Italy’s coastguard recovers 12 more bodies after shipwreck

Italy’s coastguard said on Thursday it had recovered 12 more bodies including women and children after a migrant boat sank off the country’s southern coast earlier this week, with more than 60 people reported missing, AFP reported.

The confirmed death toll stood at 20, it said, after six were recovered on Wednesday.

Eleven people survived after the boat sank around 120 nautical miles off the coast of Calabria in the night between Sunday and Monday.

Some 3,155 migrants died or disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea last year, according to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, and more than 1,000 have died or are missing so far this year.

The central Mediterranean – the area between North Africa and Italy and Malta – is the deadliest known migration route in the world, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean sea, according to AFP.

Over a third of Italy’s population to be aged over 65 by 2050

Some 35 percent of Italy’s population will be aged over 65 by the middle of the century, the head of social security agency INPS Gabriele Fava said on Thursday according to Ansa.

“Citizens over 65 will represent up to 35 percent of the national population in 2050, and this determines a need to rethink the welfare system,” Fava said.

The average age of people in the country has been steadily rising since 2014 (it now stands at 46.4 years, with around one in four aged over 65), with the trend being driven by a plunging national birth rate. 

According to the latest report from the intergovernmental Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Italy’s total fertility rate is among the lowest in the OECD area, with an average of 1.2 children per woman – only 0.5 percent higher than lowest-ranking Korea, with 0.7.

Two English women verbally abused for bathing in burkinis in Sicily

Two English women were verbally abused for bathing in a Sicilian hotel’s swimming pool in their Islamic bathing costumes last weekend, local media reported on Wednesday.

The two tourists, aged 19 and 25, from London, were allegedly targeted by two male hotel guests, both Italian nationals, with one reported as saying “who knows what you’re hiding underneath them” in reference to the pair’s burkinis – all-in-one swimsuits worn by Muslim women. 

The two London women, which some reports said were sisters, have since filed defamation and harassment lawsuits with local police authorities.

The incident came little less than a year after the mayor of Monfalcone, Friuli Venezia Giulia, sparked outrage by saying that Muslim women should stop swimming “with their clothes on” when visiting Italian beaches as the practice was “dubious” in terms of “decorum and hygiene”.

Opposition MPs call on head of state to send regional autonomy law back to parliament

MPs representing Italy’s populist Five-Star Movement (M5S) said on Thursday they had penned a letter to head of state Sergio Mattarella asking him to revert a contested regional autonomy law back to parliament for a new vote, Ansa reported.

M5S MPs Francesco Silvestri and Stefano Patuanelli said the government had used an ordinary bill rather than a constitutional bill to “undermine the constitutional order” of the country. 

The regional autonomy law, which allows Italy’s richer regions to keep more of the tax revenue raised in their territories, was approved on Tuesday amid fierce protests that it will undermine Italy’s unity and worsen already stark north-south divides. 

Opposition groups including the M5S and the centre-left Democratic Party (PD) said they were collecting signatures to hold a public referendum on abolishing the law.