Italy
EUROPE
La Befana: Italy’s Winter Gift Giver
As Rome's Piazza Navona packed with families yesterday for the 2026 Befana celebrations, one tradition proves that Italy's Christmas season runs on its own clock.
EUROPE
Owners Take Charge: A Crisis in Italian Publishing
Italy’s newsrooms went dark to protest a sale trading their legacy for profit, proving a famous past no longer protects from business reality.
LIFESTYLE
Italy’s UNESCO Victory: Shared Mediterranean Food Gets a National Label
UNESCO has crowned Italian cooking an intangible treasure, but in a shared Mediterranean kitchen it raises a question: how far can one country claim what ends up on the plate?
EUROPE
Southern Europe Drying: How Real Is the Water Crisis?
Warnings about a drying Southern Europe appear regularly, yet the scale becomes clear only when agriculture and cities begin feeling the strain.
EUROPE
Europe’s First Moon Steps in a New Space Race
Josef Aschbacher picked a German astronaut for the NASA lunar orbit mission, starting a bigger European push into space exploration powered by fresh budgets and joint projects.
Popular
Winter Storm Research Rewrites a Witch Trial Tragedy
As new research published in Smithsonian Magazine this week connects a 1617 Arctic storm to Norway's deadliest witch trials, climate historians reveal how weather shock fed decades of persecution.
Prediction Takes Politics: Prophets and Polymarkets Collide
As 11 Peruvian shamans predicted Nicolás Maduro's fall on 29 December 2025, crypto traders were placing similar bets online—five days before U.S. forces extracted the Venezuelan leader to New York.
Mladenov Takes Over Gaza Board After Regional Veto
Nickolay Mladenov becomes Gaza peace board head after Arab states blocked Tony Blair, raising questions about whose interests guide Washington's selection.
Abu Dhabi Rebuffs British Universities Over Campus Radicalisation
The world’s wealthiest patrons now view Western campuses as hazards, forcing a costly inversion of the traditional hierarchy that once defined global education.
Bury the Lead: MTV ‘Death’ and the Way We Read Now
As MTV continued broadcasting across the United States and most of Europe on 1 January 2026, millions of social media tributes mourned a channel that had never actually shut down.


