Portugal

Portugal will hold a national referendum today on legalizing abortion, an emotive issue in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country where there are worries not enough people will vote to validate a decision. The latest polls showed almost two out of three Portuguese favored lifting the ban, but in a similar referendum in 1998, more than half the 8.7 million electorate failed to vote, and the ban remained.

For years, Portuguese women seeking an abortion crossed over the border to Spain, where Yolanda Hernandez awaited. Now, Hernandez is coming to them. In the abortion business for nearly three decades, Hernandez is opening Portugal's first private abortion clinic. Sitting on the top of a hill just off an important Lisbon thoroughfare, Avenida da Liberdade, this imposing white building is no back-alley basement.

Washington, D.C. IN the 1400s, decades before the voyages of Christopher Columbus, sailors from little Portugal braved the oceans to map the world, carry back spices and other treasures, spread Christianity and set down an empire that would extend in the next two centuries from Africa to India to China to Brazil. The impact was enormous. Europe was inundated with images and objects from the outside world. And, from then on, the rest of the world would never escape the influence of Europe.

The case of missing 4-year-old Madeleine McCann, whose disappearance from a resort in Portugal sparked a celebrity-studded international campaign for her return, took a startling turn Friday when both parents were named suspects in the case.

A British couple named as suspects in the disappearance of their 4-year-old daughter have returned to England, days after being grilled by Portuguese police about new forensic evidence authorities believe ties them to the case. Kate and Gerry McCann flew from southern Portugal with their 2-year-old twins. On the airport tarmac in central England, Gerry McCann denied being involved in the disappearance of his 4-year-old daughter, Madeleine. "While it is heartbreaking to return to the U.K.

Except for the cellphone hitched to his belt, 79-year-old Jose Joaquin da Silva Perdigao has been harvesting cork in Portugal's forests in much the same way for more than half a century. Today, three generations of the Perdigao family work among the giant oaks, peeling the spongy bark that makes cork. The men (it's always men) use axes to split the bark in just the right place, tap it loose, and then with their bare hands pull off long, dark strips.

Down one of the narrow cobbled streets that lend Lisbon its antique flavor, a little piece of old Europe is feeling a modern pinch. Some of Portugal's most famous painters have shopped at the Casa Ferreira, a fine-arts supply store nestled for the last 80 years in a thick-walled, low-ceilinged building in the 16th century Bairro Alto quarter. Despite its pedigree, the family-owned store is going through hard times as it fights cheaper Chinese rivals that have poured into Europe in recent years.

When the Vatican looks out at the state of the Western European family, it is alarmed. It sees parents and children at the mercy of overly secular nations awash in laws and practices that liberalize evils, from abortion to gay marriage. Church officials now have another trend to fret about. Divorce has been marching ever upward everywhere in Europe, but nowhere more so than in the continent's three most Roman Catholic countries.

The England-versus-Portugal melodrama still sits one day off, yet already we have a winner. Rampaging and cunning, dreaded and loathed, able to puncture a defense like no force left in the World Cup, this winner is the astonishing British press, unbeaten for eons save for a tabloid lawsuit settlement here and there. Even Deco, the Portugese midfielder, noted the dynasty's ferocity.

Signing off into the emotional wilderness of another World Cup bummer summer, England seethed about a wink. The wink threatened to become the most-analyzed wink in history. By now, we've seen the wink in real time. We've seen the wink in still photographs. We've seen the wink on the BBC in slow motion, the eyelid descending ever so sloooowly until it covers the entire eyeball, then sloooowly rising to expose the eyeball.