Baffin Bay, Canada
Inuits vs. bears: The international push to ban sport hunting of polar bears is hurting Inuit villages and not helping the bears, Inuit leaders said this week. The EU recently joined the U.S. in banning its citizens from bringing home polar bear pelts, and as a result, sport hunting in Canada’s far north is down dramatically. “The ban will devastate the industry, probably kill it,” Inuit hunter Titus Allooloo tells Maclean’s. But just as many bears will be killed, he says, because the Inuit will still meet their hunting quota. They simply will kill more bears themselves, rather than charging European and American hunters up to $50,000 per hunting trip.
Havana
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Build your own house: Communist Cuba has lifted the decades-old ban on private property in order to allow people to build their own homes. Cuba has a chronic housing shortage because government building programs are notoriously slow and often lack construction materials. For each of the past three years, the state planned to build 100,000 homes but only completed about 50,000. Last year’s hurricanes exacerbated the shortage by destroying a half-million homes. “What has to be done here is build hundreds of thousands of houses,” President Raúl Castro said this week. “Let them put up their house however they can.” But he did not say where citizens were supposed to find construction materials.
Santa Cruz, Bolivia
How to get deported: A Brazilian woman was sent home from Bolivia last week after she stripped naked at the foot of a statue of Jesus in a town square. Juliana Lima, 25, actually was hoping to be deported, because she had run out of money to pay her way home. She had spent several months in Bolivia searching, she says, for her father. She had stripped once before and was detained but released, so she returned to the monument and stripped a second time, this time causing a traffic jam. Immigration officials drove her to the Brazilian border, and the Brazilian Consulate gave her money to catch a bus.
Posadas, Argentina
Yellow fever scare: Argentina began a mass vaccination against yellow fever this week, after two people died of the mosquito-borne virus. In Misiones province, where the outbreak occurred, Gov. Maurice Fabián Closs has ordered 1.2 million doses of vaccine to immunize all residents. Closs said those who resist getting their shots are showing “an alarming lack of awareness.” Yellow fever, also known as black vomit, can cause fatal hemorrhaging and kidney failure. It is most common among monkeys, and usually spreads to humans only after they’ve traveled in jungles where monkeys live.
