News stories by Silvia

LUCCA, Italy, Jul 29 (IPS) - "Only two years ago, the soup kitchen was serving 50 meals a day. Today the number has almost doubled and, what is even more worrying, we have started receiving families with children," says Donatella Turri, director of the Caritas Diocese of Lucca.

LUCCA, Italy, Jun 28 (IPS) - Two refloating sponsons is what separates the Costa Concordia cruise ship from leaving the shores of Giglio Island, Italy, where it has lain since its sinking that left 32 people dead on January 13, 2012.

ROME, Apr 05 (IPS) - Two out of three doctors in Italy are ‘conscientious objectors' to abortion, according to new data. The Italian Ministry of Health reveals that in 2011, 69.3 percent of doctors refused to carry out abortions, with peaks of over 85 percent in some regions.

ROME, Mar 11 (IPS) - "We walk inside an area that is 128 steps long and seven-and-a-half steps wide. This is the path they made for us: two metres of bars over our heads, and upon the bars, two metres of plexiglas. We are like canaries in a cage, like birds of different races all in one cage."

JAKARTA, Nov 15 (IPS) - Indonesia's rainforests are facing "legal land grabs", allege NGOs. Its ancient communities are finding that their ancestral lands are slipping into the hands of foreign companies for oil palm cultivation, as demand for the product grows in Europe, India and China.

LUCCA, Italy, Oct 15 (IPS) - Niscemi, with its 30,000 local residents and its white houses, is a typical southern Sicilian town. But it stands out not only for its ancient cork forest, but also for the Naval Radio Transmitter Facility located within the protected forest itself.

ROME, Sep 11 (IPS) - After what is remembered as the North Africa emergency of 2011, Italy is again seeing an increase in the arrivals of migrants, especially asylum seekers.

MILAN, Jul 10 (IPS) - It didn't take the financial crisis for hundreds of thousands of workers across Europe to protest the new plague of the labour market – precarity. But the financial crisis has only made it worse.

ROME, Jul 07 (IPS) - The scandal around the under-age prostitute that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi allegedly had sex with is not about just that one girl: an estimated 10,000 under-age girls become victims of sexual exploitation every year in Italy.

LUCCA, Italy/STUTTGART, Germany, Jun 10 (IPS) - Enrico Pieri was ten when German SS soldiers attacked his home village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, Italy on Aug. 12, 1944 in a massacre that left 560 people, mostly women and children, dead.