the italian ministry of health and g ristori of the university of rome neurology department treat multiple sclerosis. see eg pubmed.org ristori+ bcg as applsued by the boston red sox fan denise faustman see pubmed.org faustman dl
the vatican bank fluffs acvounts with the douls of people that ristori saves
is it any wonder that william lombardy held the views that he did?
see below
William J. Lombardy, who was one of the most talented and promising chess players of his generation, winning titles and accolades while he was still a teenager, but who all but gave up the game at the height of his career to become a priest, died on Friday in Martinez, Calif. He was 79.
His son, Raymond, confirmed the death. He added that the sheriff’s department in Contra Costa told him that Mr. Lombardy, who was born in the Bronx and had long lived in New York City, died of natural causes, probably heart disease, while staying with a friend in Martinez.
Mr. Lombardy was the first American to win the World Junior Chess Championship — doing so with a perfect score, a feat that has never been duplicated — and he led the United States to victory over the Soviet Union in the 1960 World Student Team Championship, beating Boris Spassky, the future world champion. He was later named a grandmaster, the World Chess Federation’s highest title.
“His abilities were native, with a natural talent,” Anthony Saidy, an international master who played with Mr. Lombardy on the 1960 team that won the Student Chess Olympiad, told The New York Times in 2016. “He always seemed to drag his matches out so long, getting out of jams until his opponent couldn’t.”
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But he came of age in the shadow of Bobby Fischer, the phenomenon out of Brooklyn six years his junior. Virtually all the sponsorship money and support available for American players went to Mr. Fischer.
Raymond Lombardy said his father had felt that if Mr. Fischer had not come along, he might have become world champion himself. But Mr. Lombardy was not resentful of Mr. Fischer, with whom Mr. Lombardy had an almost brotherly relationship, the son said. “He was not jealous,” he said.
Mr. Fischer was not the only impediment to an even more successful chess career for Mr. Lombardy, however. Brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, he had a competing interest — his church.
William James Joseph Lombardy was born on Dec. 4, 1937. Though he would be known as Bill in both his personal and professional life, he disliked the name, his son said. His father, Raymond, of Italian heritage, was a supervisor for the Savarin restaurant chain, and his mother, Stella, with Polish roots, was a beautician.
Though both his parents worked, the family struggled to pay the rent living in a less-than-adequate apartment in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx. Bill Lombardy, while attending St. Athanasius School in the Bronx, slept in a room that had little insulation.
“I think we could have stored meat in there — like a refrigerator,” he was quoted as saying in the 1974 book “My Seven Chess Prodigies,” by the renowned American chess coach John W. Collins, who taught Mr. Lombardy informally for many years. (Mr. Fischer was another of his students.)
No one in the Lombardy family played chess, but when Bill was 9, a 10-year-old neighbor, who played the game but who always lost, decided to teach him. The neighbor wanted a sparring partner whom he could beat. In a couple of years, Bill was already showing unusual talent and playing regularly, often in city parks.
He went on to attend La Salle Academy, a Roman Catholic school in Lower Manhattan, for two years and to graduate from Morris High School in the Bronx. He then attended City College for three years and later enrolled at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest. He was ordained in 1967 by Cardinal Francis Joseph Spellman of New York and remained in the priesthood until the late 1970s.
Most great players start out as tacticians, always looking to attack, before they evolve into strategists, plotting a long-range path to victory from the very first move. Mr. Lombardy was a strategic player, and a good one, from the beginning.
By 14 he was a master, and in 1954 he won the New York State Championship, becoming, at 16, the youngest champion in the state’s history until then.
Two years later he tied for first in the Canadian Open, and in 1957, in Toronto, he won the World Junior Chess Championship with a perfect score of 11 wins, no draws and no losses. “Clearly, he towered over the field,” Mr. Collins wrote.
In 1960, Mr. Lombardy was the top board for the United States team that competed in the World Student Team Championship in Leningrad — now St. Petersburg — in Russia. It was there that he beat Mr. Spassky while winning a total of 11 games, drawing two and losing none as he led the United States to victory over the heavily favored Soviet team.
It was the only time the United States ever finished ahead of the Soviet Union in any team competition, and it caused a crisis in Soviet chess circles.
Later that year, Mr. Lombardy played in the Chess Olympiad in Leipzig, Germany, and again had an outstanding result, including a draw with Mikhail Botvinnik, the former world champion, who had lost his title several months earlier. (He regained it the following year.)
Mr. Lombardy was named a grandmaster after the Olympiad.
At the 1960-61 United States championship, he finished second to Mr. Fischer, qualifying him for the 1962 Interzonal in Stockholm, the next step on the road to the world championship. But instead of entering the tournament, Mr. Lombardy, by then enrolled at St. Joseph’s Seminary, decided to pursue ordination.
Mr. Lombardy, in an autobiographical essay on his website, said that in the late 1960s he worked in St. Mary’s parish in the Bronx, in a rectory next to his parents’ apartment. He also worked under Theodore Edgar McCarrick, who went on to become a Cardinal and the Archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006.
Mr. Lombardy continued to compete, though intermittently. He won or tied for first in the 1963, 1965 and 1975 United States Open Championships, and he played on United States national teams in the 1968, 1970, 1974 and 1976 Chess Olympiads, winning an individual gold medal and three individual silver medals, all as a reserve. But for all intents and purposes, the serious part of his chess career was over.
In 1972, when Mr. Fischer qualified to play a match for the world championship in Reykjavik, Iceland, against Mr. Spassky, the reigning champion, he asked Mr. Lombardy to assist him by analyzing adjourned games. In the Fischer-Spassky event, which became known as the Match of the Century, 14 of the 21 games were adjourned. Mr. Fischer won and was crowned world champion.
Mr. Lombardy eventually left the priesthood, his son said, because he had lost faith in the Catholic Church, which he believed was too concerned with amassing wealth. Soon after, while competing in a tournament in the Netherlands, he met and married a Dutch woman, Louise van Valen, who moved to Manhattan to live with Mr. Lombardy in his two-bedroom apartment at the Stuyvesant Town complex. Mr. Lombardy had moved there in 1977 to help care for his friend and coach Mr. Collins, who died in 2001.
The couple’s son, Raymond, was born in 1984. The marriage ended in divorce in 1992 after Mr. Lombardy’s wife had returned to the Netherlands with their son. Besides the son, Mr. Lombardy is survived by two younger sisters, Natalie Pekala and Vickie Lombardy. A younger brother, Michael, died this year.
Raymond Lombardy said that, as far as he was aware, his father made his living through chess after leaving the priesthood — mostly through giving lessons. He had been staying with friends since he had fallen on hard times and been evicted from his apartment at Stuyvesant Town for being behind in his rent — an episode that was the subject of an article in The Times in 2016.
Though he was a good student in school, Mr. Lombardy did not like to study chess from books; he preferred to hone his skills through practice. “There is nothing like plenty of experience,” he told Mr. Collins, “doing it on the board, getting your head knocked about a bit, and learning from every win, draw and loss.”
ROME — After reading the horrors in Dante’s “Inferno,” Italian students will soon turn to the dangers of the digital age. While juggling math assignments, they’ll also tackle work sheets prepared by reporters from the national broadcaster RAI. And separate from the weekly hour of religion, they will receive a list of what amounts to a new set of Ten Commandments.
Among them: Thou shalt not share unverified news; thou shall ask for sources and evidence; thou shall remember that the internet and social networks can be manipulated.
The lessons are part of an extraordinary experiment by the Italian government, in cooperation with leading digital companies including Facebook, to train a generation of students steeped in social media how to recognize fake news and conspiracy theories online.
“Fake news drips drops of poison into our daily web diet and we end up infected without even realizing it,” said Laura Boldrini, the president of the Italian lower house of Parliament, who has spearheaded the project with the Italian Ministry of Education.
“It’s only right to give these kids the possibility to defend themselves from lies,” said Ms. Boldrini, who is left-leaning but not affiliated with any political party. The initiative will be rolled out in 8,000 high schools across the country starting on Oct. 31.
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Italy, of course, is not alone in trying to find a way to grapple with the global proliferation of propaganda that has sown public confusion and undermined the credibility of powerful institutions.
Pope Francis recently announced that he would dedicate his 2018 World Communications Day address to the topic of fake news, and the United States Congress is investigating how Russian agents manipulated Facebook and Twitter to spread false stories and stoke conspiracy theories to sway the 2016 presidential election.
But ahead of crucial Italian elections early next year, the country has become an especially fertile ground for digital deceit. Frustrated by economic woes, upset by a migrant crisis and fed a steady diet of partisan media, many Italians subscribe to all kinds of conspiracy theories. It is what they call dietrologia, the belief that there is also always something dietro, or behind, the surface.
The Italian passion for seeing intrigue — whether or not it exists — around every corner runs deep, said Alessandro Campi, a professor of political science at Perugia University. “All of this is part of the Italian cultural heritage,” he said.
A history of scheming Borgia cardinals, waves of foreign domination, papal crackdowns and corrupt governments had imbued Italians with an abiding distrust in authority, Mr. Campi said.
In recent years, this background has helped erode the standing of traditional political parties while being expertly exploited by political upstarts, insurgents and outsiders, none more so than the surging Five Star Movement and its founder, Beppe Grillo.
“I’d say that the Five Star Movement believes more than any other political party in conspiracy theories,” said Mr. Campi, an editor of “Conspiracies and Plots — From Machiavelli to Beppe Grillo.”
“It’s not only a tactic,” Mr. Campi said of the movement, which has succeeded in attracting votes from the left and the right with an ideologically ambiguous form of populism. “It’s their political worldview.”
Nicola Biondo, a former chief of communications for the Five Star Movement, said that for the party, spreading conspiracies was akin to a policy.
“They use the term Great Powers, never specifying who those powers are,” said Mr. Biondo, who has recently written a book, “Supernova: How Five Star Was Killed,” with another party defector. “It is a mantra.”
Ms. Boldrini, sponsor of the new student curriculum, asserts that the web cannot be forfeited to the fringes, and that the government must teach the next generation of Italian voters how to defend themselves against falsehoods and conspiracy theories designed to play on their fears.
She said she had included Google and Facebook in the project in an acknowledgment that virtual space is where many young Italians live.
Nevertheless, she expressed skepticism in particular about Facebook’s commitment to reining in fake news and hate speech, and recognized the possibility that the Italian school project provided the embattled giant with a much-needed public relations boon.
Facebook was quick to applaud the program. Laura Bononcini, chief of public policy for Facebook in Italy, Greece and Malta, said on Tuesday that “the program is part of an international effort. Education and media literacy are a crucial part of our effort to curb the spread of false news, and collaboration with schools is pivotal.”
Ms. Boldrini also noted that Facebook was contributing by promoting the initiative through targeted ads to high-school-age users, and she said she hoped that the program, which aimed to show students how their “likes” were monetized and politicized, could become a “pilot program” for Facebook throughout Europe.
But some of the Italian course load seems unrealistic. While some tips are useful, such as keeping an eye out for parody URLs, students are also called upon to reach out to experts to verify news stories, essentially asking the students to re-report articles.
The program seeks to deputize students as fake-news hunters, showing them how to create their own blogs or social accounts to expose false stories and “showing how you uncovered it.”
In Italy, that gives them a lot of ground to cover.
For months here, conspiracy theorists who reject scientific consensus have connected vaccinations to medical conditions including autism in children, often blaming pharmaceutical companies as a dark force behind the medical practice. It was an issue that struck a nerve in Italy and played right into the wheelhouse of the Five Star Movement’s distrust of expertise and authority.
In May, amid a measles outbreak, Italy strengthened its vaccination requirements for school-age children, prompting so-called No-Vax activists to protest outside the Italian Parliament for the right to choose.
The vaccination opponents were especially strong in the Five Star Movement, whose leader, Mr. Grillo, once attacked vaccines as a scam by pharmaceutical companies with the intention of “weakening children’s immune systems.”
His wildly popular blog has alleged that some vaccines “can kill,” and websites, such as La Fucina, run by another party leader, Davide Casaleggio, have published anti-vaccine reports.
(In the past, other sites associated with Mr. Casaleggio or Mr. Grillo have also carried sensational reports by Russian-backed news outlets that were deemed false and damaging to the movement’s political enemies.)
“It’s what the pharmaceutical companies do, and it’s questionable,” Paola Barile, 65, said as she stood with a Five Star Movement flag wrapped around her shoulders at a protest last week in front of Parliament. “The spell has been broken for us also on vaccines.”
At the same rally, Five Star activists screamed “shame” and railed against the political parties, right and left, for joining forces to draft a new electoral law they considered (maybe correctly this time) designed to keep the movement out of power.
But the Five Star Movement is not the only political force to have profited from fake news, and students are not the only ones who can be deceived by it.
Last weekend, Gian Marco Centinaio, a senator from the Northern League, a right-leaning party, acknowledged that he had put on Facebook a post, subsequently shared 18,000 times, of a picture of a man identified as Ms. Boldrini’s brother, and complained how the news programs “don’t cover” the man’s no-show job that paid 47,000 euros, or more than $55,000, a month. The man in the image was not her brother, and none of the allegations were true.
Mr. Centinaio called the post a joke and said, “People should be less credulous.”
A healthy dose of skepticism is exactly what the new Italian program hopes students will adopt.
“If people are prepared, educated on digital,” Ms. Boldrini said, “maybe they don’t fall for it.”
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