But the Turin team is at the centre of a match-fixing scandal that may be the biggest even this country has seen. On May 16th, less than a month before the start of the soccer World Cup in Germany, Italy's top sporting body, the Olympic committee, put the national football federation under emergency rule.
The federation's president had quit after claims that he ignored evidence of misconduct by officials, referees and players. The committee chose a 75-year-old former stockmarket regulator, Guido Rossi, in his place.
DEPRESSING reports about how quickly the world's tropical forests are being felled are commonplace. But depressing reports about the state of the trees that are still standing are much rarer.
In fact, a new study from the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO), an offshoot of the United Nations, claims to be the first exhaustive survey of tropical-forest management ever undertaken. Its findings, although grim, do contain a kernel of hope.
EVER since the 1870s, when a group of French landscape painters produced work deemed unacceptable for the Paris Salon but went on to sell rather well, malnourished artists have comforted themselves with the thought that the market would one day put a proper value on their work.。
For many (mostly long-dead) artists, this finally appears to be happening. Investors in financial assets may have had a jumpy few weeks, but salesrooms have notched up record prices in May.
BACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean.
There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this week's Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.
Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria, just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers.
WHAT was the 20th century's most distinctive feature? It is a historians' parlour game, but there can be no definitive answer. For some, it would be getting men to the moon, discovering penicillin, splitting the atom or some other great scientific achievement. For others, it would be the fastest and most sustained period of economic growth in history. Or the end of the age of empires, which had dominated the politics and economics of the world for centuries. For Niall Ferguson, however, only this last description comes close and even then only as background. In his view, the century's most distinctive feature was violence: the slaughter, and not only in war, of millions upon millions of people. His new book seeks to describe and, as far as possible, explain why this happened.
