An Italian court has handed two company executives 16-year jail terms for the asbestos-related deaths of more than 3,000 people.

Arifa Akbar looks forward to Tate Modern's retrospective of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti

Arifa Akbar looks forward to Tate Modern's retrospective of Italian artist Alighiero Boetti

'War Horse' may take some beating but the year ahead offers some other wonderful apparitions – such as 'Frankenweenie' and Sean Penn as a Goth

Italian government scientists have claimed to have discovered evidence that a supernatural event formed the image on the Turin Shroud, believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.

After successfully selling Beaufort Chalet d'Alpage from her garden shed in Highgate, north London, Patricia opened a cheese shop, La Fromagerie, in Highbury Park in 1992. Ten years later she opened a second on Marylebone High Street and has written two award-winning books, Cheese and The Cheese Room.

Michela Murgia's novel has been an immense success in Italy, where it has won six literary prizes. Accabadora is a Sardinian term for an angel of mercy who tends the chronically sick and dying, acting as a kind of midwife with eternity in view. The accabadora here is Bonaria Urrai, a seamstress unable to have children. Bonaria adopts the six-year-old Maria Listru, whose widowed mother Anna Teresa can no longer afford to raise her. Maria thus becomes a fill'e anima, a soul-child, the fruit of Anna Teresa's womb and Bonaria's loving spirit.