| Argentina |
Argentina Upset
Spain in Women's Basketball Worlds. [People's Daily Online, China] Argentina
made a surprise on Wednesday, beating Spain 77-64 in a second round match of Group A at
the women's basketball world championship in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Led by manager Eduardo
Pinto, Argentina showed smart tactics alongside their traditional aggression. Being
considered the weakest in the group because of its only third world championship after two
decades of absence, Argentina held the hosts Brazil in their opener neck-and-neck until
the closing minutes, and lost by merely two points 71-69.
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Bolivia |
- Election of Evo
Morales is Reshaping Women's Fashions. [San Jose Mercury News] Legions of
indigenous women, known popularly as cholitas, have faced a dilemma in this impoverished
country, where moving up has often meant abandoning native customs. Now, however, their
once-shunned fashion is winning new respect as Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian who became Bolivia's
first indigenous president in January, leads a cultural revival.
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| Brazil |
Brazilian
Traffic Warden Kills, Saws Woman in Half. [The Register] Those readers who
believe the UK's traffic wardens are the emissaries of Satan should count themselves lucky
that they don't live in Rio de Janeiro's Botafogo district - where infractions of local
bylaws can have fatal consequences. That's what 51-year-old businesswoman Edna Souza found
out after she got into a scrap with a "parking attendant" when she "left
her car in front of a building where parking was banned", The Scotsman reports. Not
content with slapping a penalty notice on the vehicle, the unnamed 29-year-old male later
went to the house Souza was trying to rent in the upmarket Rio district, killed her, sawed
her in half, and dumped 50% of his victim at the municipal tip.
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- Brazil Beat South
Korea in Women's Basketball Championship. [People's Daily Online, China] Brazil
defeated South Korea 106-86 in the FIBA Women's World Basketball Championship at the
Ibirapuera Arena, in the city of Sao Paulo on Wednesday. It was first time Brazil hit the
century mark in a FIBA World Championship for Women. South Korean Yeon Ha Boeon scored
game-high 25 points while Iziane Marques, who currently plays for the Seattle Storm at the
WNBA, was Brazil's leading scorer, with 21 points.
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- Divas
of Daspu. [Financial Express.bd, Bangladesh] Sex workers in Brazil have found
a voice. And this is a space they created for themselves, with at least two initiatives
having made an impression on both the media and popular imagination. The Little Surfer
Girl blog set up by 'Bruna' (née Raquel Peixoto), 21, is one. And the other is the
release of a clothing label called 'Daspu' by a group of sex workers from the NGO, Davida,
a sex workers' collective.
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Brazil, Spain
Qualify for Women's Basketball Quarter-Finals. [People's Daily Online, China] Brazil
and Spain booked their tickets to the quarter-finals of the women's world basketball
championship on Monday, in the second phase of the tournament that runs until Saturday in
the Brazilian cities of Sao Paulo and Barueri. Brazil battered Canada 82-41 but despite
its triumph, the team left the basketball field worried, due to the third-quarter ankle
injury sustained by veteran player Janeth, who began treatment immediately. She told media
she hopes to be ready for Wednesday's match, against a rival to be decided on Monday, by a
Group F final in Barueri's Jose Correa Gymnasium.
|
Chile |
Santiago,
Chile. [New York Times] With the election this year of Michelle Bachelet as
president of Chile (South America’s only female head of state), a robust economy and
a construction boom that has added some 28 miles of subway since 2004, Santiago feels like
a city on a purposeful march. A free trade agreement that Chile signed with the United
States in 2003 has further accelerated the Chilean capital’s emergence as a global
financial hub.
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- The
Most Powerful Women In Politics. [Forbes] Michelle Bachelet, a moderate
socialist who is Chile’s first female president and only the second woman ever
elected to lead a South American nation, was sworn in last March. Reformer Ellen
Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female president on the African continent, now runs Liberia and
is helping to put Charles Taylor, the disgraced former president, on trial for war crimes
and crimes against humanity related to the conflict in Sierra Leone. And Han Myung-sook, a
former dissident who was once jailed as a political prisoner, became South Korea’s
first female prime minister in April.
|
Chile
To Distribute Plan B Emergency Contraceptive at No Cost. [Kaiser network.org]
Chilean Health Minister Maria Soledad Barria earlier this month announced that the
government will distribute Barr Laboratories' emergency contraceptive Plan B -- which can
prevent pregnancy if taken up to 72 hours after sexual intercourse -- in public clinics to
girls ages 14 and older at no cost and without parental consent, the Christian Science
Monitor reports. Plan B since 2001 has been available in pharmacies in Chile by
prescription, and it also has been available to teenagers with parental consent. However,
Plan B -- which costs about $20 in the country -- has only been accessible to the middle
and upper classes, some people say. According to the Monitor, the government initially
planned to announce the "universal distribution" of the pill last year but
delayed the announcement after a "flurry of public protest" and the beginning of
a presidential election. The government recently lowered the age limit for Plan B in light
of changes to Chilean law -- which include lowering the age of criminal responsibility
from 16 to 14 and lowering the age of sexual consent to 14 -- and in response to recent
statistics. According to the National Institute for Youth, 14% of Chilean girls become
pregnant by age 14; 28% of Chilean teenage girls engage in sexual activity by age 14; and
about 40,000 infants are born to girls ages 19 and younger annually, the Monitor reports.
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Colombia |
- Vatican
Slams Raped Colombian Girl's Abortion. [The Taipei Times] A Vatican official has said
the Catholic church will excommunicate a medical team who performed Colombia's first legal
abortion on an 11-year-old girl, who was eight weeks pregnant after being raped by her
stepfather. Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical
Council for the Family, said in addition to the doctors and nurses, the measure could
apply to "relatives, politicians and lawmakers" whom he called
"protagonists in this abominable crime." The girl, whose identity has not been
released, had "fallen in the hands of evildoers," the cardinal said in an
interview with local television on Tuesday.
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- Entrepreneur Uses
Bra Strap Idea to Help Colombian Women. [Centre Daily Times] The tiny beads
look delicate: shades of pale pink, blue and green hand strung and sewn together to form
dainty straps for lingerie. But they're stronger than they appear, much like the women who
spend hours hand making them in South America for Strappity-do-da. The fledgling business
is a labor of love started by a woman desperate to help her husband's family get out of
poverty in Colombia, a developing nation with a bloody, violent history marked by drug
running and guerrillas.
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- Drug
Lord's Girlfriend Tells Her Story. [The Associated Press] If history's most
notorious drug trafficker was such a low-life, how did he manage to seduce a sophisticated
socialite who was a superstar model, actress and TV hostess? The question has been
obsessing Colombians ever since the late Pablo Escobar's former lover surfaced in the
United States in July and held up an unflattering mirror to Colombian society by detailing
alleged ties between the elite and organized crime.
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- Video
of Girls' Abuse Angers Colombians. [The Associated Press] Police officers are
being investigated for allegedly shooting a video of two girls being sexually abused by a
man, evidence they intended to use against him in court but which instead sparked a public
outcry after the tape was released to the media. Local television stations on Thursday
aired a brief part of the explicit video, in which a shirtless, middle-aged man is being
handcuffed while growling into the camera that he had been entrapped. The alleged abuse of
the two girls, both under the age of 11, took place in Momil, 330 miles northwest of Bogota,
police said. It was not clear when the crime took place. Three police officers and their
commander who released the video were being investigated for their conduct, said Sgt.
Alberto Cantillo, a spokesman for the national police.
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- Displaced
Women Build New Lives, Brick by Brick. [IPS] "The City of Women",
in the northern Colombian municipality of Turbaco, 11 kilometers from the fortified walls
of this tourist resort city, bears no resemblance to Federico Fellini's 1980 film by the
same name, or to the similarly dubbed Buenos Aires neighborhood of Puerto Madero, where
almost all the streets and public spaces are named for famous women.
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