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Jane Herbelin

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Postal worker in Italy delivers mail to apartment mailboxes
Economy

Who Wants To Work For The Post Office? Snapshot Of Italy's Uncertain Future

Why are no locals in the northern Italian city of Verona applying for the once prized permanent job posting? The answer is found elsewhere.

Forget the myth of permanent employment, the secure job for life. In Verona, they are looking for postal workers, but can't find them. They can't find them in Bolzano or Turin either. There is a labor shortage in the post offices of Italy's northeast, and a shortage in the northwest.

The letter carrier's position has never been in such high demand as it is today. To tell the truth: few actual letters though many more packages to deliver. Postal workers are offered a one-year fixed-term contract at 1,100 euros per month, before having the opportunity to move up the ranks and secure a job for life within two to three years. A national contract, annual leave, health insurance and workers rights. Yet the last call for applications in Verona was almost completely empty.

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Taliban Education, Inside A Madrasa Islamic School Shaping Afghanistan's Future
Society

Taliban Education, Inside A Madrasa Islamic School Shaping Afghanistan's Future

No girls, no science, no foreign languages, only the Koran. This is how the Taliban want to erase the generation of students educated for 20 years by the "Western usurpers." La Stampa's Francesca Mannocchi visits one of the rigid, boys-only madrasas near Kabul.

KABUL — When I ask Mufti Hayatullah Masroor to choose a text for the morning lesson in the Al-Jami'a Al-Islamiya Al-Mohammadia-Kabul madrasa he oversees in Qala Haidar Khan, a village outside Kabul, he takes his time, approaches the shelf where he keeps his books, flips through it, carefully selects the lines, and reads this hadith aloud: "I heard the Messenger of Allah say, 'Every woman who dies will enter Paradise if God has been pleased with her behavior'."

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​"In perfumery, the implementation of upcycling spans several years and has occurred in three major phases"
Green Or Gone

What's That Smell? The Perfume Industry's Upcycling Savoir Faire

The circular economy is a hot trend, being embraced by everything from fashion to home decor. But one industry has been upcycling for decades. And the benefits and potentials go far beyond the environment. Soon, your perfume might help you fight stress and even wrinkles.

What do orange peels, a Texas-based sawmill and rosewater have in common?

Well, all three are part of the upcycling system developed by the perfume industry. This version of recycling, which transforms a waste product by adding value to it, is well known in fashion and home decor. But perfumery has been using the technique for generations, and not just for environmental reasons.

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Two afrofeminism activists pausing together  - The creative direction inspired by British-Moroccan photographer Hassan Hajjaj.
Ideas

African Feminism Exists! A Brief Manifesto

There is a persistent misconception that African women fighting for their rights and building their identity owe a debt to feminism passed down by White women and the West. It is crucial to understand that there are unique forms of feminism that have developed on and of the African continent.

-Essay-

"You cannot go around claiming that an idea or an item was imported into a given society unless you could also conclude that — to the best of your knowledge — there is not and never was any word or phrase in that society's indigenous language which describes that idea or item.”

These words, spoken by the Ghanaian feminist writer and playwright Ama Ata Aidoo, perfectly illustrate why feminism is tirelessly put on trial the moment it is used in reference to sub-Saharan or Afropean girls and women. Here, feminism is seen by many to be an import from the West, an imposition from white women to women of African descent, going against the "true" traditional values of the latter.

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Photo of a toilet bowl
Weird

Italy's High Court: Loud Toilet Flush Is Violation Of Human Rights

A not-so-neighborly Italian saga that extends from the porcelain depths of our most basic needs to the altar of European justice.

An Italian couple has won a two-decade-long court battle that invoked an international treaty signed after World War II in order to prove the acceptable volume of a toilet flush.

The ordeal started as a typical neighborhood quarrel, yet spanned nearly two decades and eventually made its way up to Italy's Highest Court this week, Rome daily La Repubblica reports.

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Climate To Costa Concordia: How Humans Are Wired For Denial
Society

Climate To Costa Concordia: How Humans Are Wired For Denial

In 2012, the same year the Costa Concordia cruise ship sank off of Giglio Island, David Quammen published his book Spillover, which predicted that somewhere in Asia a virus would be attacking the human respiratory tract on its way to becoming a global pandemic. And so it was. This terrible shipwreck, which the world watched in slow-motion exactly ten years ago on January 13, 2012, now appears to us — just like the COVID-19 pandemic, like the trailer of a horror film we are now all living for real.

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Can We Still Say "Merry Christmas"? An Italian Take On The Inclusive Language Debate
Ideas

Can We Still Say "Merry Christmas"? An Italian Take On The Inclusive Language Debate

The European Commission's efforts to push for more inclusive language are important. But we should be careful and make sure we make room for differences.

-OpEd-

ROME — In Italian, it's Buone feste or Buon Natale? "Happy holidays" or "Merry Christmas"? The controversy triggered over the European Commission's Union of Equality guidelines makes very little sense.

The EU does not prohibit anyone from using the word "Christmas." Such guidelines only serve to highlight the importance of language in preventing inequalities from being perpetuated or worsened.

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The "Potato Crisis" At The Heart Of Algeria's Imploding Economy
Economy

The "Potato Crisis" At The Heart Of Algeria's Imploding Economy

Prices have tripled on the staple product, as farmers and the government blame each other while ordinary Algerians struggle to put food on the table. It's yet another crisis between economics and politics in the troubled North African nation.

Algeria is facing a multifaceted crisis, one of the most serious since the North African country gained independence in 1962. Boiling social and economic unrest has combined with continuing political demands that began with the Hirak uprising of 2019 that called for the end to the decades-long rule of Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

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Headstone of Adriano Trevisan in Vo's cemetery
Coronavirus

The Vo' Paradox: Home Of Italy's First COVID Death Is No-Vax Stronghold

This small Italian town is remembered well for being on the front line in the fight against COVID-19. Now it faces vaccine hesitancy.

VO' — Out of 101 municipalities in the province of Padua, it ranks 100th. This northeastern Italian town is the"weakest link," where the percentage of citizens "not vaccinated-not registered," or the No-Vax as health officials call them, is 18.7%, six points higher than the national average.

The other statistic about Vo' worth noting: as of last week, this town of 3,277 residents ranks the 18th highest number of cases in the Padua region, says Dr. Piero Realdon, coordinator of the Ulss 6 Euganea company. The paradox of the town is all in these numbers. Italians remember it well, with the small town on the front line in the fight against COVID-19 when Italy became the first country in the West hit by the pandemic in February 2020.

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Photo of a man in front of wine cellar
food / travel

Russia Thirsts For Prestige Mark On World's Wine List

Gone are sweet Soviet wines, forgotten is the "dry law" of Gorbachev, Russian viticulture is now reborn.

MOSCOW — A year after its opening, Russian Wineis always full. Located in the center of Moscow, it has become a trendy restaurant. Its wine list stands out: It offers Russian brands only, more than 200, signalled in different colors across all the southern regions of the country.

Russian Wine (in English on the store front, as well as on the eclectic menu) unsurprisingly includes Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula where viticulture has revived since Moscow annexed it in 2014.

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Miss Senegal 2020, ​Ndèye Fatima Dion
Society

"She Asked For It" — Rape Culture In Spotlight At Miss Senegal Beauty Contest

A top executive of the Miss Senegal beauty pageant dismissed accusations made by last year's winner that she'd been raped, igniting furious debate across the West African nation about the treatment of women and the retrograde attitudes across society.

DAKAR — As a defense mechanism, Amina Badiane could not have done worse. It was last Thursday, Nov. 18, when the chairwoman of the Miss Senegal organizing committee spoke with Dakarbuzz, a website based in the capital.

The interview was an opportunity to respond to the revelations of Ndèye Fatima Dione, Miss Senegal 2020, who had revealed publicly the violence she'd suffered during her time as the nation's No. 1 beauty queen. Her mother had also revealed that Dione's pregnancy was the consequence of rape, committed during a trip organized by the committee.

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Screenshot of video filmed upon baby Luna's arrival in Italy
Society

Ethics Of Surrogacy: The Case Of Baby "Luna" Abandoned In Ukraine

Surrogacy is still considered quite controversial, especially in Italy where a story has made headlines after would-be parents renounced a baby born in Ukraine. The author says we must face the ethical (and other) questions rather than dismiss the practice as "uterus for rent."

-Analysis-

ROME — The story of the surrogate child born in Kiev, and then abandoned by its would-be Italian parents, is filled with deep sadness. No child should ever be let go.

And yet, it happens. It happens when a woman decides to give birth anonymously, and the baby is then given up for adoption. Or when a child is placed in temporary foster care, but then never returns to the family of origin. It happens with some premature-born babies who, after being kept alive with the help of sophisticated therapies, will never be picked up by their parents because of a disability. It even happens with adoption: those rare occasions when the kid is returned, putting him or her through a dramatic "double abandonment."

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