The Spanish media is reporting that the suicide bomber in Yemen had asked the locals whether the group of tourists were "Westerners," though I bet he really said "infidels." When he was told they were, he waited for them to get on the road and then crashed his car into their vehicles. Obviously he must have had his car bomb already prepared, so this was a planned attack, not a spontaneous one; however, if this story is true, the suicide bomber didn't care precisely who he blew up, as long as they weren't Muslims.

Antena 3 made rather a big deal out of the likelihood that the tourists were not targeted for being Spaniards in particular, but infidels in general.

Five of the victims were Catalans, including two women who were teachers at the same high school in the Horta neighborhood of Barcelona and their husbands. Another of the seven was a Basque woman who had been on a local TV reality show, so they're showing plenty of film of her. One of the wounded is a Basque woman who is in critical condition with shrapnel in her head; they're going to fly the dead bodies and the other wounded back to Spain tomorrow, but this woman cannot be moved from the Yemeni hospital.

Get this comment from La Vanguardia's website: "Message for the planners of the Yemen attack: you got the wrong target. All deaths from terrorism are horrible, but the Catalans and Basques are the ones who have supported the Arab cause the most and have fought against Bush's war." And this one: "Iraq wasn't a war, it was a senseless invasion, the whim of a demented man. Today the invasion has brought the war of all wars...Killing for killing's sake, and destroying for destroying's sake, sooner or later will boomerang."

That's right, it's America's fault. As usual. As if Islamist terrorism had begun with the fall of Baghdad. And as if Spain were not an enemy of Islamist terrorism for the simple facts that 1) Spaniards are infidels and 2) Islamists claim Spain as part of their homeland, just as they claim Israel.

More terrorism news: Yesterday five ETA members were arrested in France. Three of them were busted fifteen kilometers from the Spanish border in a van with 165 kilos of explosives, detonators, an assault rifle, and other goodies. They were all armed with pistols but put up no resistance. One of them is a big fish, suspected of being ETA's head operations planner--that is, the guy who decided who would be killed how, where, and when. The cops suspect they were going to pull an immediate attack.

Two more etarras were caught at a roadblock outside Paris; there isn't much information on them. One was armed.

Today they had the big State of the Nation debate in the Congress of Deputies. Zap and Rajoy called each other big stinky poopheads. Zap promised to turn the Barcelona commuter train system over to the Generalitat, so now it'll be badly run by Catalan bureaucrats instead of Spanish bureaucrats. Ah, progress.

Liverpool has bought Fernando Torres from Atletico de Madrid for like 24 million euros, which sounds like way too much, and the Sun says that Barça has offered 18 million for "Fat Frank" Lampard, who Barcelona does not need unless it plans to get rid of Deco and/or Xavi. Which they've said they're not going to do.