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To: Giordano Bruno who wrote (123801)	5/18/2008 2:50:00 PM
From: Jim McMannis	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

What about the rubbish in Washington? In Italy, Naples residents rise up against rubbish crisis news.yahoo.com NAPLES, Italy (AFP) - Residents of Naples, fed up with the stench from months of uncollected rubbish, on Sunday used the waste to barricade streets in protest at the long-running crisis. For days running, residents of the southern Italian city have set scores of stinking rubbish heaps alight, some throwing stones at firefighters called out to deal with the blazes, often under police escort. Firefighters said they put out 84 blazes overnight. Traffic is impeded by mountains of rubbish pushed into the streets by protesters as rising temperatures aggravate the stench. New Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was to hold his right-wing government's first cabinet meeting on Wednesday in Naples to underscore an election campaign pledge to bury the continuing "scandal." Some 6,000 tonnes of household rubbish litter the streets of the city, and another 50,000 tonnes line the roads of the Campania region surrounding Naples, according to the latest figures, a product of the dysfunctional waste collection system. Earlier this month, the European Commission launched legal action against Italy before an EU court over its failure to tackle the crisis, which has dragged on for the last 14 years. Although the previous government appointed a waste management pointman to tackle the problem -- former police chief Gianni De Gennaro -- the commission said that authorities have failed to come up with convincing plans that would lead to a long-term solution. Many landfills in Campania are controlled by the region's Camorra mafia, which lines its pockets by subverting waste-handling procedures and shipping in industrial waste from the north. Emergency plans adopted in late January by the outgoing centre-left government of Romano Prodi failed to resolve chronic backlogs at waste treatment centres, Italian press reports said. Of Campania's 64 towns and cities, 22 failed to implement trash-sorting directives within the allotted time. On Saturday they fell under De Gennaro's direct administration. By law, rubbish that is not sorted cannot be dumped at the few landfills that still have space in Campania. Courts routinely bar local authorities from reopening dumps because they are too close to residential areas amid an uncontrolled property development boom in the region. In other cases, environmental groups or neighbourhood associations have opposed, sometimes by force, the reopening of old landfills or plans to build new incinerators. Shipping waste out by train to German treatment plants or by boat to other Italian regions has not made enough of a dent in the backlog. Authorities accuse the Camorra of undermining efforts to resolve the crisis, one of several issues that helped Berlusconi to power in mid-April elections. News reports on Sunday said Berlusconi would likely use the army to confront the situation and that future dumping sites would remain secret to prevent protests.