Website critique: www.ansa.it

Ansa .it is the website of most important press agency in Italy.

First impressions

The website seems at a first sight quite cluttered and cahotic.

This is because:

• The nameplate is too small and in a odd position (on the left-hand corner) so that it is not immediately recognisable among advertising
• Too space has been dedicated to a banner on the top of the page that catches completely the attention of the reader
• There are at least twenty articles on the homepage without any categorisation, which makes the sites very difficul to read through.
• The typography is very small

The colour scheme is quite simple and coherent, with a good combination of white, green and some parts of text highlighted in grey.

Writing

The majority of the articles don’t follow Jacob Nielsen’s rules:

• The paragraphs are too long and dense, which descorages from going on reading . Each paragraph is about 100 words long without any space beetween sentences.
• There are no sub-headings.
• Bold is extensively used in the text.
• There isn’t any criteria in the presentation of news. On the top of the page there’s an article about national politics close to another one about sport
• There isn’t any hypertext link.

Content

The website is quite rich in terms of multimedia. there are viseos and photographs for most of the articles, but all this material is not displayed in a captivating and neat way.

A  weak point is that there are absolutely no links in the articles, which doesn’t allow the reader to have any possible background or in-depth analysis of the news.

Navigation

The main navigation on the left is consistent and easy to use. The subnavigation however is very confusing. Once you choose a kind of news you want to read about it’s like groping in the dark.

On the whole the website seems not be able to contain appropriately the huge amount of news that, being the website of a press agency, it has to.

Chewing-gum art

Is it possible to create cohesion among people by sticking them together with chewing-gum? A guy in Muswell Hill said yes, it is.

 

I saw this chap for months and months, lying on the pavement, every windy, snowy or rainy day, painting something. But what? And above all, why? When finally my curiosity exceeded my shyness, I had the chance to get to know the most soul-warming person I’ve ever met, Ben Wilson, also known as The Chewing Gum Man, as he introduces himself to me.

 

He’s giving shape to the most genuine, basic and profound idea of art: taking the harsh reality of life and transforming it into something beautiful, full of meaning and worthy of admiration.

 

He’s creating a chewing-piece-of-art, painting a miniature on a minuscule white spot that before was in somebody else’s mouth, then was discarded, and now regains life and sense through his paintings.

 

Art, he simply claims, can be just an instinctual form of self-expression and a way to make the world better by creating a profound connection between people.

 

And the demonstration of this is right there under my nose. During our conversation an awful lot of people stop to say “hi”, some of them commission the artist to paint a personalised chewing-gum with their names or a message for somebody special, others just watch him, dying with curiosity.

 

So, when you’re walking down the road, after a working day or going to the supermarket, just keep your eyes wide open! Trust me, Ben’s chewing-gums will stick in your mind!

(Background) Is Britain ready for a Mumbai-style terror attack?

In India some call it their country’s 9/11 moment.

The November 2008 Mumbai attack  hasn’t been the first terror attack but it’s been without any doubt the most cruel and heinous.

From 26 to 29 November 2008 173 people lost their lives in a series of ten terrorist attacks across Mumba

Is Britain ready for a Mumbai-style terror attack?

While commandos were still fighting against terrorists in Mumbai Peter Clarke, former head of Scotland Yard’s Counter-Terrorism Command, from the pages of The Sunday Telegraph warns: “our enemies have not gone away. They are determined, resilient and utterly murderous”.

 Is Britain prepared?  According to what Mr. Clarke points out no, not at all.

In his opinion an India-style terror attack would cause in London a massacre and turn the city into a temporary war zone.

What makes Britain particularly vulnerable in the event of such an attack is that the country doesn’t have an armed conventional police.

Moreover the armed police is trained to deal with armed criminals, but wouldn’t be able to cope with a multi-site, mobile terroristic incident like the one in Mumbai.

Probably the relevant point here is not whether the police is well-trained or not, but if we even need a military force to deal with the terroristic threat.

As the last events in Mumbai showed, the police were not prepared for an attack of this magnitude. The police anti-terrorist squad even lost their chief early in the day. The police seem underfunded and underequipped for something of this magnitude.

On the contrary police forces seem to be confident enough.

Jamie Johnson, a Metropolitan Police officer, in a conference at the University of Westminster  when asked about this possible scenario said that police receive an intensive training in order to be able to face a broad range of terror attacks, included chemical and gas attacks.  

Stephen Tankel, expert on conflict and security studies at King’s College of London told Bury the Lead “an attack like this is obviously very difficult to deal with, but my presumption is that most of the people who are in charge of keeping us safe should have probably anticipated something like this if they had done their jobs. Every time there is a spectacular attack like this, like 9/11, or in Mumbai, it’s quite normal to feel as though  this is something that is entirely new and we would be unprepared for. I think an attack of this magnitude would be difficult for any security service to handle anywhere in the world”.

Click here for a backgroung to Is Britain ready for a Mumbai-style attack?

(Background) Where to die: that is the question

The debate about how to address the end of life care has been on the agenda for a while now, and it’s drawn even more attention recently with the case of Craig Ewert’s assisted suicide at a Swiss euthanasia clinic.

In July 2008 the Government published the End of Life Care Strategy, a massive ten year plan that aims to provide people approaching the end of life with more choice about where they would like to die and more support.

 The plan involves a training for medical staff in order to enable them to talk more comfortably about death with patients allowing them to express and make the best decisions while approaching the end of life.

The government also allocated 286 million pounds to guarantee a better palliative care by 2011.

The report from the National Audit Office, published in November 2008, has basically formally pointed out with the evidence of statistics some problematic areas that were well known by the experts.

Background: Norwegian prostitution law: In the footsteps of Sweden

Norway will follow in Sweden’s footsteps in two weeks when buying sex will become illegal. 10 years after the implementation of Sweden’s prostitution law, politicians and experts are still discussing whether the changes have been for the better or worse.

“Sweden’s efforts to help women involved in prostitution have been pushed aside after they made buying sex illegal a decade ago, May-Len Skilbrei, Nordic Gender Institute researcher, said in Dagsavisen.

To avoid falling into the same trap as Sweden, Skilbrei argues that is important for Norway to look to its neighbour to learn from their experiences.

She presented the findings of Nordic Gender Institute in their newly published study on Nordic prostitution.

One of the most profound findings was that growing trafficking and an increase in foreign prostitutes the last ten years have forced the law changes we now witness.

Norway, Finland and Denmark have seen large groups of foreign women on the visible prostitution market, while that has not been the case in Sweden, Skilbrei said.

Reduced street prostitution and blurred indoor market

Being the first country in Europe to make buying sex illegal, Sweden’s law was implemented in 1999 as part of the Violence Against Women Act, where prostitution was defined as a serious form of male violence against women.

Ten years on Swedish police report on increased difficulties in trafficking investigations and a blurring of the prostitution market.

According to Nordic Gender Institute’s study prostitutes are experiencing more violence and they have become more dependent on pimps to get work .

The reduction in Sweden’s street prostitustion is drastic, but it’s important to remember that most of the prostitution in Scandinavia goes on indoors, from mobile escort services to brothels and apartments, Skilbrei said.

According to Nordic Gender Institute’s research, looking at numbers is not sufficient to understand the effects of Sweden’s law.

“The Swedish government might have felt that they had “solved” the prostitution problem by getting the prostitutes off the streets, but making a new law cannot be the final step”, Skilbrei warns.

She is curious to see whether “giving out condoms to prostitutes while arresting the buyers” will prove to be a sufficient method for Norway too deal with the world’s oldest profession”.

Click here to go to main article: Norwegian prostitution law will ‘hit the weakest’

Extra: Click here for comment piece on Norwegian prostitution debate: Save a punter