Tag: Italy

  • Tomb presumed to be from era of Jesus excavated in Naples

    Tomb presumed to be from era of Jesus excavated in Naples

    A sealed tomb, presumed to be more than two thousand years old, has been discovered in the municipality of Giugliano in Campania, near Naples, Italy.

    Large murals known as frescos, found by the Italian Ministry of Culture, had creatures from Greek mythology including Cerberus-the hound called the God of the underworld. The tomb has been named the ‘Tomb of Cerberus’.

    It is believed that the tomb, discovered in a remarkable state of preservation, belonged to a wealthy person considering the grandeur of frescos and the tomb.

    In a statement released by the superintendent of archeology, fine arts and landscape, it is said that, “The territory of Giugliano, after years of oblivion, is finally returning significant vestiges of its glorious past, to be preserved and protected, thanks to a common effort.”

    The discovery of the tomb has opened doors to peek into the lives of ancient Romans and the art and culture they once cherished.

  • A Pakistani component will soon be going to the moon

    A Pakistani component will soon be going to the moon

    China’s new mission to the moon, Chang’e 6, will be launched in 2024, carrying a Pakistani satellite.

    As per a statement issued by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), Chang’e 6 mission will be launched to the moon in the first half of 2024.

    The mission is set to carry payloads to the moon from Pakistan, the European Space Agency (ESA), France and Italy.

    This includes French instruments to test radioactive gas, ESA’s Negative Ion Detector, Italy’s Valle Brett Radar System, and Pakistan’s satellite named CubeSat.

    China is currently expanding the International Lunar Research Station project that will result in more international partnerships in the future as well as an increased international cooperation.

    Constituting a first in history, Chang’e-6 mission is to journey towards the dark side of the moon and gather specimens from its surface.

    Previously, samples were collected from the near surface of the moon.

    The aim is to collect samples from various areas of the moon to evaluate its age. This is said to be followed by Chang’e 7 robotic mission to the moon’s south pole.

    This will trace for signs of ice and examine the region’s atmosphere and weather.

    The Chang’e 8 mission is said to conclude the Chang’e missions and to possibly establish a research station on the planet.

  • ‘Culpa Mia’ actor Gabriel Guevara arrested on sexual assault charges

    ‘Culpa Mia’ actor Gabriel Guevara arrested on sexual assault charges

    Spanish actor Gabriel Guevara has been arrested at the Venice Film Festival on an international arrest warrant accusing him of sexual assault in France, as reported by Hollywood Reporter. The actor was set to receive the best young actor honor award given out by Filming Italy. After his arrest, the organisation released a statement saying they had cancelled the award as a precautionary measure, and were waiting for the outcome of the case.

    The Venice Film Festival posted a statement on their official account to address the arrest:

    “#BiennaleCinema2023#Venezia80#LaBiennaleDiVenezia would like to specify that the presence in #Venice of Spanish actor #GabrielGuevara, that some press websites have recently reported as being under arrest, was not linked to any activity or production of the 80th Venice International Film Festival.”

    Guevara sky rocketed to international fame after the Amazon Prime movie ‘Culpa Mia’ where he played the rebellious step brother, Nick, who clashes with his step sister Noah (played by Nicole Wallace) after she moves to their mansion after their parents re-marry. The two originally start off as enemies, but soon come to realise their feelings for each other can’t be ignored.

  • Pakistan extradites man to Italy for daughter’s murder

    Pakistan extradites man to Italy for daughter’s murder

    A Pakistani-Italian man wanted for murdering his daughter has been arrested from his native village in Pakistan and extradited to Italy for trial.

    Geo reports that according to the Italian justice minister, Shabbar Abbas was arrested in November 2022 on suspicion of killing his 18-year-old daughter, Saman Abbas.

    Saman went missing in April 2021 after she refused to travel to Pakistan for an arranged marriage.

    The father’s arrest is considered as a “step forward to allow justice to run its full course after a horrific crime” , says Carlo Nordio, the Italian justice minister, in a statement.

    According to Geo News, teenage Saman was identified by dental records after human remains were found near her family home in the northern Italian town of Novellara more than a year after her disappearance.

    Prosecutors suspect Saman having a boyfriend angered her parents.

    They further allege she was killed when she visited her home to collect some documents after living nearby under the care of social services.

    The father, however, denies the murdering his daughter. Her uncle has also been extradited from France for the trial, along with two of her cousins.

  • Groping a girl okay, if it’s less than ten seconds, rules Italian court

    Groping a girl okay, if it’s less than ten seconds, rules Italian court

    Trigger warning: discussion of harassment, victim blaming

    Protests and demonstrations are erupting in Italy after a judge cleared a man of charges of sexual harassment of a teenager because the groping had lasted “a handful of seconds”.

    The survivor, a 17 year old student, took 66 year old Antonio Avola to court when he groped her in school while she was walking up the staircase with a friend in April 2022.

    She recalled her trousers fell from her waist and as she was pulling them up, she felt a hand touching her buttocks and then grabbing her underwear to lift her up by an inch.

    When she turned around, the caretaker brushed off the harassment by saying “Love, you know I was joking.”

    Avola confessed to the groping in court but said it was a joke. Prosecutors were seeking a three year jail term if convicted.

    However, the judge ruled that the grope could not be counted as harassment since it lasted “between five to 10 seconds” and was too short to be considered a crime. The judgement also ruled:

    “Furthermore, it seems likely that the brushing of the buttocks was caused by an awkward manoeuvre of the defendant which, due to the dynamics of the action, was carried out while the subject was in motion.”

    This ruling has outraged Italians who protested by posting 10 second videos of themselves touching private body parts along with the hashtag “palpata breve” (brief grope) and “10 secondi” (10 seconds).

    Speaking to The New York Times, ‘The White Lotus’ actor Paolo Camilli, who had participated in the trend, spoke about how outrageous the ruling was.

    “My first thought was, how can a person measure 10 seconds while they were being molested”, he said, further pointing out that 10 seconds can be an infinity for someone in a painful situation.

    Popular Italian influencer Francesco Cicconetti slammed the ruling in a video shared to his 200,000 followers on Instagram, writing that no man is allowed to turn a woman into their property.

    “Women’s bodies are not men’s property. Owned by no one but women themselves. It’s not the father who wants to hand it over to the husband, it’s not the boyfriend who wants to hide it, it’s neither the mate who wants to govern him, it’s nor the son who wants to protect him, he’s not the brother who wants to defend his honor.”

  • 28 bodies of Pakistanis recovered in migrant boat crash off Italy’s coast

    28 bodies of Pakistanis recovered in migrant boat crash off Italy’s coast

    The bodies of 28 Pakistanis have been recovered after a wooden sail boat carrying migrants from several countries crashed against the rocks off the southern Italian coast early on Sunday.

    According to the Pakistani embassy in Rome, a total of 40 Pakistanis were on board the ill-fated boat. The fate of 12 more citizens is still unclear.

    Talking about the tragic incident, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has said that most of the Pakistan who died belonged to Gujrat and some of them were on their way to Italy from Libya.

    The agency also said that strict action will be surely taken against the facilitators, ‘agents’ who send these people via illegal routes to foreign countries.

    A total of 59 migrants lost their life in the crash. The survivors were mostly from Afghanistan, as well as a few from Pakistan and a couple from Somalia. One survivor was arrested on migrant trafficking charges, customs police said.

    “According to survivors, 140 to 150 people were on board,” Manuela Curra, the provincial government official said. She added that 81 survivors— most of them from Afghanistan —had come ashore, including 22 who were now in the hospital.

  • Italian spyware hacks Apple and Android smartphones

    Italian spyware hacks Apple and Android smartphones

    A report released on Thursday by Alphabet Inc.’s Google revealed that a hacking tool created in Italy was used to spy on Apple Inc. and Android smartphone users in Kazakhstan and Italy.

    The report claimed that RCS lab, a Milan-based company whose website lists European law enforcement agencies as clients, created tools to spy on the private messages and contacts of the targeted devices.

    Regulators in Europe and America have been considering possible revisions to the laws governing the sale and import of spyware.

    “These vendors are enabling the proliferation of dangerous hacking tools and arming governments that would not be able to develop these capabilities in-house,” Google said.

    According to Billy Leonard, a senior researcher at Google, the hackers occasionally collaborated with the target’s ISP, which suggests that they had connections to the government.

    Requests for comment from the governments of Italy and Kazakhstan were not immediately returned. According to a spokesperson for Apple, the company has cancelled all known accounts and certificates linked to this hacking campaign.

    According to RCS lab, its goods and services are compliant with European regulations and support criminal investigations.

    Government spyware has become a growing global industry in recent years. More and more businesses are being accused of supporting governments that, in some cases, use these tools to repress civil and human rights.

    When it was discovered that numerous governments were using the Pegasus spyware from Israeli surveillance firm NSO to spy on journalists, activists, and dissidents, there was a widespread outcry against the industry.

  • National Geographic’s green-eyed ‘Afghan Girl’ evacuated to Italy

    National Geographic magazine’s famed green-eyed girl, Sharbat Gula, has been evacuated to Italy, the country’s Prime Minister (PM) Mario Draghi’s office announced on Tuesday, reports Reuters.

    The office said it had responded to pleas from non-profit organisations working in the war-torn country to help her leave and “travel to Italy as part of the wider evacuation programme in place for Afghan citizens and the government’s plan for their reception and integration”.

    Gula’s famous picture was taken by a United States (US) photographer Steve McCurry in a Pakistan camp in 1984, which was the front cover of the National Geographic magazine. She said she first arrived in Pakistan as an orphan, some four or five years after the Soviet invasion in 1979.

    Pakistan arrested Gula for forging a national identity card and she was deported back to Afghanistan in 2016. At that time, former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani welcomed her.

    In September, Rome said it had evacuated almost 5,000 Afghans after the Taliban seized power in August.

  • Man asks police to put him behind bars to escape ‘unbearable’ life with wife

    Man asks police to put him behind bars to escape ‘unbearable’ life with wife

    A man under house arrest in Italy went to a police barrack and asked them to put him behind bars because life with his wife at home was unbearable, the police said Sunday.

    As per reports, the 30-year-old Albanian citizen “was no longer able to cope with the forced cohabitation with his wife”, the Carabinieri police said in a statement.

    “Exasperated by the situation, he preferred to escape, spontaneously presenting himself to the Carabinieri to ask to serve his sentence behind bars,” they wrote.

    Read More: https://thecurrent.pk/no-mutton-no-marriage-groom-calls-off-wedding/

    The man had been under house arrest for drug crimes for several months and had a few years left to serve, an official Captain Francesco Giacomo told AFP.

    “He lived at home with his wife and family. It wasn’t going well anymore,” Ferrante said.

    “He said, ‘Listen, my domestic life has become hell, I can’t do it anymore, I want to go to jail.’

    The man was immidiately arrested for violating his house arrest and judicial authorities ordered his transfer to prison.

  • Pakistani-Italian girl in Italy goes missing after she refuses arranged marriage

    Pakistani-Italian girl in Italy goes missing after she refuses arranged marriage

    An 18-year-old girl, Saman Abbas, has been missing for three months in Novellara, Italy.

     Local prosecutors and police fear Saman’s family may have killed her. But after 67 days of searching, neither Saman nor her body has been found.

    According to journalist Aliya Salahuddin, Saman’s parents had arranged her marriage with her cousin in Pakistan. Saman approached social services and was sent to live with a protective community.

    According to the BBC, Saman had lived under the protection of social services since October, but returned to the family home in Novellara, near Parma, in late April.

    Saman wanted to marry Saqib, who lives in a city near Rome. Saqib told the Independent Urdu that Saman’s parents disliked the relationship and they had also threatened him.

    According to Saqib, Saman tried hard to convince his parents. Saqib himself spoke to Saman’s mother but she was not ready to accept him.

    “We were sure the Italian system would help us,” said Saqib. But the system had its own conditions. They needed Saman’s identity card and other documents that are required for a wedding in Italy. Saman did not have any option so she went back to her home with the intention to make a last effort to persuade her parents and get her documents.

    It was April 20 when Saman went to her home in Novellara. Ten days later, on April 30, it was the last time she contacted Saqib via text message. Later, CCTV footage showed Saman leaving the house with her family on the night of April 30, but she was not with them when they returned.

    After spending a few days at her home, Saman suspected that she was in danger. Once she sent a voice message to Saqib saying that she heard her parents saying ‘kill her’ and when she asked her mother for an explanation, she replied: “No no it is not about you. This is a girl in Pakistan who ran away, we are talking about her.”

    Saqib said that Saman had told him that if he does not get any message from her for a few days then he should understand that there must be something wrong and he should report it to the police.

    Saqib did report it to the police. He approached the police in his area. The search operation conducted by the agencies took a few days and there was a bit of negligence, but on May 5, the police arrived at the Saman’s house from the local station of Blakhar Novellara to check. The house was locked and the police got to know that her parents had gone to Pakistan.

    No ticket was issued in Saman’s name. The Italian authorities then proceeded with the case.

    The local prosecutor named five people in the murder investigation.  Saman’s mother, father, uncle and two cousins. The younger brother has been questioned and a cousin is in police custody who was arrested on a bus travelling without documents from Paris to Barcelona in France.

    On July 12, the Italian police stopped the search. This does not mean that the case is closed. According to local media, police sources said that the quest was stopped because there was no place left in the area where Saman’s body had not been searched. Saqib is hopeful that there may be a possibility of Saman being alive and that she may have been forcibly kept somewhere.