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Name: King Juan Carlos of Spain. Age: 75. Appearance: Barely regal.
King who? King Juan Carlos of Spain. Oh right. What's he done now? Given up his yacht.
Aww. Sad. Because he's getting too old to sail? No, it's not that kind of yacht. It's the other kind. The kind that's 136ft long, worth £18m and costs around £17,000 to refuel.
Ah. The kind a king gets. Yep, and the kind that, arguably, looks a little bit too lavish for the monarch of a country with a 27% unemployment rate. Especially when his popularity ratings have plummeted in the wake of a string of royal scandals and embarrassments.
British taxpayers are subsidising the controversial sport of traditional bullfighting in Spain to the tune of £13.5 million a year via European farm subsidies, a report has disclosed.
Common Agriculture Policy" payments worth more than £110 million a year are given to Spanish farmers using their pastures to rear fighting bulls and, the study concluded, "without such backing [bullfighting] would probably be on the brink of financial collapse".
Raul Romeva, a Catalan MEP involved in carrying out the research, has protested to the European Commission over the use of farm subsidies to support a blood sport that is declining in popularity...
Former imam spread sovereignty message and cultivated close links with regional parties
Spain’s intelligence services have ordered the deportation of a Moroccan citizen who was paid by the CDC Catalan nationalist party to fan sympathy for independence among Muslim communities in the region. National Intelligence Center (CNI) director Félix Sanz Roldán accused Noureddin Ziani, a Muslim leader, of “posing a threat to national security [...] and compromising Spain’s relations with other countries,” as stated in the deportation order...
David Cameron agreed to a meeting with one of Rupert Murdoch's senior executives that was arranged by the lobbyist now at the centre of the Jeremy Hunt scandal, The Independent on Sunday has learnt. ...
and more here: (1) http://ves.cat/be4l (2) http://ves.cat/be4m
Search engine company has said there has been a troubling increase in requests to remove political content from the internet...
If Spain’s governance model – based on a series of delicate compromises to reconcile different cultures and historical experiences – is so sensitive to any move in the direction of more centralisation, how easy will it be for the Eurozone to achieve fiscal federalism amongst 17 countries, with vastly different parliamentary and economic models, government structures, and cultural preferences?...
EVEN by the standards of euro-zone bail-outs, which are greeted with applause but swiftly fizzle, the rescue of Spain’s banks, announced on June 9th, was a disappointment.
Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy sent a text during eurozone bailout negotiations which said: "Spain is not Uganda." So how do the two compare?
The rescue operation of the Spanish banks is rather a foreign banks' bailout.
US and British banking sectors are by far the most exposed to Spain...
D'entrada, cal dir que és rellevant i gens menyspreable que el PP miri a les illes britàniques i fins i tot temi que els catalans siguin capaços ...
Germany has said that outside inspectors will supervise the eurozone’s €100bn emergency loans for Spanish banks, just like other financial bailouts over the past two years, despite Madrid’s insistence that it would escape the onerous conditions...
The dramatic €100bn (£81bn) bailout for Spain's struggling banks was under immediate pressure yesterday as sceptical bond markets turned on Madrid and the European Central Bank urged more action on clearing up billions in sour property debt.
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Barcelona (ACN).- On Friday, the Spanish Government approved its Education Reform, which aims to make Spanish a teaching language in Catalonia and reduces the Autonomous Communities’ power to manage the education system. The Spanish Government will pay for the cost of a privately-owned school for a pupil wanting to have Spanish as their teaching language.
Later Madrid will deduct the amount from the money transfers funding the Catalan Government, which will indirectly make the Catalan Executive pay for the private school.
In addition, the new law states that the Spanish Government is to decide on the curricula of the main subjects, such as History. On top of this, tests will be set at the end of the school stages and their contents will be exclusively decided from Madrid. Since the tests will be the same for the whole of Spain, items regarding Catalan culture, geography or history will not enter into the final examinations and therefore will be de facto considered as secondary.
On top of this, the new law gives more weight to the subject of Religion – understood as Catholicism – and makes it count for the grade average of pupils studying in the public school system of a non-denominational state.
The greater the stubbornness of Spain’s centralists, the greater the determination of those who wish to build a free and full statehood.
I represent the pro-independence Catalan Republican Left in Spain’s Congress. Part of my job, therefore, is trying to explain and sustain our quest for social justice and for Catalan Freedom in the Spanish Parliament. It is not an easy job, not only because the two main Spanish parties are against such ideas, but also because they oppose the notion of self-determination itself...
September 1975. Franco has signed his last death sentences. In Sweden an 8 year old boy took part in his first ever demonstration. On TV he had heard prime minister Olof Palme calling the Franco regime "Satan`s murderes" and predicting that " the historical veredict will be terribly harsh".
In MARI CARMEN- THE END OF SILENCE that boy and his friend travel around Spain 30 years later, trying to understand the trauma of a country they love. The ask questions about a past was swept under the carpet by a pact of silence...
More info: http://maricarmen-endofsilence.blogspot.com.es/
L'esclat de la bombolla immobiliària a Espanya ha deixat un paisatge amb milers de vivendes a mig fer i prop d'un milió d'habitatges nous sense vendre. Es podrà digerir aquest estoc?
[GT] The rescue of Spanish banks had not been openly acknowledged by the government of Mariano Rajoy, when the English media and publishing it on their front pages, along with photographs showing a president and a minister of Economy offside. The analysis carried out by foreign-English major headings in this case helps to see the full picture of authentic Spanish economic situation.
I don’t doubt you must be amazed by the way the Spanish politicians, especially the Spanish Government, behave. In spite of the serious crisis that overburdens us all, they all act in an utmost lack of responsibility. A lack which is causing important problems all of us must try to fix. Yet, I can’t say I’m amazed in the least, as I’ve been enduring this for decades. Such behaviour, so strange to you, isn’t at all strange to me. The citizens of Catalonia, the Valencian Country, and the Balearic Islands have been enduring their strange behaviour for ages. As an example, I’ll simply tell you that while they keep building High Speed Trains leading to small and remote towns, Barcelona and Valencia are still linked by an one-track railway. And yet, the area encompassing both cities contributes the 55% of the spanish GDP and holds as much as the 60% of the merchandise traffic...
Investors have concluded that the rescue could be a better deal for the banks and their shareholders than for the government, taxpayers and bondholders.
THAT WAS QUICK. Over the weekend, European leaders announced a $125 billion package to recapitalize Spain’s banking system. On Monday morning, financial markets reacted positively, seemingly accepting official assurances that, this time, Europe had finally put a big enough plan in place to handle the financial challenge du jour — and had done so in a timely manner...
A representative of a Spanish supporters' group has admitted that "about 200" fans racially abused Mario Balotelli during Spain's game against Italy in Gdansk on Sunday.
The latest European bailout has not calmed anyone’s nerves, with good reason. The next potential calamity is just days away.
A jubilee visit by Britain’s Prince Edward and his wife to Gibraltar has angered Madrid.
The Spanish bailout has been seized upon by the radical left in Greece as proof that the crisis-hit country can renegotiate the strict conditions attached to its financial rescue – the central issue in the upcoming elections.
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