News stories by Humberto Márquez, page 7

'My daughter was brutally tortured, intimate parts of her body were beaten, her head was put in gas-filled bags and electric shocks were applied all over her body,' Vidalina Vera, the mother of Wilmary Brizuela, told the Venezuelan Attorney General's Office.

Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of the Globovisión television channel has fled Venezuela to avoid an arrest warrant issued by a court a week after President Hugo Chávez complained that Zuloaga was not being held in prison pending trials for illegal business practices, and for remarks that were deemed 'offensive' to the president.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of basic foods rotted in the last year in shipping containers belonging to the Venezuelan government. Fully two-thirds of the food consumed by Venezuela's 27 million inhabitants is imported.

Yet another violent string of violent deaths in Venezuela’s prisons, along with the dire living conditions in many of them, have caught the attention of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which is demanding that the government adopt urgent measures.

Political sectors opposed to the Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chávez have elected 22 candidates in primaries, and selected another 143 by consensus, to compete in September for the 165 seats in the single-chamber parliament.

After years of paltry wages as a piecework seamstress, Elisa Manrique finally has the chance to leave the informal sector and poverty behind. Thanks to a small business loan from the Venezuelan government, she and a group of other women - including some of her daughters and a daughter-in-law - have been able to set up their own sewing cooperative.

Men and women of the Yanomami people paint their bodies, drawing straight, curved, dotted and parallel lines, arcs and circles, triangles, rectangles, grids, spider's webs or rings, all arranged as if on a checkerboard.

The arrest of eight Colombians in Venezuela, allegedly for espionage, further heightened the political and diplomatic tensions that have existed between the governments of the two neighbouring countries over the past year.

Shortly after it informed the world of the discovery of three new species of frogs, the environmental organisation Fundación Andígena closed its doors in Venezuela this month due to lack of financial support.

Venezuelan opposition leader Oswaldo Álvarez Paz will remain in police custody in the state intelligence service (SEBIN) until his trial, a local judge ruled Wednesday, on the grounds that he was a flight risk.