An unidentified priest in Italy didn't let the coronavirus situation stop him from doing mass. He simply live-streamed the service instead. Amusingly though, he left on his camera's filters which overlayed a space helmet, some glitter, dumbbells (?), and a Walter White hat and sunglasses get-up onto his otherwise serious broadcast.
Twitter user Gavin Shoebridge shared the footage:
screengrab via Gavin Shoebridge/Twitter Read the rest
• 3,405 people have now died of COVID-19 in Italy
Warning folks in the past about how spooky (and deadly) COVID-19 is making life for people all around the world would be the best use of a time machine right now if, you know, we actually had one. This video of Italians talking to the person they were, ten days ago, is likely the next best thing.
North America is juuuuuuuuust a little ways behind the level of COVID-19 clusterfuck that Italy is currently experiencing. It could get just as bad here as it is there. Wash your hands, constantly. Stay at home. Look after one another. It's going to be a long year.
Or two. Read the rest
Italy today confirmed over
150 cases of the disease.
An Italian police raid of 19 homes of members of the Italian National Socialist Workers' Party uncovered troves of weapons, Nazi literature, and books about Hitler and Mussolini. "The self-styled party aimed to form a pan-European alliance with other xenophobic and anti-Semitic groups, police said, without revealing how many people had joined it. Tne suspect allegedly had links with the 'Ndrangheta criminal network while another, a 50-year-old woman, called herself Hitler's sergeant-major." (Thanks, Kathy Padilla!)
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Oops. Awkward. Read the rest
Rising tides and rain in Venice are flooding the city, and hotels are giving guests knee-high rubber boots so they can slosh their way from one tourist attraction to another.
From Yahoo News:
The high water, known locally as “acqua alta”, was amusing for tourists and a nuisance for residents going about their business, but levels were far lower than the 1.94 meters (6ft 4in) in the devastating November 1966 flood.
But even lower levels of the salty high water over the years take their toll on the city, eroding foundations of homes, businesses and city buildings.
Bad weather is continuing to dog Italy, with no real let-up forecast for several days.
Image: YouTube Read the rest
Arrivederci, asshole.
In Italy, authorities are reportedly evicting alt-right self-promoter Steve Bannon from the medieval monastery he'd planned to transform into a white supremacist radicalization academy, “after reports of fraud in the competitive tender process.”
Being evicted from his fancy Italian gladiator castle is a big setback for Bannon, who's trying to grow an alt-right empire in Europe. Read the rest
Vodafone discovered that the home routers that Huawei provided for its Italian residential broadband business had a "backdoor" -- an open telnet interface that could allow attackers to take over the router and surveil the user's network -- and after they complained to Huawei about it, Huawei released an update that they claimed removed the interface, but that this was a lie.
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In southern Italy today, a brazen highway robbery in which thieves used bulldozers to pry open an armored van on the road. Read the rest
Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian company that developed cyberweapons that it sold to oppressive government around the world, to be used against their own citizens to monitor and suppress political oppositions; in 2015, a hacker calling themselves "Phineas Fisher" hacked and dumped hundreds of gigabytes' worth of internal Hacking Team data, effectively killing the company.
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Venice, Italy was hit with a storm that put three-quarters of the city under water. Read the rest
When the EU voted for mandatory copyright censorship of the internet in September, Italy had a different government; the ensuing Italian elections empowered a new government, who oppose the filters.
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In this video, three reputable Italian chefs are subjected to severe moral injury by being forced to watch the top five 'how to cook carbonara' videos on YouTube. Their emotions range between outrage, disappointment, dour amusement and absolute horror in under 13 minutes. Be sure to turn subtitles on for this one before settling in.
The most interesting thing for me was how disappointed they were in the final video that they watched, which features Jamie Oliver showing off his carbonara chops. According to the chefs, they ain't great. Their chief complaint was that he failed to show the meat being properly sanitized before chopping it up and throwing it in a hot pan to fry. I'm sure the pig processing poop adds flavor, but Yuck.
Image via Wikipedia
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Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini is what you’d call a renaissance bigot: He’s equally comfortable refusing safe harbor to migrants in desperate need of medical care as he is whipping off statements about the left wanting to keep migrants in his country to use as slave labor. Looking for ways to push a cultural minority out of his country? He’s all over that shit, too. Earlier this week, Salvini said that he would order a census of the Roma people currently living in Italy and expel those without residence permits. When asked about naturalized Roma residing in Italy, he answered, classy fucker that he is “...and Italian Roma? Unfortunately, we have to keep them.”
Originating in South Asia, the Roma, migrated to Europe hundreds of years ago. While some have integrated into the societies where they live, most live a nomadic lifestyle and keep their own customs. Having suffered generations of brutal discrimination, these itinerant communities tend to shun the communities and cities that they live near, in favor of keeping themselves to themselves, for safety’s sake. This preference towards exclusivist living in the name of safety has led to many ugly stereotypes over the years: that Roma are all criminals, don’t pay taxes, and are a plague on a productive society. Such false claims were used by the Nazis as an excuse to herd Roma into concentration camps. These same excuses have been used more recently to create areas of segregation where Roma are permitted to set up camp – often far from essential services such as schools and medical aid. Read the rest
