My story on the cyberwar in Syria is the cover story of this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek.

Taymour Karim didn’t crack under interrogation. His Syrian captors beat him with their fists, with their boots, with sticks, with chains, with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. They hit him so hard they broke two of his teeth and three of his ribs. They threatened to keep torturing him until he died. “I believed I would never see the sun again,” he recalls. But Karim, a 31-year-old doctor who had spent the previous months protesting against the government in Damascus, refused to give up the names of his friends.

It didn’t matter. His computer had already told all. “They knew everything about me,” he says. “The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account.” At one point during the interrogation, Karim was presented with a stack of more than 1,000 pages of printouts, data from his Skype chats and files his torturers had downloaded remotely using a malicious computer program to penetrate his hard drive. “My computer was arrested before me,” he says.

Much has been written about the rebellion in Syria: the protests, the massacres, the car bombs, the house-to-house fighting. Tens of thousands have been killed since the war began in early 2011. But the struggle for the future of the country has also unfolded in another arena—on a battleground of Facebook pages and YouTube accounts, of hacks and counterhacks. Just as rival armies vie for air superiority, the two sides of the Syrian civil war have spent much of the last year and a half locked in a struggle to dominate the Internet. Pro-government hackers have penetrated opposition websites and broken into the computers of Reuters and Al Jazeera to spread disinformation. On the other side, the hacktivist group Anonymous has infiltrated at least 12 Syrian government websites, including that of the Ministry of Defense, and released millions of stolen e-mails.

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The cover of TIME’s international edition this week is the profile I did with Catherine Mayer on the Italian football player Mario Balotelli.

This game won’t turn out well for Mario Balotelli, but Manchester City’s star striker is always watchable. A Mohawk adds a bristling inch to his strapping frame, and even by the balletic, fast-paced standards of top-tier football, he moves with a mesmeric grace, twisting past defenders without losing speed. Sometimes he attracts attention for the wrong reasons too. Eighteen and a half minutes into the Oct. 20 match with West Bromwich Albion, his tackle on an opponent is deemed a foul, and the referee brandishes a yellow card. A further infringement risks earning a red card, banishing Balotelli and leaving City a man short. He knows he ought to accept the decision as surely as everyone watching knows he will not. And soon enough he is arguing with the referee, returning at the halftime whistle to remonstrate with him again until a teammate roughly pushes the player away.

Whether on the pitch or in private, Balotelli seems to generate energy rather than burn it. Dramas flare around him; passions ignite. When he isn’t playing, he fidgets. But if called to take a penalty, at the very peak of pressure, he turns icily calm. Since signing with the English Premier League club in 2010, “Super Mario” hasn’t missed a spot kick at the goal. (Lionel Messi, Barcelona’s most prolific scorer and winner of this year’s European Golden Boot award for racking up the most goals in the season, had a success rate from penalties of 82%.) “It’s just like a game of mind, me and the goalkeeper,” says Balotelli of his perfect penalty record. “Me, I know how to control my mind.” The secret lies in his distinctive stuttering run-up to the ball, so different from his usual fluidity. He waits for the goalkeeper to guess at the likely trajectory of his shot and in that fraction of a second aims into the opposite corner of the net. “When the goalkeeper moves before me, it means that in this game of mind he lost,” he says.

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My piece on Berlusconi’s latest conviction has just been published by Time.

The single most important thing to know about Silvio Berlusconi‘s Oct. 26 conviction on charges of tax fraud is that it’s not the first time the former Italian prime minister has been sentenced to jail. In his two decades of battling the judicial system, the billionaire media mogul has previously been found guilty three times, on charges ranging from perjury to illegal financing of a political party to the bribing a member of the tax police. Each time, he’s managed to get the charges overturned or dropped. There’s little reason to suspect that this time will be any different. “When Americans see a newsflash that Berlusconi has been convicted and sentenced to four years in prison, they picture a paddy wagon around the corner ready to take him away in a prison suit,” says Alexander Stille, author of The Sack of Rome, a biography of the former prime minister. “But if you know any thing about the Italian justice system, you know that’s very unlikely that he’ll go to jail anytime soon, or probably ever.”

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Time has just published my story on the verdict on the trial of the Pope’s butler.

Paolo Gabriele, the former butler to Pope Benedict XVI who was convicted Saturday of leaking the pontiff’s personal papers, has been sentenced to year and half in prison–but he’s unlikely to serve any time. Minutes after prosecutors declared Gabriele guilty of aggravated theft, Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, told journalists assembled for the trial that a pardon by the Pope was a “likely hypothesis.” He added, “I can say this without fear of being contradicted.”

It was a trial in which the pontiff was at the same time the victim, the person in whose name the crime had been committed, the authority under which the proceedings were being held—the judgment was delivered “in the name of His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, gloriously reigning” — and the ultimate arbiter of whether the sentence will be carried out.

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Businessweek just published my story on Sicily as an extreme example of Italy’s political and economic dysfunction.

Giarre, a town in eastern Sicily, sits above the sea on the slopes of Mount Etna. It was once a famous collection point for the wine produced on the hills above, which was rolled down its main street in barrels to the port below. Today, Giarre bears a far more dubious distinction. The city of 27,000 hosts the largest number of uncompleted public projects in the country: 25 of them, nearly one for every 1,000 inhabitants. So spectacular is the waste that some locals have proposed promoting Giarre’s excess as a tourist attraction.

On an afternoon in September, I toured some of Giarre’s most notorious eyesores with Turi Caggegi, a journalist who has been writing about government waste since the 1990s. Caggegi showed off a partly built, graffiti-covered theater where work has started and stopped 12 times. It has yet to host a show. Not far away stood a hospital that took 30 years to build and was outdated before it was ready to open. Later, Caggegi drove past an Olympic-size swimming pool that was sunk but never completed. “So much money wasted,” he said. “And it wasn’t that they were spending it on productive investments. They were buying votes.”

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Time has just published my story on the testimony the Pope’s butler gave during his trial.

Before Paolo Gabriele turned himself in to Vatican authorities for passing Pope Benedict XVI’s personal papers to the press last May, he wanted to do one last thing. “I needed to surrender myself to the authorities, but I didn’t know how,” the former butler to the Pope recalled on Tuesday, during testimony in the trial against him. “The first step was spiritual. I went to a confessor and explained what I had done.”

Gabriele, a layman with a wife and three children, was calm and sometimes smiling during the three hours he spent giving evidence in the second day of his trial on charges of aggravated theft. He wore a light gray suit. His face was thin, barely a shade darker than the cream-colored wall of the courtroom behind him. As butler, Gabriele could hardly have been in a more intimate position with the head of the Catholic Church. He had served the Pope his meals, helped him pack for trips and, when the weather turned foul, he had held the umbrella that protected the Pontiff from the rain. “Concerning the accusation of aggravated theft, I declare myself innocent,” he said. “I feel guilty for having betrayed the trust vested in me by the Holy Father, whom I loved as if I were his son.”

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Time has just published my story on the trial of the Pope’s butler.

It was what passes for transparency at the Vatican. Only eight reporters were permitted to attend the opening session on Saturday of the trial of the former butler to Pope Benedict XVI, Paolo Gabriele, who is accused of stealing and leaking the Pontiff’s personal papers. Before entering the courtroom, the journalists were asked to check their purses, cell phones and keys and pass through a metal detector. Even their writing implements were confiscated, replaced once they were inside by orange ball-point pens supplied by the Vatican. “They basically did not want you to bring in pens for fear that they were either audio or visual recording instruments,” says one of the attendant reporters, who asked to remain anonymous citing rules drawn up by the Vatican press corps forbidding the journalists who attended from telling their personal stories.

The trial, which is expected to wrap up by the end of the week, has been billed by some journalists as the most significant legal proceeding since the 16th century when Giordano Bruno was tried for heresy and burned at the stake. But that’s less a reflection of the gravity of the charges against Gabriele than of the type of cases the Vatican’s judicial system is usually called upon to handle. The proceedings took place in a corner of the Vatican city state, in a small courtroom normally reserved for petty crimes involving tourists or pilgrims. If convicted, Gabriele could face up to four years in prison — a term that would be served in an Italian facility.

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My conversation, with Karen King, the scholar who claims to have discovered “The Gospel of Mary,” has just been published by Time.

When Karen King, a historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, unveiled last week a fragment of papyrus, on which Jesus says the words my wife, she was greeted with a mix of excitement and dismay. Could a tiny strip of barely legible papyrus call into question some of the church’s most well-known teachings? King spoke to TIME about the controversial fragment’s authenticity, its relation to the New Testament and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

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Time has just published my story on the convictions of seven Italian experts for not having warned the city of Aquila of the risk of an earthquake.

When a judge in Italy ruled Monday that seven experts were guilty of manslaughter for having failed to adequately warn citizens in the city of Aquila of a major earthquake, the verdict was met in the courtroom by stunned silence. Internationally, it was greeted with outrage. Scientists claimed that science itself was on trial. Columnists compared the conviction, in which each man was sentenced to six years in prison, to the persecution of Galileo. In Italy, on Tuesday, the head of the country’s disaster management agency resigned in protest. But whatever one thinks of the judgment–and there are more reasons than not to be concerned–the greatest danger may lie elsewhere: that anger over the verdict will distract from the very real lessons the case has to offer.

At issue is a meeting of the seven defendants, then members of a board called the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks, in Aquila on March 31, 2009. Small tremors had been rocking the area for months, light shocks that rattled buildings and sent frightened citizens into the streets. To make matters worse, a local resident who wasn’t a scientist was using an unproved method of earthquake prediction, analyzing concentrations of radon gas to forecast the time and place of tremors. His findings–which proved unfounded–were being picked up by the local media, adding to the sense of panic.

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Time has just published my story on using insurance as a hedge against climate change.

The Tigray region in the Rockstrewn highlands of northern Ethiopia isn’t the type of place where you’d expect to find an innovative financial product. Its residents are mostly farmers, poor and vulnerable to crop failure resulting from persistent droughts. That’s precisely why the region has been chosen to serve as a test range for a new kind of insurance that could help poor countries cope with climate change.

The idea is simple. Instead of relying on food aid to help farmers after drought has hit, aid agencies can sign them up for crop insurance before disaster strikes. When the rains fail, a farmer can use a crop-insurance payout to buy food without dipping into the assets needed for the next planting. “It allows you to smooth out your income,” says David Waskow, director of the climate-change program at Oxfam America, which is coordinating the project. “Otherwise, you can fall off a cliff.”

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