aprile 2006
(gilbotulino 28-3-2006)

 
 
Saving Italian Science

Nature, la rivista scientifica (comunista) più importante del mondo ha pubblicato un articolo, dal titolo "Saving Italian Science", sullo stato della ricerca scientifica in Italia dopo la devastazione dei cinque anni di permanenza di Berlusconi al governo.

SPECIAL REPORT

Saving Italian science

As the general election looms, candidate prime minister Romano Prodi strives to convince Italy’s discontented scientists that he can turn things around. Alison Abbott reports.

Last autumn, Romano Prodi, a candidate for Italian prime minister, proposed a thought experiment to a group of top scientists. “If you had an additional €400 million (US$480 million) a year for five years to rescue Italian research, to be allocated during the first 100 days of government, what would you do with it?” he asked.
   Prodi had summoned 20 or so scientists to his Fabbrica, a think-tank housed in Bologna where he has been developing his government platform.
   The short answer came fast: “We would double the number of researchers.” Italy’s research force is currently half the size of comparably  large, rich countries. The longer answer comprised a ten-page document published last  December, which lists the many problems with  Italy’s underperforming research sector, and  how they might be tackled. The bottom line:  too much bureaucratic incompetence and an  unreasonable demand for immediate returns,  as well as too little money and meritocracy.
   The conclusions won’t surprise most Italian scientists. “Physicists have developed a theory for chaos, but Italy is now running  an experiment in chaos,” comments Carlo Rubbia, a 1984 physics Nobel laureate and, until last year, president of the Italian energy and environmental agency ENEA.
   But the document proposes how to bring order. Its concerns and recommendations are now feeding back into detailed action plans for a government science programme that can be agreed by all nine parties of Prodi’s centre-left Olive Tree coalition.
   Mathematician Luciano Modica is a former head of the Conference of Italian University Rectors (an association of university chiefs), and now a member of Prodi’s union. He says, for example, that the document’s proposal for an independent authority to evaluate research done in all publicly funded research institutes and universities is now a central concept in the proposed government programme. “It would eliminate the unfair and inefficient elements in the Italian academic system,” he says.
   The scientists summoned by Prodi, none of whom is affiliated to a political party, argue that the problems have been there for decades, but have worsened in the past four years of Silvio Berlusconi’s rule. The government has reduced Italy’s scarce science funds for basic research, they say, and oriented the sector to applied research.Berlusconi’s centre-right coalition has not issued formal statements about science in the run up to the elections next month, but sources close to Berlusconi indicate a continuation of this philosophy.

Uphill struggle
“The situation wasn’t good before, but the Berlusconi government made it much worse, says Giorgio Parisi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’. “Perhaps the worst thing that has happened has been damage to the research agencies,” adds Massimo Inguscio, an atomic physicist at the University of Florence. He says a series of much needed but failed reorganization  attempts over the past decade have left agencies like the National Research(CNR) and the National Institute for the Physics of Matter with unclear sets of rules, imposing a culture of extreme uncertainty, “which is not supportive of free research”.
   Others have openly criticized Berlusconi’s set of politically appointed agency heads as scientific lightweights, who lack the charisma needed to defend the Italian tradition of research (see ‘Careless with the truth’).
   Curiously, the problems of Italian scientists have not so far translated into an equivalent dearth of high-quality research. Given the difficult conditions in which many have to work, the output in fundamental research is relatively impressive; in number of publications and publication impact, Italy scores seventh out of the world’s 140 highest-performing countries. Some point out, however, that the latest assessments include data that are already five years old, so may not reflect the harder times that have come recently
   As Italy spends only half the European Union average on research and development, the issue of money is on everyone’s mind. But most agree that more money alone is not the answer. Filippo Andreatta, a political scientist at the University of Bologna and one of Prodi’s chief advisers, says that although more money is foreseen — that indeed was the point of Prodi’s thought experiment — funds will be limited as Italy is struggling to stay out of recession. More important, he adds, a centre-left government would “turn upside down how we give money”.
   In effect this means making new rules to ensure fair and effective competition for research jobs and funds. This may not be music to the ears of Italian scientists, who despair of what they call La riforma continua, referring to the reforms to research organizations and recruitment procedures that began with Prodi’s first term of office in 1996, and that have not stopped since.
   The CNR, for example, which runs 100 research institutes, has had three major but ineffective shake-ups in the past decade. And, hampered by the confusion, universities are still trying to achieve the goals of a 1990 law that gave them autonomy to run their own budgets. Continuing uncertainty over rules has meant that few new research programmes have been launched.
   But Rossella Palomba, a social demographer at the CNR Institute for Population and Social Policies in Rome, and a member of Prodi’s group of scientists, says that “some restyling is unfortunately necessary, at least to ensure that academic recruitment allows us to hire the best people”.
   For those used to seeing academic positions advertised publicly as soon as they become available, the system of Italian recruitment competitions, or concorsi, seems incomprehensible. Until 1998, all jobs at universities and research institutes were organized centrally in Rome; every year or two, there would be a single mass announcement, and phone systems would become jammed with personal lobbying. Since then, a series of changes have attempted to leave recruitment decisions to the institutions involved, while trying to discourage the tendency to recruit locally.

Chaotic inclination
But because many universities continued to fail to recruit outsiders, research and education minister Letizia Moratti reintroduced a type of centralized concorsi system, in a decree that was forced into law last November.
   This recentralization would be reversed by a centre-left coalition, says Modica. “We need to create an environment where universities both have the right to choose their own candidates and feel compelled to choose the best.” He favours “a controlled ten-year transition linked to evaluation, to allow universities to adapt to a new culture where they are penalized if they recruit poorly”.
   The Olive Tree coalition also foresees two other policy changes. One would tone down the emphasis on research with immediate applications, introduced by the Berlusconi government. This industry-friendly philosophy included reorienting the CNR’s mission from fundamental to applied research. Despite its unpopularity among scientists, Fabio Pistella, appointed by the government as the CNR president in July 2004, says the focus on applications must continue. “Italian industry invests little in research and the CNR’s mission  is now to fill this gap — scientific papers are not the only measure of success of a good research organization.”
   The other shift in policy would reintroduce sources of research grants that have all but dried up, as well as more con-“The situation wasn’t concern ventional mechanisms for dis-found no consensus in Prodi’s tributing them. Even the CNR good before, but the coalition is the issue of has virtually no money for Berlusconi government embryonic stemcell research. actual research projects; most made it much worse.” The research community of its budget is eaten up by running costs.
   The CNR researchers can team up with university professors who are eligible to apply for scarce university project grants distributed by the research ministry. But the ministry has also come under attack for inefficient management of the grants. One international research programme rejected 60% of its grant applications as invalid — including many from very experienced researchers.
   Cell biologist Jacopo Meldolesi from the Vita Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, who is president of the Italian Federation of Life Sciences, had his application rejected before review for not meeting all criteria. This was despite him getting reassuring answers to  his phone and e-mail enquiries. “Obviously the programme was not explained properly to applicants,” says Meldolesi, who was also a member of Prodi’s group of scientists.
   One concern that has found no consensus in the Prodi's coalition is the issue of embryonic stemcell research. The research community would like to see more liberal rules, as the authors of the December document make clear. But Catholic and conservative coalition partners oppose loosening the embryo-protection laws, which are among the strictest in Europe.
   Some things will have to wait until after the April elections, acknowledges Giovanni Bignami, an astrophysicist at the University of Pavia, who chaired Prodi’s group of scientists. But he says: “We were happy to have been consulted by politicians. That hasn’t happened in a while in Italy.”


CARELESS WITH THE TRUTH
Several high-ups in Italy’s research organizations have come under fire for making dubious boasts.

  • The CNR president Fabio Pistella claims to have 150 scientific publications on his CV; this was submitted to the Italian parliament in support of his presidential nomination in 2004. But Le Scienze reported in January 2006 that ISI cites only three publications by him. Pistella told Nature that some of his publications are old and in Italian, “and the roles of the CNR president in any case require management skills”.
  • Claudio Regis, the vice-commissioner of ENEA, the Italian environmental agency, uses the formal title ‘Engineer’. But on 2 August 2005 the Corriere della sera newspaper reported that he is not listed as qualified with the Italian Guild of Engineers. Regis did not respond to requests for clarification.
  • In the Bologna newspaper Il resto del Carlino on 3 January 2006, Sergio Vetrella, the president of ASI, the Italian Space Agency, was reported to have claimed that Italy will build a telescope on the moon. But the agency has no such plan. Vetrella told Nature he was misquoted, but the journalist argues that he approved the text. On 28 February, Vetrella  announced a call from ASI’s website for ideas for moon-related plans.

Nature, Vol 440, 16 marzo 2006
(gilbotulino 28-3-2006)

 

Clicca a destra per tutte le notizie di Speciale Elezioni 2006

Speciale elezioni politiche 2006

Rosa Calipari e Nuccio Iovene domani a Lamezia Terme

Il giorno 29 marzo Rosa Calipari e Nuccio Iovene, candidati al Senato nella testa di lista dei DS in Calabria, saranno alle ore 11:00 presso il mercato di Nicastro per incontrare i cittadini, e successivamente alle ore 12:30 terranno una conferenza stampa al Punto d'incontro dei Democratici di Sinistra su corso Giovanni Nicotera. Alla conferenza stampa, tra gli altri, parteciperanno Giandomenico Crapis, segretario cittadino Ds e Gianni Speranza, sindaco di Lamezia Terme.

(gilbotulino 28-3-2006)

 

Link Utili... (dei politici che hanno scritto a Gil e degli amici)

Pino Soriero

candidato al Senato

Nuccio Iovene

candidato al Senato

Franco Critelli

candidato alla Camera

   
 
 

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