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blog

Italy Announces A Bear Hunt, And The Public Growls

Italy Announces A Bear Hunt, And The Public Growls

Daniza doesn't read the newspapers or check social networks, so she probably has no idea that people are searching for her.

The brown bear made Italian headlines a few days ago after she wounded Daniele Maturi, 38, who was foraging for mushrooms in the woods in the heart of the Dolomite mountains. Maturi was bitten and scratched by the mother bear, reports La Repubblica, but he has since been released from hospital.

Alessandro Olivi, the vice president of the autonomous province of Trentino, signed an order for Daniza to be captured, but not killed, and a task force of 10 forest rangers was created for that purpose. The order has been met with public backlash, with thousands of emails being sent to the province's council, nearly 24,000 petition signatures gathered, not to mention the tweets and Facebook group support.

WWF Italia's Massimiliano Rocco was quoted as saying that capturing the bear would be a historic defeat for environmentalists, who reintroduced the bears back into the region from 1999 to 2001. Caterina Rosa Marino of the League for the Abolition of Hunting disputed the need for the capture, arguing that Maturi had stumbled across Daniza in "the only situation that is really dangerous: encountering a mother with her cubs."

Daniza may be a bear, but she's as sly as a fox, La Stampareports. Born in the Slovenian mountains 18 years ago, she has lived outside Trentino for the past 14.

File photo of a brown bear — Photo: Tambako the Jaguar

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Society

Brazil's Evangelical Surge Threatens Survival Of Native Afro-Brazilian Faith

Followers of the Afro-Brazilian Umbanda religion in four traditional communities in the country’s northeast are resisting pressure to convert to evangelical Christianity.

image of Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Abel José, an Umbanda priest

Agencia Publica
Géssica Amorim

Among a host of images of saints and Afro-Brazilian divinities known as orixás, Abel José, 42, an Umbanda priest, lights some candles, picks up his protective beads and adjusts the straw hat that sits atop his head. He is preparing to treat four people from neighboring villages who have come to his house in search of spiritual help and treatment for health ailments.

The meeting takes place discreetly, in a small room that has been built in the back of the garage of his house. Abel lives in the quilombo of Sítio Bredos, home to 135 families. The community, located in the municipality of Betânia of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco, is one of the municipality’s four remaining communities that have been certified as quilombos, the word used to refer to communities formed in the colonial era by enslaved Africans and/or their descendents.

In these villages there are almost no residents who still follow traditional Afro-Brazilian religions. Abel, Seu Joaquim Firmo and Dona Maura Maria da Silva are the sole remaining followers of Umbanda in the communities in which they live. A wave of evangelical missionary activity has taken hold of Betânia’s quilombos ever since the first evangelical church belonging to the Assembleia de Deus group was built in the quilombo of Bredos around 20 years ago. Since then, other evangelical, pentecostal, and neo-pentecostal churches and congregations have established themselves in the area. Today there are now nine temples spread among the four communities, home to roughly 900 families.

The temples belong to the Assembleia de Deus, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the World Church of God's Power, the latter of which has over 6,000 temples spread across Brazil and was founded by the apostle and televangelist Valdemiro Santiago, who became infamous during the pandemic for trying to sell beans that he had blessed as a Covid-19 cure. Assembleia de Deus alone, who are the largest pentecostal denomination in the world, have built five churches in Betânia’s quilombos.


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