One thing the designers of Brazil’s modernistic capital Brasilia forgot to map out in their intricate plans was where to put the garbage.
The city’s creators, world famous architect Oscar Niemeyer and urban planner Lucio Costa, could never have imagined the city’s explosive growth.
Sixty-seven years and 50 million tonnes of garbage later, the Estructural dump had become the biggest in Latin America — until Friday, when Brasilia’s dirty secret was closed.
Governor Rodrigo Rollemberg opened a new landfill further out of town to replace it, angering thousands of scavengers who make a living from the garbage.
“We cannot live with this open wound in the midst of our nation’s capital, a dump where human beings put their lives at risk seeking a livelihood in an undignified way,” the governor said at the opening of the new landfill.
Since the city was founded on a cattle ranch on a highland plateau, Brasilia has expanded to become the nation’s fourth-biggest metropolis with 2.5 million inhabitants.
Just 20km from the presidential palace, thousands of scavengers have eked out a living for decades by picking out cans, copper wire and anything that can be recycled and sold.
Generations of pickers have brought their children to work in the dusty dump, beneath a scorching sun and hovering vultures, plagued by swarms of flies and the pungent stench of putrid food and methane gas.
Rollemberg’s plan is to employ the pickers at new “triage” centers in warehouses where garbage can be separated for recycling on conveyor belts in cleaner conditions by workers in uniforms and gloves.
However, scavengers working at the dump on its last day said they refused to swap their source of income for regimented government jobs that paid too little to sustain their families.
While human rights groups criticized precarious conditions and child labor at the dump, environmentalists made the strongest case for closure, warning that it was polluting the water table beneath Brasilia, a city that already has to ration water supplies due to recurrent droughts.
Some members of the 3,000-strong pickers cooperative said they would rather stay working the dump and not have the cost of a long commute to the new recycling centers.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing