The Italian parliament has voted unanimously to introduce the crime of femicide, a law that specifically criminalises the murder of a woman for gender-related motives.

Previous attempts to pass the law failed to gather enough support, but the killing of a 22-year-old student, Giulia Cecchettin, by her ex-boyfriend in 2023 “shocked the country into action”, said the BBC. Following this week’s parliamentary debate, the bill was passed on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, on Tuesday. Italy is only the fourth country in the EU to categorise femicide as a distinct crime.

How widespread is femicide?
Every 10 minutes, a woman or girl somewhere in the world is killed because she is female, according to a newly published UN Women report on femicide. Last year, an estimated 83,000 women and girls were killed deliberately, with nearly 60% murdered at the hands of an intimate partner or family member. By contrast, only 11% of male homicides last year were committed by an intimate partner or family member.

Yet few countries even record and report their femicide statistics. We “need better prevention strategies and criminal justice responses to femicide”, said John Brandolino of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.

Why has Italy made the change now?
More than 90% of the 116 women murdered in Italy last year were killed because of their sex, according to the national statistics agency. “High-profile cases”, such as Cecchettin’s murder, “have been key in widespread public outcry” and debate about the causes of violence against women, said The Associated Press.

Demands for action were led by Cecchettin’s sister, Elena, who said her killer was not a “monster” but rather the “healthy son” of Italy’s patriarchal society. “They were words that brought crowds out across Italy demanding change,” said the BBC.

Does the new law go far enough?
The law will apply to murders that are “an act of hatred, discrimination, domination, control, or subjugation of a woman as a woman”, said the BBC. Critics of the new legislation believe the definitions of femicide are too vague and will be hard to prove, while its backers are calling for broader measures to counter sex-based violence and abuse.

Hannah Fry is “surely the UK’s leading populariser of science”, said The i Paper. Recently named co-host of “The Rest is Science”, the latest podcast in Gary Lineker’s hit The Rest Is… franchise, Fry is a “natural communicator” with a “winning fusion of darting intelligence, sly humour, electric enthusiasm and a touch of cheerful glamour”. The maths professor is “like the teacher you wish you’d had”.

Country girl
Growing up in a working-class family in Hertfordshire, with a factory worker father and housewife mother, “I wasn’t really going out”, dating, drinking, or “hanging out in the park at ill-advised hours”, Fry told The i Paper. Instead, I was “learning how to do Rubik’s Cubes”, juggle and “genuinely just reading”.

After enrolling at UCL to study mathematics, Fry said, I became “one of the people who grew up in the countryside and whose parents were really strict and they Lose. Their. Minds”. She tried stand-up comedy at university, then studied for a PhD in fluid dynamics so that she could work in Formula 1. But she found the motor racing industry “awful” and broke into broadcasting through a TED talk on the mathematics of love.

‘Fact-filled banter’
Fry was diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2021, at the age of 36, and opted for a radical hysterectomy. The strain “precipitated the amicable end of her marriage”, said The i Paper, but she “dealt with it all by intimately tracking” the experience in a BBC Two documentary, “Making Sense of Cancer with Hannah Fry”. She’s also written a book, “Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine”, and co-hosts BBC Radio 4’s “Curious Cases” podcast. And as the presenter of National Geographic TV series “The Infinite Explorer”, Fry visits countries all over the world, which was “the chance of a lifetime”, she told Metro.

She was also recently appointed the University of Cambridge’s first professor of the public understanding of mathematics. As to her performance on “The Rest Is Science”, the reviews are mixed. Fry’s “fact-filled banter needs structure”, said The Times, but The Telegraph described the opening episode as “a delight”.

Pope Leo XIV and Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople attend a prayer service in the Turkish town of Iznik, once known as Nicaea. The landmark meeting marked the 1,700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicaea, which produced the Nicene Creed still used by worshippers.

Andreas Solaro / AFP / Getty Images

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Amol Rajan is certifiably clever. But does he need to let everybody know?
Kat Brown in The Independent
Radio 4 presenter Amol Rajan’s “fact dump about sibilance” in “Paradise Lost” while interviewing an Oxford English don “was delightful”, writes Kat Brown. But “if you are clever, should you show it off?” Doing so was once “seen as deeply uncool”. And there’s always the risk that, “by showing off your cleverness, you reveal you’re not all that clever at all”. Perhaps “the smartest thing is to appreciate how much you still have to learn”.

In praise of private jets
Clive Aslet in The Telegraph
“It’s hard to weep for the sort of people who travel by private jet,” writes Clive Aslet. They’ve “been clobbered” by a 50% uplift in air passenger duty in this week’s Budget, but they’re rich and “can afford it”. If Rachel Reeves’ measure is “intended to change behaviour, so that fat cats” fly less, I’m afraid her “pinprick of a levy won’t even be noticed by the super-rich, let alone convince them to take the train”.

Will a Graft Scandal Bring Down Another Marcos?
Karishma Vaswani on Bloomberg
Even by the “troubled standards” of the Philippines, recent months have “exposed how deep the rot goes”, writes Karishma Vaswani. This flood-battered country is in “the grip of a scandal” about “missing flood-control funds”, involving “government ministers, senators, members of Congress and wealthy businesspeople”. Can President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. “turn this around”? He’s going to have to “act quickly if he’s serious about restoring trust”, because “history has shown” that voters’ “patience will run out”.