WorldcrunchAlessio Perrone is a freelance journalist based in Milan, Italy.
SÃO PAULO — One of the world’s most important biodiversity regions is experiencing the worst drought and the worst series of wildfires in decades. Yes, the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland area, in western Brazil, is burning. So far this year, fires have scorched more than 1.2 million hectares of land, about eight times […]
On the Italian island’s Emerald Coast, the summer lifestyles of the rich and famous ignored the threat of a new coronavirus breakout. Now hundreds are testing positive, including Billionaire nightclub owner Flavio Briatore.
COURMAYEUR — When the alarm sounded last year, it was because the ice on the Mont Blanc, on the border between Italy and France, was moving too quickly. Its front had broken away from the rest of the ice lobe, separated by a huge crack, and descended three meters per day. Experts feared that 250 […]
The South American nation has the second highest number of coronavirus fatalities in the world (after the United States), and with ICU beds in short supply, the death toll will continue to rise.
Earlier this week, as I packed my things for my first post-pandemic vacation, my eyes and mind dwelled on the object I spend more time with than any other: my laptop. Of course many things have changed since last summer’s break. Instead of flying, I’ll drive from my home in the northern city of Milan […]
-Analysis- You could almost hear a collective “Ha!” from around the world. The news yesterday that Jair Bolsonaro had been infected with the coronavirus comes after the Brazilian president’s response to the epidemic over the past four months that mixed arrogant dismissiveness with outright lies: The 65-year-old hardline right-wing leader first baselessly suggested Brazilians were […]
Grief and catastrophe in and around the Italian city that became a symbol of the swiftness of the pandemic’s death and destruction.
Even as the total number of cases of COVID-19 decreased In Italy, an outbreak flared up in the southern province of Caserta among migrant agricultural laborers. Writing in the Italian daily La Stampa, Mattia Feltri recounts how, once again, the pandemic is bringing long-simmering tensions, economic inequity and social injustice to the surface. Almost all […]
ROME — “We deserve a smile …” With these words, Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte urged the country to celebrate the reopening of the country’s regional borders on June 3. Unfortunately, there’s very little to smile about, and nothing to celebrate. As it reopens, Italy is a country that has been worn out by the […]
MILAN — In our pandemic times, face masks are politics. Last Thursday, the debate arrived with fury at the Culture Commission of the Italian parliament. “I won’t be gagged and I won’t wear it!” barked Vittorio Sgarbi, a Parliament member from the center-right Forza Italia party. The obligatory face mask policy inside the Parliament, he […]
In India, Thailand and elsewhere, authorities have recently passed laws or decrees limiting what media can do and say.
João Pedro Matos was in his uncle’s garden on May 18 in São Gonçalo, near Rio de Janeiro, when Brazil’s Federal Police stormed in. Police claim officers traded shots with armed drug traffickers, though the Matos family denies this. A bullet fired by an officer hit João Pedro, who was taken away in a helicopter […]
-Essay- Among the many things that COVID-19 taught us, one is to not measure the world by latitude. Take the case of Milan, a shining example, we’re told, of northern Italian industriousness and efficiency that’s supposedly absent in the south. And yet this capital of the Lombardy region saw one of the world’s worst COVID-19 […]
MILAN — In March, the first coronavirus outbreak in the West put Italy’s hospitals under unprecedented strain, with health authorities facing what they described as a “tsunami” of new patients. As intensive care units filled with COVID-19 patients, hospitals scrambled to convert other wards, freeing up corridors and operating theaters for patients of the potentially […]