Stories and News

Stories and News No. 1124 The Nobel Peace Prize 2018 was given to Denis Mukwege , a Congolese doctor and activist considered the world's leading expert in the treatment of physical harm caused from rape, and Nadia Murad , an Iraqi human rights activist. In August 2014, then a young student, Nadia was taken prisoner by ISIS, following an attack against the village of Kocho. At least 600 people from the Yazidi community had been murdered, including 6 of her brothers. Later, with more than 6700 women, Nadia was enslaved, suffering beatings, cigarette burns and abuse of all kinds. Three months later she escaped from his captors and went to Stuttgart, Germany, becoming in fact an immigrant, a clandestine, a refugee and, four years later, a Nobel Prize... Once upon a time the first monster who violated the tenderness with a noble future. The torturer who preceded the others. Those who have acted or even just looked, in a miserable ranking of truce cowardice, if there really is...

Stories and News No. 1121 According to some scientists of the University of California, who study brain activity, the connectivity between the parts of the brain responsible for training and especially the conservation of memory increases after a short interval of physical exercises, even light, of ten minutes. “You're eighty years old, Grandma Teresa,” he says, “how can you walk so much?” “Ask the legs,” that’s what I answer. Because I used to ask what I do not know. “But the legs don’t speak,” he says, my nephew Mattia. “Yes, but they still move and I do with them, may be blessed.” He says: “Aren't you afraid of going around, alone?” That’s what he says, Mattia, my nephew, who is fifteen years old and tells me about fear. Him…. I explain: “If I were afraid, I wouldn't be still here.” And I repeat it, two, even three times. But not because I’m eighty, rather because he is fifteen and he talks about fear. He says: “But there are immigrants.” He says it, my...

Michelle's confession By Alessandro Ghebreigziabiher Here, I am. Soon, you’ll have to go, Michelle, very soon, you must be honest, now. Okay, I'm a potential killer, but I luckily survived the death penalty, and maybe, for a pinch of typically feminine stubbornness. Well done, I said it, I'm happy, now. But that's not enough, isn’t it? I have to say it all, I have to do it, I need to remember and confess everything. I wanted to kill you, I admit, I tried many times to do it and I was just a whisker from getting you out of my life. You look at me with that absent face, with your head elsewhere, your heart on the other side, and every single cell of your body on its own business, as if being there, at that precise moment was not the priority. How much you made me suffer, you have no idea, you do not have it. How many disappointments I have had to endure, because of you, and your absolute inability to obtain true results, those that make the family happy...

Stories and News No. 1088 I’ll marry you, Marielle and Mônica . In spite of every limit of logic and possibility, ideal ground for madmen from excessive courage and naive scribblers like myself, I am going to marry you. I will marry you and I will be the celebrant , that’s right. Because in the place where this page and all the aspirations erased from the vilest hate live, it doesn’t matter who celebrates who or what. What is worth the price of the slightest presence is the tangible, realized desire that from this extraordinary moment is written colour on colour , no black on white . Since beyond such a window on one of the many perfect tomorrow, we have just touched, there are all the imaginable shades and no one of the latter will feel entitled to overlap the others. Forgive me, Mônica, while you're still awaiting Marielle's return a month from her unacceptable disappearance, if I offer only a drawing as a gift to this cruelly wounded feeling. That is maybe the ...

Stories and News No. 1082 There are protests all over Brazil following the death of Marielle Franco , a well-known city councilor from Rio, and her driver, shot dead by two men in what seems to have been some kind of execution. Franco, 38, was a revolutionary activist who became a spokesperson for the disadvantaged people living in the favelas, where creeping poverty, police brutality and drug-gang shootings are normally . The story of one , the stories of all . Of women and men, of all ages and other trifles, such as skin color and orientation, geographical and historical location. Whether you are standing, with due respect, or sitting, with equally dismay, or with all the indifference of the world before the umpteenth cancellation of the best character from the common story, the substance of the latter remains unchanged. Count, use the numbers, if you prefer, play the card of concreteness. On the podium the ever-first born is often applauded, come to the world not only alre...