Ocili News

Newly elected PM Silvio Berlusconi has promised to tackle the crisis

A mountain of uncollected waste in Naples has prompted the EU to announce it is taking Italy to court.

More than 1,000 tonnes of rubbish is rotting on the city’s streets, and the EU argues not enough has been done to get rid of it.

“The Commission is not convinced that this issue will be solved quickly enough,” said an EU official.

Italy could face a heavy fine if the European Court of Justice decides that Rome has infringed EU laws on waste. Continue reading »

Tags: BBC, Berlusconi, court, EU, Italy, Naples, Rome, rubbish

• More than 22,000 killed and 41,000 missing, Myanmar radio reports
• 3.6-meter storm surge leaves more than 100,000 homeless in one area
• U.N. estimates that up to a million people could not be homeless
• Storm damage concentrated over a 30,000 square-kilometer area

A Myanmar government radio station said Tuesday that more than 22,000 people are dead and 41,000 missing after the catastrophic cyclone that battered the country.

Buddhist monks move branches from an uprooted tree blocking a street in Yangon.
Continue reading »

Tags: Burma cyclone, CNN, death, Myanmar, Yangon

“Dear friends, for over 25 years both my situation and my country have not progressed. Things are getting harder; more corpses than I can count are laying around as a result of economic regression. People are numb to hunger for the longest time now; it doesn’t scare us anymore.”

That’s what Haitian Renald Deraz, 27, e-mailed Beloiter Debbie Fischer after his brother starved to death. Continue reading »

Tags: BeloitDailyNews, Church, Haiti, starving

Parisians have been ordered to get rid of rats in their homes and businesses or face prosecution under an official campaign to fight a plague of rodents.

Less than a year after the animated cartoon Ratatouille turned Rémy the French rat into a loveable culinary hero, the city’s residents have been ordered to eradicate his real-life counterparts. They are also being asked to denounce insalubrious neighbours responsible for the infestation. Continue reading »

Tags: control, disease, France, Paris, pest, plague, rats, TimesOnline

Americans don’t like to lose wars—which makes sense, since we have so little practice with it. Of course, a lot depends on how you define just what a war is. There are shooting wars—the kind that test our mettle and our patriotism and our resourcefulness and our courage—and those are the kind at which we excel. But other struggles test those qualities too. What else was the Great Depression or the space race or the construction of the railroads or the eradication of polio but a massive, often frightening challenge that we decided as a culture we ought to rise up and face? If we indulge in a bit of chest-thumping and flag-waving when the job is done, well, we earned it. Continue reading »

Tags: climate, deterioration, Global Warming, Time.com, USA