November 27, 2007
Woman wins beauty contest despite sabotage
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (Reuters) - Someone doused her make-up and clothes with pepper spray, but Ingrid Marie Rivera put on a happy face and managed to win the beauty pageant that selected Puerto Rico's representative in the Miss Universe contest.
The 24-year-old from the town of Dorado was all smiles in front of the audience and judges during the competition, which ended on Friday when she beat 29 rivals. But backstage, she had to strip off her clothes and ice down her face and body to fight swelling and hives.
Pageant officials have vowed to get to the bottom of the attempted sabotage that tainted the pageant, an event that inspires passions in the U.S. Caribbean territory. Puerto Rico has produced five Miss Universe winners.
"It was a lot of sacrifice, and my tears were genuine," Rivera told reporters at a news conference on Sunday.
"At one point, I asked, 'Am I a masochist?' But I said regardless of the results, this is my goal. The more rocks there are in my path, the more thanks I will give to God for sustaining me."
Pageant organizers say they suspected a member of the team handling one of Rivera's competitors was responsible.
Magali Febles, director of the Miss Puerto Rico Universe Pageant, said the person behind the "vile act" was "from inside."
"I am going to investigate this until the final consequences. When we have everything, I will announce who the person is because someone with these instincts is capable of anything."
Organizers also said Rivera's bags, containing clothing and credit cards, were stolen, and that a bomb threat called in on Thursday forced the cancellation of some preliminary events. Police were investigating the bomb threat.
Beauty competitions are important stuff in Puerto Rico.
The ability to field a Miss Universe competitor from Puerto Rico, as well as Olympic sports teams, is a factor in the island's endless political debate, brought about by its status as a U.S. territory with aspects of a state and an independent country.
The events are widely watched, the winners are front page news and the local press is filled with speculation about favourites in the days prior to the competition.
Posted by ronnie at 07:41 PM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2007
Estonian minister announces language beauty contest
TALLINN (AFP) - Estonia is planning a beauty contest with a difference to mark its 90th birthday, according to a report Monday: the winner will be the world's prettiest language.
Education Minister Tonis Lukas wants his counterparts from around the world to get school pupils to enter recordings of sentences of up to seven words for the contest, the Baltic News Service (BNS) agency reported.
"There's a story that a world championship of beautiful languages was once held in which Estonian took second place after Italian with the sentence 'soida tasa ule silla', or 'go slowly over the bridge,'" Lukas said Monday.
"As part of the events for the anniversary of the republic, we're pleased to turn to other nations with a friendly call to check how our language sounds to others now," he added.
Estonian is a member of the Finno-Ugric group of languages and unrelated to most other European tongues.
It is spoken by only about 1.1 million people worldwide. Around 950,000 of them live in Estonia itself and many of the rest in neighbouring Finland and Russia, as well as Sweden, Germany, North America and Australia.
Preserving their language was a crucial part of Estonian opposition to foreign rule from the 19th century onwards, and remains an important plank of government policy.
Estonia is due to celebrate the 90th anniversary of its first period of independence from Russia on February 24 next year.
The country was taken over again by the Soviet Union during World War II, and became independent once more as the Moscow-ruled bloc crumbled in 1991.
Estonian is now an official language of the 27-nation European Union, which the country joined in 2004.
Posted by ronnie at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)