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Tag: Brazil

  • Tragic Crash Was A Near Miss For Many At Brazil Soccer Club

    Tragic Crash Was A Near Miss For Many At Brazil Soccer Club

    For soccer striker Alejandro Martinuccio, the surgery on his right knee two months ago was a tough blow, keeping him off the field as his small Brazilian team, Chapecoense, pulled off surprise wins against top clubs from his native Argentina.

    But in the end, the surgery saved more than Martinuccio’s knee. It saved his life.

    After most of his teammates died in a plane crash in Colombia on Monday (Nov 28) on their way to the final of the Sudamericana Cup, Martinuccio is one of a handful of players and staff at Chapecoense coming to terms with their escape from the same fate.

    “If I’d been healthy, I would have gone to the match,” Martinuccio said, adding that it could take days to understand what had happened.

    “The fact that I wasn’t there, it’s very tough. It’s too much for my head.”

    Of the 77 people on the charter flight, only two crew members, a journalist, and three members of the Chapecoense squad survived after the plane crashed into a wooded hillside outside Medellin.

    Psychologists counselling the club and surviving relatives in Chapeco say it may take far longer than just a few days for those left behind to work through feelings of relief, sorrow and guilt.

    “Missing the flight is also a kind of trauma,” said Andre Pessoa, a psychologist from a local university volunteering his services to the team. “On the one hand, those people may be relieved at not being on that plane, but the suffering may be as bad as if they had been.”

    For some, their absence was a simple accident. The son of coach Caio Junior was left behind in Sao Paulo because he forgot his passport.

    Eliandra Valer, girlfriend of the team’s security chief, had just travelled with the team to Argentina using her Brazilian ID, but she lacked a passport for the trip to Colombia.

    “I was planning to go, but I was unlucky with the passport – or I guess I was lucky… ,” she said, choking back sobs. “I don’t know what to think.”

    Former coach Vinicius Eutropio had left the team last year.

    “It makes you think about the value of your life, if there’s any meaning to when you go and when you stay,” Eutropio said.

    Claudio Winck, a defender whom the coach left out of the travelling team, said he struggled to get to sleep after spending Tuesday imagining what could have been.

    “I lay there with my head on the pillow just thinking of my teammates,” he said. “We all wanted to play in that final.”

     

    Source: The Straits Times

  • Saiyidah Aisyah Catat Prestasi Terbaik Walaupun Gagal Ke Peringkat Separuh Akhir

    Saiyidah Aisyah Catat Prestasi Terbaik Walaupun Gagal Ke Peringkat Separuh Akhir

    Pendayung negara, Saiyidah Aisyah Rafa’ee yang berlumba di lorong kelima gagal mara ke separuh akhir acara scull perseorangan.

    Aisyah menamatkan perlumbaan suku akhir pertama yang bermula sekitar 8.10 malam tadi (9 Ogos) di kedudukan terakhir di tempat ke-6 dengan catatan masa 7 minit 56 saat.

    Meksipun gagal melangkah ke separuh akhir, catatan masa Saiyidah dalam perlumbaan ini lebih baik daripada prestasinya di peringkat saringan iaitu 8 minit 44.71 saat.

    Apa pun, penyertaan Saiyidah ini merupakan satu detik bersejarah kerana beliau merupakan pendayung negara yang pertama bertanding di Sukan Olimpik.

    Source: http://berita.mediacorp.sg

  • Did Supermodel Gisele Bundchen Go In Burqa To Clinic For Breast Job?

    Did Supermodel Gisele Bundchen Go In Burqa To Clinic For Breast Job?

    Supermodel Gisele Bundchen is a laughing stock among fellow Brazilians for an apparent boob job.

    She is being ridiculed not so much for the boob job, as plastic surgery is common in Brazil.

    The supermodel received the flak because she hid under an all-covering burqa as she walked into the clinic, reported New York Post.

    It showed the model mum, 35, wearing the burqa to disguise herself while entering the plastic surgeon’s office in Paris last month.

    She was with her sister Rafaela, who was also wearing a burqa.

    Sources told the New York Post that after Gisele and Ms Rafaela posed as devout Muslims to secretly enter the clinic, they both underwent overnight surgical procedures.

    The two were seen wearing open-toed sandals in the photos, which some Muslim women consider inappropriate in public, reported the Daily Mail.

    Some Brazilians went online to criticise her hypocrisy.

    “She went through all this trouble just so she could say that her beauty is absolutely ‘natural’, ” said Paulo, commenting on a Brazilian news website.

    “It’s laughable!”

    The world’s highest paid supermodel had previously said there was “no way” she would ever consider plastic surgery.

    “I have never had plastic surgery, nor have I ever felt the need to do any kind of intervention,” she had said in 2011, when asked about rumours of a nose job.

    Bundchen, who took to social media on Friday for the first time since the burqa episode by posting an Instagram photo of herself in a yoga pose, has not commented on the incident yet.

    Last year, more than two million Brazilians – roughly 1 per cent of the country’s total population – had plastic surgery, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery.

     

    Source: www.tnp.sg

  • HSBC To Cut Jobs Globally To Focus On Asia

    HSBC To Cut Jobs Globally To Focus On Asia

    HSBC will slash as many as 50,000 jobs worldwide in an effort to streamline its businesses and improve its sluggish performance as it shifts its focus back to fast-growing Asian economies, Europe’s biggest bank said yesterday.

    About half of the staff cuts will come from the sale of HSBC’s businesses in Brazil and Turkey, while the other half will come from cutting about 10 per cent of the remaining 233,000 staff by consolidating IT and back-office operations, and closing branches. About 7,000 to 8,000 of the workforce reduction are expected to be in Britain, where it is based.

    When asked by TODAY, Mr Daniel Fitzpatrick, head of HSBC Singapore’s corporate communications, declined to comment on whether there would be any job cuts or gains in Singapore. The bank, which has been in Singapore since 1877, employs about 3,000 people here, its website shows.

    The global workforce reduction exercise is part of a second attempt by HSBC chief executive Stuart Gulliver to boost profits since he took the helm at the start of 2011. The previous effort was foiled by high compliance costs, fines, low interest rates and weak growth.

    The cuts will leave HSBC with about 208,000 staff by 2017, down from 258,000 at the end of last year, though the bank said it would be hiring in growth businesses and its compliance division.

    HSBC also said it will cut its assets on a risk-adjusted basis by US$290 billion (S$392 billion) by 2017. That will include a reduction of US$140 billion in the Global Banking and Markets division, its investment bank, where returns have suffered in tough market conditions.

    HSBC also lowered its target for return on equity to “greater than 10 per cent” by 2017, down from a previous target of 12 to 15 per cent by next year. Overall, HSBC aims to cut costs by between US$4.5 billion and US$5 billion by the end of 2017.

    A key tenet of HSBC’s strategy unveiled yesterday is to expand its presence in China and across the Asia-Pacific region. HSBC has a sizeable presence across Asia deriving from its deep historic ties to the region.

    It was founded in Hong Kong in 1865 when the city was a British colony in order to finance growing trade between China and Europe.

    “Asia is expected to show high growth and become the centre of global trade over the next decade,’’ said Mr Gulliver.

    HSBC’s plans to accelerate its investments in Asia will involve the expansion of its asset management and insurance businesses in a bid to earn more profits from the region’s rapidly expanding class of newly wealthy.

    In particular, the bank is planning to expand in southern China’s Pearl River Delta manufacturing hub in southern Guangdong province, which is next door to Hong Kong and one of the wealthiest regions in the world’s No 2 economy.

    It is also planning a similar expansion exercise in South-east Asia, where booming economic growth in countries such as Indonesia is swelling the ranks of the middle classes.

    The Asian pivot raises the likelihood that HSBC will shift its headquarters to Hong Kong.

    HSBC has set out criteria it will use to evaluate whether to move its headquarters from London, where a bank levy cost the lender £700 million (S$1.45 billion) last year. These include factors such as economic growth, the tax system, government support for the growth of the banking system, long-term stability, and the possibility of attracting good staff.

    The bank said it would complete the review of the possible move by the end of this year.

     

    Source: www.todayonline.com

  • Brazil And Netherlands Recall Ambassadors From Indonesia As Their Citizens

    Brazil And Netherlands Recall Ambassadors From Indonesia As Their Citizens

    Brazil and the Netherlands recalled their ambassadors from Indonesia and expressed fury Sunday after Jakarta defied their pleas and executed two of their citizens along with four other drug offenders.

    The other convicts to face a firing squad were from Vietnam, Malawi, Nigeria and Indonesia. The six were the first people executed under new President Joko Widodo.

    Indonesia has tough anti-drugs laws and Widodo, who took office in October, has disappointed rights activists by voicing support for capital punishment despite his image as a reformist.

    He defended the executions, saying drugs ruin lives.

    A spokesman for Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said she was “distressed and outraged” after Indonesia ignored her last-ditch pleas and put to death Marco Archer Cardoso Moreira, who was convicted of smuggling cocaine into Indonesia in 2004.

    “Using the death penalty, which is increasingly rejected by the international community, seriously affects relations between our countries,” the spokesman said in a statement.

    The Brazilian ambassador to Jakarta was being recalled for consultations, the spokesman added.

    Meanwhile Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders said the Netherlands had also recalled its ambassador over the execution of Dutchman Ang Kiem Soei, and in a statement described all six deaths as “terribly sad”.

    “My heart goes out to their families, for whom this marks a dramatic end to years of uncertainty,” Koenders said. “The Netherlands remains opposed to the death penalty.”

    Dutch King Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Mark Rutte had been in contact with the Indonesian president about the matter, he said, and the government had done “all in its power” to try to halt the execution.

    – In line with law –

    Widodo on Sunday defended the death penalty in a Facebook post.

    “The war against the drug mafia should not be half-hearted measures, because drugs have really ruined the good life of the drug users and their families,” he said.

    “There is no happiness in life to be gained from drug abuse. The country must be present and fight with drug syndicates head-on,” he added.

    “A healthy Indonesia is Indonesia without drugs.”

    All the prisoners, who had been sentenced to death between 2000 and 2011, were executed shortly after midnight, the attorney general’s office said.

    The 53-year-old Brazilian, who was caught with drugs stashed in the frame of his paraglider at Jakarta airport, and the 62-year-old Dutchman were executed on Nusakambangan Island, home to a high-security prison, off the main island of Java.

    A Nigerian, Daniel Enemuo; Namaona Denis, from Malawi; and an Indonesian woman, Rani Andriani, were executed at the same location.

    The sixth convict, Vietnamese woman Tran Thi Bich Hanh, was executed in the Boyolali district in central Java.

    They were all caught attempting to smuggle narcotics apart from the Dutchman, who was sentenced to death for operating a huge factory producing the drug ecstasy.

    All had their appeals to the president for clemency rejected last month.

    Vietnamese foreign ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh said Hanoi had asked Indonesia “to ensure Vietnamese citizens’ legal rights and consider reducing their sentences in a humanitarian way” since Hanh’s arrest in 2011. But it was unclear whether they had asked for her sentence to be commuted.

    Vietnam also uses the death penalty for drug offences and has sentenced dozens of foreigners over such crimes, although it has been decades since a foreign national was executed in the communist country.

    Jakarta had an unofficial moratorium on executions for several years from 2008 but resumed capital punishment again in 2013. There were no executions last year.

    Widodo, known by his nickname Jokowi, has taken a particularly hard line towards people on death row for narcotics offences, insisting they will not receive a presidential pardon since Indonesia is facing an “emergency” over drug use.

    Following Sunday’s executions, the number of people on death row for drugs-related offences stood at 60, around half of whom are foreigners, said a spokesman for the national narcotics agency.

    Widodo’s tough stance has sparked concern for other foreigners sentenced to death, particularly two Australians who were part of the “Bali Nine” group caught trying to smuggle heroin out of Indonesia in 2005.

    One of the pair, Myuran Sukumaran, also had his clemency appeal rejected last month but authorities say he will be executed with fellow Australian Andrew Chan as they committed their crime together.

    Chan is still awaiting the outcome of his clemency appeal.

    Also on death row is British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford. She was sentenced to death in 2013 after being caught trying to smuggle cocaine into Bali.

     

    Source: https://sg.news.yahoo.com