Brazil’s president asked God to halt the devastating rains that have killed at least 116 people in a southern state and offered new plans on Monday to help tens of thousands of people rebuild ruined homes and businesses.
Continuing rains have hindered rescuers’ attempts to find bodies of more victims claimed by the mudslides and floods in Santa Catarina state while making it tough for survivors to return home, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on his weekly radio show.
“We’re only asking God to stop the rains soon so that we can start to rebuild the state of Santa Catarina,” he said.
Thirty-one people are still missing, and some officials have estimated the death count could rise to as much as 150.
About 80,000 people were forced from their homes by storms that dumped more water on the region during the weekend of Nov. 22 to Nov. 23 than it normally gets in months. Another 8,000 people were displaced in neighboring Rio de Janeiro state.
Lula called for a study on the causes of the tragedy, saying that heavy rains alone should not have been able to cause such devastation.
Meanwhile, the country plans to boost spending and programs to significantly slow destruction of the Amazon rain forest by 2017, aiming to reduce global warming by slashing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted when trees are burned.
The plan would reduce deforestation to 5,000km² a year, an area the size of the US state of Delaware, Lula said on Monday — setting Brazil’s first ever concrete goal to slow rain forest destruction.
That represents a 59 percent decline over the 12,000km² of jungle that were destroyed between last August and July, the last yearly period for which data was available.
Environment Minister Carlos Minc said the plan would slow destruction by 72 percent when compared to the 19,000km² lost on average each year between 1996 and 2005.
The new proposal would boost federal patrols of forested areas, replant 5.5 million hectares of forest, and finance sustainable development projects to give locals alternative work in areas where illegal logging dominates the economy.
“We need to offer help them with one hand, but with the other we have to tell them there will be punishment if they don’t pay attention to environmental preservation,” Lula said, without describing those penalties.
He did not say how much the plan would cost.
Deforestation — both the burning and rotting of Amazon wood — releases an estimated 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, making Brazil at least the sixth biggest emitter of the gas in the world.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
RSS