Uruguay's President Tabare Vazquez vetoed on Thursday a bill decriminalizing abortion passed earlier this week by Congress, said Tourist Minister Hector Lescano. The two Houses lack the three-fifths required vote to override the veto, he added.
Two clones of highly antibiotic-resistant organism strains, which previously had only been identified in the United States, have now been detected in several Colombian cities, say researchers at The University of Texas Medical School.
Economic activity is expected to fall by 0.9% in the United States in 2009, by 0.5% in the Euro area and by 0.1% in Japan as OECD countries enter a protracted slowdown, according to latest projections.
The Euro-zone has officially slipped into recession after EU figures showed that the economy shrank by 0.2% in the third quarter. This follows a 0.2% contraction in the 15-nation area in the previous quarter from April to June. Two quarters of negative growth define a technical recession.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged leaders of the G20 developed and emerging economies to resist calls for protectionism. Speaking in New York ahead of the weekend G 20 summit on the widening global financial crisis PM Brown said protectionism was the road to ruin.
United States retail sales fell 2.8% in October, the largest drop on record for the month and another sign that US consumers are clamping down amid the faltering economy, the Commerce Department reported Friday.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Chilean Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley signed Friday in London a Memorandum of Understanding on Educational Scholarships, the first of its kind and which will help increase the number of Chilean students in the UK.
Deutsche Bank anticipates a significant slowdown of the Uruguayan economy for 2009, with weakening domestic demand growth and investment plus fiscal deterioration. The German bank estimates that Uruguay's GDP will expand 10.5% in 2008 but fall back to 3% next year.
The Argentine Supreme Court ruled this week as unconstitutional an article of the trade unions law, which says that workers wishing to be elected as shop stewards must be card-carrying members of unions with legal status.
Thousands of Chilean public sector employees began a two-day strike on Tuesday to demand higher wages to counter the highest inflation in 14 years.