Mediterranean diet keeps people 'genetically young'

Spain's obesity index above European average, below UK and Ireland

SPAIN -- According to a report on research in the US, on BBC News Online by Health Editor Michelle Roberts, following a Mediterranean diet might be a recipe for a long life because it appears to keep people genetically younger. Several years ago, this diet was preponderant in Spain and, of course, other Mediterranean countries, including Southern France, Italy to a certain extent and in Greece. Since then the intrusion of fast food, mainly in the shape of US franchises (McDonalds, Burger King, etc. etc.) has caused an alarming increase in obesity in this country. The latest reliable figures (May 2014) show that over 24% of the population is considered obese, or just under the indicators, that is, well above the average levels for Western Europe (18.5%), or with France (15.6%), Italy (17.2%), Greece (17.5%), Germany (21.3%) or Portugal (21,6%). However, both the UK and Ireland, are above the European average at 24.9 and 24.5% respectively.

Google News in Spain to close on December 16

Measure taken before a new intellectual property law is introduced on January 1

SPAIN -- Google will shut the service on 16 December before the law comes into effect in January, the firm said. The law allows Spanish publications to charge services like Google News if their content is shown on the site. But Google has argued against the ruling, saying that it makes no money from its search-based service"It's with real sadness that on 16 December we'll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain," said Richard Gingras, head of Google News in a blog post on Wednesday.

Spain is officially free of Ebola

WHO makes declaration 42 days after the second Spanish victim is released

Teresa Romero on release

MADRID -- Teresa Romero, who survived a critical bout of Ebola, left her hospital confinement 42 days ago this week, while the repatriated Medicins Sans Frontieres volunteer doctor who had pricked herself accidentally with a possibly contagious needle has tested negative. She is still in hospital but not quarantined. These and other factors have allowed the World Health Organization to officially declare Spain as free from the deadly virus.

Fabian Picardo: Gibraltar vindicated over border queues

"Gibraltar’s cause in Europe was a marathon, not a sprint"

(gbc.gi)

GIBRALTAR -- In an interview on GBC, the Chief Minister said that the Gibraltar and UK Governments are absolutely vindicated in their approach to dealing with Spain’s border harassment. Reacting to the European Commission’s letter to Spain, which was sent last July but came to light on Monday, Fabian Picardo says he always maintained that fighting Gibraltar’s cause in Europe was a marathon, not a sprint, and believes they are now seeing results. Speaking to GBC, Mr Picardo said he now realises why Spain didn't want to publish the letter sent to it. He said the Commission hasn't let Gibraltar down, nor has it let Spain off the hook. Mr Picardo says it’s obvious that following that letter, sent to Spain last July, Spain is now clearly acting in a way designed to comply with the Commission’s recommendations, and we are now seeing works at the frontier to that effect. He also believes that, barring one or two incidents, we haven’t seen huge queues forming at the frontier compared to pre-July queues. (Source: GBC)

New York Times publishes article on La Almoraima sale

• "The government has learned nothing from the property bubble"
• La Almoraima stands in contrast to Marbella and the Costa del Sol

CASTELLAR -- The New York Times has been running a Sunday series on public lands all over the world. Last Sunday, the 16th, it published a whole page on the sale of La Almoraima titled 'In Public Land Sale, Not All of Spain Is Buying', the first couple of paragraphs say, "La Almoraima, a farming estate at the edge of a nature reserve, is prized by environmentalists. Home to one of Europe’s largest cork forests, it is a rare place where deer and boar roam wild within sight of the Rock of Gibraltar. The Spanish government, which owns the land, wants to sell it for as much as 300 million euros, or about $376 million, pitching it as a perfect spot for a luxury resort, including a five-star hotel, a small airport, two golf courses and a polo grounds." It's a very interesting article with a few factual errors (to be expected, alas), all of which you can read HERE. It's always a good idea to hear other opinions ... I might change mine, though probably not about this. 

European Commission rebukes Spain over border queues

Deadline for finishing work by summer of 2015 'at the latest'

(www.telegraph.co.uk)

GIBRALTAR (from The Gibraltar Chronicle by Dominique Searle) In a stinging letter the European Commission has criticised Spain and given it the deadline of summer 2015 for the completion of its works at the frontier that are supposed to respond to the “unjustified” delays witnessed by a team of EU experts in September 2013. The move comes in a letter recently sent to the Madrid Government which also sets out new steps its expects to be taken to ease flow. It states that checks by the Spanish authorities on travellers should be “significantly reduced” and that Spain should work with the Gibraltar border authorities in relation to frontier reforms. The letter also details that the Commission last July offered to act as a conduit for two way information exchanges between Spain and Gibraltar on the basis of each side approving what information can be passed on.

What will Spain be like in fifty years' time?

Fewer and older inhabitants, less births, more deaths

Population growth
(Huffington Post, España)
CLICK TO ENLARGE

MADRID -- The population of Spain has been falling steadily since 2012 and the future does not look rosy, according to a recent article in El País. Recent forecasts by the Spanish Institute of Statistics (INE in its Spanish acronym) show that the country will lose up to 1 million inhabitants over the next 15 years (total population on January 1, 2014: 46,507,760). If the demographic tendencies continue as they are, some 5,6 million people will have been lost over the next 50 years. That would take us back to the population of 2000, approximately. There are several consequences to that loss.

Fewer inhabitants

This would be the result of fewer births and more deaths. The economic consequences would be close to catastrophic: less tax money collected, so less money to take care of the older population (pensions, hospitalization, medical facilities, etc). This would bring about a significant downturn in purchasing power, which in turn would impact the country's entire economy.

Spaniards work 277 hours longer than Germans

• Number of working hours is not equal to work quality
• Spaniards 'sit around' doing very little

EUROPE -- The myth exists that Germans work harder than their equivalents in the Mediterranean but the numbers don't agree. Spaniards who are still lucky enough to still have a job in the first place, or those who have managed to reinvent themselves by becoming self-employed, work an average of 1,665 hours a year -- compared to the German average, about 300 hours below that. This is according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation) in its Better Life Index/Work-Life Balance latest report. However, Spain is not at the head of the world ranking for the longest hours. That is headed by such countries as Mexico, Korea and Chile. On the other hand, Germany and Holland have the lowest average annual working hours of all the OECD countries: between 1,350 and 1,450 hours.

Spanish winds for British energy

Takes up twice the surface of the city of Bilbao

(ecofriend.com)

WEST OF DUDDON SANDS (UK) -- Spanish energy giant Iberdrola put the company's offshore wind farm at West of Duddon Sands into operation on October 30. Iberdrola Renovables bought control of ScottishPower Renewables back in 2011 in the largest purchase in the company's history. According to the Iberdrola Renovables website, "Located approximately 20km off the Barrow-in-Furness coastline in North West England, the wind farm covers a total area of 67km², has 108 Siemens turbines with 3.6MW unit capacity and has also seen more than 200 km of undersea cables installed. With an investment of €2 billion, this offshore wind facility developed by Iberdrola, through its subsidiary ScottishPower Renewables, in a joint-venture with Dong Energy was commissioned more than two months ahead of schedule."

Map of Corruption in Spain (to date)

Avalanch of cases make it difficult for media to follow

Click HERE to link to page

MADRID -- On Wednesday last week El Mundo published an interactive map of corruption in Spain. It is in Spanish and we have not been able to translate it, but if you click on your Autonomous Community, you will see how many and where the cases are. It is an impressive document that doesn't need a great deal of Spanish to understand. For some of the major cases, please see articles that have appeared here: Who's who in the largest PP corruption cases, Spain loses billions on tax evasion and errors, Pope Francis: "Corruption is worse than sin", Competition authorities to fine car dealers for price fixing, or just click on CORRUPTION on the label cloud in the sidebar.

So what exactly happened in Catalonia on Sunday?

Is Catalonia ready to become an independent state?

Queuing to vote in Barcelona.
Photo courtesy of Simon Harris
via SandraInSpain

BARCELONA -- Here is a very good personal article by Sandra Piddock on a subject that hardly, if at all, got reported on in New CampoPulse. It is titled Never mind the percentages – look at the people who turned out to vote!. One of the sentences in Sandra's personal view of the situation there: "Forget percentages, forget the numbers, forget the negative attitude that ‘60% didn’t vote.’ The words will fade from memory, but the image of those snaking queues of Catalans will probably stay with me for ever." Any comparison to Scotland's recent venture is purely coincidental, if there is one at all.

Wildlife photography winnners 2014

Overall winner, Michael Nichols (USA)for The last Great Picture, of sleeping lionesses

The Young Talent award went to Carlos Pérez Naval (Spain), aged 8

Spain asks EC to sanction Gibraltar for assigning itself tuna quotas

Image: WWF Global

MADRID -- The central government has urged the European Commission (EC) to initiate an infringement procedure after Gibraltar allocated itself a quota of 10 tonnes of bluefin tuna to capture in 2015.

The Spanish authorities have stressed that this decision is totally illegal in accordance with Community and international law. Fishing opportunities for bluefin tuna are set based on the decisions of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), which is responsible for the management and conservation of tuna stocks in the East Atlantic and Mediterranean.

See Cádiz with your mobile

CÁDIZ -- One of the loveliest cities in Spain, and not one that is overcrowded with visitors, is the capital of the province of the same name. A new app is available as a 'tour guide' that will show you places off the usual routes. Called Geoexperiencias, it is based on the GPS system and you get the information as you are living them, right on the street. Available for Android as well IOS, it is aimed at local inhabitants as well as to tourists. Created as a joint project by Seis6 and Isoluciona, with the cooperation of Natures and Enreda, as well as the availability of vast photographic data from Diario de Cádiz, it was co-financed by an EU social fund for young developers, Intercooperación Empresarial en la Economía Social. For the moment, it is available only in Spanish, but translations into other languages, including English, are in process.

The shame of Spain: Thalidomide victims get no compensation

Patients hearing the bad news

MADRID --The Provincial Court of Madrid has decided to annul the indemnization to victims of the Thalidomide scandal of the 1950s, who had been claiming between €155 and €204 million (depending on which source you choose) from the manufacturers, the German pharmaceutical company Grünenthal and UCB Laboratories. All over the world, Thalidomide was well proven to be the cause of serious malformation in the womb, although for a number of years it was prescribed as a 'safe' medicine for pregnant women. Also all over the world, victims have been compensated with varying amounts, but this Madrid court's sentence says that the matter had prescribed. It added that the association of Thalidomide victims, called Avite (Asociación de Víctimas de la Talidomida en España), which presented their case to

There are 2,826,000 children living below the poverty line in Spain

Alberto Di Lolli / Ana del Barrio

MADRID (EFE) -- Strange though it may seem, a lot of expats don't know that Save the Children has a branch in Andalucía. The NGO works in 120 countries, so it isn't very surprising that there's a need for them in one of the poorest areas of this country, Andalucía. With recent news about Malala Yousafzai winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize, which she shares with Kaylash Satyarthi, also a defender of the poorest children, below are some of the facts for Spain and Andalucía, according to various sources, but especially a recent report by UNICEF:

Spain loses billions on tax evasion and errors

MADRID -- According to Brussels in a study published last week by the European Commission, Spain lost €12,400 million (that's over 12 billion!) in IVA (VAT) income -- a full 18% of what the national coffers should have received. This is caused mainly by tax evasion, but also by company bankruptcies, statistical errors and tax avoidance. Nevertheless, the difference is nearly 4% lower than last year. The EU in total, did not ingress some €177 billion through fraud or simply unrecovered. This is 16% of the income it had forecast.//Since 2012, the countries registering lower VAT loss levels were The Netherlands (at 5%), Finland (5%) and Luxembourg (6%). The biggest gaps between projected income and the reality were registered in Romania (44%), Slovakia (39%) and Lithuania (36%). Among the EU's largest members, the VAT gap: Germany (10%), France (15%) Italy (33%) and the UK (10%). The European Commission is presently working on a 'basic reform' of the VAT system to give it "more solidity and efficiency and to reduce its vulnerability against fraud," according to Algirdas Semeta, the Commissioner for Fiscal matters.

All 15 Spanish banks pass ECB stress tests

MADRID -- With one minor exception, the Spanish banks passed the regular stress tests set by the European Central Bank, and they will not be needing an injection of capital. Good news for all, except for one of the smallest in the country, Liberbank, which came just below the mark with a deficit that has already been covered (See chart, click to enlarge). At the top of the list is another small entity, Kutxabank, followed by Bankinter and Bankia, the latter having received multi-millions in help not that long ago, and being in the midst of a row about directors' 'do-as-you-like' credit cards. Among other things resulting from the tests, the ECB has requested all of Spain's banks to get ready for a third recession -- just in case, of course. The Governor of the Bank of Spain, Luis María Linde said at the press conference preceding the presentation of the tests results, "The results allow us to think that, even though the Spanish banking sector is facing many challenges in the short and medium term [including convergence towards a new regulatory and supervisory framework, and complex economic environment that could affect their profitability], our country's financial entities face a future in good condition."  (See chart below)

There are 2,826,000 children living below the poverty line in Spain

MADRID (EFE) -- Strange though it may seem, a lot of expats don't know that Save the Children has a branch in Andalucía. The NGO works in 120 countries, so it isn't very surprising that there's a need for them in one of the poorest areas of this country, Andalucía. With recent news about Malala Yousafzai winning this year's Nobel Peace Prize, which she shares with Kaylash Satyarthi, also a defender of the poorest children, the facts for Spain and Andalucía are as follows, according to various sources, but especially a recent report by UNICEF:

Spain: worst drop in exports in five years

MADRID – Spain’s exports dropped 5.2% in August, the worst since October 2009. The reasons behind it are multiple, but the main cause is the problems the European economies, especially France and Germany, have undergone. Sales to emergent nations have also dropped, a contributing factor. While presenting these figures at a press conference last week, the Minister for the Economy, Luis de Guindos, pointed out that in real terms and having discounted the price of exports, the downward drift is only 1%. Nevertheless, the general trend of the Spanish economy is toward negative inflation. German exports fell by 1% in the same period, and the French, 5.7%; in both countries this is the sixth consecutive downturn. Exports from the UK were also down, which accumulated a 20% descent in eight consecutive months. Bad news, too, from outside the EU, where exports dropped by 7.1%, particularly in emergent Latin American nations such as Venezuela (-73.5%), Brazil (-22.3%) and Mexico (-16.5%). (Source: El Economista)