Brazilian police went on strike in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, risking a surge in crime just days before the beach city’s famed carnival celebrations.
Salvador, Brazil’s third-largest city, has already been hit by a crime wave since police walked off the job there last week. The Rio strike is likely to force the government to send in thousands of army troops, as it did in Salvador.
Hundreds of thousands of tourists will descend on Rio next week for carnival parades of scantily clad women and men dancing to samba bands and raucous street parties in the annual pre-Lenten bash.
Both Rio and Salvador are two of the 12 Brazilian cities that will host the 2014 soccer World Cup and the police strikes add security fears to concerns about inadequate infrastructure for the global sports event in Latin America’s biggest country. Rio will also host the Olympics in 2016.
Thousands of police, firefighters and prison guards voted to strike in Rio, demanding higher wages. It was not immediately clear how many of the 70,000 workers in those posts would comply with the call for strike.
Rio state authorities have said 14,000 army troops were ready to protect the city from the wave of murders, looting and vandalism that hit Salvador after 20 percent of the 31,000 police officers of the northeastern state of Bahia walked off their jobs on Jan. 31.
Salvador’s striking policemen remained defiant on Thursday and voted to maintain their stoppage even after hundreds ended an occupation of the state legislature.
Some of the vandalism in the city was allegedly committed by police officers themselves, complicating negotiations with state officials who have refused the strikers’ demands that officers be pardoned for any crimes during the walkout.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
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