Free electron laser-driven ultrafast rearrangement of the electronic structure in Ti

High-energy density extreme ultraviolet radiation delivered by the FERMI seeded free-electron laser has been used to create an exotic nonequilibrium state of matter in a titanium sample characterized by a highly excited electron subsystem at temperatures in excess of 10 eV and a cold solid-density ion lattice. The obtained transient state has been investigated through ultrafast absorption spectroscopy across the Ti M2,3-edge revealing a drastic rearrangement of the sample electronic structure around the Fermi level occurring on a time scale of about 100 fs

Revisiting Tangentopoli 30 Years Later: Why Have the Media Shifted from Party Collateralism to Adversarial Reporting?

17th February, 2022 marked the 30th anniversary of Tangentopoli, the most important corruption scandal in Italian history. In this study we will attempt to reconstruct the controversial role of the media in the scandal in order to provide insights that help to understand the existing link between journalism and corruption. Based on a Bourdieusian perspective, we will try to see how various factors, exogenous and endogenous, have produced pressures both in terms of autonomy and heteronomy to the journalistic field. The proposed analysis will be both theoretical and empirical, with data retrieved from journalistic coverage of the time. Unlike media- and political-centric approaches, which tend to produce monocausal explanations, the article sheds light on the interplay of different factors (political, economic, judicial and media-related) that made the scandal of Tangentopoli possible

Constraints and limitations of investigative journalism in Hungary, Italy, Latvia and Romania

The article provides evidences about mechanisms and practices that undermine the effectiveness of investigative journalism through the analysis of selected case studies of corruptive phenomena in Italy, Hungary, Romania and Latvia. In particular, the article shows that the idea of watchdog journalism does not work actually in the observed countries. Indeed, investigative journalism requires certain socio-economic conditions, such as a low degree of influence of the political and economic spheres and a high level of journalistic professionalism, which are not (always) present in the aforementioned countries. More specifically, the article focuses on three aspects that may distort investigative journalists\u2019 work: a certain proximity (sometimes overlapping) of publishers (often rich oligarchs or prominent businessmen) and politicians, the \u2018blackmail\u2019 exercised through advertising investments and the interferences of secret services, which may dissuade newsrooms from performing their role as the watchdog

A Workflow to Detect, Monitor, and Update Lists of Coordinated Social Media Accounts Across Time: The Case of the 2022 Italian Election

Information operations that target public opinion often exploit breaking news, crises, and elections by using coordinated social media actors to disseminate problematic content. These events often reveal the relationships between actors, prompting the creation of lists of malicious actors and news sources. However, relying on outdated lists may underestimate the prevalence and impact of such operations. This article presents a novel workflow to detect, monitor, and update lists of coordinated social media actors during and beyond peak activity periods. Using this approach, known problematic actors are constantly monitored, allowing the detection of new actors and the update of the monitored pool. The workflow was applied to the 2022 Italian snap election, leveraging previous research on coordinated inauthentic behavior during the 2018 and 2019 Italian elections. The initial list of 435 coordinated accounts was monitored, surfacing 1,022 overly shared or commented political posts, 272 coordinated links, and detecting 66 political and 554 generic coordinated accounts not previously listed. Three case studies were identified: one politically motivated, one click-economy driven, and one religiously motivated operation. The article discusses the implications of this approach, its limitations, and potential future work

Case studies on corruption involving journalists: Italy

This report, as part of the case study reports within WP 6, provides in-depth insight into Italian cases of corruption in which journalists played a crucial role either because they discovered the case or because they were directly involved in the network of corruption

The role of the Italian press in times of pandemics : old features in the face of a new risk

Objective. The global Covid-19 pandemic constitutes an unprecedented global challenge. Assuming the crucial role of information systems in orienting societies in times of crisis, it is necessary to investigate the role the media played reporting on the Covid-19 crisis and the related social control policies. Focusing on the Italian press, the study aims to analyse the journalistic coverage of the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, trying to understand if it supported the government’s social control policies or questioned them. Design. A computerised content analysis was done on 23,720 articles published by six Italian newspapers in the very first weeks of the health emergency in 2020 and a qualitative analysis of a selection of those articles. Quantitative analysis helped to pinpoint the main topics covered, while the qualitative analysis revealed three main narrative expedients adopted by newspapers to report the emergency. Conclusion. Despite the structural characteristics of the Italian media system, the press was able to perform a service role, fostering the new social control policies and avoiding a polarisation of the debate

A short honeymoon : the Italian press and the coverage of the government’s strategic communication on COVID-19

Published online: 19 June 2022Emergency situations like the COVID-19 pandemic are key drivers of strategic communication. Governments must implement communication strategies for ensuring the well-being of citizens, to enforce social control policies responding to a health emergency. Choosing Italy as case study, this analysis focuses on the press coverage of the government’s strategic communication of such policies, during two different pandemic waves in 2020, evaluating if the press supported or hindered it. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identified which criteria of newsworthiness have influenced news media coverage. In other words, our focus will not be strategic communication per se, but on agenda setting. By understanding the COVID-19-related agenda of newspaper discussions, we will be able to assess whether and how “news values” have influenced the media coverage of the government’s strategic communication, and how this has influenced the perception of citizens. Our results offer a contrasting picture: during the first wave, a sort of “honeymoon” between the institutions and the press emerges. During the second wave instead, the journalistic routines of the Italian media system- partisanship and conflictual narrations- influenced the narration of the pandemic, undermining the effectiveness of the strategic communication of Covid-19 social control policies

Experimental setups for FEL-based four-wave mixing experiments at FERMI

The recent advent of free-electron laser (FEL) sources is driving the scientific community to extend table-top laser research to shorter wavelengths adding elemental selectivity and chemical state specificity. Both a compact setup (mini-TIMER) and a separate instrument (EIS-TIMER) dedicated to four-wave-mixing (FWM) experiments has been designed and constructed, to be operated as a branch of the Elastic and Inelastic Scattering beamline: EIS. The FWM experiments that are planned at EIS-TIMER are based on the transient grating approach, where two crossed FEL pulses create a controlled modulation of the sample excitations while a third time-delayed pulse is used to monitor the dynamics of the excited state. This manuscript describes such experimental facilities, showing the preliminary results of the commissioning of the EIS-TIMER beamline, and discusses original experimental strategies being developed to study the dynamics of matter at the fs-nm time-length scales. In the near future such experimental tools will allow more sophisticated FEL-based FWM applications, that also include the use of multiple and multi-color FEL pulses