Page 11 - ATD21NOV2015

WORLD NEWS A11
Saturday 21 November 2015

Portugal allows same- Thousands take part in black

sex adoption, artificial women’s march in Brazil

insemination BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) —

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — Portugal’s Parliament has ap- Thousands of black women
proved laws allowing same-sex couples to legally adopt
children and permitting lesbians to obtain medically as- from across Brazil marched
sisted fertilization.
Left-of-center parties used their outright parliamentary on the nation’s capital on
majority to ensure the bills passed Friday. The Social-
ist Party, Communist Party and Left Bloc had promised Wednesday to call atten-
those measures during their campaigns for last month’s
general election. tion to the pervasive vio-
Parliament in 2013 approved a law allowing gay mar-
ried couples to adopt their partners’ children but reject- lence and discrimination
ed legislation granting gay couples the same adoption
rights as heterosexuals.q they suffer.

UN: 729 human Organizers described the
rights activists slain
in Colombia since 1994 march, which brought sev-

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — The United Nations says 729 eral thousand participants
human rights activists have been killed in Colombia in
the past two decades. That’s an average of nearly three to a lawn in front of Con-
a month.
A statement from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human gress, as the first of its kind.
Rights’ office in Colombia says 30 activists were slain
this year through September. It adds that 20 more have A scuffle broke out af- A group of women pose for an usie during a march by black
been the targets of attempted murder in 2015. women to protest the violence and discrimination they say they
The statement says an “insecure and hostile environ- ter march participants suffer, in Brasilia, Brazil, Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2015.
ment” persists for rights workers in the Andean nation,
with authorities unable to guarantee their safety. clashed with a separate Associated Press
The figures are being published as talks on ending Co-
lombia’s half century-old internal conflict enter their third group urging the impeach-
year. The government saying it expects them to wrap up
in early 2016. ment of embattled Presi- which saw thousands of teens. Another recent so-
The chief prosecutor’s office responded Friday by saying women go public with ac- cial media campaign saw
investigating violence against activists is a priority.q dent Dilma Rousseff. counts of the first time they prominent male editorial-
experienced sexual harass- ists turn over their columns
Study: Poverty in A report in the Folha de ment — most as very young to female counterparts for
adolescents or even pre- a day.q
Venezuela at 73 S.Paulo newspaper said

percent of households three lawmakers were hit

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — A study estimates poverty by police pepper spray as
in Venezuela has hit an all-time high of some 73 percent
of households. they stepped in between
The report says that’s up from about 27 percent in 2013
and 48 percent in 2014. the two sides. Globo tele-
It was prepared by researchers at three Venezuelan uni-
versities on the basis of surveys with 6,000 people in the vision network’s Internet
nation of 30 million.
Poverty rates plummeted during the first years of Venezu- portal G1 said two police
ela’s 16-year-old socialist revolution under the late Presi-
dent Hugo Chavez. q were detained after they

shot into the air.

Valdecir Nascimento,

one of the organizers of

Wednesday’s march, said

it was intended as a re-

sponse to the “vulnerabil-

ity and fragility” that Bra-

zil’s more than 57 million

black and mixed race

women face on a daily

basis.

Studies have shown that

in Brazil, black women are

more likely to die in child-

birth and become victims

of homicide than their

white counterparts. They

are also twice as likely as

white women to be illiter-

ate, according to the na-

tional statistics agency,

and on average they earn

less than white women or

men of either race.

Wednesday’s demonstra-

tion came amid a recent

tide of feminist campaigns

in Brazil, including a social

media-based campaign

called #myfirstharassment,