Word: mafia
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...often complain that immigrants will erase their most precious cultural norms. The race riots in southern Italy last weekend may be one indicator that change is inevitable, as African immigrants who don't live by the country's infamous omertà code of silence violently protested against the powerful Mafia clans that control their lives, says Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, an anti-Mob book that earned him both critical praise and a 24-hour police guard. Saviano - who reported from within the Camorra, Italy's biggest Mafia clan with a global reach into fashion, real estate, waste disposal...
...prides itself on its bella figura - the beautiful image. About 2,500 migrants live in the Rosarno valley in the southern Calabria region, moving with the seasonal agricultural jobs. Many have political asylum or are otherwise legally in Italy, but legal or not, the migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated - and not just by a pink slip. "It's a military system," Saviano tells TIME in Rome...
Berlusconi would testify in a suit against a journalist who referred to rumors that the Prime Minister is impotent. Last week, Berlusconi vowed to launch additional suits against newspapers that printed unsubstantiated reports that a close adviser of his was involved in a 1993 bombing campaign by the Sicilian Mafia. (Read "An Offended Berlusconi Goes on the Offensive...
FarmVille is part of Zynga, the fastest-growing, most buzzed-about social-game company of the moment. In October, Zynga operated six of the 10 most popular Facebook games: FarmVille, Cafe World, Mafia Wars, YoVille, zyngapoker and Roller Coaster Kingdom. Founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus, 43, Zynga had 45 staffers by June 2008 and now employs 600, counting contractors. Its most recently launched game, FishVille, hooked 9 million users in a week. Zynga is privately held, but a rival less than half its size was recently bought by Electronic Arts, the GM of games, for $400 million...
...truth is, you don't really play Mafia Wars; it plays you. It rewards you lavishly for doing next to nothing and for propagating its viral spores further and further into your social network, thereby perpetuating its existence. In fact, Mafia Wars isn't so much a game as a parasite: it lives in the petri dish of the social-networking sphere and feeds off your attention. Try to quit, and it begs and bribes you to fall off the wagon again. It's just a game, but it's like the real mafia in that one respect: just when...