U.S.Billionaire Buys Fiorentina Football Club

Rocco Commisso (photo), the billionaire owner of Mediacom Communications, acquired Italian football club Fiorentina on Thursday from billionaire brothers Andrea and Diego Della Valle. The purchase price was not disclosed, but media reports pegged the transaction at between $150 million and $200 million.

Commisso, 69, also owns the New York Cosmos soccer club and is worth an estimated $4.8 billion, according to Forbes. In a statement, he said, “I would like to thank the Della Valle family for managing Fiorentina over the past 17 years. … They leave a solid foundation on which to build the club."

The Della Valle brothers acquired the 92-year-old Fiorentina—based in Florence—in 2002, after the prior owners drove the club into bankruptcy. They are widely credited with revitalizing the team. Still, this year the club narrowly avoided demotion in the Serie A league.

Born in war-ravaged Calabria, Italy, Commisso grew up playing soccer with a ball made of rags. He immigrated to the United States in 1962, at age 12, and worked his way through Mount Saint Michael Academy in the Bronx.

From there, Commisso secured a full scholarship to Columbia University, where he played on the soccer team. (The college renamed its soccer stadium for him in 2013, in recognition of his financial support.) After graduating in 1971, he earned an M.B.A. at Columbia Business School, with a plan to go into investment banking. But no banks wanted to hire him.

 “There was discrimination,” Commisso told Forbes in 2018. “I'll never forget the guy from Kuhn Loeb telling me, ‘Rocco, you know what your problem is? You're neither Jewish nor Irish. The Italians haven’t arrived on Wall Street.’ ”

Commisso eventually landed at the Royal Bank of Canada, where he led lending to media and communications firms. He joined the industry in 1986, taking a job at Cablevision, before founding his own cable firm, Mediacom, in 1996.

Leveraging hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, Commisso expanded Mediacom throughout secondary markets in Georgia, Iowa, Missouri and elsewhere. Today the business hauls in $2 billion in annual revenue.

Photo credit: SETH WENIG / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Article by Noah Kirsch from Forbes

Beer lovers and makers

Beer lovers --- and makers -- are always looking for new and interesting versions of the drink. But recent efforts in Israel and Belgium are aiming to bring back beers from long ago.

Monks first began brewing beer at the Grimbergen Abbey in the 13th century. But they stopped doing so in the late 1700s, after French troops damaged parts of the property – including the brewing area.

Father Karel Stautemas is one of 11 religious members who now live in the abbey. This month, he announced plans for a newly built brewery inside the abbey. More than 100 reporters, city leaders and beer lovers gathered in the town of Grimbergen for his announcement.

Norbertine Father Karel poses with a Grimbergen beer in the courtyard of the Belgian Abbey of Grimbergen. REUTERS/Yves Herman

Father Karel said, “For us, it’s important to look at  the tradition of the fathers for brewing beer because it was always here. Brewing and religious life always came together.”
Grimbergen Abbey expects to produce its first beer by late 2020.

The abbey has been linked to commercial beer makers since the 1950s, when local brewer Maes asked the monks to use the Grimbergen name on its “abbey beer.”

The monks will follow centuries-old methods for manufacturing beer. The directions come from a collection of old books found inside the abbey.

Grimbergen’s monks will also follow the rules of Belgium’s Trappist beer makers, although they are not members of the Trappist order. Such rules require the religious workers to brew the beer within abbey walls and use any money earned to repair the building and support charitable causes.

The interest in ancient brewing methods is not limited to Belgium. Researchers in Israel announced recently they have removed yeast from the remains of containers found at ancient sites and have used the remains to create a beer similar to the kind that Egyptian pharaohs enjoyed thousands of years ago.  Beer was a popular drink in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Early Egyptian writings describe many different brews, including “iron beer,” ″friend’s beer,” and “beer of the protector.”

Last Wednesday, researchers from Jerusalem’s Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University presented a beer made with yeast that came from an ancient jar.

Hebrew University microbiologist Michael Klutstein said, “What we discovered was that yeast can actually survive for a very, very long time.”

The researchers plan to combine ancient methods with more modern ways to brew a beer that could one day be produced in large amounts.

Shmuel Naky, right, pours beer during a press conference in Jerusalem

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Article from VOA (edited)

The lost town of Fordlandia (captions)

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Sale of whole Italian village: a PR hoax

 Esino Lario . Photograph: AleMasche/Alamy

Last month a mountain village in northern Italy put all its assets up for sale. Street signs started at €1,250. A pilgrimage site cost around €600,000, with a 15% discount applied. The town hall was a bit cheaper – €200,000. Benches came at €280 each, but with an enticing three-for-two promotion.

In a full-page advert placed in almost all of Italy’s top newspapers, Esino Lario’s mayor, Pietro Pensa, lamented the reason for the mass sell-off: a lack of resources to fight the village’s depopulation.

“Sadly, we no longer have the resources to fight against problems bigger than us,” he said. “I have decided  to sell the most symbolic places of Esino Lario.”

The initiative attracted widespread national media coverage and scores of potential buyers. But on the day sales supposedly began online, prospective customers were unable to purchase anything – instead, they were redirected to a page asking them to share pictures of the items on social media. The sale was “fake news”.

The mystery was addressed at a press conference in Milan later that day. In fact, the sell-off turned out to be a PR campaign by a local tech company specializing in broadband for remote villages.

The company teamed up with the Esino Lario council to raise awareness about the depopulation of rural areas, while also obtaining publicity for its new scheme for villages.

Massimo Castelli, the national coordinator for small villages at the National Association of Italian Local Authorities, said he supported the bizarre deception.

“As representatives, we try to make the suffering of small villages come to the fore,” he says. “These areas are actually losing population because there are no jobs, schools close, services are cut.”

While Italy’s population has grown by 4 million since the 1990s, research shows that villages with fewer than 5,000 residents, which make up a fifth of Italy’s population and manage over half its territory, hemorrhaged some 675,000 residents. The trend is expected to speed up over the next decade.

Smaller local authorities are fighting for resources and public attention. The houses for €1 scheme, for example, has become popular throughout the country and have lured potential buyers from the UK, Dubai, Panama and Russia.

The Esino Lario’s campaign brought about unprecedented media coverage, with national TV crews descending on the village. The tech company says the mayor joined the campaign voluntarily to raise awareness about the issue, without receiving any direct compensation.

 The Esino Lario ‘sale’ was publicised in national newspapers and had its own website

From The Guardian (edited)