Spanish political news: Pacifist defense minister Carme Chacon gave birth yesterday in Barcelona to a boy named Miguel. Interior minister Rubalcaba will take over her duties while she is on maternity leave. Zap and Basque premier Ibarretxe had a meeting and they didn't agree on anything. Madrid mayor Ruiz-Gallardon announced his support for Rajoy and his move toward the center, while Aznar warned Rajoy not to abandon or ignore the right wing of the PP. Looks like Gallardon will be the next PP secretary-general.

Spain's carbon-dioxide emissions are up 1.8% over last year. Since 1990, Spain's CO2 emissions have increased 52%, while the Kyoto Protocol permits an increase of only 15%. It's a good thing Zap's prime minister, because he's an ecologist who believes in the Kyoto Treaty to the point that he criticizes George Bush for not signing it. You can really tell that reducing pollution is one of Zap's top priorities.

Another Spanish justice system disaster. You won't believe this one. A young man named Daniel, from Lleida, raped six women at the age of 14. They sent him to juvie in Barcelona, where they allowed him out on furlough, and he raped eleven more women. So in 2002, they sent him to five years of prison, where he held a knife on a fellow inmate and forced him to perform fellatio. Now his five-year sentence is up, and his fifteen-month sentence for the prison rape runs out in October. Daniel has refused to participate in any sort of rehabilitation, and the prosecutor's office considers him "highly dangerous."

So the National Court has decided to release him now. This unrehabilitated serial rapist should obviously be locked up for life far away from the rest of society. If Spain's justice system won't do that, then there is something seriously wrong with it. I would suggest that the PP should pick up this issue and bash Zap around the head with it repeatedly.

National Health disaster update: Another patient died at the 12 de Octubre hospital in Madrid of a hospital-acquired bacterial infection, this time staphylococcus aureus. Looks like the 12 de Octubre hospital features a variety of bacteria to infect its patients with.

The Catalan corporation Abertis, in a consortium with La Caixa and Citigroup, has won the bidding to manage the Pennsylvania Turnpike for the next 75 years for a total of €8.3 billion. Abertis's most important businesses are turnpike and airport management, along with logistics. The Barcelona savings bank giant La Caixa owns nearly 29% of Abertis, and is the company's largest stockholder.

Note: The Spanish toponyms for American states are usually the same as in English. Exceptions: The states whose names include "New," which is "Nuevo/a," the ones that include a direction (e.g. "Dakota del Norte"), Pennsylvania ("Pensílvania"), Missouri ("Misuri"), Mississippi ("Misisipí"), Louisiana ("Luisiana"), Hawaii ("Hawai"), and sometimes Texas ("Tejas"). Frequently the Spanish pronunciation is quite different, even when the spelling is the same; for example, Virginia is "Beer-HEEN-ee-ah," and Georgia is "Hay-ORE-hee-ah."

United States Senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in all public services, whether publicly or privately owned:

Republicans:

Tower, TX
Hickenlooper, IA
Goldwater, AZ
Mechem, NM
Simpson, WY
Cotton, NH

Democrats:

Russell, GA
Harry F. Byrd, Sr., VA
Ellender, LA
Hill, AL
Eastland, MS
McClellan, AR
Fulbright, AR
Johnston, SC
Holland, FL
Robertson, VA
Sparkman, AL
Stennis, MS
Long, LA
Smathers, FL
Gore, TN
Ervin, NC
Thurmond, SC
Talmadge, GA
Robert Byrd, WV
Walters, TN

Robert Byrd is notoriously still in the Senate. Fulbright is the scholarship guy. Gore is Al Gore's dad. Thurmond is the one who lived to be 100. Ervin is the Watergate guy. Long is one of the Long dynasty.

ETA again: They set off a truck-bomb loaded with 60 kilos of explosives on the beachfront street in Guecho (Getxo), Vizcaya, at 1 AM today. They called in a warning an hour before the bomb went off, so nobody was hurt. For a big explosion--it left a crater a foot deep and six across--it did surprisingly little structural damage.

Constitutional Court confusion: Justice Roberto Garcia-Calvo, a conservative, died suddenly yesterday, leaving another vacancy among the court's twelve members. The Court had been divided six to six between "progressives" and "conservatives," with the progressive Chief Justice breaking ties. No one knows who's going to replace Garcia-Calvo, especially since four of the current Justices' terms expired in December and the PSOE and PP haven't been able to agree on who'll replace them, either.

Here in Catalonia the focus is, of course, on the controversial Catalan statute of autonomy (= regional constitution), which was passed by the Catalan and Spanish parliaments, but which has been held up by judicial appeals from both the opposition PP and from other Spanish regions. With Garcia-Calvo dead, the "progressives" would have an advantage if a decision on the statute were to be made now. Which is highly unlikely.

The Spanish construction sector's production was down 10% from a year ago as of March, the highest drop in the EU; the EU average is a mere 0.1% decline.

72% of Spanish soccer fans would rather watch soccer than have sex, which might have something to do with the birth rate around here.

ERC Catalunacy: Pepelu Carod-Rovira is going to Portugal to request support for Catalan independence. Why would he possibly think he's going to get any? Meanwhile, accused embezzler and influence-peddler Joan Puigcercos wants to be the party's candidate in the 2010 regional election so he can get Catalonia all ready for independence in 2014.

Defense Minister Carme Chacon said yesterday, "I am a pacifist woman, and the Army is pacifist too."

They had a big old demonstration in Amposta, a small Catalan city on the Ebro River, against sending any of their precious liquid to keep us clean and hydrated here in Barcelona. As usual in Spain, the organizers and the authorities claimed radically different turnouts; this time the organizers said 35,000 and the authorities said 6000. The selfishness is appalling, since the Ebro Valley towns and farms don't need the water to be sent to Barcelona through the new "mini-transfer" aqueduct supposedly already under construction. The whole point of sending this Ebro water to Barcelona is that Barcelona is buying the excess water that the Ebro Valley farmers aren't going to use.

I bet the murder in Reus becomes a big stink; the victim was a law-abiding citizen, a 37-year-old engineer from a nearby small town, while the alleged killer is a Spanish gypsy. That is not going to go over well around here, where gypsies are stereotyped as knife-wielding criminals. Which some of them are.

The Spanish First Division soccer season is over. Real Madrid is champion; other Champions League teams next year are Villarreal, Barça, and Atletico de Madrid; Racing, Sevilla, and Valencia (Cup champion) will play the UEFA Cup; and Levante, Murcia, and Zaragoza are relegated to Second. Just wait till next year. Meanwhile, this summer we'll have the Eurocup to keep us entertained.

The PSOE has decided to grab onto the immigration issue, since their surveys tell them it's the PP's strongest weapon against them. Get this: the PSOE promises to "guarantee respect for social norms that, before the arrival of immigrants, our society had never seen broken, in such important areas as housing, quality of life, commerce, opening hours, or the use of public space, which have suffered evident tensions because of the arrival of foreigners coming from different cultures." They also promised to "prioritize employment for Spaniards." Yet Socialist deputy prime minister De la Vega just made a fool out of herself by criticizing Italian immigration policy as racist and xenophobic.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Moratinos announced that he wanted to "take ambitious steps" to make Spain's relationship with the US "deeper and more profound." Unfortunately, Zap took a couple of ambitious steps in the other direction a few years ago which are going to keep bilateral relations cool as long as he's prime minister.

The Ted Kennedy story is getting play over here; of course, it's news only because he's a Kennedy. If some other Democratic senator had a couple of seizures and was hospitalized, it wouldn't be trans-Atlantic newsworthy.

Another thing that's getting massive press is the 40th anniversary of May 1968. Every newspaper is literally devoting entire pages every day to romanticizing a bunch of pseudorevolutionary middle-class mama's boys. I'll spare you the reminiscences of those who claim to have been in Paris at the time. May 1968 has to be the most overrated historical event ever, since it changed absolutely nothing.

Relatives of the 14 alleged terrorists arrested in January for plotting suicide bomb attacks in the Barcelona subway, among other places, held a demo demanding their release. The high point was when a young daughter of one of the arrestees made a weepy plea for her daddy's freedom. They got a mere 200 people out, which shows that almost everyone is happy that these guys are behind bars because at least in jail they can't blow us up. Naturally, our friends the Communists, along with the rest of Barcelona's trendy suicidal extreme left, helped them organize it.

Sometimes I can't believe the crazy shit that gets talked up around here. The Basque Parliament has passed a resolution accusing the Socialist Zap Spanish government of torturing ETA prisoners. Can you imagine an American state legislature passing a resolution accusing the federal government of torturing, say, that lot in Guantanamo?

National Health hospital infections update: A court ruled that the Madrid regional government had to pay an indemnity of €90,000 to the family of a baby girl who died of the pseudomona aureginosa bacterium contracted at the 12 de Octubre hospital. In the US a jury would award them at least $9 million.

Remember the Great Barcelona Blackout of last summer? The city's electrical system won't be completely repaired until June, a mere eleven months after the breakdown.

You may have heard that the Spanish cops arrested five hackers--it made the American press--who were going around breaking into other people's websites, including the US government's. Don't worry, they're not ideologically oriented, they tried breaking into everybody's site, including that of the Spanish Communist Party; they substituted caricatures of Rajoy and Zap for the Commie website's content.

Get this headline from El Pais: "Woody Allen fills Barcelona with intelligence." Seems Woody's Made in BCN movie has been released. Penelope Cruz is in it, which is the only reason to pirate it when it comes out on DVD; I wouldn't bother paying to get in at the theater. I think the last Woody Allen movie I liked was "Annie Hall."

Lynching in Reus, right here in Catalonia: A mob of six to ten persons were chasing two men through the streets at 4 AM in the city's downtown. One of the men tripped, was caught, and was stabbed to death. The press is not reporting the ethnicity of those involved.

Barça finished its regular season last night with a 3-5 victory in Murcia, already sentenced to relegation to the second division. The press is unanimous that this was a season to forget. Eto'o is leaving, along with Ronaldinho, Deco, Zambrotta, and company. Marquez will stay because Milito is out until at least January. Supposedly Alves and Keita have already been signed from Sevilla, and Piqué from Man United. Champions Real Madrid play relegated Levante tonight, but the club owes the Levante players millions of euros in back pay, and they've threatened to strike.

I found out what happened re: gunfire here in Gracia. Just before dawn on Friday, a car tried to escape a police roadblock on the Travesera de Dalt, headed down Torrent de les Flors, and the cops fired on the car near the corner of Torrent and Legalitat. The car stopped and those inside were arrested; the driver was an Iraqi. Nothing to do with terrorism, we have been assured.

I don't think it was a very good idea for the police to shoot at a car in the middle of Europe's most crowded residential neighborhood, unless the car contained extremely bad people who could not possibly be allowed to get away. If these guys were just car thieves or hash smugglers, they should have kept the guns holstered.

Here's some nice Spanish racism from El Correo Gallego via our compadre Colin Davies. Yes, you're right, this cartoon was published in a mainstream newspaper, not in the Ku Klux Klan Kronikle. It's a reference to De la Vega's outburst of horror in Niger after being photographed with a Nigerese businessman and his three wives.

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.