There was gunfire early this morning on Calle Torrent de les Flors two blocks away from my house; when I went down to the café with my newspaper and the dog, there were three cop cars and they had the street blocked off. Nobody seems to know what happened, whether anyone was hurt or why the guy did it. There is a consensus that it's got nothing to do with terrorism. The local press hasn't picked up on it yet.

Gracia is a very peaceful place but we do have the occasional murder; within the last three or four years an Argentinian girl was knifed by her boyfriend, an old guy murdered his wife over on Principe de Asturias street, there was a Chinese mob killing at a restaurant on Calle Providencia, and some psycho murdered two women at a parking garage just the other side of Plaza Lesseps. The wildest one was when this guy fell in love with a prostitute and shot her Albanian pimp at a bar in the Plaza Rius i Taulet; the pimp survived. ("Just like in the movies," everyone said.) All that sounds pretty bad, but remember we've got 200,000 people packed in here; we've got the highest population density of all Barcelona neighborhoods, and Barcelona is the most densely populated city in Europe.

The boat people continue arriving; this morning a boat containing 76 black African illegal immigrants washed up in Almeria, and another boat with 26 more was found off the Granada coast. These voyages across the Mediterranean from Morocco are much safer than the attempts to reach the Canaries from the Mauritanian and Senegalese coasts. It's still a shame and a tragedy, and what we in the West can do to help is stop interfering with their commerce. Put an end to protectionist tariffs and stop subsidizing our own producers, especially farmers. That's the best way to help out the Third World: give them a chance to compete.

ETA update: They seem to have re-established their car bomb factory in France; the French cops raided their last one in September 2007 and confiscated 400 kilos of explosives. It's thought that the new bomb workshop cell turned the van-bomb over to the Vizcaya operational cell, who proceeded to set it off in Legutiano yesterday. They tried something similar last year in Logroño, but the bomb didn't go off, as ETA's bomb-making expert, Luis Ignacio Iruretagoyena, who made the enormous Barajas bomb that destroyed an entire concrete parking garage, had already been arrested during the French roundup. Since then ETA has only exploded small, amateurish bombs, since they didn't have the explosives or expertise to make big ones. Until yesterday.

More PP infighting: Now the Basque PP says it backs Rajoy against Maria San Gil's challenge to his leadership. That is, they're supporting the national party leader over their own regional party leader. This can only strengthen Rajoy's position.

Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega has made a damn fool out of herself again. There's been a backlash in Italy against Romanians in general and Romanian gypsies in particular. There are 550,000 legal Romanian immigrants in Italy, and 195,000 illegals. Among them are 42,000 Romanian gypsies, and also 28,000 Yugoslavian gypsies. As usual, there has been a populist working-class backlash against them, exacerbated by several well-publicized crimes; the ones that angered many Italians were when a Romanian gypsy woman tried to steal a baby from another woman's arms, and three rape-murders committed by Romanians. Gypsy camps have been burned by mobs in Naples. This is a problem.

So the Berlusconi government in Italy is setting up three police brigades specifically to deal with gypsies, one in Milan, one in Rome, and one in Naples. Yesterday morning the Italian cops rounded up 400 illegals and deported a bunch of them, and more raids are coming.

Racism? That's a factor, but no country is free of racism. Especially, no European country is free of anti-gypsy racism; Spain is notorious for it. The problem is that there's some justification for disliking many gypsies, especially some of the Romanians, who even the Spanish gypsies fear. Many gypsies just do not follow the rules of European society; it's not their different but harmless customs and beliefs that are disliked, it's the stealing and bullying and drug dealing and throwing garbage around and begging and abusing women and not working.

Anyway, De la Vega felt it necessary to spout off about Italian internal affairs, and accused Berlusconi of "exalting violence, racism, and xenophobia." She added that she disagrees with the deportations "because it does not respect the law and the rights of immigrants. Our government repudiates violence, racism, and xenophobia, and therefore cannot accept what is happening in Italy."

Oh, shut up, you self-righteous ninny. Take a look at the La Mina gypsy neighborhood here in Barcelona if you want to find a few social problems that your Socialist government might want to do something about.

In the mood for some irony? La Vanguardia says today that "integration is a failure in Catalan schools." Half of the immigrant children in Catalonia would have to be forcibly transferred to another school in order to desegregate. Some public schools have become effectively ghettos for immigrant children, because when the tipping point of immigrant students is reached, all the Spanish parents pull their kids out of the school. 85% of immigrant children in Catalonia go to public schools, and so the nice, white, often Catholic (which equals no Muslims) private schools are the obvious refuge. Funny, I thought "white flight" was only a problem in racist countries like the United States and Britain, and that moral, high-minded people like Spaniards would never succumb to it.

Example: In the working-class Fondo neighborhood in the Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma, the percentage of immigrant children is 35%. One public elementary school there is 69% immigrants. The neighborhood "concerted" (fee-charging Catholic school that receives state subsidies) elementary school has only 4% immigrant children.

Reality tops Viz. Viz is a vulgar English comic magazine that features the running character Eight Ace. Eight Ace is a pathetic alcoholic addicted to Ace beer, which goes for one pound forty-nine an eight-pack at Mr. Patel's off-license down the street. His family, which includes his violent wife and an indeterminate but large number of children, lives in a shack on the edge of town, though Eight's wife often makes him sleep in the shed, especially when he urinates on himself, which is usually.

In every episode, Eight tries to reform, and he's well on the way to becoming an upstanding citizen, when somehow the sum of one pound forty-nine reaches his hands. Eight can't resist the call of the Ace, and he backslides yet again, gets beaten up by his wife, and is forced to sleep among the debris in the front yard once more. My favorite was when he decided to be a good father and took his kids to the zoo, but unfortunately people had thrown 1.49 in change into the crocodile pen. The last frame shows a horribly mangled Eight, leaving a trail of blood behind him, dragging himself down to Mr. Patel's.

Naturally, of course, there's no beer in England called Ace, and definitely no beer in England that goes for less than five pounds for six cans down at the off-license. But here in Barcelona, in today's La Vanguardia, Caprabo has an ad advertising Aurum beer, which I've never heard of before, at 18 euro-cents a can. A little multiplication means that an eight-pack would cost €1.44. And if we convert that into pounds--one euro is about 0.8 pounds--an eight-pack of Aurum would set our man Eight back by only one pound fifteen. Amazing. Eight cans of beer for one pound fifteen. Eight ought to move down here, he'd save money in the long run.

In case you haven't noticed, I figured out how to make the polls stay open for longer than a week, so you can now vote in all of them if you scroll down and look on the right side.

Tragedy update: Now they're talking 20,000 dead in China and 100,000 dead in Burma, with 1.5 million people in danger of death from hunger, disease, and exposure. When are we going to start bombing Burma with parachute-loads of rice and medicines? To hell with the junta and what they want us to do. Slate has two pieces worth reading, an Anne Applebaum denunciation of the Burmese junta and an explanation of how disaster casualties are estimated.

Al Qaeda is making Internet threats to carry out bombings in Switzerland and Austria during this summer's soccer Eurocup. Let me point out that both Switzerland and Austria are constitutionally neutral nations, that neither has troops outside its borders, that neither is a member of NATO or an American ally, that neither is participating in the Iraq or Afghanistan occupations, and that neither is especially pro-Israeli. Many people in Spain still don't get the basic fact that Islamist terrorism wants to kill us all or force us to submit. Zap: Spain is still a target and don't forget it.

Spain news: Rajoy and Zap are making a show of unity in the wake of the ETA bombing in Alava. We'll see how long this lasts. Maria San Gil is not going to get on the bus: she had a meeting with Rajoy and told him that she has no confidence in his leadership. The price of rented flats in Spain increased by almost exactly the inflation rate, 4.2%, over the last year, so while sale prices are dropping, rental prices are holding.

The water wars continue: Aragon wants the Zap administration to halt construction of the aqueduct that is to carry water from the Ebro to Barcelona. The European Central Bank says the eurozone countries are going to go through "a prolonged period of inflation." Remember that Alan Greenspan said it might be necessary to sacrifice growth in order to hold inflation down. Fallout from the housing market: The Barcelona real estate agency Don Piso, which belongs to the developer Habitat, is going to close the 120 offices it owns and fire 350 people. They will keep their 140 franchised offices open. Habitat's yearly sales are down 66%, they lost €444 million in 2007, and they're expected to take further losses in 2008 and 2009.

Remember a few weeks ago when La Vanguardia ran a photo taken in the US of a joke sign reading "No trespassing. Violators will be shot. Survivors will be shot again," and everybody went wild about gun-nut Americans and their violent society? Well, today they ran a photo taken in Sant Boi of a sign reading "All dogs that shit here will be exterminated," that was then rectified to "The owners of all dogs that shit here will be exterminated." No one is going wild about how violent Catalan society is, though.

Speaking of violence, I came across this Wikipedia entry; it's a list of murder rates around the world, and it includes a color-coded illustrative map. According to Wikipedia, these are the most recently available national murder rates per 100,000 people; they're from between 2004 and 2006. I've selected a few of them:

El Salvador 55
Jamaica 49
Venezuela 45
South Africa 41
Colombia 37
Brazil 27
Russia 17
Mexico 13
Argentina 9.5
Thailand 8.5
United States 5.9
Spain 3.4
Switzerland 2.9
United Kingdom 2.0
Canada 1.9
France 1.6
Japan 1.1
Germany 1.0

So Spain is actually more violent than the UK, and not that far behind the US. By the way, many countries are not included in the list, including China and India, as well as most of Africa and a good part of Asia.

The homicide rate in the US is actually a good bit lower than it was in the "good old days." Except for an unusually peaceful period between 1947 and 1968, the American murder rate has always been high. In 1916 it was 6.5, in 1921 it was 8.1, in 1928 8.6, in 1933 9.7, in 1939 6.4, in 1946 6.4, in 1969 7.3, in 1974 9.8, and in 1980 10.2. It declined dramatically in the mid-1990s to more or less the current level.

Pilar Rahola is angry, and she has a devastating piece titled "Apology for terrorism in Barcelona" in La Vanguardia today. The Barcelona Council of Youth, which receives large government subsidies, has invited Leila Khaled to speak on "the Palestinian cause." Ms. Khaled, in case you didn't know, is a member of the Marxist-Leninist PFLP terrorist gang, and was involved in several notorious hijackings in the early '70s. Khaled's speeches include such statements as, "Negotiations are useless. The occupation will only be ended by armed struggle."

Says Rahola:

The problem, unfortunately, is not that in Palestine there are people who support bombing schools, buses, and weddings with the sole goal of indiscriminately killing civilians in order to sow terror. The problem is that this kind of individual receives the support of Catalan organizations, is invited with public money, and is allowed to give speeches that are evidently apologies for terrorism.

Of the many Palestinians that the Barcelona Council of Youth could have invited, the brilliant members of the Council decided to choose one of the most hate-filled voices in the history of Palestine, only surpassed by some Hamas leaders. The most tragic thing is that Leila Khaled's party, which is classified as terrorist by the European Union and the US Department of State, has always defended European terrorism, and it has a historical relationship with the IRA. In Barcelona, thanks to the support of institutions like the Barcelona City Council and the Catalan Department of Interior, today speeches can be made that justify and defend terrorism as a means of conflict resolution.

The question is as simple as it is ugly: after Leila Khaled, will our worthy Barcelona Youth Council invite an ETA member to speak about the necessity of armed struggle? What does the Council consider to be terrorism? Does it depend on whether they kill us or kill others? Is killing Israelis an epic feat and killing Spaniards tragic? And what does the radical position of a leader of a Palestinian terrorist organization have to do with the problems of the youth of Barcelona?

The vision of the lunatic Left, which confuses solidarity with nihilism, and believes that defending the Palestinian cause means defending Palestinian bombs, is delirious. In their twisted view of the conflict, they do not realize that many Palestinian parents are horrified at the idea that their children might be entrapped by terrorism. So today, in the city of Barcelona, paid for with public money, someone who is a hijacker, who defends terrorism, and who does not believe in a negotiated peace, will give a speech. If this is the Council's idea of teaching values to our youth, then it's time to flush the toilet.

It's especially ironic that Khaled will speak today, the same day that ETA murdered a Civil Guard in the Basque Country with a car bomb.

In case you'd like to see some vile Spanish anti-Semitic Israel-bashing, check out this cartoon by Ferreres, who is lower than what you scrape off your shoes after you walk through a barnyard, in yesterday's El Periodico. There are two Israeli soldiers holding automatic rifles on blindfolded Palestinians on their knees in front of a high wall with a watchtower flying a pirate flag. The first soldier says, "Sixty years ago our free state was born democratically." The second soldier says, "We invited those who lived here to leave. Democratically, of course. But it looks like some of them didn't understand."

ETA bombing update: They used a car bomb loaded with more thn 100 kilos of explosives. The explosion scattered debris in a radius of 100 meters. Serious damage was done to the barracks. The four wounded officers are in good condition at the hospital; one was trapped in the wreckage for two hours, and is currently in intensive care, but he's going to live. The cops found the car the terrorists escaped in; it was booby-trapped and the bomb squad deactivated a gasoline incendiary bomb. Can we please not negotiate with these terrorists ever again?

Electricity prices, which are regulated by the government in Spain, are going up; the National Energy Commission has approved an 11.3% rate hike to take effect in July. Econ minister Pedro Solbes says the administration will almost certainly sign off on the increase. The problem is that electricity rates are fixed by the government below the market price, and the utilities are €5 billion in the hole this year and €15 billion all totaled. It just doesn't work to force businesses to charge less than cost price for their goods. Looks like we're going to have to do a bit of belt-tightening around here, with higher mortgage rates, high food and gasoline prices, increased unemployment, and low economic growth. Every boom has its bust.

Speaking of which, Spanish GDP growth in the first trimester of 2008 was 2.7%; it was 3.5% in the last trimester of 2007. Solbes is calling it "rapid deceleration." Good news: Telefonica posted a €1.5 billion profit for the trimester, which will help out everybody's pension plan and mutual funds.

PP news: Maria San Gil has threatened to resign as PP president in the Basque Country if Rajoy doesn't move away from his new moderate position on regional nationalisms. Ms. San Gil, we all respect your courage and decency, but we've lost two elections in a row and something's got to change. Either get on the bus or get out of the way with as little fuss as possible. She has, by the way, ruled out challenging Rajoy for party leadership at the June convention.

Remember the Jose Couso case? He was the journalist killed in Baghdad when the Americans took the city back in 2003. He was pointing a camera out the window of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad and an American tank fired on him, thinking he was an enemy fighter or spotter. His family and the Spanish far left have never stopped trying to take the US Army, and specifically the three soldiers involved in Couso's death, to court in Spain for "murdering" him. So Spain's National Court has just thrown out their case for the second time. Maybe they'll get the message now: we're sorry he got killed, but bad things that are not crimes happen in battles.

Barça report: There's a movement taking shape to call a no-confidence motion against club president Joan Laporta. I bet it doesn't work. Supposedly they've already signed Alves from Sevilla, they're interested in Hleb and Drogba, they've offered Ronaldinho, Zambrotta, and €20 million to Milan for Kaká, and Puyol is mad and is talking about leaving.

Breaking news: ETA has killed again. They exploded a car bomb at the Guardia Civil barracks in Legutiano, Alava, killing one Guardia and wounding four, at 3 AM today. The murdered man´s name is Juan Manuel Piñuel Villalón; he was 41, married, with two children. One of the wounded was trapped in the wreckage for two hours. Two of the wounded Guardias are women.

ETA must be destroyed.

Wow. The Associated Press has a piece on Barcelona's water problems, and Fox News's site is giving it some play. The local press is not going to like this at all:

Spain's worst drought in decades forced the proud city of Barcelona to start shipping in drinking water Tuesday, an unprecedented step that business leaders bemoan as a public relations nightmare for one of Europe's top tourist destinations.

A Panamanian-flagged tanker loaded with water docked in Spain's second-largest city, launching a mission by an emergency, six-vessel flotilla scheduled to operate for at least three months.

Tuesday's scene was humbling for Catalonia, the capital of which is Barcelona, with more than 100 journalists crowded at the dock to record the water delivery.

The region likes to say it stands out from the rest of Spain for its efficiency and economic might. But it has been among the regions hardest hit by Spain's worst springtime drought since record-keeping began 60 years ago...

The crisis is the latest in a string of embarrassments for Catalonia. Last year sink holes delayed construction of a high-speed rail line from Madrid to Barcelona, and other engineering problems with it shut down commuter rail lines for days. In July, a blackout left 350,000 people in Barcelona without power for three days.

Now Catalonia is buying extra water, even from France; some of the emergency ships will come from Marseille.

They're not going to like this one bit.

Thought Americans were bad at geography? Check out this Swiss Airlines map of the Americas via Strange Maps. Among other blunders, it puts Sao Paolo in the Atlantic, San Jose, Costa Rica, in Nicaragua, and Santo Domingo and San Juan near the Cayman Islands. They don't seem to have bothered labeling Santiago de Chile. As for US cities, they've put Portland and Sacramento in Idaho, Seattle near Spokane, Indianapolis on Lake Michigan, Chicago in northern Wisconsin, Memphis south-east of Nashville, Little Rock in mid-Kentucky, Pittsburg (without the H) and Columbus on Lake Erie, Minneapolis near the Canadian border, Detroit in Lake Huron, and Oakland on the coast north of San Francisco. Washington is on the Delaware and Philadelphia on the Hudson, with New York somewhere near Springfield, Massachussetts. As for Canada, Toronto's nowhere near Lake Ontario, and Ottawa is in south Quebec.

My guess is that most people are ignorant of geography outside their own area; I've met few Europeans who know much about the world outside Europe, and few Americans who know much about the world outside America.

Corruption bombshell in Catalonia. Seven regional government counselors (the equivalent of cabinet ministers in the national government) have been accused of embezzlement, influence-peddling, and abuse of power by the Catalan prosecutor's office. What they did was hire "consultants," to the tune of €32 million, to write up unnecessary reports, more than 1500 of them. This money, of course, wound up in the pockets of political clients and the bank accounts of the parties, the PSC, ERC, and ICV.

Specifically, most of the "consultants" involved are former government or party officials belonging to one of the Tripartite parties. They were all paid less than €12,000 a report; any government project that costs more than €12,000 has to be open to competitive bidding.

Those involved are: Socialists Joaquim Llena (Agriculture), Marina Geli (Health), and heavy hitter Joaquim Nadal (Public Works); from ERC, Carme Capdevila (Social Action), Joan Manel Tresserras (Culture), and Joan Puigcercós (Public Administration), who is challenging Pepelu Carod for ERC leadership; and the Communist Joan Saura (Interior), Chemical Imma Mayol's "partner."

I would like nothing more than to see Puigcercós and Saura behind bars. And I will bet this brings down the Montilla administration within a few months.

The first ship bringing in drinking water arrived at Barcelona harbor yesterday. It contains enough to provide one day's consumption for 170,000 people. There will be six ships carrying water to Barcelona, making a total of some 65 voyages a month, and costing €22 million a month. Tourists, don't worry, it looks like we won't have any water cutoffs this summer, and you can make your plans now.

The yearly inflation rate declined to 4.2% in April, which is good news. Meanwhile, new housing prices are down between 20 and 40% across Spain, and discounts of up to €40,000 are being offered. La Vanguardia thinks that demand is going to stay low until prices in Barcelona drop to an average of about €240,000, a psychological barrier since it translates to 40 million old pesetas. You can buy a nice place in a smaller city for a lot less than that; a 65 m2 flat that would go for €270,000 in the Barcelona suburb of Badalona would cost you only €150,000 in Valladolid.

Spanish oil giant Repsol earned more than €1.2 billion in the first four months of 2008. That's 37% more than last year. This is good for everybody's pension plans and mutual funds.

Split in the PP: Former defense minister Federico Trillo has joined Maria San Gil, Esperanza Aguirre, and Aznar's wife and Madrid city councilwoman Ana Botella in criticizing Rajoy and his crew's move toward appeasing the regional nationalisms in Catalonia and the Basque country. The Madrid PP is in open rebellion.

Get this, from La Vanguardia's TV critic, of all people, reacting to De la Vega's "horror" at being introduced to a Nigerese polygamist and his three wives, and the popularity of Catalan NBA forward Pau Gasol and the LA Lakers:

Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega should be very wary if she decides one day to visit the home court of the Utah Jazz, the basketball team in the semifinal playoff in the Western Conference against the Los Angeles Lakers. Because the percentage of Mormons who watch the games in Salt Lake City is very high, and therefore the possibility and danger of being photographed with a local polygamist is extremely high.

How ignorant. The mainstream Mormons banned polygamy more than 100 years ago, and 0% of the people living in Salt Lake are polygamists. There are tiny fragment splinter groups of ultra-fundamentalist Mormons living up in the remote Utah hills that practice polygamy, but they don't total more than a few thousand people, and that lot wouldn't go to a basketball game anyway.

Just a comment: The Utah Jazz and the Los Angeles Lakers are two of the dumbest team names in sports, since they don't play jazz in Utah and there are no lakes in LA. What happened is those teams moved from New Orleans and Minneapolis, respectively, and kept their original names. The name I most dislike, though, is the Buffalo Bills. How corny.

US soccer league team names win the dumbness crown, since they've been imitating European names and now we've got atrocities like FC Dallas, Real Salt Lake (what, there's a fake Salt Lake?), and DC United. What I would have done is adopt appropriate football-sounding team nicknames already used in England and Scotland. Teams could be called the Spurs, the Rovers, the Gunners, the Red Devils, the Blues, the Reds, the Wanderers, the Rangers, the Celtics, the Hammers, the Hearts, the Wolves--there are dozens of possibilities. Maybe the Chavs or the Pikeys or the Yobbos or the Spivs or the Asbos.

Tragedies around the world. 7000 dead in an earthquake in Sichuan, probably 200,000 dead in Burma with the refugees locked up in concentration camps, and the Lebanese civil war has broken out again. Burma finally let the Americans send in one planeload of supplies from Thailand. Supposedly the junta is stealing half the aid that comes in. 2 million people are at risk. I vote we parachute in loads of supplies, and if the Burmese government doesn't like it there's not much they can do.

In Spain: The PP has ruled out primary elections to nominate its candidate for the 2012 election. Basque PP leader Maria San Gil has announced that she's mad at Rajoy for toning down the rhetoric on regional nationalisms, and Esperanza Aguirre is backing her. Montilla's been complaining about regional financing, wanting the share of public spending pork that the not-yet-in-force Catalan statute guarantees for Catalonia. Zap told him to shut up.

De la Vega admitted that the gender violence law has done nothing to stop gender violence. Of course not. To stop men beating up on women, you have to protect the woman and jail the man, and this is exactly what Spain is not doing. Telma Ortiz, Princess Letizia's sister, has pressed charges against 57 media outlets for not leaving her alone, as she is a private person, not a member of the royal family. Good for her. Down with the trashy press, and kudos to Ms. Ortiz for not playing the scandal magazines' game.

The rain over the weekend has the reservoirs at an average of 28% full, which means that the restrictions on watering gardens and filling swimming pools may be lifted, and that we probably won't have any cutoffs this summer. Meanwhile, the first tanker ship carrying drinking water will arrive at the port May 15.

Barça choked again last night against Mallorca in their last home game of the season, also Rijkaard's goodbye. He was well-received by the crowd, but Deco, Eto'o, and Henry got booed in what was almost certainly their last game in the Camp Nou. Ronaldinho didn't even show up. Barça got ahead 2-0 and then let Mallorca come back and score three. They're not going to get second place, either, which means they have to go through a playoff to reach next year's Champions League, and if they blow it then the club loses literally tens of millions of euros.

Everybody wants president Joan Laporta to resign. I bet he holds out. A good season next year would save his neck. If they have another disastrous season like this one, though, he's finished and so are his political aspirations.

Disaster at the National Health. 18 people died in the intensive care unit at the 12 de Octubre university teaching hospital in Madrid, one of the city's most important, due to an outbreak of the Acinetobacter baumanii bacteria, which is antibiotic-resistant. Hospital management denies the patients died directly from the bacterial infection, but rather from something else. I'm not sure what the difference is; they were infected with the bacteria and they died.

El Pais says that more than 250 people were infected, 101 have died so far, and 18 of the deaths are directly attributable to the bacteria. The outbreak lasted from February 2006 to October 2007. The authorities finally tore down the ICU and built a completely new one.

Enough of a scandal has been stirred up that deputy prime minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega announced from Niger that the prosecutor's office would investigate.

Said Juan Carlos Montejo, an ICU doctor, "(The outbreak) should not cause alarm or call into question the health care offered, but rather teach us about an important clinical problem around the world: bacterial infections contracted in hospital are more and more resistant."

What a load of shit. If 250 people get infected over nearly two years with a deadly bacterium, the quality of the health care provided at that hospital is lousy and somebody needs to pay.

I will point out that my mother-in-law died from a generalized bacterial infection she picked up in a Barcelona National Health hospital. We gave her to them with a broken leg, and they gave her back to us dead.

This is going to be a political football, with the PSOE blaming the PP regional government in Madrid, and the PP blaming the PSOE Ministry of Health. The PP also claims that El Pais timed its report in order to distract attention from the Coslada municipal police mafia scandal, which I doubt.

De la Vega weirdness from Niger: She posed for a photo with a Nigerese businessman and three women, who later turned out to be the gentleman's wives. So De la Vega announced she was "horrified." Wait, what's the problem? It's Niger. They're Muslims. Polygamy is not only legal, but a cultural tradition. I thought Socialists were supposed to be all, like, multicultural and stuff. I really don't get the horror: has she never met a Gulf oil sheik and his entourage? Marbella's full of them.

By the way, the Nigerese businessman in question is partners with a Spanish businessman, which is why De la Vega was introduced to him. Their company processes "chufas," called tiger nuts in English, and it employs 500 women directly, while buying its chufas from some 3000 Nigerese farmers. I would say that these two guys have done more good for more people than De la Vega has in her life.

(Note: I was thinking about attempting a joke along the lines of "If my hand was full of tiger nuts, I'd let go really quick," but decided not to.)

Publico, surprisingly, has a front-page editorial that I largely agree with. "Secular" ("laíco") is a fetish-word for the Jacobin European Left that goes back to the French Revolution, and all good Jacobins, anticlericals to a man, believe in the secular state. Well, I do, too, but I think my definition of "secular" may be different from theirs. I agree that there should be no established church, and that the churches should stay out of other people's business. I don't want to tear down the Catholic Church, though, and I think the anticlericals need to accept that Catholicism is one of the bases of Spanish culture.

Here's Publico's ten commandments for the secular state:

1. No more government subsidies for Church schools. Completely agreed. The problem is that Spain doesn't have enough public schools for everybody, so one-third of the kids go to "concerted" schools, Catholic schools partly funded by the state. Changing this situation would require massive investment on the part of the state.

2. No more religion classes in the public schools. Completely agreed. Right now all schools must offer classes in Catholic doctrine, which are elective for the students. If parents want their kid to get religious training, they should send their kid to a religious school, not a public one.

3. No religious symbolism at occasions of state. Completely disagree. The example they give is Calvo-Sotelo's state funeral, held at a Catholic church and presided over by a Catholic priest. Well? Calvo-Sotelo was Catholic, and that's the kind of funeral he would have wanted. Such symbolism is basically harmless. No one is offended except people who want to get offended.

4. No state presence at religious celebrations. Completely disagree. Their example is government officials in Semana Santa processions. So what? Nothing's being imposed on anybody. If you don't like Semana Santa processions, don't watch them.

5. No more state religious holidays. Absolutely, totally disagree. Why change the tradition and make everybody angry? Believe me, nothing's going to piss off the people more than removing the holiday status of Christmas. Besides, about a third of Spaniards are observant enough to do stuff like take the day off to go to church on Good Friday; might as well make the day a holiday for everyone.

6. No Catholic representatives in non-Church institutions. Completely disagree. Their examples are Army chaplains and chapels in hospitals. It makes sense to me to allow soldiers religious consolation, and to have a priest around the hospital to administer last rites. Again, nothing's being forced on anyone; you don't have to go see the chaplain if you don't want to.

7. The state should confiscate Church property. Absolutely, totally disagree. Their example is "Who does Burgos cathedral belong to, humanity or the Church?" The Church, of course. I have no problem with state subsidies for the preservation of privately owned historical treasures, and such a program is an incredibly tiny portion of the budget anyway.

8. Make apostasy easy. Agreed, but who cares? Yes, the Church should allow people who want to un-baptize themselves and take themselves off the membership rolls. But if you're an atheist, who cares if you were baptized in the first place, since you believe it's a meaningless ceremony anyway?

9. State-owned media should not televise religious programs. I agree in the sense that there should be no state-owned media, period. I disagree in the sense that some people are interested in religious programming on Sunday morning, and the customer should get what he wants. If you don't want to watch it, turn the channel over to Playboy TV or whatever you like better. Nothing's being imposed on you.

10. The Church should be 100% self-financed. Completely and totally agree, with a few tiny exceptions such as, say, government cooperation with Church homeless shelters and such things. Right now there's a check-off box on your income tax if you want to give a euro or whatever to the church; get rid of that. If you want to give the church money, do it yourself and not through the tax system.

I think it's interesting that Publico didn't mention the divorce and abortion laws, both of which include religiously-based impediments to individual decisions.

I noticed that visitor traffic was way up yesterday, more than 300, when it's usually about 180 on Fridays. So I checked, and discovered I was getting dozens of Google hits for Javier Rodrigo de Santos, the Pervert of Palma, the Vice Mayor, mostly from Germany but also Austria, Switzerland, and central Europe generally. I checked even further, and discovered that Der Spiegel has picked up the story; their interest is due to the large number of Germans on Mallorca.

I don't speak German, of course, but I was able to figure out a little of the article. For example, "Gruppensex," "Koksorgien," and "Dildogeschichten." And "das Happy End einer Massage," as well.

I'm going to add Dildogeschichten to my vocabulary. "It was kind of a kinky porno vid. There were three couples swapping partners and positions, and after about ten minutes the Dildogeschichten started."

The drought has finally broken. There's a low-pressure system over the western Mediterranean bringing counterclockwise winds from the east carrying moist air. It's going to rain until at least next Wednesday, at least four inches total in all of Catalonia, and this should make an appreciable difference in reservoir levels. It'll be a green summer out in the country.

The situation in Burma is beyond scandalous. It's openly criminal. Figures (probably exaggerated) of half a million dead are being thrown around, and there are reports of cholera and malaria outbreaks. The Americans and several other countries, including the Brits and Aussies and of course the Thais, are just waiting for permission to start flying in aid, and the xenophobic Burmese junta won't let them. Even the UN and Amnesty International are denouncing the junta. Meanwhile, of all things, they're having a pseudo-election tomorrow, a referendum on a new constitution. If this doesn't bring the government down--remember last year's rioting, brutally put down?--I don't know what will.

Meanwhile, in one of those slightly admirable and slightly silly ceremonies they have around here, the Generalitat's Catalonia International Prize has been jointly awarded to Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi and a Burmese woman doctor. The honorees will receive €100,000 in cash (rather generous) and an Antoni Tapies sculpture (rather worthless). My problem here: It seems to me that the moral stature of the awardees is higher than that of the awarders, and that the awarders are attempting to buy moral stature by associating themselves with the awardees.

Monica Terribas has been named president of TV3, so good-bye to hopes of its de-politicization. Even though the Socialists are in power, TV3 will always be the heart of nationalist influence in Catalonia. Monica is probably most memorable, at least to me, for her adrenaline-fueled (?) performance the night of the 2004 US election, and for her interview with Colin Powell, when she got a bit snippy and he bulldozed her.

Our friends in Esquerra Republicana have pitched in on the Free Franki crusade. Puigcercos and Pepelu Carod are vying to see who can be Cataloonier; Puigcercos has called on the government to liberate him. Carod took it farther and denounced "the impunity enjoyed by those persons and media that insult, defame, and lie about Catalan reality, its institutions, or its political representatives." Wow. Sounds like Pepelu's against free speech for everybody but him.

ETA update: The French cops found the car used by the terrorists who killed the two Guardias Civiles near Bordeaux, but the killers are still at large. No news on the murderers of Isaías Carrasco, who are also still at large.

Get this: 36 local cops, including the police chief, have been arrested in the Madrid suburb of Coslada for extorting protection money from bars and discos, and for collaborating with a Romanian gang that trafficked in prostitutes. I'm pretty sure that corruption among local cops is pretty well entrenched in Spain. I know some places in Barcelona that have been operating illegally for years, and they must be paying somebody off.

The cops rounded up yet another bunch of Internet kiddie-porn pervos, 17 this time. Jeez. These guys are just crawling out of the woodwork.

The Barça firestorm is growing. All the fans are mightily pissed off that the team looked so bad against Real Madrid. Eto'o, Edmilson, Xavi, and Bojan were harassed as they drove away from practice yesterday. There's a movement to get rid of Laporta, but I don't think it'll be successful. Rijkaard is officially out as coach and Guardiola in, and Beguiristain shows no signs of stepping down as general manager.

Just a comment: I've been getting several Google hits a day for "javier rodrigo de santos," the Pervert of Palma, the guy who spent €50,000 of city money at gay brothels. The fun part, of course, is that he'd posed as a traditionalist family values advocate, married with kids and all. I don't understand the international interest in him, though. Maybe he has a lot of foreign, uh, friends.

I also got a Google hit this morning for "insid a hores rectom." I'm curious about whether he meant "horse's" or "whore's." Either way it's pretty gross. The searcher is in Crowville, Louisiana, which means he's probably a native English speaker, and he managed to spell all three words longer than one letter incorrectly. I hope I never go to Crowville, Louisiana.

It's even worse in Burma than had been thought. They're talking 100,000 dead. Survivors report mountains of bodies.99,000 of the dead would still be alive if their government weren't so incompetent and corrupt. I didn't know this: The main road from Mandalay to Rangoon wasn't even paved. Now it's not there anymore.

The xenophobic and autarchic nature of the Burmese dictatorship makes it very hard to get news out of there, and the information available is very limited. Some aid is coming in through Thailand, high-energy cookies, blankets, and medicine. La Vanguardia reports that the Burmese junta has deigned to accept American aid; the Americans have offered $3 million as long as American officials get to supervise the distribution. People from the UN's World Food Program are having trouble getting in because the junta won't give them visas. People are getting desperate in the Irrawaddy delta, and there have been food riots.

You know there's not much news when La Vangua puts a photo of Madonna tongueing one of her dancers on the front page of their website with the headline, "Another Madonna lesbian kiss." Has anybody cared what Madonna does since about 1992? I never cared about what she did at all, ever. I imagine that most male Madonna fans are heterosexuality-challenged.

Econ minister Pedro Solbes says that the housing market needs to adjust (that is, deflate), and that he's not going to take any "artificial measures" to stop it. Now he's hoping that growth will return to 3% in 2010, and that Spain needs some "financial austerity." That sort of contradicts Zap's stimulus package and all the money-raining promises he made during the campaign. Whatever happened to the day-care centers at every company, or the job training for ex-construction workers, or the six-month government mortgage guarantees?

Spain is claiming that the American salvage company Odyssey "expoliated" the wreck of a Spanish navy ship which sank in 1804, found by Odyssey last year. They want the treasure that the company discovered, valued at some $500 million, for themselves, though Odyssey did the work of finding it and then bringing up the gold. I dunno. If the shipwreck wasn't found in Spanish territorial waters, I don't think Spain has much of a claim; they lost their ownership of it when they abandoned it under water for two hundred years. And if anybody but Odyssey has a claim on the treasure, seems to me it would be Peru, not Spain, right?

Remember Franki the flag-burning squatter punk? A couple of his buddies used climbing equipment to suspend themselves between the towers of the Sagrada Familia over the weekend, and this morning they suspended themselves off a bridge over the motorway into Barcelona through Sant Joan Despi, and the cops had to cut off traffic in order to get them down. If I were the cops I'd give them five minutes to get the hell out, and then cut their ropes if they didn't comply. By the way, Franki is supposedly mixed up with Laura Riera, the Terrassa girl who put the finger on a PP town councilman murdered by ETA.

The number of abortions performed yearly in Spain has increased by 99%--that means it's doubled, from 51,000 to 101,000--in the last ten years. Spanish women have their first child at age 31 on average, the highest age in the EU.

Barça played dreadfully last night and was humiliated 4-1 by Real Madrid. Everybody was terrible. I was completely wrong about TV viewership: it was the most-watched Madrid-Barça since 2004, and the most-watched program in the history of Tele 5.

Just a reminder: The name of the city is Barcelona. The C is pronounced TH in Spanish and S in Catalan. It is never abbreviated in speech. It is sometimes abbreviated in writing as Barna or BCN (after the airport three-letter identification code.) I call it B-ville or Barneytown, but nobody else does. Often in the Spanish press Barcelona is referred to as "la Ciudad Condal," the "City of the Counts." This is never used in speech. The name of the football team is FC Barcelona, abbreviated as Barça, in both speech and writing.

Two stories in La Vanguardia's international section on US news: Georgia executed a murderer, and Obama won North Carolina while Hillary took Indiana.

From La Vangua's comments section on the death penalty:

What a civilized country! The master of the lives and deaths of its citizens...

And this is the country that "demands" that others respect human rights. Even though the crime rate in that country is very high, its causes should be studied, and possibly many would be surprised to see that their own lifestyle is one of the principal causes. Then they act like they're the example for other countries to imitate. What an example!

The causes and the errors are part of the vices of the Americans, especially the ease of obtaining guns. We have nothing to envy the people of the US, nothing at all.

I know about somebody who, if the laws of his own country were applied to him, would have to die...his name is George Bush...have you heard of him?

The Americans like death. It doesn't matter if it's an invasion with hundreds of thousands of victims or an electric chair or lethal injection. These people's moral evolution is less than minimal.

THERE IS NO BIGGER MURDERER THAN BUCH (sic).

From La Vangua's comments section on the Obama-Hillary story:

I hope they all lose, Obama, Clinton, and the Republican candidates. They represent nothing but extreme vulgarity and foolishness and they are the antithesis of what politics should be. They do nothing but support the economic mafias, the real powers, the multinationals, which sadly hold dictatorial economic power over the world we live in. A short life to all of them. They deserve nothing else, all of them, than total ostracism!

All the candidates are mafiosos, always absolutely in favor of the economic lobbies that dominate the US and the world. With this scum, because that is what they are, we will never have a world in which equality exist, but the gap between rich and poor will keep getting bigger and bigger. A bad, very bad thing. In reality, they are candidates made by the rich and the privileged.

If Obama wins we will have a Republican government for another 4 or 8 years. McCain will beat Obama easily and the Bush era will be extended in time. What are the Americans thinking? Have hamburgers filled their brains with toxins? The bad thing is all we Europeans are going to suffer. Obama, you false Democrat, withdraw for the good of your country and the world!

Obama's advisors think they have everything covered, but as soon as there is a violent Muslim attack against American interests, the nigger will lose the elections because he's a darky...and we'll have Bush's shadow eight more years. Vote for the African, the world is "de puta madre."

The average American may make thousands of mistakes, but the establishment, which really rules, above the president himself, have already thought about how to eliminate somebody who sticks his nose in. Go ask Kennedy...

THERE IS A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE AT GIBRALTAR AND THIS NEWSPAPER HAS NOTHING TO SAY.

Virtually no news today. All the papers are reporting, get this, that Franco fixed the 1968 Eurovision contest so the Spanish singer Massiel's "La, la, la" would beat out Cliff Richard's "Congratulations." Yeah, right. Franco had better things to do with his time. He was a traditional military man, a cold, hard-headed realist capable of cruelty, not someone who cared about such silliness. The number of people on the unemployment rolls increased by nearly 40,000 in April, the largest increase since 1997. Nearly half of the newly unemployed are from the construction sector. Barça plays Real Madrid tonight at the Bernabeu, but nobody cares because Madrid's already clinched the League title. I bet the TV networks are really pissed, because Barça-Madrid matches are usually among the year's top five programs in the TV ratings. Rumor has it that Milan wants to buy Zambrotta but not Ronaldinho, and that Barça is interested in some kind of Henry-Cesc swap, which I wouldn't do if I were Arsenal.

On anti-Semitism in Spain: I've come across it personally four times in the last couple of weeks.

1) An extreme left-wing gentleman of my acquaintance informed me that Hillary Clinton is the bought-and-paid-for tool of the Jewish-Israeli lobby, which won't tolerate an Obama victory.

2) An elderly gentleman of my acquaintance asked me about the US election; I explained that Hillary and Obama are competing for the Democratic nomination, and that John McCain has already clinched for the Republicans. He thanked me and asked me which candidate the Jewish lobby was supporting.

3) A relative of Remei's informed me that Israeli insurance companies are behind the conspiracy to spray anti-hail chemicals into the Catalan atmosphere.

4) Another relative of Remei's informed me that the Israelis were war criminals who were exterminating Palestinian children. (This occured last week, right after Hamas mortared and rocketed an Israeli city, the Israelis responded with an air-to-surface missile, a Palestinian family was killed, and La Vanguardia ran the photo of the bodies at the funeral on page 3 above the headline "Massacre of children in Gaza.")

Peter (not Paul) Preston had a poorly-written piece about crime in Barcelona with several inaccuracies on the Guardian's website. The piece is so poor that the Guardian has taken it off its Comment Is Free archive, but you can still access it on Google.

However, Preston is absolutely right about one thing: Street crime is rampant in Barcelona, and all tourists are targets. You're not likely to get hurt, but it is likely that somebody will try to pick your pocket or snatch your bag. Watch for groups of Moroccan teenagers wearing expensive sports clothing and for Bosnian women pickpockets on the tourist bus.

You should be OK if you take proper precautions and keep an eye out. Don't carry anything valuable on you. Don't let your possessions get out of your sight at a restaurant or bar. Don't get sloppy drunk, don't try to buy drugs, don't go down any dark streets, stay out of the Raval at night, and it's best if you go out accompanied. Consider staying at a hotel outside the Old City, in the Eixample or Sant Gervasi, which are considerably safer areas. Particularly dangerous tourist areas: Public transport, the Ramblas and Barrio Gotico, the Sagrada Familia, La Pedrera, the Picasso Museum, and the Parque Guell. Whatever you do, stay away from the three-card monte dealers on the Ramblas. Not only is the game a scam, of course, but pickpockets act in the crowd watching it. Also, if you are driving, and somebody (not a marked police car) indicates that you should pull over, don't do it until you get to a place where there are some other people.