Italy’s top story on Thursday:

Italy’s coastguard said on Wednesday it had recovered six bodies after a migrant boat sank this week off the southern coast with more than 60 people reported missing, including many children, the AFP news agency reported.

Twelve people were rescued after the sailing boat sank around 120 nautical miles off the coast of Calabria overnight Sunday-Monday, although one of them died after disembarking.

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

The ‘Mediterranean Route’ 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 Med, according to AFP.

Indian farm worker dumped with severed arm dies in Italy

An Indian farm labourer working in Italy died on Wednesday after being left by the road following an accident that severed his arm, Labour Minister Marina Calderone told parliament, condemning an “act of barbarity”.

Satnam Singh was injured on Monday while working on a farm in Latina, a rural area south of Rome that is home to tens of thousands of Indian migrant workers, according to AFP reports.

Singh, who was 30 or 31 and working without legal papers, was cutting hay when his arm was sliced off by a machine, according to the Flai CGIL trade union.

“Instead of being helped by his employers he was dumped like a bag of rubbish near his home,” it said, likening the situation to a “horror film”.

The centre-left Democratic Party condemned the man’s treatment, in an area known for the exploitation of workers, as a “defeat for civilisation”, AFP reported.

Poverty levels ‘at all-time high’

Italy’s rates of poverty are the highest they’ve ever been, with homelessness and ‘chronic’ poverty on the rise, according to a report released by Catholic charity Caritas on Wednesday.

“Poverty today is at an all-time high and should be understood as a structural phenomenon of the country”, the organisation said in its Poverty 2024 Statistical Report.

The number of people seeking assistance from Caritas increased by 5.4 percent between 2022 and 2023, and by as much as 40.7 percent in the five years between 2019 and 2023.

One in four people helped by the organisation was in employment but struggled to get by on their salaries, while one in seven children under the age of four was in a state of absolute poverty, compared to 9.8 percent of the general population, it said.

Mafia intimidation of public officials on the rise

Mafia intimidation of mayors and local councillors is growing in Italy, the head of the country’s Anti-Mafia Investigations Directorate (DIA) warned on Tuesday.

At a Rome presentation of a report on DIA’s activities for the first half of 2023, Director Michele Carbone said that mafia groups increasingly preferred to focus their efforts on corruption rather than violence, but were quick to resume “typical mafia behaviours” when opposed.

“There are episodes of collusion in the political-administrative apparatuses, as demonstrated by the long list of municipal councils dissolved for mafia infiltration (379 from 1991 to 2023, of which 25 were annulled on appeal),” Carbone told reporters from news agency Ansa.

“When many public administrators oppose these infiltrations, they are subjected to harassment and threats to make them submit’.