Using ropes but no brooms, four rock-climbing garbage collectors are tasked with removing tonnes of trash dumped down hillsides by residents of Rio’s famed favelas in Brazil.
Donning helmets, harnesses, gloves and climbing goggles, these trashmen can dangle up to 80 metres in the course of a day picking up “vertical waste” with special hooks and rakes.
The rock-climbing specialists have been employed by a municipal garbage collection company for nearly 10 years but more need to be hired now as hillside neighbourhoods that were once no-go zones are now considered safe.
So far, more than 20 favelas have been occupied by the authorities as part of a pacification campaign aimed at cleaning up gang-ridden neighbourhoods before the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. (AFP)
Wrong dough
Police say masked and armed men in Cape Cod thought they were nabbing a bag of dough.
They did – just not the kind they wanted. Three men from Hyannis, Massachusetts, are facing armed robbery charges after police say they robbed a Dunkin’ Donuts with knives and a hatchet – only to end up with a bag of doughnuts.
According to police, the men demanded a paper bag that was in one of the worker’s purses, mistakenly believing she was carrying cash from the day’s receipts. But police say the men never looked inside. The men were captured on video and police were able to track them down. (PA)
Look out, shark!
A species of shark thought to be behind hundreds of attacks on humans has been sighted off the coast of Cornwall.
The harbour master’s office in St Ives confirmed that two people on separate boats had reported seeing an oceanic white tip shark a mile offshore from the popular tourist destination.
According to the Western Morning News, one sighting was made by a fisherman who had fished off St Ives for 30 years, whose wooden boat was rammed by one of the sharks as he fished for mackerel. (PA)
Human cargo
A Michigan bus operator has been ordered to cease all commercial passenger services after the discovery that one of its buses was carrying six passengers in its luggage compartment, US officials have said.
Roger Haines was driving a Haines Tours motor-coach from Roscommon, Michigan to Clyde, Ohio, a nearly five-hour trip, when Ohio State Highway Patrol in Lake Township, pulled over the bus and authorities discovered that six of the 62 passengers were riding in the luggage compartment, which also contained unsecured baggage. (AFP)
Winning protester
One of the demonstrators camped in a central Madrid square to protest the economic crisis has won €1.3 million in the national lottery, officials said yesterday. “The prize of €1.3 million has been attributed this weekend. We tried in vain to get in touch with the winner all day on Sunday,” said Ignacio Garcia, the head of Serviapuestas, the website of the Spanish lottery.
“We were finally able to speak to him today (Monday) and he told us that he was in the encampment in the Puerta del Sol, so that is why he had not been able to reply by telephone or check his e-mails,” he said.
The winner is a 34-year-old man from Madrid.
Protests over the economic crisis and soaring unemployment began in Madrid on May 15 and fanned out to city squares nationwide as word spread by Twitter and Facebook among demonstrators. Protesters installed in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square dismantled their camp on Sunday. (AFP)
Sauna diplomacy
Finland’s Foreign Ministry yesterday won the Steam Spirit Prize for promoting sauna culture abroad, organisers said, hailing Finnish diplomats for using saunas to help forge international relations.
“The prize is given for a deed, a person or an event promoting sauna culture. The recipient meets all these criteria,” Sauna Society chairman Ben Grass said in a statement, hailing the way Finnish diplomats around the world use embassy saunas as a place for diplomatic “deeds and events”.
The wood-fired sauna is a cornerstone of Finnish culture. It is not merely a way to wash but a place that is still a key aspect of family, social and even political life in the Nordic country. In the 1970s, for instance, president Urho Kekkonen was known to hold diplomatic meetings in his sauna, while today’s Finnish peacekeepers build saunas in every camp they are deployed, even in places like Chad and Afghanistan. (AFP)