A German man reportedly dumped by a Brazilian woman he met on the Internet camped out in an airport for 13 days before being taken on Thursday to a hospital for a psychological evaluation.
The man, identified by authorities as Heinz Muller, was out of money and wouldn’t say when he planned to leave, according to airport workers, some of whom brought him meals from the food court.
The 46-year-old former pilot spent his time wandering the airport in Campinas, an industrial city about an hour’s drive from Sao Paulo, and using his laptop perched on a luggage cart. Occasionally he spoke to workers and passengers in basic Portuguese mixed with some Spanish.
While airport workers said they were getting used to Muller’s presence and authorities said he could stay at the airport because he was in Brazil legally, doctors determined Muller needed to be checked out.
He put up slight resistance as he was taken away on Thursday evening but authorities did not have to use force, said a representative of Brazil’s civil aviation authority who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with department policy.
Muller arrived in Rio de Janeiro on Oct. 2 and wound up at the airport after being dumped by a woman living nearby, a spokesman for the authority said, also on condition of anonymity. He had declined offers to stay at a shelter or in housing offered by nonprofit groups.
The case was similar to that of Hiroshi Nohara, a Japanese man who spent three months living in the Mexico City airport before leaving last December. Nohara turned into a local celebrity, and his story drew comparisons to that of Viktor Navorski, a character portrayed by Tom Hanks in the 2004 movie The Terminal.
But Navorski was forced to stay at a New York City airport after war broke out in his Eastern European country, and officials said they could neither allow him into the US nor deport him.
Muller washed himself in the airport bathrooms and slept on chairs in the airport’s only terminal.
In a brief interview in English before he was taken to the hospital, Muller said that airport workers “are treating me OK” and that he wanted to move permanently to Latin America’s largest country.
“I want to be living in Brazil in somewhere pretty,” he said, declining to elaborate after a reporter would not buy him the computer cable he demanded in return for answering questions.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS