'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013'

Hi

Using Python 2.3.4 + Feedparser 3.3 (a library to parse XML documents)

I'm trying to parse a UTF-8 document with special characters like
acute-accent vowels:
--------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
...
-------

But I get this error message:
-------
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u2013' in
position 122: ordinal not in range(128)
-------

when trying to execute a MySQL query:

----
query = "UPDATE blogs_news SET text = '" + text_extrated + "'WHERE
id='" + id + "'"
cursor.execute (query)  #<--- error line
----
I tried with:
-------
text_extrated = text_extrated.encode('iso-8859-1') #<--- error line
query = "UPDATE blogs_news SET text = '" + text_extrated + "'WHERE
id='" + id + "'"
cursor.execute (query)
-------
But I get this error:
------
UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode character u'\u2013'
in position 92: ordinal not in range(256)
-----
I also tried with:
----
text_extrated = re.sub(u'\u2013', '-' , text_extrated)
query = "UPDATE blogs_news SET text = '" + text_extrated + "'WHERE
id='" + id + "'"
cursor.execute (query)
-----
It works, but I don't want to substitute each special character,
because there are
always forgotten ones which can crack the program.
Any suggestion to fix it? Thank you very much.