Word: shantytowns
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...inferno kills hundreds and devastates a teeming shantytown...
...only a small courtesy, but it changed the young man's life. One day in a black shantytown near Johannesburg, South Africa, Primary Schoolteacher Desmond Mpilo Tutu saw a white man respectfully tip his hat to a black woman. Tutu had never seen a white make such a gesture. The woman was Tutu's mother; the white was the Rev. Trevor Huddleston, now an Anglican bishop. The priest subsequently befriended the young black, and after Tutu was hospitalized in 1953 for tuberculosis, Huddleston visited him daily for 20 months. Tutu, profoundly impressed, followed his white friend into...
...death toll from a devastating fire last Feb. 25 in the shantytown-or favela-of Vila Soco, in the southern Brazilian town of Cubatao, was simply too low. Only 86 bodies were recovered after a gasoline-fed blaze exploded into a giant fireball that looked like an atomic mushroom cloud. Yet some 9,000 people lived in Vila SocÓ, a patchwork of wooden shacks built on stilts over a marshy swamp. Coroner Carlos Affonso Figueiredo found it strange that no bodies of children under five years of age had been discovered among the ashes and in the hot rubble...
...causing a leak in the pipeline that ran next to Vila SocÓ. Investigators contend that Petrobrás failed to monitor a pressure buildup on the line and stop the leak. At the time of the explosion, shortly after midnight, gasoline had spread throughout many ditches of the shantytown, creating a liquid bomb that awaited only ignition. Petrobrás admitted human error in the accident and has agreed to pay hospital costs and damages for the survivors...
...various left-wing political and union organizers. Over loudspeakers, union leaders exhorted the crowds with revolutionary slogans. Leaflets passed out by the Peruvian Communist Party protested hunger and misery and stated the party's demands for job stability and the control of fuel and food prices. In one shantytown south of the city, small bands of youths flung rocks at bus windows. Almost all of Peru's privately owned buses stayed off the roads, making it difficult for many people to get to work. At least one-third of the work force in 16 cities decided to stay...