Mr Saviano has been studying the changes in Castel Volturno with the same forensic obsession that saw him forced into hiding in 2007 after the publication of his global bestseller, Gomorrah. He's one of 20 Italian writers who are now under 24-hour police guard thanks to their mafia exposes.
Victoria J. Haneman (Creighton), Tax Incentives for Green Burial:
Every living being is doomed to decay and die and decay some more. Death is inevitable, and the disposal of our dead is a fundamental global activity with the potential to have significant environmental impact. In the United States, the environmental toxicity of “traditional” modern burial is stark. A cosmeticized body is pumped with three gallons of embalming fluid (containing chemicals such as formaldehyde) that eventually leaches through metal and wood and into the ground. An estimated 5.3 million gallons of embalming chemicals are buried annually in what are essentially luxury landfill-slash-golf-courses, with landscaping and grass to maintain and mow, in coffins that are typically constructed of nonbiodegradable chipboard. And while cremation is a more environmentally friendly alternative, incineration cremation falls short of being labeled “green.” Fire-based cremation utilizes significant resources and energy, attributable to the substantial quantity of fossil fuel required to burn human remains at 1,562° F (850° C) to reduce a corpse to ash. Pollutants are generated in doing so, including an average of 250,000 tons per year of carbon emissions and an estimated 320 to 6,000 pounds of mercury (from incineration of dental fillings) per year.
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A night-time SAS raid on an Afghan village left two men dead. New allegations about how they died could lead to war crimes charges against Australian soldiers.
German Military Laptop Sold on eBay Included Classified Missile Information
The computer was probably decommissioned years ago, but its hard drive held information relating to a weapons system that’s still in use.
"You can't tell people a place like this exists in Italy," says Roberto Saviano. "No-one would believe it … a whole city that's been constructed illegally." In a ruined city on the Italian coast, the Nigerian mafia is muscling in on the old mob
The Nigerian mafia has built Italy into a European hub, smuggling cocaine from South America, heroin from Asia, and trafficking women by the tens of thousands.
Episode 2, Tax Policy and the 14th Century Fresco (Miranda Stewart (Melbourne Law School)):
Boeing shows the danger of ignoring fearful staff FT
Boeing shows the danger of
ignoring fearful staff Would financial salespeople recommend their products to
their own family members?
Andrew Hill An employee works
on a Boeing Co. 737 MAX 8 airplane on the production line at the company's
manufacturing facility in Renton, Washington, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 7, 2015.
Boeing Co.'s latest 737
airliner is gliding through development with little notice, and that may be the
plane's strongest selling point. The single-aisle 737 family is the company's
largest source of profit, and the planemaker stumbled twice earlier this decade
with tardy debuts for its wide-body 787 Dreamliner and 747-8 jumbo jet.
Boeing has said it is
focusing on running the 737 Max jet production line at a manageable pace
Be the first to know about
every new Coronavirus story Am I safe? Are my family, friends and colleagues
safe?
The coronavirus pandemic has
exposed how thin the frontier is between security and insecurity. Citizens are
looking to fallible leaders for reassurance.
Employees rarely pose the
same questions to business leaders. Yet they should. The evolving case of how
Boeing’s ill-starred 737 Max jet was produced reveals why.
Indeed, the most striking testimony presented
to the US House of Representatives committee looking into the design,
manufacture and certification of the aircraft came from Ed Pierson, a former senior
manager on the 737 production line. He asked exactly those questions — and
received an unsatisfactory response. In June 2018, just before the first 737
Max crash, Mr Pierson emailed the programme head about what he later called a
“factory in chaos”. He wrote: “For the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say
that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing aeroplane.” He claimed no
action was taken. The House committee referred to Mr Pierson’s testimony in
preliminary findings that included a coruscating attack on Boeing’s “culture of
concealment” and its overriding desire to beat its rival Airbus. “The desire to
meet these goals and expectations jeopardised the safety of the flying public,”
the committee said.
What struck me about Mr
Pierson’s account was not only his highly personal reaction to the problems on
the production line, but the fact he had also spotted many weaker signals that
Boeing’s culture had broken down. His initial email listed employee fatigue
combined with schedule pressure as reasons why he was requesting the line
should be shut down, “to allow our team time to regroup”. In a later email,
sent after the fatal 2018 Lion Air crash and just before the Ethiopian Airlines
accident in 2019, he also drew attention to “a large number of high hazard
safety incidents” on the production line. Employees were reluctant to log “near
miss” safety breaches because they did not have time, he claimed. That reminded
me of my discussion last year with managers at Linde Engineering.
The project management arm of industrial gases
group Linde instituted a coaching programme — encouraging team leaders to ask
open-ended questions and “actively listen” to the responses — after it noticed
a pattern of small accidents, such as falls and puncture injuries, that seemed
impervious to traditional safety management techniques. Not only did safety
improve, the “ask, don’t tell” approach also changed the relationship between
managers and teams and enhanced the culture as a whole. Financial services
employees would also recognise the “production pressures” piled on to the
Boeing engineers. Whether in the Libor interest rate-fixing scandal or mortgage
mis-selling, banks have repeatedly subjected staff to dangerous competitive
pressure, amplified, in some cases, by ill-begotten incentive schemes.
Like Mr Pierson, financial
salespeople might ask themselves whether they would recommend their products to
their own family members. Boeing denied at the time of Mr Pierson’s testimony
that production problems caused the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines crashes. In
one exchange with the House committee last October, then chief executive Dennis
Muilenburg sparred over a 2016 internal survey that showed 39 per cent of
Boeing staff surveyed had experienced “undue pressure” and 29 per cent were
concerned about the consequences if they reported it. Mr Muilenburg preferred
to draw attention to the finding that over 90 per cent of staff were
“comfortable raising issues”. That was evidence, he said, of a “culture where
employees can speak up”.
Mr Muilenburg has since been
replaced as Boeing chief executive by Dave Calhoun. In a recent interview with
the New York Times, he said he was focusing on insulating engineers from
business pressures and running the production line at a manageable pace “one
airplane at a time”. Boeing now faces the additional pressure of a pandemic
that has thrown the aviation sector into disarray. But one positive feature of
the early corporate response to the coronavirus outbreak is that employers are
offering to listen to their fearful staff’s concerns. Whether they are equipped
to do so is another matter, but if they were not before, they should be
afterwards. As Amy Edmondson, author of The Fearless Organization and proponent
of “psychological safety” at work, wrote recently, in Harvard Business Review,
while it “takes courage to choose transparency” — over, say, a culture
of concealment — “organisations that explicitly value and make paths for
speaking up happen are more effective in dealing with challenges of every
kind”. andrew.hill@ft.com
Twitter: @andrewtghill
Three of our Italian
members, Gloria Riva, Paolo Biondani and Leo Sisti, share their experience
reporting on the coronavirus as it gripped their nation. Riva feels both “personally
involved and powerless” as she reports on the pandemic for
L’Espresso, a weekly magazine. The trio have been working from home since early
March, an experience that is “very strange” for veteran reporter Biondani. He
shares his “survival kit” for working alongside his grandmother, sons, cats,
dogs and wife.
Our chief reporter, Ben
Hallman, will share occasional roundups of investigative stories that shine a
light on the COVID-19 virus as it spreads. This time we ask: Where are the
tests? While other countries, like China and South Korea, have
worked to identify and isolate victims, doctors in the United States have been
hampered by a lack of test kits and labs to process them.
Peru’s former first lady faces jail over
corruption allegations stemming from our Bribery Division investigation.
Nadine Heredia is accused of leading a scheme to steer a $7 billion pipeline,
the Gasoducto Sur Peruano, to Odebrecht in exchange for campaign contributions
to her husband, former president Ollanta Humala, and other illegal payments. A
prosecutor has recommended that she be jailed for three years.
Portuguese judge Carlos
Alexandre wants all of Isabel dos Santos’ assets in the
country seized, including lucrative stakes in various companies
and luxury properties. Alexandre said a previous court ruling in January that
froze dos Santos’ bank accounts did not go far enough in safeguarding Angola’s
interests.
- BuzzFeed News’ Ruby Cramer goes behind the scenes for “The Week Bernie Sanders Learned That He Was Losing.”
- The Ringer has started a coronavirus page that (mostly) looks at the impact on sports.
- Is Deadspin close to coming back? Awful Announcing’s Ian Casselberry has the details.
“Journalism’s most critical role in a crisis is to provide information people need to make decisions for the safety of family and community. That is our mission.”
- The local newspaper at the epicenter of the coronavirus story is The Seattle Times. Rachel Abrams of The New York Times has a sensational story about The Seattle Times’ work during this pandemic.
- The Washington Post’s Heather Kelly with “The Most Maddening Part About Working From Home: Video Conferences.”
- Did you hear about the Tennessee man who bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizers in hopes of selling them for a huge profit? Well, he’s under investigation for price gouging and he’s donating the sanitizer to charity. It all happened after The New York Times ran a story on him. Now the Times’ Jack Nicas has the update.