The Vangua leads off today with the story about Iraq destroying some weapons of mass destruction. Yeah, right. Somebody remind me of when the last time Saddam Hussein told the truth, because I can't think of it.

The Turks can join in or stay out as far as I'm concerned. I imagine the government wouldn't mind allowing the deployment of American troops, but public opinion there is solidly against it and the state is weak enough in Turkey that I can see the government being concerned. On the other hand, the way to prove a state is strong is to act decisively; Turkey's staying out would show weakness. The votes in the Turkish parliament were very close--the last one was 264 in favor of US deployment in Turkey, 250 against, and 19 abstentions. They only needed a switch of three votes to approve the deployment, so I'll bet a vote is tried again and this time it'll be approved.

The Vanguardia's man in Peking, Rafael Poch, who is also their man in Moscow and parrots the Moscow government line, claims that the Japanese are going to go nuclear. There is an American proposal to bring Japan and South Korea under an American missile-defense scheme, and the Japanese are receptive because they are scared as hell of North Korea. Poch claims, of course, that the fear of North Korean nukes is being fomented by Washington and that the missile defense system would really be anti-Chinese, not anti-North Korean. Says Poch, "North Korea would not be a nuclear problem if that country, instead of being included in the 'axis of evil' and as an objective of preventative nuclear attacks by Washington, received guarantees of security and normalization of relations, as was agreed in the 1994 pact."

Jesus Christ. This guy is pro-North Korean.

Anyway, Poch does some scare propaganda, saying that Japan could have hundreds of nukes within six months and that the Americans are behind it all, in addition to the evil missile defense system. What should amaze you is that the Vanguardia is the BEST newspaper in Spain. Can you imagine how horrible the others are? This is why nearly all Catalans are political idiots of one sort or another. Now, they're wonderful people, friendly folks, generous to a fault. But, politically, these people have no common sense whatsoever, with about eight exceptions.

Rafael Ramos in London says that the Observer is reporting that the Americans are spying on the Security Council members and that this is a huge scandal. The Observer got this information from MI6. First, I certainly hope we are spying on all of them, even on our pals in London, because I guarantee you they're spying on us. Nothing wrong with a little espionage between friends. Second, getting caught doing so is very unprofessional. Third, if I were MI6, I would hunt down Mr. Loudmouth with a Pal on the Observer and terminate his employment. With extreme prejudice. Fourth, Ramos reports that Washington is "in full war fever". That's interesting, since he's based in London. This is the guy who, in a piece about how much he loved baseball, identified Don Mattingly as the Yankees' pitcher. For you Brits, this would be like calling David Beckham Man U's goalkeeper while saying you were a huge football fan. He's also the guy who said that in the US you had to go out with a girl ten times before you could get her in bed. All I want to know is how he can be so sure.

Chirac was received by a massive crowd in Algiers on a state visit. Now that's something to be proud of.

There was an enormous demonstration in Valencia yesterday in favor of the government's proposed water plan, which would send water from the Ebro River south to the dry regions of Valencia, Murcia, and part of Andalusia. I don't see what's wrong with it, since I'm satisfied that it would not do any significant environmental damage. Some 600,000 people came out into the streets from all over southern Spain. Now, there have also been big demonstrations, especially in Aragon, against the water plan, and there were, of course, recent big anti-American demos. The Vanguardia raised not a peep about the demonstrators' political motives in these cases, though all of the demonstrations were organized by the Socialists and other leftist groups.

But in this one, which was organized by José María Aznar's PP, the subheadline is "The financial support of the administrations controlled by the PP gave fruit, and the demonstration in favor of the water plan was supported by dozens of thousands of people." Naah, the Vanguardia isn't biased at all in its news reporting. See, Barcelona and Valencia have a rivalry. Valencia is the second-largest Catalan-speaking city, but instead of showing allegiance to Barcelona and Catalanism, it's thrown in its lot with Madrid and Spain--Valencia basically has the choice of which orbit they want to be in, and they've chosen Madrid's orbit. Valencia goes so far in its desire to be non-Catalan that everybody calls the local language valenciano and a good few deny that it's related to Catalan (that is, of course, linguistically nuts, but they love taking the piss out of the Catalans by saying that). The ultra-Catalan Vanguardia just can't stand any of this.

The main focus of the story was not on what the demonstrators were saying, and there are no impassioned articles in the news section saying that the voice of the people must be listened to, as there have been for the demos "against" the oil spill (I thought we were all against oil spills, but the Socialists and the Galician independentistas are accusing the PP of being responsible for this one, which is so far from being true that it is an out-and-out "Big Lie"), against the water plan, and against America. In fact, the Valencian Socialist Party described the demonstration, consisting of some 600,000 people from all over southeastern Spain in support of a government water project, as "intolerable". Nice to know they're impartial in their support of the right to freedom of expression and public assembly.