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In North Rhine-Westphalia, there are discussions about the Dortmund Model, which provides strict rules for beggars, including a minimum distance of five meters from certain places and a ban on silent begging in prohibition zones, which is met with increasing support as well as criticism from social organizations. #Betteln #NRW #SozialeGerechtigkeit (translated)

Regina Laska wrote that Donald Trump announced an immediate energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine and stated that both sides had agreed. According to her, Volodymyr Zelensky initially had no knowledge of this. Later, he said the report was new to him, but Ukraine was ready to cease attacks on Russian energy facilities, provided that Russia would no longer attack Ukrainian power plants. Laska wrote that there was no initial confirmation from the Kremlin, and Russian attacks continued. According to Ukrainian sources, among others, power plants in Kyiv and Kharkiv were hit. She also referred to Trump's earlier claim from September 14 that both sides had agreed to spare energy facilities; however, a sustainable ceasefire did not emerge from that. The author placed the announcement within a series of Trump's statements: on Friday, he announced a diesel deal with Putin and a US waiver for Russian diesel deliveries; on Saturday, he said Ukraine needed a new president; and on Sunday, he declared a ceasefire, to which this president allegedly agreed. Laska described this as contradictory since Zelensky had simultaneously been portrayed by Trump as a potential negotiating partner, even though he was unaware of the agreement. Furthermore, Laska wrote that seven US senators - four Republicans and three Democrats - legally challenged Trump's diesel deal with Putin. They accused the government of not involving Congress as required and demanded the withdrawal of the deal. While the US Treasury had issued a license, its sufficient legal basis was disputed. In a satirical scene, Laska imagined Trump reacting by putting down his phone, splattering a freshly painted wall while drinking, and possibly firing the painter afterward. #Trump #Ukraine #Russland (translated)

LETTERE MERIDIANE — “TEATRO-EDICOLA” OF SAN SEVERO CONQUERS THE WORLD SOURCE: https://www.letteremeridiane.org/2026/10/il-teatro-edicola-di-san-severo-conquista-il-mondo/?fbclid=IwY2xjawU4oqFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5rVEwYs6UUXg7v-P0SyIQ_DRb_F6ZiY58OcseYoV4J7atcTiERnhWaqKM2pw_aem_Njle1jq1XLzHr93KLBUcVA After “Broadway World”, the “Los Angeles Journal”, “The Psychologist (British Psychological Association)” and Hollywood Beat Magazine, its “academic consecration” has now arrived courtesy of Stanford University. As I have already emphasised in my article on the revival of the GIO Festival in Foggia, celebrated by BroadwayWorld for the world stage premiere of the Giordano’s opera Marina (1888), the province of Foggia has long ceased to be peripheral. It happens when it finds an idea that shifts the coordinates: well, in San Severo, 40 kilometres from Foggia, it has happened again. Only this time an orchestra was not needed; six chairs were enough. The celebrated Teatro-Edicola of San Severo artistic director Francesco Gravino of the theatre company Foyer ’97 has been featured in the academic journal “Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR)” as an academic case study. The news, relayed on 19 September 2026 by ANSA Nazionale, looked like a misprint. Then it became clear that it was not. SSIR, an award-winning publication covering multisectoral solutions to global problems, included the project in its Dispatches section with the reportage “The Six-Seat Revolution”. It is the inverse trajectory to that of the GIO Festival: not a forgotten opera returning to a grand historic Italian horseshoe theatre, but an entire theatre reborn inside a disused place, forgotten by man. There are moments when past and future intertwine to create something visionary, innovative, artistically “revolutionary”: San Severo experienced one of those moments on the morning of 27 March 2026, during World Theatre Day, when the shutter of a newsstand closed for six years in Via Matteo Tondi was reopened “not to sell newspapers, but to offer stirring stories”, to quote Gravino’s motto. The idea of the visionary Francesco Gravino, artistic director, stage director and actor of the San Severo company Foyer ’97, active for at least 30 years in Capitanata, centred on the kiosk, hexagonal in metal and glass, granted free of charge by its owner Pino Frau, by now an urban relic created by the publishing crisis of the early 2000s: today in Italy active newsstands have fallen from about 35,000 in 2005 to about 20,000 in 2024, a decline of 42.8%. Gravino and eleven other actors restructured it in two weeks of work, without institutional funding, and transformed it into what is now under examination by the London commission of Guinness World Records as the “world’s smallest theatre”. The formula is deliberately austere: six spectators at a time outside, actors inside at less than a metre’s distance, 15-minute performances, continuous rotation from 11:00 to 20:45, texts ranging from Goldoni to Chekhov, from Ibsen to Dacia Maraini. On the door a QR code with an original theatrical warning: “Warning! This QR code transforms passers-by into actors. Scan only if ready.” The numbers immediately showed that it was no boutade: more than 60 people in a single afternoon, three inaugural days that sold out. But above all a positive echo that went beyond the borders of San Severo. “Broadway World” (just as in the previous case of the GIO Festival), the world’s most influential theatre criticism outlet with over 5.5 million monthly views, devoted exclusive coverage to it on 27 April 2026: “An Abandoned Italian Newsstand Just Became the World’s Smallest Theatre”. Not a mere listing, but an analysis: “There is no foyer, there is no balcony, there is no grid. There is barely a wing. What there is is something almost unrecognisable as an evening at the theatre, and for that very reason it is all the more powerful.” “Broadway World” captured Gravino’s manifesto idea: “This is a theatre of proximity. In an era of digital distance, we are putting human contact back at the centre,” framing it as “More than a clever exercise in site-specific theatre. It is a reappropriation.” All of this, in a Mezzogiorno of Italy often narrated only in terms of organised crime and marginalisation. To that seal of approval was added another, even more disorienting for a newsstand in San Severo: the “Los Angeles Journal”, one of the most influential publications on the West Coast for the performing arts. On 12 May 2026, it headlined thus: “San Severo’s Teatro-Edicola as an Innovative Model for Los Angeles Theaters?” opening as follows: “In a city in southern Italy that Hollywood has never heard of, a theatre director has just built the smallest stage in the world: six seats, fifteen minutes, zero distance. Los Angeles should pay attention.” The “Los Angeles Journal” does not indulge in folklore, but places the kiosk in Via Matteo Tondi alongside the prestigious 1,600-seat Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, the Pantages of Broadway in Hollywood, the 99-seat plan of Rogue Machine, the Odyssey, the Victory Theatre and the Hollywood Fringe. It even recalls Ethan Marks’s Electrical Box Theatre, a veritable electrical box lined with red velvet in downtown Los Angeles, to argue that Gravino has taken to the extreme the question Los Angeles has been asking itself for decades: How small can a stage become before it ceases to be a stage? And it recognizes the San Severo urban model: almost zero cost, two weeks of work and six chairs, in return for immediate provincial, regional and national media coverage, recognition by the San Severo’s Municipal Administration, and a format exportable anywhere. Then, the third American piece came from “Hollywood Beat Magazine” on 20 April 2026: Six seats. Fifteen minutes. One actor. No stage. The magazine recounts the kiosk in Via Tondi left disused for almost six years, the contemporary six-seat cultural outpost, placing Francesco Gravino in a distinguished genealogy: Richard Schechner and environmental theatre, Jerzy Grotowski and poor theatre, Nicolas Bourriaud and relational aesthetics. But it closes with pragmatism: it is not a thesis, it is fixing a street corner, that is, repairing an urban street corner by asking not how large a theatre can become, but how small it must become again to recover its original power. And finally, the celebrated London-based “The Psychologist”, the journal of the “British Psychological Society (BPS)”, the oldest psychological society in the world, transformed the Teatro-Edicola into a scientific case study: on 30 July 2026 it published “The world’s smallest theatre — and Psychologists’ next act”, starting from the same detail, the morning of 27 March when the metal shutter of the hexagonal kiosk in Via Tondi reopened after six years, six people inside, an actor at less than a metre’s distance beginning Chekhov. It describes the formula: six spectators, 15 minutes, 11 actors over 10 hours, from Goldoni to Euripides, inside a kiosk where the fourth wall does not break because architecturally it never existed. But the BPS goes a step further: it cites the 2025 studies by Damien Gabriel in IBRO Neuroscience Reports, that live performance generates measurably stronger emotional and physiological activation than video, and introduces Edward Hall’s proxemics: below one metre is intimate space, reserved for doctors, close friends, lovers. In that one-square-metre space, the actor’s breath is audible, micro-expressions legible, the self-other boundary becomes permeable. The Teatro-Edicola “does not make theatre better, it makes it inevitable”. And it is here that one understands why Stanford is studying it as an academic case study in social innovation, not as a case of artistic originality. In Italy, meanwhile, the national media circuit had already picked up the phenomenon: RaiNews — TG2 Storie brought it to RaiDue at midnight on 19 April. RTL 102.5 devoted space to the format conceived by Gravino and developed by Foyer ’97 in the heart of San Severo in Via Tondi, defining it as a permanent micro-stage capable of bringing theatre into public space. ANSA.it, Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, La Repubblica, TG2000, Radio Capital, Swiss RSI, ANSA Brazil and many others followed. And for the record: Fiorello praised it in La Pennicanza as an artistic case inspired by his Edicola Fiore, and Biagio Antonacci, on his tour in the Augustan amphitheatre of Lucera, made a “fact-finding” stop at the Teatro-Edicola singing the celebrated and nostalgic Iris in front of an audience certainly larger than the “six seats”. Francesco Gravino’s theatre company Foyer ’97 was not born yesterday: behind it lie the Teatro-Cantina of 2016, the underground theatre, and in 2011 a performance on the bell tower of a church in the centre of San Severo at 45 metres high. The Teatro-Edicola completes, in Gravino’s words, “the entire vertical extension of theatre: underground, street level, rooftop”. And it is preparing for its thirtieth anniversary in 2027 aiming to purchase the kiosk to make it permanent, exporting the “San Severo Model” to Rome, Lucca, and to the festivals of Santarcangelo and Todi. As with the GIO Festival, someone might dare to claim that it is merely a stunt, but when BroadwayWorld places you alongside the Los Angeles Opera House, the “Los Angeles Journa”l proposes you as a model for Hollywood, “Hollywood Beat Magazine” reads you through Grotowski and the “British Psychological Society” uses you to explain mirror neurones, it is no longer a stunt but an excellent artistic and academic positioning. To those who still whisper that Foggia and Capitanata are provincial, the answer is now written on two opposite and complementary fronts: on 5 June in Foggia a 138-year-old opera found the stage again at the Giordano ending up on BroadwayWorld; on 27 March in San Severo a 4-square-metre kiosk invented a stage that did not exist, ending up at Stanford, in Los Angeles, in Hollywood and in London. The periphery, when it has a precise idea, becomes the centre. Even with six chairs. Luciano Magaldi Sardella

The Hayek Club Weimar warned of a possible economic and social decline. Only when cars fell silent on the side of the road, businesses closed, apartments remained cold, and families suffered from hunger would people, according to the club, recognize that they had watched for too long. It stated that the foundations of a livable life had been systematically destroyed, diligence and achievement devalued, and responsibility portrayed as a burden. The silence and the willingness to be deceived had facilitated the downfall, the club explained. #Gesellschaft #Verantwortung #Zukunft (translated)

The author from Brandenburg wrote that the evening was the most relaxed since he opened his account on X, formerly Twitter. He received no hate comments from AfD supporters. He also thanked Volodymyr Zelensky and urged him to continue shutting down the Russian data centers. Donald Trump does not like that, he added. #Entspannung #Politik #Zukunft (translated)

The writer stated that the British government was trying to push through a ban on questioning someone's gender identity. As an example, the writer mentioned parents of children who suddenly said they were born in the wrong body and added that it would not be an easy process. #könsidentitet #UKpolitik #förbud #GB (translated)

The author claimed that countries condemning Ansar Allah for what they described as defending Yemen against Saudi aggression had refused to condemn the US bombing of a school in Minab, which they said killed 168 children. They also said those countries continued doing business with Israel, helping fund what they described as genocide in Gaza. https://t.co/uHZCZVTgGp #Yemen #Gaza #HumanRights #YE #SA #US #IL #PS

The post’s author called on the United States to end sales of new diesel passenger cars by 2030, while retaining diesel for agriculture, trucks and tanks. They wrote that agriculture needed reliable heavy-duty machinery. https://t.co/QanyI19MMn #Diesel #Agriculture #Sustainability #US

The author questioned why business continued with the Israeli regime, which they accused of carrying out genocide in Palestine, if attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure were unacceptable. They also asked why people had remained silent when, they said, a Western-backed Saudi and UAE blockade caused 80,000 deaths from hunger in Yemen. #HumanRights #Palestine #Yemen #IL #PS #SA #AE #YE

A new expedition of American scientists arrives tomorrow at the remote coral island of Nikumaroro in the South Pacific, hoping to find the wreckage of the plane of the missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, who disappeared without a trace in 1937 along with her navigator Fred Noonan. #AmeliaEarhart #luchtvaart #mysterie (translated)