The resort town of Ostia, on Italy’s west coast, is a magnet for tourists in the summer, but is also mafia territory where clans carve up the drugs and extortion business.
“If you don’t see anything, hear anything or say anything, then you can live to be 100 here,” said a sexagenarian resident of Ostia, near Rome, declining to give his name.
“But if you want to change things, then you are going to have some major problems ahead,” he added. “That should have happened a lot earlier. These problems are enrooted and now it’s no good lopping off a branch because another will grow and the tree will be just the same.”
Ostia, a town with a population of 85,000, where many live on impoverished estates, has been in the media spotlight since Tuesday when the brother of a mafia boss violently assaulted a journalist.
Roberto Spada was filmed headbutting TV reporter Daniele Piervincenzi, before attacking him with a baton.
Piervincenzi had been investigating Spada’s alleged links to the far-right CasaPound movement and his nose was fractured in the attack.
In Ostia on Friday dozens of Italian journalists protested in defense of freedom of speech after the attack on their colleague.
Piervincenzi was questioning Spada for a report for national broadcaster Rai about municipal elections, two years after the local council was dissolved due to mafia infiltration.
CasaPound, suspected of links to organized crime in the area, won 8 percent of the first round votes.
Italian police arrested Spada on Thursday for assault, with prosecutors saying his behavior was typical of methods used by organized crime groups to control territory.
While no one in the town openly talks about the mafia, its influence is all-pervasive.
“Look at that beach. Not long ago the beach huts, towels, life guards were all abusively managed by the clan,” one resident said.
“But since last summer, nothing. The municipality decided to seek tenders for the management, but no one has bid,” he added, smiling knowingly.
The attack on Piervincenzi did not just upset fellow journalists. Ostia residents also turned out to defend freedom of expression.
“Let’s just say that the presence of the press has forced law enforcement to lift the lid on the issue,” resident Silvia Frau said.
“I hope they stay once the media rush is over,” she added.
However, another local passing by said that the reporter “was looking for it and he got it.”
“He should have known when to stop. He was too insistent, he wanted to dig a little too deep,” the person said.
Rome Mayor Virginia Raggi, of the populist Five Star Movement, was one of the first politicians to react to the attack, calling the violence unacceptable and pledging a crackdown on crime.
“Spada’s arrest is proof that there are no lawless areas in Italy,” the Italian Ministry of the Interior said in a statement.
CasaPound came fourth in first-round voting in the municipal elections on Sunday last week and is hoping to do better in the second round this Sunday.
It is calling on voters to kick out Raggi, who it claims “hasn’t even managed to move an abandoned mattress in 18 months.”
The Spada clan is notoriously violent. Seven members of the family were sentenced to a combined 56 years in jail last month.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
RSS