Brindisi

All roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes, and the most prestigious is the Appian Way, the strategic highway for the Roman Empire now hoping to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Film director Paul Haggis was detained on June 19 for investigation of allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman in southern Italy, Italian news media said, quoting local prosecutors.

The Canadian-born, Oscar-winning Haggis, 69, has been in Italy for a film festival that begins today in Ostuni, a tourist town in Puglia, the region that forms the "heel" of the Italian peninsula.

The authorities in Italy detained a 66-year-old driver with a Bulgarian citizenship in whose TIRs were found three migrants. The man, Dimitar U., is charged with aiding illegal immigration for profit.

Italian police arrest 50 people for mafia links in the southern province of Apulia.

According to ANSA, all arrested are members of the local Sakra organized crime group. They will be charged with murder, blackmail, drug trafficking and arms. The operation, started at the end of last year, was carried out in the towns of Lecce, Brindisi and Taranto.

Petros Lianos, the last Greek national who had remained hospitalized in Italy after being rescued from the Norman Atlantic following a fire that broke out on the Italian-flagged, Greek-chartered vessel on December 28, returned to Athens on Monday.

By Andrea Rosa

Italian firefighters and forensic experts searching for bodies inside a fire-charred ferry braved fierce heat and thick, black smoke Monday for the third straight day but still did not reach the crucial site where the blaze broke out, authorities said.

Italian firefighters at the port of Brindisi have recovered the main black box data recorder from the Norman Atlantic ferry but there are fears that it may have been seriously damaged by the fire that broke out on board.

Another black box had been discovered on Friday. Italy?s Rai TV reported that authorities believe the fire may have been caused by a short circuit.

The body of a third Greek passenger on the Norman Atlantic ferry was identified on Saturday, soon after investigators boarded the ship for the first time. Rescue crews recovered its black box data recorder but were unable to do much more than that due to the residual heat from the ship’s fire.

Firefighters and investigators boarded the wrecked Norman Atlantic ferry on Friday, after it had been towed to the Italian port of Brindisi.

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BRINDISI, Italy — Firefighters boarded the charred Norman Atlantic ferry in the Italian port of Brindisi on Friday to put out residual fires and allow a search for possible dead.