the times | Tuesday July 28 2020 2GM 29
ing your coffee.” The initiative was wel-
comed by environmentalists who have
long campaigned against heated ter-
races, fuelled by studies such as the one
published recently by NégaWatt, theformer Houston consulate that violat-
ed the Vienna Convention on consular
relations and the China-US consular
convention.
“The Chinese side deplores and
firmly opposes the US move of forcibly
entering China’s consulate general in
Houston and has lodged solemn repre-
sentations. China will make legitimateThe World at Five
How Covid-19 sparked a surge in
migrant crossings from Tunisia to EU
In depth and online today at 5pm
thetimes.co.uk
four-metre-high barrier. This time it
took him three months to break out.
The bear was first captured
and then released in 2018
but was destined for cap-
tivity after being blamed
for half of the livestock
lost to predators in the
mountainous area of
northeast Italy. Miche-
la Vittoria Brambilla,
president of the animal
defence league, begged
the authorities not to kill
the fugitive. “He’s guilty only
of loving freedom, like all of us.”ing the 1999 stoning of the US Embassy
in response to the accidental Nato
bombing of the Chinese embassy in
Serbia, or the 2001 collision between a
US surveillance plane and a Chinese
fighter jet over the South China Sea.
China’s foreign ministry issued a
statement of protest at the weekend
over what it called intrusions into itsThe Sicilian mafia has proved remark-
ably durable, with some families that
were leading it in the 19th century still
in charge now, investigators have said.
The formula for Cosa Nostra’s
longevity is laid bare in a three-volume
history of the dominant crime families
published by the Antimafia Investiga-
tive Directorate (DIA), Italy’s
equivalent of the FBI. It shows that
despite the efforts of investigators, the
mafia has outlasted all attempts to
stamp it out.
The History of the Mafia from Police
Chief Sangiorgi (1898) to Col. Dalla
Chiesa (1971) marks a rare venture into
publishing by the unit, offering a repro-
duction of the handwritten reports of a
19th-century Palermo police chief and
the results of a joint investigation by the
police and carabinieri in the second half
of the 20th century.
Ermanno Sangiorgi’s painstaking
reports failed to convince the courts or
establish the complex and dangerous
reality of the Sicilian mafia in the eyes
of the Italian state. The 1971 Report on
the 114 provided the basis for a success-
ful prosecution of mafia bosses in the
following decade, but three of its au-
thors, including Carlo Alberto Dalla
Chiesa, were murdered by Cosa Nostra.
Connections to political and
economic power have been part of the
mafia’s formula from the beginning.
The Sangiorgi report details how
powerful families engaged in the lucra-
tive Marsala wine trade interacted with
mobsters to mutual advantage.
The Whitaker family, Marsala
tycoons who moved from England to
Sicily in Napoleonic times, quietly paid
a ransom when their ten-year-old
daughter Audrey was kidnapped. The
two men responsible for the crime
ended up dead. They had quarrelled
over their share of the ransom with the
mafia boss who protected the villa and
grounds of the Florio family, also
Marsala tycoons.
The dissatisfied kidnappers had also
stolen property from the Florio villa as
a way of getting back at the mafia boss
who protected it. The Florios wereMore than 100 years
of trying to destroy
the mafia has failed
gratified when the items were returned
prior to the miscreants’ elimination, a
problem resolved quietly within the
mafia family.
The publication celebrates the
successes of the DIA and the National
Antimafia Prosecutor, set up by Judge
Giovanni Falcone shortly before his
murder in 1992.
“That was the turning point, when
people began to see the Sicilian mafia as
a whole, not as an archipelago of crimi-
nal gangs,” said John Dickie, author of
Cosa Nostra — A History of the Sicilian
Mafia. “Cosa Nostra is a shadow of its
former self today.”
Investigations and arrests since the
1986 maxi trial in Palermo have
depleted the power of Cosa Nostra
since the days when “men of honour”
were responsible for the private collec-
tion of taxes on the island, Professor
Dickie said. “The strength of the mafia
is its ability to create networks outside
itself. I don’t think the Sicilian mafia
can call on remotely the same contactsas they could in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Giuseppe Governale, the carabiniere
general who leads the DIA and who
commissioned the report, said that the
underestimation of the mafia seen in
the old police documents was being
repeated today in the rest of Europe.
In 1922 a mafia boss was in London to
negotiate sulphur exports with a future
fascist finance minister and the founder
of one of Italy’s most important
industries in his entourage, General
Governale said. “If Calogero Vizzini
could do that a century ago, what will
the mafia be able to do in 2022?” he said.
“What the mafia did in Italy in the
last century is now happening in the
rest of Europe. Cosa Nostra is like
water, it flows to wherever the anti-
mafia legislation is most weak. I’m
sorry that fighting organised crime has
not been a priority for Europe.”Italy
Philip Willan RomeEscapologist bear heeds
call of the wild yet again
A bear nicknamed Papillon
because of his escapology
skills has defied his
captors again.
Forest guards were
hunting for the brown
bear, officially known
as M49, after he
slipped out of his elec-
trified pen near Castel-
ler in the northern prov-
ince of Trento. He escaped
the same pen last year, scal-
ing three electrified fences and aPhilip Willan
watch on China
CHICHINANA
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MMMMMMALAYSIAMMMMMM AAAAAAAAA AAAAAA
BBBRUNEIBBB
South
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Islands100 milesSulu
SeaBashi
ChannelPHILIPPINPHIPHPHHILHIHHLLLIPIPIIPPIIIIIPPPPPPNES
and necessary reactions,” the state-
ment said.
China maintains consulates in San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and
New York in addition to its embassy in
Washington. The US has four other
consulates in China and an embassy in
Beijing, keeping the sides in parity in
terms of diplomatic missions.cool reception from Parisian bar owners
environmental association, showing
that five gas heaters in a 75 sq m terrace
produce the same amount of CO 2
throughout the winter as would the av-
erage car going around the world three
times.
However, the ban angered restaurant
and bar owners, notably in Paris,
where nearly two thirds have heaters
on their terraces. Many said that the in-
itiative could scarcely have been timed
worse, with the sector in financial
difficulties as a result of the coronavirus
pandemic.
The Paris region branch of the Hotel
and Restaurant Owners’ Union
retweeted a comment from a drinker
saying that “tens of thousands of
establishments risk being threatenedwith closure just... to please the green
ideology”.
Ms Pompili said that the ban on
heated terraces would come into effect
at the “end of next winter” to give bars
and restaurants time to prepare.
Jacques Boutault, a member of the
Europe Ecology Green party, who has
been at the forefront of the campaign
against heated terraces, said: “You can’t
pretend to be an ecologist and not
respect the seasons. Heating outdoors
is ridiculous. And to think that we mock
Qatar for wanting to air condition its
stadiums” at the 2022 World Cup.
Bans on heated terraces have already
been implemented on a local basis in a
handful of towns, including Rennes in
Brittany.PETTY OFFICER 3RD CLASS ERICA BE/US NAVY; NOEL CELIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; ALAMYcontinue to rise over Chinese claims to the Paracels, left, and other islands, and the Chengdu consulate closure, top left
Sixty per cent of bars and restaurants
in Paris have heaters in their terracesSalvatore Riina,
one of the most
brutal Cosa Nostra
bosses, died in
prison in 2017The be
and th
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