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Beirut Protesters Return to Streets

Thousands of Lebanese protesters have returned to Beirut’s streets, demanding that politicians take action to end the country’s rubbish crisis and calling on their leaders to step down.

Hundreds of activists on Sunday broke through police lines to rush to the Lebanese Parliament building demanding the government end the two-month-old crisis, Al Jazeera reported.

Mobilizing with the hashtag #You Stink, the movement has widened into protests against the political establishment.

Protester Neamat Badereddine said, “We do not want any more dumps; we need hygienic dumps with international standards that do not create cancerous diseases that kill the people.”

Thousands of tons of rubbish have been left on the streets of a city once known as the Paris of the Middle East.

The city’s main landfill hit capacity in July, and the government started piling rubbish on the Mediterranean coast on one of the Middle East’s most popular seafronts.

Lebanon’s Parliament is deeply divided and it has been unable to elect a president for more than a year. In addition, the country with a population of four million people has had to host nearly 1.5 million Syrian refugees.