Welcome to the first of a weekly series highlighting some of what I consider to be the more interesting news from Buenos Aires and Argentina. I find many new things every week and often want to blog about them, but realize that I don’t always have the time to get to them. Hopefully, with these posts, I can just give a quick summary and you can read the ones that interest you.
Maradona rubbed from Yahoo! web by Argentinian judge [The Register]
Following a judge’s temporary restraining order, all searches for Diego Maradona, Argentina’s most (in)famous soccer player, on Yahoo! Argentina have been blocked. Argentine judges have issued more than 100 search site restraining orders over the past two years in an attempt to expunge allegedly inappropriate references to some of the country’s most recognizable names. Most of these have been lead by one attorney who is effectively censoring the Internet.
Argentine Fans Hijack Public Buses To Go To Match [Reuters UK]
How much do Argentines love their soccer? Let’s just say that things often get a little crazy when soccer is involved and this latest story is no exception. On November 13, in two separate incidents, fans of an Argentine second division soccer team hijacked two public buses and ordered the drivers to take them to their team’s game.
Spare Change? There’s None in Buenos Aires [Time]
Time has a good article covering the shortage of coins in Buenos Aires and the problems it’s causing across the city. Many stores have “No Change” signs up, large grocery stores routinely round-off the total in their favor. So acute was the coin shortage, one day last month, that the Metrovias subway company was forced to open its turnstiles and let passengers ride for free after it ran out of change. Interesting article…
Argentina vetoes glacier law that curbed mining [Reuters]
Argentina’s president has vetoed a law that would have protected the country’s glaciers by restricting mining and oil drilling. The law, which was passed by Congress last month, was vetoed by President Cristina Fernandez. She issued a decree stating that governors in Andean provinces feared the glacier law could threaten economic development in their regions.
Al Jazeera focuses on Latin America [The Miami Herald]
The Buenos Aires office of Al Jazerra’s English service is dedicated to reporting the news from Latin America in a different way.
Brazil, Argentina Agree to Increase Import Taxes [Bloomberg]
As if imported good were not expensive enough here, Bloomberg is reporting that import taxes will be raised on various products including wine, peaches, canned foods, textiles, pasta and wooden furniture, from outside the Mercosur trading bloc.
Fiscal Crisis Gives Argentines Familiar Sinking Feeling [New York Times]
A growing number of Argentines are stockpiling dollars amid worries that their government’s economic policies have doomed them to yet another financial crisis.
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What’s with all the negative news? Geez, leave that back in the states already. Every time I hear an American bitching about this and that on the streets of BA I can’t help but think, “Go back home, nobody wants your weird energy down here anyways. I mean do your really think porteños give a flying fuck about what small-minded, god fearing, uneducated, McDonalds cultured Americans think anyways?
Negative news? I don’t see this as negative news, it’s a mater of knowing what’s going on in your surroundings. Knowing that spare change is hard to come by is important, as is the fact that the price of imported goods may rise. I hardly see any of those articles as negative.
And, by the way, lot of Americans do their best to assimilate to the culture here, and if you want to hear complaining, listen to a porteño talking politics or about the economy.
Awesome new feature. Thanks for all the great links to issues I have been wondering about, and others that I was not even aware of.
Karly – glad you like it. I'm going to keep updating it as I see new and interesting stories.