Barcepundit (English edition)

2009-07-06T13:35:00.001+02:00

SPAIN GOES HALFWAY ON NUCLEAR POWER: a good piece in the Christian Science Monitor about the decision by Zapatero, which is really difficult to understand.

2009-07-06T10:06:00.001+02:00

THE NEW CAMPAIGN by the International Society for Human Rights is just brilliant.

2009-07-06T09:59:00.001+02:00

THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT admits 140 people were killed and at least 828 were injured in the clashes in the Xinjiang region in northwestern China. If that's the toll by the authorities, I'd wager my collection of chopsticks that the real figures are much, much higher.

So, United Nations, tell me: at what time today are you going to hold an emergency meeting of the Security Council? You were quite fast for the bloodless Honduran "coup", so I'm sure -cough, cough- you'll be fast here too. Also, Zapatero and Sarkozy, at what time today are you going to announce the recall of your countries' ambassadors in Beijing, as you did after the Zelaya ouster?

2009-07-05T15:50:00.001+02:00

TO ME, this sounds as very significant:

The most important group of religious leaders in Iran called the disputed presidential election and the new government illegitimate on Saturday, an act of defiance against the country’s supreme leader and the most public sign of a major split in the country’s clerical establishment.
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A statement by the group, the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qum, represents a significant, if so far symbolic, setback for the government and especially the authority of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is supposed to be final. The government has tried to paint the opposition and its top presidential candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, as criminals and traitors, a strategy that now becomes more difficult — if not impossible.

2009-07-04T12:47:00.001+02:00

IRAN AS YOU HAVE RARELY SEEN IT. Because it's more than just mullahs and fundamentalists...

2009-07-04T09:22:00.004+02:00

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

2009-07-03T21:07:00.001+02:00

VENEZUELA TAKES one more step into darkness:

The National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) announced on Friday that it will open punitive administrative proceedings to all the media that have broadcasted advertisements advocating private property. Conatel also issued a precautionary measure that prohibits radio and TV stations to broadcast such advertisements.

Diosdado Cabello, the Minister of Public Works and director of Conatel, said that the decision was due to the fact that the spots, which are produced by two different organizations: Asoesfuerzo and the Center for Dissemination of Economic Knowledge (Cedice) "make people think that there is a threat in this area." According to Minister Cabello, this would be misleading advertisement. Cabello added that the spots do not specify the way these threats would work.

2009-07-03T13:34:00.001+02:00

RECOVERY OR MIRAGE?

Spain's unemployment dole is gradually decreasing but the country is not out of the woods just yet.

The number of people filing claims for unemployment benefits in Spain fell for the second straight month, dropping by 55,250 in June, according to government figures published on Thursday. The Labor Ministry said the decline left the total of jobless people at 3,564,889 and marked the first time since mid-2007 that the figure has gone down two months in a row.

Too bad that these figures wear more makeup than the late Michael Jackson.

First of all, if you look at the seasonal effect the number of people filing for unemployment is still up. By only 107, true, but they're still up.

Second, because that number doesn't include some groups that may not be officially asking for unemployment benefits but are not working either: people looking for their first job, unemployed workers attending government-paid courses for career development, etc. That's about five hundred thousand more.

And finally because, also in June, the number of workers affiliated to Social Security went down by a whopping 182.000. This means they're 182.000 who are not working anymore. The only thing that could reconcile this with the 55.000 people not filing for unemployment benefits in the same month would be if the labor force was shrinking, but it's not the case.

2009-07-02T19:32:00.002+02:00

IT'S TRUE, the whole "Iraq has WMDs" stuff was a gigantic lie. A hoax. A big load of crap. Yes, but not by Bush and his poodles, but by Saddam himself (note to fact-resistant people out there: the White House occupant, who ultimately gave the green light for this document release, is not Bushh anymore but Obama, a fierce war opponent):

EIGHTEEN months before he was hanged, Saddam Hussein told the FBI he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, reports said yesterday.

According to declassified accounts of the FBI interviews released yesterday, the former Iraqi president said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect (Iraq) from threats in the region".

The Washington Post reported that summaries of the FBI interviews underlined Saddam's fear of Iran. In the interviews, Saddam said he considered Tehran a greater threat than the US.

Iran and Iraq had fought an eight-year war in the 1980s, and Saddam was convinced Iran was trying to annex southern Iraq, which, like Iran, is largely Shia, the report said.

George Piro, the FBI agent who conducted the interviews, said: "Hussein viewed the other countries in the Middle East as weak and could not defend themselves or Iraq from an attack from Iran."

Former US president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 after Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions requiring UN weapons inspectors unfettered access to suspected WMDs production facilities.

"The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors," Mr Piro said.

"Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq."

2009-07-02T16:24:00.002+02:00

[Updated] SOME COUP:

As military "coups" go, the one this weekend in Honduras was strangely, well, democratic. The military didn't oust President Manuel Zelaya on its own but instead followed an order of the Supreme Court. It also quickly turned power over to the president of the Honduran Congress, a man from the same party as Mr. Zelaya. The legislature and legal authorities all remain intact.

We mention these not so small details because they are being overlooked as the world, including the U.S. President, denounces tiny Honduras in a way that it never has, say, Iran.

Keep reading.

UPDATE. More:

Honduras’s military acted under judicial orders in deposing President Manuel Zelaya, Supreme Court Justice Rosalinda Cruz said, rejecting the view of President Barack Obama and other leaders that he was toppled in a coup.

“The only thing the armed forces did was carry out an arrest order,” Cruz, 55, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Tegucigalpa. “There’s no doubt he was preparing his own coup by conspiring to shut down the congress and courts.”

2009-07-02T11:56:00.001+02:00

JUST LIKE THEY DID on Iran. Oh, wait...

Spain and France are recalling their ambassadors from Honduras after President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a coup, the two countries' foreign ministries said Wednesday.

2009-07-01T19:02:00.000+02:00

ZELAYA linked to drug traficcking?

The regime that ousted Manuel Zelaya in Honduras claimed Tuesday that the deposed president allowed tons of cocaine to be flown into the Central American country on its way to the United States.

"Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds ... and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking," its foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, told CNN en Espanol.

"We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA has it," he added.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Rusty Payne in Washington said he could neither confirm nor deny a DEA investigation.

2009-07-01T09:56:00.001+02:00

FAUSTA KEEPS DOING a great job following everything regarding the constitutional crisis in Honduras.

2009-06-30T19:32:00.001+02:00

ONE OF SPAIN'S "crusading judges" gets smacked, legally speaking:

Spain’s National Court dropped an investigation into whether Israeli forces committed a war crime in the Gaza Strip by bombing an apartment building housing a Hamas leader.

Magistrate Fernando Andreu had been investigating the 2002 attack in Gaza City that killed Hamas commander Salah Shehadeh and 14 other people. Today’s ruling by a panel of judges to end the investigation without charging anyone can be appealed to the Supreme Court, according to a statement from the National Court. No reason for the decision was given in the statement.

No reason? How about "sanity"?

2009-06-30T19:24:00.001+02:00

THE SPANISH GOVERNMENT making friends. I guess someone had to succeed Bush in being unilateralist...

2009-06-30T10:29:00.003+02:00

JUNE 2009 is the month in which the Obama honeymoon was over.

UPDATE. More here.

2009-06-28T21:30:00.001+02:00

TURMOIL IN HONDURAS: Fausta is following the events.

2009-06-27T20:14:00.001+02:00

A MOOD OF MELANCHOLY descends on Tehran.

2009-06-27T12:25:00.002+02:00

PICTURE OF THE DAY, no question about it.

UPDATE. Yeah, yeah...

2009-06-27T12:10:00.001+02:00

BARACK W. OBAMA:

Obama administration officials, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, are crafting language for an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war. Obama advisers are concerned that an order, which would bypass Congress, could place the president on weaker footing before the courts and anger key supporters, the officials said.

After months of internal debate over how to close the military facility in Cuba, White House officials are increasingly worried that reaching quick agreement with Congress on a new detention system may be impossible. Several officials said there is concern in the White House that the administration may not be able to close the prison by the president's January deadline.

2009-06-26T15:24:00.001+02:00

GOODBYE, FARRAH. More than a woman indeed.

2009-06-26T15:23:00.001+02:00

GOODBYE, MICHAEL.

2009-06-26T15:14:00.001+02:00

SOME SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS, EH?:

In April, the Polish Academy of Sciences published a document challenging man-made global warming. In the Czech Republic, where President Vaclav Klaus remains a leading skeptic, today only 11% of the population believes humans play a role. In France, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to tap Claude Allegre to lead the country's new ministry of industry and innovation. Twenty years ago Mr. Allegre was among the first to trill about man-made global warming, but the geochemist has since recanted. New Zealand last year elected a new government, which immediately suspended the country's weeks-old cap-and-trade program.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

2009-06-26T10:07:00.001+02:00

STEVIE WONDER, a good man.

2009-06-25T12:22:00.001+02:00

SEE? THERE IS a connection between Obama and Zapatero:

A Spanish military plane carrying Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero failed to take off twice from the West African country of Togo after flies blocked its speed sensor, press reports said Wednesday. Zapatero was returning home from a visit to Nigeria and Togo on Tuesday.

The Lords of the Flies!