Here's an article from Fox News giving a rather different perspective on the looting in Baghdad that the Spanish press has gotten so worked up about.

It's a low-on-news weekend, which is just as well because I'm on a mild blogging break. Good Friday is a holiday in Spain and Easter Monday is one, too, in Catalonia. It's been a very nice weekend and Barcelona, which can be gray and dull (though never too cold, at least not outdoors) during the winter, is now green and flowery. The wisteria is in bloom and so is the jasmine. Everybody's geraniums are out; the geranium is definitely the most popular balcony plant in Spain, I guess because they are hardy and don't require a lot of attention. We had an epidemic about five years ago of worms that infested all the geraniums in town and a lot of them died; the ones that didn't, which include all three of mine, seem to be immune, and now the streets are almost as geraniumy as they were before the worms came. The herb garden is just fine--we've got oregano, thyme, lavender, parsley, mint, and some weird kind of parsley that Remei brought back from the pueblo. It's just fine, tastes like strong parsley, but I have no idea what it's called.

Baghdad Bob Fisk has gone back home to his undoubtedly very expensive British residence--like most lefties with jobs, Bob talks big about solidarity and the like, but I'll bet he sacrifices very little of his paychecks to help those less fortunate. But we don't have to read Bob's whinings in the Vanguardia any more. The Catalan lefties are all notorious for behaving in such a way--they all make a lot more money than I do, anyway, and every time Catalan Socialist leader Pasqual Maragall (who got raked over the coals by none less than the Economist for having compared José María Aznar with Hermann Göring) gets all solidarious, we should remind him that he comes from the most bourgeois Hochkatalanisch family imaginable.