Well, the Iraq situation is still rather on the back burner; the big news is the huge winter storm that has hit all of northern Spain, including interior Catalonia. Here in Barcelona it's about 7ºC and windy, a rather chill winter's day, but temperatures have fallen to -15ºC in the Pyrenees with snowfalls of up to 2 1/2 meters and winds as high as 200 km/h. The north winds (in northern Catalonia it comes straight out of the north and is called the tramuntana; in southern Catalonia it comes out of the northwest and is called the mistral) are one of the more unpleasant aspects of the Catalan winter, since they blow hard every day and never let up. Waves were four meters high at Roses, when the normal Mediterranean waves are like a foot high. The winds were so high that there was a major forest fire up in Santa Cristina that burned up 300 hectares--a soccer field is about half a hectare. 400 people had to be evacuated. The Valle de Arán up in the Pyrenees (nice place, worth a visit) is cut off since both the Vielha tunnel and the Bonaigua mountain pass are blocked off by the snow and the only way in and out is through France. Most of the high-altitude ski resorts have had to close down, both because the storm makes it impossible to ski and because no one could get there to ski anyway. (People in Barcelona love skiing. Good slopes are three hours or so by car from BCN. Some people go every weekend.)

I remember once taking a geography class that dealt partially with people's perceptions of geography. I had a good idea for a term paper, that of looking at the radio networks of various sports teams to see how far a city's influence extended. For example, if you look at a map of Missouri, the St. Louis Cardinals dominate most of the state; the Kansas City Royals have followers who care enough to listen to the games on radio only in the northwestern quarter of Missouri, the area that's more influenced by KC than by St. Louis. I just got the idea of looking at the cities listed in La Vanguardia's international weather report; the hypothesis is that the places listed are those of most importance for the Barcelonese. I've classified the cities:

European capitals: Andorra la Vella, Amsterdam, Athens, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dublin, Stockholm, Helsinki, Lisbon, London, Moscow, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Rome, Warsaw, Vienna.
European non-capitals: France: Chamonix, Lyon, Montpellier, Nice, Perpignan. Germany: Frankfurt, Munich. Switzerland: Geneva, Zurich. Italy: Milan, Naples, Turin.
North American cities: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Washington.
Latin American cities: Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana, Managua, Mexico City, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Santo Domingo, Sao Paulo.
Middle East / North Africa: Cairo, Istanbul, Rabat, Tunis.
Rest of world: Hong Kong, Manila, Nairobi, New Delhi, Tokyo.

It looks to me, then, as the Barcelona vision of the relative importance of places is, first, Catalonia, with weather reports for about 30 cities listed; then the rest of Spain, with about 50 cities on the list; then Europe, and especially France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany--the Balkans are not significant in Barcelona's eyes, with no city listed between Budapest and Athens, and neither is the former Soviet Union except for Moscow; then North America and Latin America--Latin America, with nine cities listed, is clearly important in the Barcelona view of the world, more so than it is to most people in most other European countries; then North Africa, close to Spain, with three cities listed. The rest of the world, Asia, Oceania, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, count little in the Barcelona worldview.