Lebanese protesters just want the government to remove trash from the streets
Lebanese citizens took to the streets of Beirut on Saturday and Sunday to call for a fairly simple thing: trash removal. Garbage has been piling up in the streets since July, when protesters blocked the entrance to the nation's biggest landfill, which has exceeded its capacity.
"If we don't die from a bullet we will die from cancer from the trash smell," one protester in the "you stink" campaign told The New York Times.
Lebanese lawmakers have been at odds with each other to the point of what the Times calls "political paralysis," unable to even agree on a new president since May 2014, when the last leader's term expired.
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Prime Minister Tammam Salam is defending the rights of the protesters, whom cops have tear-gassed, and threatening to resign, which would likely add a new layer to the country's severe political turmoil.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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