Big royal family news: Princess Elena, King Juan Carlos's and Queen Sofia's oldest daughter, has separated from her husband, Jaime de Marichalar. (Marichalar and Elena are known as the Duke and Duchess of Lugo.) It's not a legal separation, but it is an officially announced "end to living together."

This is by far the biggest story today in the Spanish media.

The two married in 1995 and have two children, Felipe, aged 9, and Victoria, aged 7. Marichalar suffered a stroke in December 2001, "from which he has only partially recovered."

In case anyone is interested, here's La Vanguardia's photo gallery.

There has been gossip about both of them for a long time. It is said that both of them are borderline retarded; Elena is, at best, shy and not very bright, while Marichalar has a bad reputation as a playboy and cocaine user.

La Vanguardia is reporting that: 1) the decision to separate was made more than a year ago 2) "Marichalar's character changed" after he had his stroke 3) When their first child was born, Marichalar told the media, "Poor kid, he looks like her" 4) Rumors of a separation began in 2004; "Don Jaime, a great follower of fashion, has attended the principal fashion salons alone on many occasions" 5) "He sought refuge among ill-considered friends, and did not follow his designated course of recovery."

El Periodico says, "Recently, the monarch has not been a big fan of Jaime de Marichalar. Among other reasons, because of his lifestyle and his disproportionate passion for luxury. The duke is especially attracted to fashion and cars. After the stroke he suffered in 2001, the princess and her husband distanced themselves from one another. The duke, in very serious condition, showed an incredible will to recover. Thanks to his efforts, he is able to walk and talk with some normality. Once physically recovered, Marichalar decided to live it up. He even gained a malicious nickname from the media: "The Duke of Lujo." It is common to see the King's son-in-law browsing in the most exclusive shops in Madrid."

Looks like the guilty party in media eyes is going to be Marichalar.

It's been a rough year for the King. The El Jueves magazine cover, the attacks from the far right, the Cataloonies burning photos, the controversy over the Ceuta-Melilla visit, and the Hugo Chavez scene. Now this.

Now, I'm a republican with a big R and a small one, too. I prefer a system in which no one has special privileges because of their birth. However, a parliamentary monarchy like Spain or the Netherlands or the UK is a perfectly reasonable form of government, and if it's solving more problems than it's causing, it would be stupid to change it. The question, of course, is when that line is crossed.

I don't think the Spanish monarchy is anywhere near crossing that line. The Spanish royals are generally discreet and well-behaved, they don't cost the State a whole lot of money, and they do their public-relations jobs, opening health clinics and meeting with charity organizers and shaking hands with foreign dignitaries, very well.

I do think Juan Carlos provides a great deal of stability in this country. The only thing we can get the two main parties to agree on is that they both say they support the Constitution, of which Juan Carlos is the living symbol. The old wounds of the Civil War have still not healed, and significant numbers of left voters think the PP are a bunch of Francoists, while significant numbers of right voters think the PSOE are a bunch of Bolsheviks. Lots of them still hate each other.

Juan Carlos is trusted by both sides, though, since if he'd wanted to rule as a military dictator after Franco's death, he could have. Instead, with the cooperation of the responsible elements in Spanish society, Juan Carlos led Spain toward a parliamentary democracy just three years after the dictator's death. People have actually seen him deliver the goods, while staying above partisan politics.

It's commonly said around here that many Spaniards are not monarchists, but they're "Juan Carlosists."

Little news is good news, I guess.

They convicted the two cartoonists from El Jueves who drew Prince Felipe doing Princess Letizia doggy-style on the magazine cover and fined them €3000 apiece for lese-majesté.

It turned out that the skinhead who killed the squatter in the knife fight in the Madrid subway is in the army. Great, just what we need, neo-Nazis in the armed forces.

Supposedly one of the commuter train lines that is still on the fritz will be repaired over the weekend. Don't hold your breath.

Hugo Chavez claims that he didn't hear the King tell him to shut up, but if he had, he would have told him "to go wipe his ass." Fidel Castro called the incident "an ideological Waterloo." Yep, with Juan Carlos playing the part of Wellington.

Some dipshit dad left his vial of liquid Ecstasy lying around where his two-year-old could find it. The kid drank it, went into a two-day coma, and Dad's in jail. Can you say "custody hearing"?

Another dipshit, this time a rock-and-roller named Melendi (who I've never heard of) and his band boarded an Iberia flight for Mexico City drunk, and then pitched a fit when the stewardess cut them off. The pilot turned the plane around, back to Madrid, and Melendi's in the slam. Meanwhile, the 180 other people on the plane had their flight delayed by twelve hours.

Spanish families have adopted 23,000 foreign children in the last five years, the most in the world per capita. It must have something to do with Spain's very low birth rate, and possibly with the advanced age of first marriage.

Five executives, including the big boss of Mutua Universal, Spain's third-largest workman´s-compensation insurer, are going on trial in Barcelona for embezzling €12 million from the National Health. Ah, the sweet smell of corruption that impregnates this city.

Barça lost a match against a mediocre team, so everybody wants to fire the coach. Typical immature reaction by the local media, who have nothing else to write about.

King Juan Carlos made the news all over the world after his public humiliation of Hugo Chavez. Aznar called up Zap to thank him for defending him against Chavez's attacks. Rajoy blamed Zap's "dangerous liasons" with Latin American populists for the whole scene. As one might expect, the Communists and the Cataloonies have criticized Juan Carlos; Pepelu Carod-Rovira accused him of having bad manners, and the Chavez-loving Commies called the King's attitude "unacceptable." Convergence and Union, the moderate Catalanists, congratulated the King for defending Spain's "democratic integrity."

Looks like all the reports are in regarding the Madrid stabbing: The skinheads were on their way to their demonstration "against immigration and anti-Spanish racism," and a bunch of squatters were on their way to break it up. The two groups found themselves in the same subway car and the gang fight broke out; each side accuses the other of starting it. The skinhead demo wound up being broken up by the cops, who charged them with nightsticks several times, and the squatters put on a riot last night in downtown Madrid, burning garbage skips and looking for trouble.

Spain's largest corporation, Telefonica, earned a profit of €7.85 billion (with a B) over the first nine months of the year.

According to El Mundo's latest electoral survey, the PSOE leads the PP by three points, 42.2%-39.1%. That is 1) within the poll's margin of error but 2) pretty much what all the polls have been saying. The Commies got the support of 4.8%.

Here's the video of King Juan Carlos telling Chavez to shut up. And here's commentary from Barcepundit.

This was the main discussion topic at the cafe this morning; general feeling is very pro-King, seen as standing up against bigoted anti-Spanish rhetoric. Even the moderate Catalanists approved.

ETA planted two small bombs, one with five kilos of cloratite and the other with three, outside the courthouse in the Vizcayan town of Guecho this morning; the cops dismantled them.

One person was killed in a knife fight this afternoon between squatters (called "anti-fascists" in Spain) and skinheads on the Madrid subway. Eight more were injured, one very seriously, and a cop got hit in the head with a flying bottle. The skinheads involved were this bunch of dirtbags, who had put on an anti-immigrant demonstration. Now they're saying that the killer is one of the eight injured, that the squatters picked the fight by trying to break up the fascist demo, and that several people were tear-gassed. The paramedics had to set up a field hospital.

Meanwhile, here in Barcelona, they arrested six Latin immigrants for starting a knife fight last week outside a disco at the corner of Balmes and Diputacion, only two blocks from Murph's house. Three people, also Latins, were seriously wounded; they had to remove a kidney from one of them. The cops say the rumble wasn't gang-related.

As everyone knows, the percentage of immigrants in Barcelona is more than 15%, and we are beginning to see the backlash. Dark-skinned Latin immigrants, especially Dominicans and Ecuadorians, are not popular among a lot of people (light-skinned Argentinians, and all Brazilians, are OK). The Latins, fairly or not, are associated with gang violence; the Moroccans are even less popular, associated with street crime and drug dealing. There isn't much prejudice against black Africans, east Asians, or Pakistanis, who are seen as being here to work; in fact, the only complaint I've heard about the Chinese is that they've taken over the area near Arco de Triunfo with their textile import-export houses.

Sports update: Kansas beat Oklahoma State in Stillwater and is now 10-0, for the first time since 1899. KU is now the only unbeaten major-conference team left. Yeah, the truth is that they've slaughtered five really bad teams at home, and they laid a historic whupping on a not-very-good Nebraska. But they have beaten four pretty good teams on the road, Colorado, Kansas State, Texas A&M, and now Okie State. Next they play Iowa State, another bad team whom they should beat, and then comes the showdown with their first real challenge of the year against Missouri at Arrowhead in Kansas City. If they beat Missouri they win the Big 12 North for the first time ever, and they play Oklahoma for the Big 12 championship.

Barça lost in Getafe, 2-0. They were solidly outplayed. If they're going to compete for the title, which they should be able to do, they're going to have to start winning some games away.

This is great. King Juan Carlos told Hugo Chavez to shut up at the Ibero-American summit in Chile. Made him look like the crude, vulgar demagogue he is.

Chavez was slagging off Spain in general and former prime minister Aznar in particular, calling him a "fascist." Zap showed some class (for once) and reminded Chavez that Aznar was a democratically elected leader and deserved respect. Chavez interrupted Zap, and kept on with his anti-Spanish rant, and the King told him, "Why don't you shut up?" Then Daniel Ortega got into it, attacking the Spanish company Union Fenosa, and Juan Carlos walked out.

Three cheers for the King, and one cheer for Zap, too.

Here's a very interesting report by the World Bank called Doing Business 2008 Spain; there's one of these profiles for pretty much every country in the world. What it makes clear is that Spain has a long way to go on the road to international competitiveness.

Personal note: I myself had the idea a couple of years ago to open a nonfiction bookstore in Barcelona, and I still think there's a niche for one. So I went down to the city hall, and learned that it was so slow and difficult and expensive that there was no way I was ever going to make any money. So BCN is short one bookstore.

Spain ranked 118th worldwide in ease of Starting a Business; 46th in Dealing with Licenses; 154th in Labor Regulations; 42nd in Registering Property; 13th in Getting Credit; 93rd in Paying Taxes; 47th in Importing and Exporting; 55th in Enforcing Contracts; and 17th in Closing a Business. Figures that the stuff Spain does well at is getting easy cash and going bankrupt.

A few comparisons between Spain and the US (the UK figures are generally pretty similar to the US):

It takes you 47 days to open a business in Spain; 6 in the US. It costs you 15% of per capita yesrly income in Spain to open up; in the US it's 0%.

In order to build a warehouse, it takes 233 days to get the permits in Spain; 40 in the US. The license costs 65% of per capita income in Spain; 13% in the US.

It costs an average of 56 weeks' pay to fire a worker in Spain; it's 0 weeks' pay in the US. Nonwage labor costs are 33% of wages in Spain; 8% in the US.

Registering property takes 18 days in Spain and 12 in the US; it costs 7% of the property value in Spain and 0.5% in the US.

Average taxes are 62% of profits in Spain and 46% in the US.

It takes 515 days to enforce a contract in Spain and costs 17.2% of the claim; the figures in the US are 300 days and 9.4% of the claim.

Maybe some smart political party can campaign on these issues, putting forth a real program for making it easier to do business in Spain. Of course the logical consequences would be more businesses, higher employment, and a greater tax base, and everybody's in favor of that, right?

Naah. It'd never work. Better to slag off the opposition about not being Catalanist enough. Or just question their commitment to democracy and accuse them of plotting a coup.

The top story around here is that the three remaining Spanish aircrew held in Chad have been released, which makes sense because they're innocent of everything but being hired by the wrong outfit.

Jordi Pujol cited an urban legend the other day, claiming as fact that a Madrid taxi driver had kicked a Catalan friend-of-a-friend out of his cab for speaking Catalan on his cell phone. Yeah, right. All Pujol's loud-mouthing has only contributed to fanning the flames of discontent caused by the Great Barcelona Transport Snafu. And Montilla is going around saying that if the central government doesn't do anything to solve the problems partially caused by his and his party's bungling, then Catalonia is going to get very mad at Spain. He's so uncharismatic that he's a terrible demagogue, though. And he's got Zap pissed off at him now.

Development minister Maleni Alvarez now says that the commuter trains will be back on line before November 30. Yeah, right.

All the Glasgow Rangers fans went home; they supposedly drank 140,000 liters of beer among them, which is pretty good. If there were 20,000 of them, that's seven liters (an American six-pack is a little more than two liters) a man during the day-and-a-half they were here. That doesn't count all the other alcoholic beverages they consumed while here, either. They didn't cause a whole lot of trouble; they made a big mess in the Plaza Catalunya, and urinated profusely in public. However, the mess they caused was a lot less than what happens when the Barça wins the league or New Year's Eve. The cops were mellow and just kept an eye on them to stop matters from getting out of control, and nobody got arrested, which was probably pretty smart. Putting a lot of porta-johns around the Old City might have been a good idea, though, which they didn't do.

However, one Ramon Masagué Arribas sent a letter of complaint to La Vanguardia that was published this morning: "Every year the same thing happens with the English fans. They keep drinking and drinking..." Now wait a minute. People from Glasgow are Scots, not English, and they kind of make a big deal out of that. Mr. Mesegué has no idea, however, which is interesting because many Catalans become very indignant that the rest of the world does not pay much attention to their attempt at differentiating themselves from the rest of the Spaniards.

I cannot count the number of times that people around here have told me accusingly, "Americans don't even know that Catalonia exists." As if not having heard of a European region with seven million people made one ignorant. I bet no Catalan could tell you the difference between North Carolina and Missouri, much less that between a Bengali and a Gujerati, or a Mandarin-speaker and a Cantonese-speaker. Hell, TV3 doesn't know the difference between an Arab, a Persian, and a Turk; they have no idea that Kurds are Persians, Azeris are Turks, and Armenians are none of the above.

The school shooting tragedy in Finland, in which eight people were murdered, got interesting coverage in La Vanguardia. Here's the lead paragraph:

Finland doesn't believe it, not even the government. A multiple murder in their country was, until yesterday, unthinkable, something that only happened in the United States. Pekka Eric Auvinen, an 18-year-old student, armed with a pistol, opened the eyes of the Finns to the fact that globalization includes everything and that massacres like those at Columbine and Virginia Tech are also exportable to the countries of peaceful, developed Scandinavia.

What utter bosh.

First, the shooter used a German name, Sturmgeist89, on the Internet, and he claimed to be an admirer of Hitler and Stalin--and to be violently anti-American. If anything, he was a Nietzche-Nazi, and he called himself "a social Darwinist." Second, such things are not unthinkable in Finland, since in 2002 a nutcase with a bomb blew himself up at a Helsinki mall, killing six other people. And third, we've posted before on mass murders in Europe, of which there have been plenty:

Top European spree killer: Thomas Hamilton, who killed 17 people at a preschool in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996. Next is Robert Steinhauser, who killed 16 people at an Erfurt, Germany school in 2002. He's tied with Michael Ryan, who killed 16 people in Hungerford, England, in 1987...More European spree shooters: Eric Borel killed 13 people in Cuers, France, in 1995. Richard Durn killed 8 people in Nanterre, France, in 2002. Mauro Antonello killed 7 people in Chieri, Italy, in 2002. Mattias Flink killed 7 people in Falun, Sweden, in 1994. Josef Gautch killed 6 people in Austria in 1997. Jean-Pierre Aillan killed 5 people near Rennes, France, in 1996. Tommy Zethraeus killed 4 people in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1994.

Germany had three single murders in its schools, one in November 1999, one in March 2000, and one in February 2002. In January 2004 another single murder occurred in the Hague, Netherlands.

So I'd say that it's most definitely anti-Americanism to blame a school shooting in Finland on the Americans.

The big news here in town is that Barcelona has been invaded by about 20,000 Glasgow Rangers fans, who are currently attempting to drain the city of beer in preparation for tonight's Champions League game against Barça. Only about 6000 of them have tickets. There was some hell-raising last night in Plaza Catalunya, with bottles being thrown around and three people injured, but nothing too serious.

The Barcelona press is playing up the hooligan stereotype, but most of these guys seem to me like fairly good-natured drunks. I doubt anything bad is going to happen; it seems to me like the British football scene has been cleaned up a good deal, with much less thuggery than there was fifteen or twenty years ago. This lot is here for a laugh, not a fight. Also, in order to afford to travel to Barcelona, you need to have a job, and people with jobs don't do too much serious rioting or vandalism.

TV3 is reporting that scalpers are selling tickets at €400 each.

Breaking story: Somebody in Finland got a gun and shot up a school, with at least two dead. The Spanish media is not churning out pieces questioning the violent basis of Finnish society.

They busted four junior terrorists this morning in San Sebastian, and the cops say that Segi, the current name of ETA's youth brigade, has been broken up in that city, at least for now. These guys are accused of torching city buses, sabotaging train lines, tossing Molotov cocktails at public buildings and bank branches, and starting riots after illegal pro-ETA demos, besides recruiting and indoctrinating new members. Lock them up and throw away the key.

I have been keeping track of real estate prices around here, and a three-bedroom place in Gracia has declined by about €25,000 in the last couple of months. They interviewed Leslie Crawford, a Financial Times reporter here in Barcelona, in La Vanguardia. She says Spain is going to have its own subprime mortgage crisis, since Spanish banks have been giving out shaky mortgages too, and the difference is that in America the banks sold off their debt in the secondary market, while in Spain they didn't. Also, in America only 13% of mortgages are considered to be subprime, but I have no idea what the percentage might be in Spain.

Crawford spoke at the big Barcelona Meeting Point real estate trade fair, and was roundly criticized by a couple of local developer big wheels for tossing freezing water on their already cooling market.

It doesn't help matters that the trade fair complex is right in the middle, both physically and chronologically, of the AVE-commuter trains construction mess. Which has a lot of people really angry. I think I already said that a few times. The level of pissed-offitude is tremendous, bigger than I've ever seen it, and this latest bungle comes on top of the blackout.

Montilla shot off his mouth again, demanding that the central government respond to the "anger, skepticism, and pessimism" of the Catalans. That's what we call passing the buck where I come from; Mr. Montilla, you are the regional premier, are you not? You are in charge here, are you not? Sure, the Zap government deserves some of the blame, and so do the various local administrations, but so do you.

This guy is a terrible spinner, a lousy vote-getter, Mr. Negative Charisma. He needs to stick to the backroom wrangling and stay out of the public eye, because he is so incredibly unconvincing as a leader. I prefer competence to charisma, and Mr. Montilla has shown little of either so far.

Get this. After years of bitching about the US being a police state spying on its own people and everybody else, the European Union has just decided that it is going to do exactly what Europeans have criticized so often. They are going to require airlines to turn over passenger data on flights entering or leaving the EU, just like the US (and Britain and France) already require. La Vanguardia says directly, "The system is based on the American PNR (Passenger Name Record) established after the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington."

The EU Commissioner for Justice, Security, and Freedom, Franco Frattini of Italy, also wants to restrict Internet use by terrorists. This would be a good idea if they wanted to MONITOR internet use and see who keeps googling "bin laden jihad kill kill kill" and creative stuff like that. However, Mr. Frattini wants to block Internet searches for such words as "bomb, murder, genocide, or terrorist." That might be going just a little too far.

The prosecutor's office wants to retry "the Egyptian," Rabei Osman el Sayed, who was acquitted at the 3-11 bombings trial of being one of the masterminds, on the ground that he is already serving a sentence in Italy for membership in a terrorist organization and so convicting him in Spain would be a double conviction for the same crime. The prosecutors do not buy this and are appealing to the Supreme Court. I say good for the prosecutors.

The Generalitat's health department is introducing how-to sex education for children as young as 10. They've published two comic-book guides "directed at an audience between 10 and 16 years old," and the Generalitat's Salut and Escola (Health and Schools) program is sending 400 nurses to tour Catalan schools and hold workshops and discussions with students aged 12 and 13. Now, I'm in favor of sex education for teenagers; hell, it should form part of every biology class. But I'm not sure ten-year-olds need brochures telling them, "Condoms allow us to enjoy and share our sexuality with security and tranquility," along with cartoon figures of a nude young girl with her arms around a boy in his boxer shorts asking themselves, "Will I know how to put it on right? Will I lose sensitivity? Will it break?"

Meanwhile, the Spanish government wants to ban spanking kids. Glad we've got our priorities straight.

Another boat people tragedy: Mauritanian authorities discovered a cayuco adrift between Africa and the Canaries with 55 survivors aboard. 45 others had died from hunger and thirst while the boat drifted for two weeks.

The Great Barcelona Public Transport Snafu will be celebrated until at least November 30, when they finally hope to have commuter train service back on line. That is, they didn't manage to fix it over the long weekend, and I'll bet they don't get it done by the end of November, either. Meanwhile, nobody knows when the AVE will actually go into service. I'm betting they try really hard to get it done before the March 9 election, and fail.

The employers' association estimates that the transport chaos is going to cost the local economy at least €208 million in lost business--and that's if they get the trains fixed by the end of November. €6.7 million a day.

In case you are coming to Barcelona, you need to know that most train lines, even long-distance, that run from Sants central station to the south and west have been cut off, and have been replaced by bus service. This includes the line to the airport, regional trains for Tarragona and Lleida, and several longer journeys as well. Call Renfe before you travel to find out what the deal on your train is. If arriving at the airport, I would just take the regular blue bus from in front of the terminals to Plaza Catalunya, and if there are two or more of you, catch a cab into town (it's about €25-30).

By the way, both Rajoy and Artur Mas of CiU are promising to privatize the airport. About time. Let's see what happens.

This whole mess is going to hurt the Socialists and the Tripartite come the election. The only question is how much.

So the King went to Ceuta yesterday, and he's going to Melilla today. In Ceuta they had a huge welcome--at least 30,000 of the city's 70,000 people turned out waving flags. There's no question that these folks are thrilled to be part of Spain rather than Morocco; Spain's per capita income is ten times higher, and the government is one hundred times better. Even with Zap as prime minister. The Spanish press says that the Moroccan government has behaved as expected, with the officially required protests but no long-term consequences.

The dust-up in Chad is still being played out. Sarkozy made a surprise flight to Chad and secured the release of the four Spanish flight attendants, along with three French journalists. I wonder how much the bribe was. The other three Spaniards in the airplane crew are still being held, along with representatives from the dodgy charity, Zoe's Ark, that tried to carry out this mission. The children being transported to France were not orphans, and were bandaged as if they had been wounded, which they hadn't been; the head of the charity admits this. Sarko made Zap look kind of like a dope, since Zap's diplomatic efforts to get the Spaniards freed have done no good at all.

Note: The other sleazy charity / NGO / whatever that's in trouble around here is Intervida, which also does business in the United States. They embezzled most of the contributions they received and spent the money investing in real estate, and some of those responsible are going on trial in Spain. However, they are continuing their operations in other countries, especially Central America. Here's their Spanish website; here's their American website; here's a story from El Pais with some of the details; and more; more; more; and more.

And the saga of the African boat people continues. Two cayucos with a total of 161 people on board were found off Tenerife yesterday. Fortunately no one in either group had died on the voyage, and all appeared to be in good health.

Sports update: Real Madrid coach Bernd Schuster (who is constantly whining about the referees, just like everyone else in Spanish football) put his foot in it Saturday night. After Madrid lost to Sevilla, he asked at a press conference, "Where is the referee from?" He got the answer, "He's Catalan," and Schuster responded, "Well, that explains it." Tasteless and stupid, as if Catalan refs were any different than any other refs.

One thing Americans don't get is the constant conspiracy-mindedness of Spanish soccer, in which every team is convinced the other 19 are in cahoots with the league office, the referees, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the Jesuits to steal the title away from them. Openly calling the referees cheaters and liars is not tolerated in the NFL, where everyone recognizes that it's in everyone's interest for the refs to be honest.

Barcelona beat Betis 3-0 on Sunday night, in a good game that saw Ronaldinho and Henry get back on track. Barça is only one point behind Real Madrid in the league standings.

The big news around here is that the King announced he would pay an official visit to Ceuta and Melilla, Spanish cities on Morocco's north coast, on November 5. Morocco claims those two cities, along with a few uninhabited rocks along that coast which are in Spanish hands. So the Moroccans have recalled their ambassador for "consultations," and there's a diplomatic crisis under way.

The whole situation is ironic, since Spain claims Gibraltar, a British enclave on the Spanish south coast, but denies Morocco's claim to Ceuta and Melilla. That is, they're completely hypocritical. Spain's reason for denying the Moroccan claim is that Ceuta and Melilla were built by Spaniards, they have been part of Spain for hundreds of years--they're not recent colonies--and that their population is Spanish, not Moroccan. True. But Gibraltar has been English for hundreds of years, and its population is English, or at least English-speaking, not Spanish.

Seems to me the logical thing is to be democratic about the whole thing and follow the wishes of the residents. Those of Gibraltar want to stay with Britain, and those of Ceuta and Melilla want to stay with Spain. So just let things stay the way they are and everybody will be happy. If it ain't broke, stay out of the kitchen. Or get off the pot. Whatever.

Gaspar "Gas" Llamazares, the Spanish Stalin, is the head of the Communist United Left. He's not one of those wimpy Commies, he believes in shooting people who don't agree with him. Check out this dreadfully written love letter to Che Guevara he wrote in El Pais yesterday.

It is evident that Che has not lost his capacity to be a standard-bearer, an icon, a symbol of how to understand political commitment and of living his personal life in accordance with his understanding of public life...Che was an example of political and moral integrity, of denunciation (sic), of faithfulness to the ideals of emancipation and freedom. This is what is substantial, and it is why his figure has not shrunk over time.

Yeah, but what's his point?

How many more elections must Hugo Chavez win in order to be treated with the respect that a democratic leader deserves? What is so bothersome about processes of refoundation based on constitutional changes and the reform of the political system?

Oh, I see.

It is in this rebellious will, of resistance and of determination, that we recognize the figure of Che and his contribution. Principally, rebelling against injustice and living his commitment to those down below with personal coherence. This is, exactly, the interpretation of Che that seduces us...Latin America tells us, those who from the left bother to listen, that there are chances for the agenda of social transformation, that it is possible to rethink the Scoialist utopia for the 21st century, that it is possible to rebuild the social contract with a different agenda, and that there is no reason to bow down to totalitarian designs without resistance.

Yep. Not only is Gas in favor of shooting people when Che did it, he'll support Chavez when he does it.

Today is Todos los Santos, the day when the dead are honored in Spain and Catholic countries in general. (Note: The American equivalent is Memorial Day.) So today is a national holiday, and tomorrow is what they call a "puente" in Spain: a workday between two off-days, which most companies and people take as one more day off work. That is: four-day weekend! Remei and Rosa are going out to the pueblo to pay their respects at the cemetery, and I'm holding the fort down here.

We'll see if they can fix the commuter train lines over the long weekend. I bet they don't.

The majority reaction in the Spanish media to the verdicts in the 3-11 trial was that the ETA conspiracy theory, promoted by elements of the PP and the right-wing media, is dead and buried. Rajoy announced that the PP "accepts" the court's verdict, though he said, "Those who were accused of being the planners were acquitted." Meaning, I guess, that since no planner has been convicted, the question of who planned it is still open. Wrong. They're all either dead or on the run. He also pointed out something I've been saying for a long time, that it was the Interior Ministry under the Aznar administration that arrested and made the case against all these guys who were on trial.

A very important point made by the verdict: The plan to attack in Spain was first discussed at an Istanbul meeting in February 2002, more than a year before the invasion of Iraq. That is: Spanish participation in Iraq may have made Al Qaeda even angrier at Spain than it already was, but there would have been an attempt at an Islamist terror attack in Spain with or without Iraq.

One more very important point: The Aznar government had established a signals intelligence operation in order to monitor phone and computer use--not the messages themselves, but the signal that each communication produced--by several of the conspirators. They put the system into action the day of March 11 after the bombings. It was the key to breaking up the gang and convicting these guys. When the Americans pass the Patriot Act and do the same thing, though, then all the illustrated and enlightened among us pitch a fit.

Pepe Blanco, the Socialists' organizational secretary and eminence grise, shot off his mouth, saying, "The planner of the massive lie of 3-11 is Jose Maria Aznar, it was carried out by Angel Acebes, and the conspirators are Mariano Rajoy and Eduardo Zaplana." Yep, the Spanish political scene is still very hot: the Socialist Party boss called the top four members of the main opposition party liars, for the five thousandth time in the last three and a half years.

The date for the general election, to coincide with the Andalusian regional election, is March 9, 2008.

The Generalitat announced its budget for 2008: almost €35 billion, a 7.9% increase. "Investment," whatever that is, will increase by 17%, to almost €6 billion. I presume most of that will come from the larger transfers from the central government to the Catalan government. 33% of the budget is dedicated to health care, and 18% goes to education. This budget is predicated on economic growth of 3% or more, though, and if growth is less than that (as many, including the IMF and Spain's BBVA, predict), then the numbers won't work out so well. La Vangua also complains that the inheritance and gift taxes have merely been reduced by 13%, rather than completely eliminated, as other regions have done.

Rising gas and food prices have caused the economics ministry to raise its forecast for 2007 inflation to 3.6%. Most people think inflation is a lot higher than that; basics like milk, eggs, and fruit have risen by more than 20%, and rising interest rates are hurting Spaniards on variable-rate mortgages, which is most of them. The government points out that the prices of many goods and services, such as telephone calls and pharmaceuticals, have dropped, but people don't notice that nearly as much. Food prices are expected to continue rising, perhaps 10% more, because of increased demand for cereals combined with a bad harvest in both Europe and Australia and an increase in transport rates due to fuel price rises.

Percentage of Spaniards who consider the following to be "a principal problem": Housing 37%, Terrorism 35%, Unemployment 35%, Immigration 29%, Economy 22%, Jobs 14%, Crime 13%.

Meanwhile, La Vangua ran its annual anti-Halloween article yesterday, giving a full page to complaints by Catholic schools: "On this holiday, based on fear, death, the living dead, black magic, and mystical monsters, minors are disguised using all these elements. What idea of death must remain in the heart of the child who has dressed up as a skull and has been playing? Death is not a game or a party in order to have fun once a year." The Catholic PTA added that Halloween is "imported," and that it "has colonized Spanish culture to the detriment of Todos los Santos." They claimed that Halloween has become popular "because of rebelliousness, snobbishness, and a desire to break with tradition." Geez. Calm down. Besides, if you want really creepy, check out the Day of the Dead celebrations in Catholic Mexico.

They found a headless body floating in Barcelona harbor yesterday. Reminds me of the greatest tabloid headline in the history of journalism, from the New York Post: HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.

Sports update: Midweek games in the Spanish league. Real Madrid stomped the shit out of Valencia last night, 1-5. Tonight Barça plays at Valladolid, and they'd better win. Valencia named former Barça star Ronald Koeman their new coach. Barcelona is all excited because local hero Juan Carlos Navarro has signed with the NBA Memphis team, where Pau "The Crying Spaniard" Gasol plays. They're going to suck again, of course. Also, TV3 is tremendously excited over the fact that the Catalan National Roller Hockey Team has been invited to play in the Roller Hockey Cup of the Americas. Catalonia is 4-0 so far, and they just beat the United States 13-0. I hang my head in shame. In a real manly sport like ice hockey, though, we'd win by forfeit after putting all their guys in the hospital.

In case anyone is interested, here's a link to the piece I wrote for Pajamas Media back on February 15. It holds up fairly well, I think.

Update: Here are the English-language reports on the verdict in the Madrid bombings trial from the Telegraph, Fox News, the Guardian, CNN, the New York Times, and the Times of London.

Interesting bits:

Fox News: Much of the evidence against the men was circumstantial. Bouchar, for instance, had been seen on one of the bombed trains shortly before the attack, but at trial no one could positively identify him and there were no fingerprints or other forensic evidence placing him at the scene.

A senior court official privy to the decision-making told The Associated Press following the verdict that the case against Osman was "flimsy," and that there was "no hard evidence" that Belhadj or Haski were masterminds. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

Circumstantial evidence is admissible in Spanish court, but the judges may have avoided relying heavily upon it because of a number of high-profile terror cases that were overturned on appeal, including one involving a Spanish cell accused of involvement in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, said Fernando Reinares, until recently the chief counterterrorism adviser at the Interior Ministry.

He said the judges in the case used a narrow approach to the law and warned that Spanish courts would have to change their rules of evidence if the country was to defeat Islamic terrorism.

"Islamic terrorism ... leaves a different kind of footprint," said Reinares, now head of the terrorism studies program at the Elcano Royal Institute, a Madrid think-tank.

The Guardian: Rogelio Alonso, a lecturer in politics and terrorism at King Juan Carlos University, said he believed the trial had shown that "it is possible to fight this type of [Islamist] terrorism through the courts". He also said the investigation had uncovered a link between the Madrid suspects and the wider world of al-Qaida.

However, Scott Atran, a US academic who has investigated the Hamburg cell connected to the September 11 2001 attacks in the US as well as those behind the Bali bomb attacks of 2002, and who witnessed the trial, said: "There isn't the slightest bit of evidence of any relationship with al-Qaida. We've been looking at it closely for years and we've been briefed by everybody under the sun ... and nothing connects them."

CNN (note the teaser at the end attempting to play on morbid voyeurism): Of the 28 men on trial, eight had been considered prime defendants, alleged to be either the bombers, ideologues, or "necessary cooperators" in the fatal plot. Each of the eight faced 191 charges of mass murder and more than 1,800 charges of attempted murder.

But there were gasps in the courtroom as the judges convicted only three of the eight prime defendants of the gravest charge -- mass murder. The judges convicted four others on lesser charges and acquitted one prime defendant of all charges.

The number of acquittals is likely to disappoint survivors of the attacks and relatives of the victims, who said the trial had dredged up bad memories of the bombings that they could not now put to rest. As they left court, some victims and families said they felt deprived of justice. Watch how victims of the bombings are coping.

The New York Times: The verdicts closed a sprawling trial that over the course of five months brought 29 defendants, 40 lawyers and 350 witnesses to a temporary courtroom on the outskirts of Madrid. The verdicts offer the first taste of justice to those wounded in the attacks as well as to relatives of those killed on March 11, 2004, when 13 sports bags stuffed with explosives tore through trains carrying hundreds of people from mainly working-class suburbs to the city center. The bombings changed the course of politics in Spain, which was used to decades of Basque but not Islamic terrorism.

They were carried out by a group of Islamist radicals that intersected with a band of Moroccan petty criminals whose ringleader, Jamal Ahmidan, had become radicalized in a Moroccan jail. Seven of the main suspects, including Mr. Ahmidan, killed themselves in a Madrid apartment to avoid arrest three weeks after the attacks, and another four are believed to have fled.

The verdicts underscore the difficulty of building a solid legal case against defendants suspected of playing an inspirational role in a diffuse and nonhierarchical network, rather than having direct involvement in the violence.

The Times: Thomas Catan, Times correspondent in Madrid, said that many survivors of the attacks appeared surprised and upset today by the number of acquittals and by some of the sentences imposed, which were shorter than prosecutors had demanded.

But Jose Luis Zapatero, the Socialist Prime Minister who came to power after the Madrid bombings, insisted that justice had been served.

Spain's National Court just handed down the verdict in the March 11 bombings trial. Jamal Zougam and Otman El Gnaoui were sentenced to 40,000 years each in prison for actually planting the bombs on the trains, and José Emilio Suárez Trashorras, who swapped them the dynamite for drugs, got 35,000 years. The maximum possible time served in Spain is 40 years. Fifteen others were also convicted.

Surprise: "Mohammed the Egyptian," currently in prison in Italy and accused of being the mastermind of the plot, was acquitted. Seven other small fry were also acquitted. The three-judge tribunal ruled out any ETA participation in the bombings, and the alleged Zap-ETA-Carod-Trilateral Commission-Masonic conspiracy theory is completely dead.

Here are the reports from El Periodico, La Vanguardia, TV3, and El Mundo.

The demo last night in the Plaza Sant Jaume was apparently a pretty good show, especially since about eight different groups showed up and tried to hijack it, among them the PP who wanted to protest against the Socialists, and the Cataloonies, who wanted to protest against Spain. A Cataloony got all agitated and punched a woman in the face, breaking her glasses. I love the way they'll call a demo at the drop of a hat in Spain; what's the point of protesting against the commuter train system being all screwed up? I thought we were all against that.

There were between 500 and 1000 demonstrators, not much compared to what they can bring out on the streets when it's a question of attacking the United States.

Meanwhile, very wisely, the Generalitat has decided to postpone its plan to reduce the speed limit to 80kph (50 mph) on the motorways leading into Barcelona, since they're all snarled up right now, and making drivers go slower would just make things worse and really piss everyone off; there was a 13-kilometer traffic jam yesterday inbound on the B-23 until 10 AM.

They've announced that the closed-down commuter lines will not be back up until after the upcoming long weekend (four days for Todos los Santos), and I'll bet they won't be back on line for a long time after that.

Note: I'm getting at least twenty hits a day on Google searches for the story about the scumball who beat up the Ecuadorian girl on the train. Many of them are from the US and in English; I get the idea that this incident is being seized on by the multiculturalism industry over there, for some reason.

The story about Sarkozy walking out on Lesley Stahl for asking persistently about his relationship with his soon-to-be ex-wife has caught on over here, and is getting plenty of play.

Looks like it's going to take a while and maybe a bribe to get the seven Spanish aircrew out of Chad, whose government has accused them of being "pederasts." La Vanguardia speculates that the whole thing has something to do with French dirty dealing in order to get European Union troops to go into Darfur. La Vangua loves to speculate.

Yesterday foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos finally got a face-to-face meeting with Condi Rice. They discussed, get this, the agenda for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe meeting at the end of November in Madrid. Real top-level issue, that. Cuba was not mentioned because there was obviously no point in mentioning it, as the Zap administration is pro-Castro.

Want some moral snobbery? The Milà i Fontanals high school has a student body that is 80% immigrants. So they decided to put on "an exhibition and a series of debates" on capital punishment. Why? Because "many students come from countries where the death penalty is used, and some of them are in favor of it." So, therefore, we have to teach them that they're wrong. Wonder how many sides there are going to be during the "debates." The exhibition includes pictures of garrotes, gallows, and guillotines, along with "a documentary about Guantanamo." Now wait a minute. A total of zero executions has taken place at Guantanamo.

Naomi Klein gets the back-page interview in La Vanguardia today. It's the same old wank as you'd expect. She claims that people are allowed to die every day in the United States because they cannot pay for medical care. And that "capitalist fundamentalism takes advantage of natural disasters," like the Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. She blames the US for "the CIA coup in Chile," and the lack of social democracy in Russia and China. She states that the "neocons" have replaced the public school system in New Orleans with a private system, and that in California "the fire brigade has been privatized." Says Klein, "Washington fights efficient and solidarious states that restribute goods and services, because they get in the way when it tries to apply its global capitalist utopia." And she adds, "In Iraq, the dogmatic American prophets of fundamentalist capitalism have wiped out all vestiges of the Iraqi state and have left the country in the hands of mercenaries and subcontractors."

The interviewer provokes Klein twice into going even farther than she'd planned, by saying that in the US "public health is unknown," and that "In the '60s, the CIA, in order to stop social democracy, created the myth of suicide in Sweden." Naomi takes the bait, of course.

But get this. The best part is our interviewer's introduction. He says that Klein's new book "perhaps incurs in some simplifications and possesses a certain adolescent idealist vision...So what? Milton Friedman and the neocons at the American Enterprise (sic), who give Washington an ideological alibi, have committed gross simplifications of reality and idealism that violates common sense. Naomi, besides, doesn't invade countries, just libraries."

How snotty and self-righteous.

There are a whole lot of people around here who are absolutely obsessed with the Catalan-Spanish identity conflict. Everything takes second place to that, no matter how important an issue it may be, and they'll work nationalism into the discussion about every single issue.

So former Catalan premier Jordi Pujol accused the Spanish media and Spanish politicians of "fomenting hatred for Catalonia" by blaming the Catalan regional government for the Great Transportation Snafu of 2007. Actually, I think Pujol is doubly wrong: first, it's not anti-Catalan to blame the Generalitat for making mistakes on a specific issue, and second, I think people are blaming the Socialists and the Tripartite, who are in control of the troika of the central, regional, and local governments, more than they are the Generalitat in itself.

(Comment: I have always held a certain admiration for Pujol, who was one hell of a good machine politician, sort of like a classier Mayor Daley. Yeah, there were a lot of financial scandals, and his government put in the laws that discriminate against Spanish-speakers, but a lot of positive things got done in a reasonably democratic manner. No incompetent could have stayed in power for 23 years.)

La Vanguardia has already pulled in 339 comments on their website on this story. There's nothing that will get the commenters all heated up faster than waving the Catalan flag. Check out some of these. I think some of them are pretty reasonable, and some of them aren't. Let's see what you think!

A. (Original Spanish): Most of the blame for our bad image belongs to the independentistas' childish stunts and the self-interested manipulation that the right-wing media makes of them.

B. (Spanish) You aspire to your own State, one more. A great advance for the world. And besides, from an ethical point of view, a questionable obsession. State-of-the-art hospitals, absurd millionaire salaries for athletes, a port, an airport, and you go around telling the world what victims you are. No one is listening to you.

C. (Catalan) 2014, goodbye Spain and enough already of putting up with this rubbish. We don't need to go around justifying ourselves, and we don't have to explain what it is to be Catalan...independence!

D. (Spanish) A question for nationalists. When personal sacrifices are demanded in the name of the glorious fatherland, how far are you willing to go? Let's see who has the guts to answer.

E. (Catalan) This hate, Mr. Pujol, is innate, they carry it inside them like a gene. We will never be friends because by definition we are different, and the larger one (the Spanish empire) oppresses the smaller ones who resist (the Catalan colony). Luckily we are in the 21st century and now sovereignty is possible without a war. There are more and more nations with their own state in Europe and now it is our turn.

F. (Catalan) The future is self-determination, since with the Castilians as friends we are going nowhere...They want Catalan and its culture to disappear.

G. (Spanish) What do the excluding nationalists want? That in addition to spending all day working against community among the citizens, we non-nationalists are going to reward you with recognition? Pujol complains about hate but that is exactly the fuel that moves nationalism. As nationalism prospers more and more, hate spreads to more places. That is the dynamic of nationalism, which the 20th century made clear.

H. (Catalan) INDEPENDENCE NOW! And stop whining, little Spaniards, "God's empire" and "united, great, and free" fortunately failed. Good-bye Spain, and good luck (you're going to need a lot...)

I. (Catalan) Can you imagine being married to a fat, dirty, stinking, ignorant, violent, and crude broad? Well, that's what living with Spain is like. We want a divorce! And we want it now! Freedom!!!!

J. (Spanish) When in my building things don't work, it's the superintendent's fault. When my city doesn't work it's the mayor's fault, and when my region doesn't work, it's the regional premier's fault. In Catalonia, when something doesn't work, it's not the fault of anyone inside...it's Spain's fault!

K. (Catalan) And what should we expect? We spend all day putting down Spain, saying Spain robs us, we whistle when the speaker at the Mercé ceremony speaks Spanish or when someone sings in Spanish at the Diada celebration, we don't respect the Spanish flag, which we don't fly at town hall buildings when there is a law requiring it, we say nothing when photos of the king are burned, et cetera...What surprises me is that they let us cross the Ebro river. Pujol, Carod, and company, why are you surprised?

L. (Catalan) An independentista is not born, he is made by blows like insults, manipulation, injustice, disrespect, boycotts, hate, and scorn. All of this is what Spain shows toward Catalonia.

M. (Spanish) Spain is indescribably disgusting. We want independence and we want it as soon as possible. No one can stand you. Not Gibraltar or anyone.

N. (Spanish) Catalan independence is unstoppable and inevitable. No sane person wants to live tied for life to such a repulsive and oppressive entity as Spain.
O. (Catalan) Spanish nationalists have enjoyed themselves shooting people, above all Catalans. I don't know how many Spanish nationalists CiU or ERC shot, I would say none, and not because they didn't have a good reason to.

P. (Spanish) Without the Spaniards we would live much better, and we're working on it. Soon we'll achieve it.

Q. (Catalan) Keep dreaming about your eternal Spain. In the long run all totalitarian states end up getting what they deserve. Look at the Serbs, so happy with Greater Serbia. Look at them now. Montenegro has left them and Kosovo is next. Here the Spanish-Falangists won't wait one moment to come and massacre us. They'll end up like the Serbs, alone and humiliated. This isn't 1936 any more.

R. (Spanish) It is insulting to see the nerve of the new Spanish ultra-nationalists. Now they are pretending to be democratic and modern when they are nothing more than Franco's puppies. Spanish nationalism is murderous by definition. Catalan nationalism is democratic by choice.

S. (Spanish) Today there are few Falangists left, but there are plenty of Escamots and Maulets. Why do you separatists tend to radicalize? Something tells me that after the hypothetical independence of Catalonia, all this hate will be turned first on the non-Catalanists, then on the moderate Catalanists, etc. I don't want my homeland to become a slaughterhouse.

T. (Spanish) Accusing Catalan nationalism of being violent can only come from a sick mind. Violent, crude, ignorant, anti-democratic, and militarized nationalism has always been Spanish.

U. (Spanish) It's all Bush's fault. That dumb Texan has created most of our problems. I know because one of my relatives works in Washington.

I hope the last one is a joke.

It's Day 6 of the Great Barcelona Commuter Train Transportation Disaster. Zap made a quick trip to the construction site yesterday, along with Montilla and other local dignitaries. He accepted all responsibility for the mess, which was the smart thing to do, since it takes some of the pressure off the local authorities. Then the development minister, Magdalena Alvarez, will be the scapegoat. The ad hoc plan to build the terminus station at El Prat has been shot down.

TV3 is promoting a demonstration to be held this evening at seven in the Plaza Sant Jaume; the organizers are using a blog in order to publicize their demo. I think demos are silly, and have no plan to show up. The most useful place for citizens to express their dissatisfaction is the ballot box.

Let's hope this leads to fewer out-of-line statements by Montilla, who struck back at PP criticism by accusing them of "wanting to win outside the democratic process what the ballot box denies them." That is, they're plotting a coup, Mr. Montilla? Yep, he added: "One hundred years ago, or 70, or only 26, attempts to reach power through non-democratic ways are called, here and everywhere, coups d'etat." Oh, bullshit. Criticizing your party because it bungled an important piece of infrastructure is not precisely undemocratic, and neither is appealing a proposed new law to the Constitutional Court. In fact, such behavior is democratically laudable.

A La Vanguardia survey taken last week shows few changes in the division of Catalan seats in the Madrid Congress of Deputies, to be determined at the March general election. Catalonia has 47 seats; according to the survey, the Socialists would gain two seats at the expense of the Cataloonies, and that's all, leaving the division PSC 23, CiU 10, ERC 8, PP 6, ICV 2.

The verdict in the March 11, 2003 bombings case will be released on Wednesday; the National Court is likely to hand down the harshest sentences possible. Of course, the longest stretch a criminal can serve in prison is 40 years in Spain, and that's not counting possible time off for good behavior, etc.

In Catholic circles, the beatification of 498 of the clerics murdered by the Left during the Spanish Civil War has caused a good bit of fuss in Spain; there's still a lot of Jacobin anti-clericalism around here. Seems to me these people were all murdered because of their religious activity, and that the Church is entirely within its rights in honoring them.

There's a huge mess going on in Chad. Seems that a very questionable French charity group called Zoe's Ark chartered a plane to transport 103 children, supposedly orphans, to France. The Chadian government seized the plane and accused the charity of trafficking in children. The seven-person crew of the plane is Spanish; the charter company operates out of Barcelona. The crew is being held by Chadian authorities. I assume they are innocent of everything but being hired by a shady charity group which they thought was legit, and that they will be turned loose sometime soon.

Good news: Spain's life expectancy has reached 80, one of the highest in the world. Why? Probably a) generally good health care, including preventative maintenance; b) a comparatively relaxed lifestyle; c) comparatively close extended family ties leading to better care of old folks; d) a diet high in fish and fruit, the two things Spaniards eat a lot more of than other Europeans; e) the decline in smoking.

Sports update: Barcelona beat Almeria last night 2-0, putting on an unconvincing show but holding on to second place, two points behind Real Madrid. Barça president Joan Laporta got in a street scuffle outside a restaurant before the match with a former club employee. More classy behavior from Cataloony Laporta, who declared an "independent republic of the Barça" a couple of weeks ago, and once took off his pants when instructed to pass back through an airport metal detector. Rumor has it that Laporta is trying to use his position as Barça president to go into politics. Won't work; he's too big a jerk and everyone knows it.

Serious coach movement in Spain: Juande Ramos left Sevilla to sign with London's Tottenham Hotspur, and Valencia fired Quique Sanchez Flores this morning.

Kansas beat Texas A&M on Saturday, going 8-0 for the first time since 1909. So what if five of the eight teams were schloops?

The Barcelona transportation crisis is going to be a political disaster for the Socialists. La Vanguardia is speculating that this mess will do for the PSOE wnat the Prestige disaster did for the PP. (In case you don't remember, the Prestige was an oil tanker that sank off the Galician coast a few years back. The Aznar government was accused by the Socialists of not managing the crisis well, and with some help from the media, the PSOE made it look like the PP were a bunch of dirty unecological polluters.)

Incompetence is rampant. Yesterday a sinkhole opened up under one of the platforms at the Bellvitge commuter station, which is normally very heavily used. Fortunately the station was closed, because people would have been killed. All construction on the AVE line was halted indefinitely by Adif, the central-government owned company in charge of contracting out railway construction. Which should of course be privatized.

Today development (Fomento) minister Magdalena Alvarez announced that she had no plans to resign, though everybody is reporting Zap is going to fire her next week. She also contradicted the Socialist government of Catalonia, the Generalitat; the Gene announced that OHL, one of the contractors working on the AVE, was going to have its contract rescinded, but I guess the central government overruled them.

The Communists (ICV) and the Cataloonies (ERC) are trying to distance themselves from the Catalan Tripartite by demanding minister Alvarez's head. It'll work among their loyalists, but both these parties are going to be badly hurt among the non-hardcore voters who went for them in March 2004 in the wake of the Madrid bombings.

Get this. The idea of improvising a station at El Prat as the temporary terminus of the AVE line is being floated. What awful planning.

The crisis at the Constitutional Court continues. Both the PP and the PSOE are trying to disqualify every judge who disagrees with them for the key upcoming vote on the Catalan statute of autonomy. Since the Court is divided 6-6 (not 5-5, as I had said) between "progressive" and "conservative" groups, and everybody is going to get recused eventually, there is a complete deadlock and there is no precedent for a solution. There is now no way that the Court is going to decide on the Catalan statute case (the PP's appeal to the Court that the statute is unconstitutional) before the all-important March general election.

I have no idea why Spain gives out the Principe de Asturias prizes every year; I suppose they're trying to compete with the Nobel Prizes. Whatever. The ceremony was last night in Oviedo. They gave Al Gove the prize for International Cooperation, and Al showed up and gave a speech. Bob Dylan got the Arts prize, but he was too busy playing Omaha. No kidding. I love Dylan and all, he's probably my favorite musician except maybe for Johnny Cash or Hank Williams, but I don't know why Spain needs to give him a prize. And Michael Schumacher got the Sports prize. Just what he needs.

It'd make sense if these prizes were sort of like the Pulitzers in the US--you'd give one for, say, fiction, nonfiction, theater, film, serious music, popular music, visual art, and you'd give them only to people from Spain. I can see why you'd want national prizes in order to foment culture in your country, and I can even see inviting a Woody Allen or somebody for a special prize every year to make the thing more high-toned. But inventing a prize for Communication and giving it to the magazine Science and Nature? I will give them credit for awarding the Concord prize to Yad Vashem, the Israeli holocaust museum, except that--I don't know quite how to put this, but it seems to me that Yad Vashem's moral stature is considerably higher than that of whoever decides who gets this award.

Sports update: FC Barcelona nneds to get back on track tomorrow night against Almeria after losing against Villarreal in the last league game, and drawing against Glasgow Rangers in the Champions' League. Touré. Márquez, and Zambrotta will all be back from their injuries, and Messi and Ronaldinho are apparently going to play. Barcelona's defense will be immeasurably improved with Zambrotta instead of Oleguer, Márquez instead of Thuram, and Touré instead of Gudjohnsen. (Note: Some English club ought to make an offer for Gudjohnsen; he's a good player but just doesn't seem to fit in here.) Espanyol is having a good year, with homegrown young Albert Riera looking good. Real Madrid is in first place, but their squad isn't anywhere near as good as Barça's.

A lot of noise is being made about getting rid of Ronaldinho. Staying out partying in Brazil instead of coming home in time to play against Villarreal was the tipping point, I think. Without using his name, Joan Golobart called him a "vampire" in his column in La Vangua today: "A vampire leader is one who sucks the energy from his teammates in order to grow," and concluded, "In most situations there is an optimum moment to sell a player, no matter how much he has brought to his club." There have been even more reports than usual about back-office moves being made by Ronaldinho's brother / agent to move him to AC Milan. Team president Joan Laporta denied any plan to sell him to anybody.

Kansas is 7-0 and ranked 10th in the college football polls, but they have to play in College Station tonight. They've already beaten Colorado and K-State on the road, though; on the other hand, the other five teams they beat were a bunch of patsies. Anyway, I'm going to take this opportunity to rub it in on my brother-in-law Phil, who is a Tennessee fan. This week is the first time since about 1969 that KU has been ranked higher than Tennessee, and it may very well not happen again ever. Should KU get past A&M, though, their biggest challenge is Nebraska, who's not very good this year, and KU doesn't even have to play Texas or Oklahoma this year. They just might go into the season-ending showdown with Missouri with only one loss.

The story on President Bush visiting the area of the San Diego fires has received these comments from readers of La Vanguardia:

lylo, Mataro: The images don't look anything like the devastation in Iraq...these rich Americans will collect on their million-dollar insurance policies, but the Iraqi civilians won't.

Diferente: Immediate aid has arrived because the governor is Republican, in New Orleans the mayor and governor were Democrats, there's the difference.

rapadink, Barcelona: Don't forget about the great business that the corporations will do "reconstructing California" like in New Orleans and Iraq...Mr. Bush is a crook who will pay the price within a few years.

junkers: You're totally right, cowboy (sic), in order to prevent fires you have to cut down all the trees. Brilliant. All right? (sic)

Manuel BA: They should have sentenced Bush to life imprisonment a long time ago. A criminal like him cannot walk around loose as if nothing were happening. He is one of the most dangerous thugs on our planet Earth.

Eduardo: Of course it's not like the Katrina situation. In the Malibu area there are a bunch of millionaires, of whom many know Bush personally and can talk to him directly. And with him or without him, they're going to reconstruct the area with even bigger houses. Those from Katrina are still there waiting.

tonimarsa: That thug Bush goes there now with a sad face and I wonder why he didn't go to New Orleans during Katrina.

emyr, Wales: The fires are caused by global warming. Bush should do something about the problem to prevent things like the fires in California and Katrina. It's Bush's fault that the fires are happening!

Note: There's a persistent urban legend around here that Bush once said forest fires could be stopped by cutting down all the trees.

Note II: These attacks on President Bush are clearly anti-Americanism, not criticism of government policy.

Another tragedy on the high seas: A Spanish fishing boat found a cayuco adrift about 400 miles off the coast of the Canaries with one survivor and seven dead bodies aboard. A total of 56 African illegal immigrants died on the boat while it was adrift for twenty days. Three days ago a boat with 106 illegals aboard was found off Tenerife, and last week a boat with 161 illegals washed up on La Palma. Something has got to be done about the crisis of the African boat people, and the place to start is by establishing free trade with those countries and writing off the interest on most foreign debt.

Sergi Xavier Martin, Mr. Douchebag Skinhead who beat up the Ecuadorian girl on the train, has had a court hearing and has been released WITHOUT bail. The judge's reasoning was: The crime wasn't serious enough to jail Mr. Scumball; there are no medical reports proving that the girl was injured; there is no risk Mr. Shithead is going to attack her again; the victim has not suffered serious psychological damage; grabbing her breast was not sexual harassment; and Mr. Asswipe has a fixed domicile.

Therefore, the judge charged him with "an attack against the moral integrity of the person with the aggravating circumstance of xenophobia," for which Mr. Cowardly Punk may be sentenced to between six months and two years in prison. If he is eventually sentenced to a year or less, his sentence will be suspended.

Completely ridiculous. This guy committed assault and battery, it's an open and shut case since the attack is on film and the scumbag admitted it anyway, and he's got priors for armed robbery. Get him off our streets. He ought to be locked up, instead of selling interviews to TV channels and scandal magazines.

The video has gone around the world, and the Latin American media is angry. La Vanguardia says, "The modern, integrating image of Barcelona has suffered a hard blow...Barcelona is associated with racism and xenophobia, and it is stressed that this is not the first serious case of attacks on immigrants."

Nota bene: Barcelona is no more racist than any other big European city, and maybe less so than some. At least for now. Barcelona has no history of foreign immigration, and as recently as 2000 there was very little. Now the number of immigrants is growing so quickly (15% of the city's population) that some conflict is inevitable as society adjusts to a brand new phenomenon.

Violent conflict needs to be stopped as soon as it starts, though, and an excellent way to do this would be to put this dickhead in jail and leave him there as an example to others.

They had a big old demonstration in the Plaza Sant Jaume to protest. 400 people showed up. Of course, they can get more than a million out to demonstrate if the United States decides to take out an aggressive and bloody dictator. The priorities of some illustrated and enlightened Barcelonese seem to be to throw lots of stones without worrying about their own glass house.

Meanwhile, more than 40 illegal immigrants, mostly Moroccans, broke out of the Center for the Internment of Foreigners here in Barcelona last night by simply climbing the fence.

The Madeleine McCann circus continues, with the parents doing an exclusive interview with Antena 3 TV and hiring a Barcelona detective agency. This story will not die, and it's become the European O.J. Simpson case. My guess is that they accidentally overdosed her with a sedative while they went out, came back and found her dead, and panicked and got rid of the body.

Unemployment in Spain in the third quarter rose back above 8%.

The transportation crisis continues in Barcelona. Yesterday's brilliant idea was to make one of the lanes of the Castelldefels motorway buses-only, which didn't work and made the traffic jams worse.

It's beginning to hurt the Socialists. Montilla is blaming Zap big time for this mess, and development minister Magdalena Alvarez looks like she's going to take the fall. Zap is pissed off because he doesn't think he deserves the blame, but the PSC is dumping it on him rather than accepting any responsiblity themselves.

Meanwhile, a while back a big deal was made out of the Madrid government's agreement to transfer control of the Barcelona commuter-train system to the Catalan government on January 1, 2008. But now the Generalitat is refusing to take over the system until the Madrid government has fixed the mess. Wait a minute, guys, isn't the whole point of your demand for more authority here in Catalonia, that the Generalitat can do a much better job than the central government? Why aren't you willing to roll up your sleeves and get to work?

So guess what Socialist-controlled TV3 is trying to whip up on its morning show today? That's right, Catalunacy. The big debate today is going to be on why it pisses Cataloonies off when they address someone else in Catalan and get an answer in Spanish. Give it a rest, people, we've got a few more important things to worry about right now.

Congratulations to Spain on hitting the trifecta this year in the category "drunk truck drivers transporting hazardous cargo before dawn." The cops pulled over this guy driving a truck hauling diesel fuel, for weaving in and out of his lane and nearly causing an accident, in the Baix Llobregat suburbs. He blew four times the legal limit, and, get this, he was perusing a catalogue on top of his steering wheel while driving. At eight in the morning. What is it that makes these guys think it's a good idea to get up early, get drunk, and haul a load of diesel? They're too smart to pull a stunt like that even in Oklahoma.

Some guy on my referrals log Googled "spanish politician pujol yoda."

It's been a very long time since we've done a blog roundup, so here goes.

A Fistful of Euros comments on continuity between Nazi Germany and the early Federal Republic.

Barcepundit has the dope on an old Bush-Aznar conversation leaked by the Zap administration to El Pais.

Biased BBC sees an anti-Bush prejudice in coverage of the southern California fires.

The Brussels Journal reviews a Diana West book blaming the wimpiness of Western civilization on the Sixties, the welfare state, and feminism.

Colin Davies posts on everything that happens in Spain, and is nice enough to add a link to us.

Davids Medienkritik links to a documentary on European anti-Americanism. Highly recommended.

Eursoc reports on Italy's proposed law that would gag bloggers. This is one of the most repressive laws that I have ever seen, much worse than anything Bush or Blair ever did.

Expat Yank comments on an incredibly dumb statement by Doris Lessing.

Fausta has plenty about the Chavez and Correa show.

Guirilandia, who is considering retirement, has one on the meaning of "relax" in Spain.
Includes a video of Salvador Dalí on What's My Line.

Trevor has a photo of a stolen Dutch bicycle for sale at Els Encants market, where they have absolutely all the junk (mostly fished out of garbage skips) you might ever want. I keep saying I'm going to go down there and see if any of the old magazine dealers have a copy of Signal, the Nazi propaganda magazine sold in Europe during World War II.

La Liga Loca keeps us all up on the latest news from the top national obsession of Spanish males. Cars would be second, with women coming in a poor third. Or maybe food and drinking would come in third, with women dropping to fourth place.

LA-Madrid Files has a fascinating piece on a guy who combined the worst excesses of both New York and Madrid, and is therefore not surprisingly dead.

No Pasaran! recommends Johann Fest's autobiography of his childhood during the Nazi years, comparing it with Gunter Grass's, and points out a few differences between today's US and Nazi Germany.


Notes from Spain has been running a generally lighthearted series on "The Worst of Spain." Check it out.

Observing Hermann posts on a German cultural thing that I had never heard about before.

The Dissident Frogman takes a shot at both Bernard Kouchner and Der Spiegel.

This town is talking about only two things: Mr. Piece of Shit Skinhead, whose attack on the Ecuadorian girl has been televised around the world, and the disastrous commuter train situation.

Interestingly, there hasn't been a bunch of soul-searching and meditation on institutional racism around here, the way there always is in the States when something like this happens. For example, look at the "Jena 6" case: six black teenagers in Assboink, Louisiana stomp a white kid half to death, for whatever reason, they get charged with attempted murder, and garments are rent among the illustrated and enlightened. Here there's been a great deal of condemnation of Mr. Scumbag Skinhead, but no self-questioning by society.

Meanwhile, the State Development Ministry has admitted that the AVE to Barcelona won't be in service until at least January, if not February.

La Vanguardia blames it on a combination of the inefficiency of the state, regional, and municipal governments: "Negotiations about this section of the AVE go back to the end of the Nineties, with the PP governing in Madrid, CiU (governing the Generalitat), and the Socialists, Communists, and later also ERC (governing the city). The three sides negotiated from different perspectives. Those in Madrid planned a line in the straightest line possible. Others wanted to go toward France, and the others wanted to develop the city. Some wanted the line to go through Cornellà, others through the Vallés, and the third to the airport and La Sagrera. The solution was to take the choice in the middle, to Sants, for many the worst possible solution."

Those responsible seem to have: underestimated the difficulty of tunneling through the soft soil of the Llobregat delta; rejected the possibility of using an underground tunneling machine, choosing instead to dig a trench to be later covered; set an unrealistic target date for the AVE's completion for electoral reasons; underestimated the possible consequences of working too hastily; and not planned for the possible transportation problems the construction would cause.

So La Vanguardia editorializes today on the fires in Southern California: "In any case, the management of emergencies and internal security in the United States is not sufficient. The policy of reducing the structures of the states leads to situations that make them ineffective, as is happening now in California."

Huh? I thought part of the story of these fires is that the government's crisis management HAS been effective this time, especially at the state and local level--precisely the opposite of New Orleans, where state and local government performance was truly lousy. And what does all of this have to do with "reducing the structures of the states," which I think means cutting the budget? Besides that, California HASN'T cut its emergency management budget, and neither has any other administration.

Says Eusebio Val: "Exactly as happens in Florida with hurricanes, in California massive urbanization has invaded formerly protected areas. If you defy nature, it will take revenge...More and more construction is happening in frontier areas between what is urban and what is natural; this increases the dangers."

Seems to me that whenever any city anywhere in the world expands, it grows into areas that were once "natural" and non-urban, no? So why is this particularly problematic in San Diego and not, say, Barcelona?

The Kansas City Royals announced their coaching staff for next year. One of the new hires is a guy named Rusty Kuntz. If I were him, I'd have changed my name to something like Joe Smith a long time ago.

News from these here parts: Pepelu Carod-Rovira is now everybody's favorite TV show guest because of the probability that he will say something outrageous. He's already been on Monica Terribas's TV3 show, and he's supposed to appear on Buenafuente and Jordi Gonzalez later this week. My guess is that he'll make a lot more enemies than converts, and all those enemies will be fired up to vote for the PP. All Rajoy has to do is say, "A vote for Zap is a vote for Pepelu," which is true, since the Socialists have been allied with Pepelu's party both in the Catalan regional and Barcelona municipal governments.

The cops busted an alleged Islamist North African pro-terrorist cell in Burgos, of all places, making six arrests. They were recruiting jihadi volunteers, raising money for the terrorist cause, and spreading pro-terrorist propaganda, and they'll be charged with conspiracy and belonging to a terrorist gang as well. The story I want to see is Iraqi Baath Party spokesman and agent "Abu Mohamed" behind bars, as well as his Spanish contacts who helped him raise money to kill his fellow Iraqis.

Scandal on a Barcelona commuter train: A Catalan skinhead (his name is Sergi Xavier Martin, not Sergio Javier, as Pepelu would say) was caught on a security camera harassing a young Ecuadorian girl, using racist slurs and grabbing her breasts. Then he hauled off and karate-kicked her right in the face, and followed it up with a few punches. There were other people in the train car, but no one did anything, and the skinhead just got off the train at the next stop. The girl was so afraid she didn't even report it to the police.

Shocking racism and violence. What a piece of shit. If you want to fight, pick on someone your own size. Typical skinhead courage. I hate those assholes.

This story is being played up big in the European media as an example of Spanish racism, and Al Jazira is playing it up; I don't think Spain's more racist than anywhere else in Europe. Wherever you go, there are a few assholes; this appalling scene is neither common nor typical around here.

So get this. Mr. Asswipe Skinhead had an arrest record for, get this, armed robbery, but he was walking around free and clear. When the cops busted him for attacking the girl, he was arraigned, and they TURNED HIM LOOSE on bail. There was a public outcry, and now they say they're going to arrest him again and jail him without bail sometime later this week.

The US criminal justice system is sometimes harsh, but I guarantee you this would not have happened in the US, because Mr. Piece of Shit Skinhead would have been serving five to ten for the armed mugging he committed, and he would be looking at five to ten more for this assault and battery charge, aggravated by the violation of the hate crime law. We'll see how much time he actually does.

Also, on the subway in, say, Chicago, you never know who might have a gun, so it's smart not to go around kicking people in the face. Never knowing who might have a gun has its negative side, of course, but an armed society tends to be a polite society.

The Al Gore Traveling Patent Medicine Show was back in town this week, as Reverend Al flew into town on his private jet and picked up another €200,000 for giving his stump speech. Supposedly the two hundred grand goes to Al's foundation, which I think is a synonym for his campaign fund. I don't think he's running for 2008, though, because he'd be on the trail in New Hampshire and Iowa right now if he were. Unless he's planning on a "Draft Al" movement at the convention.

It's Day 3 of Operation Traffic Disaster in Barcelona, with the commuter trains still down and huge traffic jams on the highways leading into the city. The Socialist Generalitat is blaming the Socialist central government, and the central government is blaming the allegedly pro-PP contractors, while the Cataloonies as usual blame some kind of sinister Madrid conspiracy to keep Catalonia down.

Transportation chaos continues today in the Barcelona metro area. Everything is snarled up. Three RENFE (State-owned) and one FGC (region-owned) commuter lines (serving the southern and western suburbs from Sants central station) are cut off because of complications from construction on the parallel AVE (high-speed) line which is to connect Madrid and Barcelona. Vice-prime minister De la Vega admitted the RENFE lines would be down for two weeks, and the FGC line is going to be down for two months. At least. Those train lines transported 160,000 passengers a day, which I assume means 80,000 people daily on round-trips. The fleet of buses that was hastily improvised to cover the transit gap is not doing the job, and city street traffic is up more than 10%, which the system can not handle without massive traffic jams. And the AVE will definitely not have been completed in time for Christmas.

So get this. De la Vega blamed the contractors doing the work for delaying construction, presumably for political reasons. SER Radio, which belongs to pro-Socialist media conglomerate PRISA, specifically accused a company named OHL, which belongs to a well-known PP supporter, of creating intentional delays.

As usual in Spain, the best defense is a good offense. We, the Socialists, look bad because a major transportation screwup is happening on our watch? Let's just blame the PP and other assorted conspirators who care about nothing but damaging us politically.

Let this be a warning to all of you. Do not put off going to the dentist for seven years, no matter how much you hate it, or you too will have what seems like eighteen cavities to be filled. Then you will have to spend a very long, uncomfortable time in the chair and your whole mouth will be sore for several days.

The quality of medical, dental, etc. care in Spain is very high, but it's done a little differently than it is in the States. Americans expect to be pampered by their health care personnel. They expect to be treated as a personal, special case, which the system can handle as long as it's private.

It doesn't work that way in Spain. The National Health is overworked, you wait in line, and they get you in and get you out as fast as they can. Dental care (except for extractions) is all private in Spain, but they've learned their style from the National Health. You open up, they shoot you full of a lot of anaesthetic that keeps your mouth numb for the rest of the day, they drill out every tooth you need work on, and then fill them up. That's it. No pampering. No special treatment. You're just a mouth, not a person.

I actually think I prefer it the Spanish way. Less hassle, and it's over and done with fast. None of this "we'll do it one tooth at a time and come back next week" stuff. And it's a good bit cheaper than it is in the US, where most people's health insurance covers dental care and dentists charge whatever they want to. In Spain, where few people have such an insurance policy, dentists can't charge exorbitant prices because patients can't afford it.

The Cataloonies came out in force last night with a big old wingding hoo-haw at the Palau Sant Jordi, Barcelona's arena, demanding the return of the "Salamanca papers." We've discussed this many times already; after the Spanish Civil War, enormous quantities of files and papers were stored at the Civil War Archive in Salamanca. A few years ago, the Cataloonies, looking for a divisive issue, demanded that all documents that originally belonged to Catalan organizations (the Generalitat, the CNT, the PSUC, and all that lot) be turned over to the current Catalan government.

Of course, this is a big "Who cares?" It's a bunch of old historical papers from seventy years ago of interest to nobody but a few historians. Besides, the Zap government has already agreed to send them to Catalonia anyway. The big old wingding hoo-haw was held, get this, in order to demand that they be turned over RIGHT NOW.

They managed to get 12,000 people with absolutely no sense of proportion to show up at the Palau Sant Jordi for this. I've never seen 12,000 Barcelonese turn out against, say, the Castro dictatorship or the Burmese junta or Saddam Hussein, but the Cataloonies among them will yell and scream for hours over some files from seventy years ago. The justification repeated over and over at the wingding hoo-haw was, "The papers were stolen from us and we want them because it's a question of national dignity." National dignity is something you earn, not something you demand, and whining en masse is not dignified, but instead rather pathetic.

Pepelu Carod-Rovira was of course the star of the show, with Communist Joan Saura and CiU leader Artur Mas there as well. Of course there was some opening up of old wounds: some descendents of Lluís Companys, the wartime Catalan premier shot after the war (with some justification--he was in charge while 8000 alleged fascists were murdered between 1936 and 1939 in Catalonia), and relatives of wannabe anarchist terrorist Salvador Puig Antich, garroted in 1974 (with some justification--he shot two cops, killing one), were there in order to whip up some anger and indignation.

Naturally, the real function of this wingding hoo-haw was to serve as a political rally, since the general election is coming up in March. The whole thing is really very cynical, as nobody with any sense cares about these damn papers; they might as well stay in Salamanca or be transferred to Barcelona, it really doesn't matter as long as historians have access to them. Besides, somebody should have microfilmed them all long ago, and if they're so important, they could be posted on the Internet to make them accessible to anyone anywhere.

Of course, the highlight of the show was when Sixties leftovers Raimon, earth's worst folk singer, and Maria del Mar Bonet, earth's biggest Joan Baez copycat, sang all the old revolutionary nationalist hit songs, only slightly relevant now that the Franco regime has been dead for thirty-two years.

What I really want to know is: Who paid for this? It must cost a couple of hundred thousand euros to rent out the Palau Sant Jordi for a night. Did this come from the taxpayers' pocket or from the pockets of the political parties represented? If from the political parties, how much of the cash did they get from illegal kickbacks?

Meanwhile, Barcelona's metropolitan area is completely snarled up, since they've closed down the Barna Sants-Bellvitge-Airport commuter train line because of the construction on the parallel high-speed train line, which most certainly won't be finished by Christmas as it was supposed to be. They kept having cave-ins on the commuter train line, and so it will be closed down for, officially, one week. I bet it doesn't reopen for a lot longer than that. They're substituting a fleet of buses for the train, but it's not working very well, and the streets are flooded with cars since people who normally use the train drove into town today.

My old boss, Federico Jiménez Losantos, who is right on some issues and very wrong on others, has dragged King Juan Carlos into his partisan struggle against Zap and the Socialists. I don't like Zap and the Socialists at all, and I heartily hope that they lose the election, but Jimenez Losantos has a big conspiracy theory set up in his brain about a plot between the Zapsters and ETA and Pepelu Carod and those guys to break up Spain and establish a Masonic-Bolshevik regime. Absurd on the face of it, and besides Zap's not that smart anyway. Losantos claims that the Zapsters are somehow using the King as a tool as part of this great conspiracy, and he wants Juan Carlos to abdicate in favor of Prince Felipe. How dumb.

Note: If you thought some items in the old Spain Herald were pretty crazy, you should have seen them before I translated them to English. Once, during a long string of daily attacks on Socialist party hack Gregorio Peces Barba, I sent back a story with the note, "Is this the Spain Herald or the Peces Barba News?" We laid off that subject for a while.

We reported several years ago that Bill Clinton's black Labrador retriever Buddy, which he got during the dark days of the impeachment in order to make him look cuddly, was hit by a car and killed not long after Clinton's presidential term ended.

Now it's being reported that Socks the cat, supposedly Chelsea's pet, was dumped on long-suffering secretary Betty Currie when Bill and Hillary moved out of the White House.

Poor Buddy and Socks. They thought they were loved and cherished parts of a family's life, but they were just public relations props that made the hungrily ambitious Clintons seem like real people with human feelings.

And the children of America, deceived by Hillary's mendacious "book" about Buddy and Socks's bucolic, idyllic lives with the Clinton family in the White House. The poor animals were cynically used in order to steal our children's innocence.

Those of us who love our animal friends must stop heartless Hillary now, before she becomes President again and exploits more dogs and cats to burnish her image for her sinister political purposes.

So I'm organizing a political action committee called AnimaL Lovers Against Hillary (ALLAH), in order to publicize Hillary Clinton's manipulation of our emotions and feelings.

We need volunteers and contributions for our struggle against America's Number One hypocritical pet exploiter! My cat Oscar has already volunteered to scratch Hillary if she ever gets within five feet of him. Let's see some humans show the same spirit!

Former Barcelona mayor and Catalan premier Pasqual Maragall of the Catalan Socialist Party announced this morning that he has Alzheimer's disease. This might explain a few things that have happened in recent years.

I've never had a positive opinion of Maragall as a politician, and I think he was a lousy premier. However, he seems to be a decent person, and I'm sorry this happened to him. Let's hope modern medical treatment can do its best for him and other Alzheimer's sufferers--and yes, that includes stem cell research.