Political News THE single biggest news is that the UK and France are going to sign a defence treaty. The Spanish Secretary of State for Defence , Constantino Mendez, criticized the mismanagement throughout a series of major acquisitions for the modernization and professionalization of the Spanish armed forces. The Spanish Ministry of Industry will inject €1,250 million into the Spanish MoD. T...

An article on Bloomberg (found here) is discussing the Spanish Debt dilemma. To make the Spanish economy more productive they have to cut their Euro Denominated wages. However this is halting the ability of the Spanish to pay off the debts they accumulated in the good times. Usually you would allow either inflation to erode the internal debts, devalue or set interest rates to jump start economic a...

Former members of the International Brigade receive their Spanish citizenship and passports in a ceremony at the Spanish embassy in London yesterday. A recent change in Spanish law has allowed volunteer fighters who fought in the 1936-39 Spanish civil war to be granted citizenship. From left to right: Thomas Watters, Sam Lesser, Lou Kenton, Joseph Kahn, Penny Feiwel, Jack Edwards, and Patrick Coc...

A Spanish judge opened a criminal investigation into atrocities committed during the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing right-wing dictatorship.

Next month the government of the Spanish Republic is to honor the surviving members of the International Brigades who fought Franco Fascists in the Spanish civil war, by giving them Spanish passports. A noble gesture; and well earned by those veterans of the IB who due to their great years will travel to the nearest Spanish Embassy to collect their passports. The International Brigades were manned...

According to the Spanish EU Presidency calendar, the next EU-US summit is to be held in Madrid on 24-25 May. However, according to Spanish daily ABC, Washington has discreetly conveyed the message that it would prefer Brussels to be the venue.  According to the daily, which is close to the Spanish centre-right opposition, the USA wants to signal that President Barack Obama considers...

The Times is carrying a story of how the Spanish are letting a Terrorist out off jail to get IVF treatment on the state. Now I don’t want to get into a “Human Rights” gone mad issue here, I’ll leave that to the Daily mail, but have the Spanish really thought this one through? Or is it another one of those Spanish ideas like letting fishermen set their own quotas, the Armada, buying Heathro...

I can see all the reasons why the government has felt the need to bail out HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Barclays, Standard Chartered, RBS, HBOS and Nationwide. After all, they are all UK banks, pay UK corporation tax and are UK owned. The big question for me is, why are we bailing out Abbey, which is part of the Spanish banking giant Santander, which Alistair Darling was claiming was relatively chas rich on ...

The European Commission has informed the Spanish telecoms regulator, Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT), that it has serious doubts that the draft measures on the Spanish wholesale broadband access market, notified under the Electronic Communications Framework Directive, are compatible with EU law.

A diplomatic battle was looming last night after Spain tricked the EU into handing it new rights to the waters around Gibraltar. The sleight-of-hand has provoked fury in the British outpost and left red faces in Whitehall. And it has already produced a potential confrontation between British and Spanish ships in the region. HMS Sabre forced a Spanish warship out of Gibraltar's watersSpain, whi...