Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I’m going to make this photograph the first in a series provisionally entitled Uncharacteristic photos from well-known or touristy places. Here’s an old shot taken in one of the busiest tourist locations on Earth, slightly photoshopped – fotoxx-ed, to be…
The Guardian published a long article by Peter Pomerantsev on the Kremlin’s information warfare last week, along with a Russian translation. While it reads smoothly in English, the Russian version requires a little effort to take in, but I still hope it…
I did not expect Italy’s supreme court (Cassazione) to acquit both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito outright: I was, in fact, rather skeptical that Knox’s conviction would be reversed at all, and did not hope for a straight acquittal “for…
From Edward Luttwak’s interview with Il Giornale, February 2013. Available; on the paper’s website; a pdf of the original available here;. Previously quoted in this post. All translation errors are mine. Title: “Italy? A country where liberty is limited by…
Nina Burleigh writes that Amanda Knox never retracted her bizarre sort-of-confession “officially”: After she was arrested, Knox wrote in a notebook that she wasn’t sure of the memory described in her signed statement, but she did not officially retract her…
Diego Gambetta, a professor of sociology at Oxford and the author of Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, explains his findings: An unexpected result of my research on the mafia was to find out that mafiosi are quite incompetent at doing anything… Mafiosi…
A brief addendum to this post: in Italy as in Russia, prosecutors and judges often work as one team. I wrote this, among other things, about one of the most shameful criminal trials in recent Russian history (followed by a…
Russia’s infamous Investigative Committee is pushing a bill to make judges in criminal cases search for “objective truth” rather than merely weigh arguments put forward by the prosecution and the defense. To that end, judges would be allowed – and…
I’ve blogged about the l’Aquila earthquake trial but neglected to mention that all but one of the scientists convicted by the first-level court were acquitted by an appeals court in November 2014. David Wolman and Lorenzo Mannella reported: Today, after a surprisingly swift-by-Italian-standards appeals…
Via David Wolman‘s Twitter feed, I have found Earthquakes and Great Risks, a blog on the Aquila earthquake trial maintained by a group of Italians. I have written about the earthquake trial here and here but I’m no authority on the case – I’ve learned…
An enlightening piece on the 2012 conviction of Italian seismologists by David Wolman. The prosecutor offered, and the judge accepted, the theory that Italy’s leading seismologists had conspired with the mayor’s office in l’Aquila to send a falsely reassuring message to the…
In their 2011 report acquitting Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito of murder, judges Hellmann and Zanetti examined, one by one, every important piece of evidence presented by the prosecution and found each and every such piece meaningless and worthless. Overturning that…