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Thousands march in Spain over climate change
Thousands marched through Madrid recently to demand that the Spanish government adopt concrete measures to fight climate change, organisers said.
"We demand a law against climate change that calls for an increase in the use of renewable energy and that favours saving energy," Raquel Monton, a spokeswoman for the Spanish branch of Greenpeace, told Cadena Ser radio.
Greenpeace was one of about 40 green groups that backed the protest in the Spanish capital, two days before World Earth Day.
Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who was re-elected in March with a slightly bigger majority, has made the environment a priority of his second term.
Under the 1997 Kyoto protocol on global warming, Spain and the 14 pre-enlargement members of the European Union agreed to reduce their CO2 emissions eight per cent between 1990 and 2012.
But unofficial estimates put Spain's emissions at 53 per cent above the 1990 level, one of the biggest increases of any Kyoto signatory.
Two ETA attacks in three days
Basque terrorist group ETA detonated a bomb in Elgoibar, Guipúzcoa at 3.25am on April 20th, targeting the offices of the local Socialist party. No one was injured in the blast.
The device, which was made up of three kilos of explosives, caused damage to the buildings in the street where it was left, as well as several parked cars. Having received a warning, police cleared the area and made megaphone announcements to residents to open their windows and lower the blinds in order to minimise damage from the blast.
Socialist sources have said that the offices have suffered six attacks in the past, including a petrol bombing.
The attack was the second by the terrorist group in just 72 hours, after a five-kilo device was detonated in the Bilbao neighbourhood of La Peña, causing minor injuries to seven police officers who were evacuating the area.
Spaniards' view of immigration tested by slowing economy?
This issue The Paper begins a two-part look at immigration and how it is currently seen by the Spanish population.
The two faces of immigration in Spain
Patricia Sánchez stands in front of her flower stand and speaks about her life as an immigrant in Spain. "My intention was to remain about three to six months and then return, like all immigrants say they will," she explains while showing a customer her roses, daisies, and bonsai plants.
Seven years later, she is still here, a naturalised Spanish citizen with a good job that pays her 10 times what she made in her native Colombia. "I liked this country," she says. "I knew that I could never find the peace on the streets of Bogota that I found here."
Just a few blocks away, Lamin Danso stands at the entrance to the Church of St. Mary of Mount Carmel, begging for money. A native of Gambia in West Africa, Danso has been an illegal immigrant in Spain for five years, unable to work or acquire a work permit. "That's why I beg here," he says, "because I have no papers and I don't want to do something bad."
Sánchez arrived in Madrid by plane from Colombia on a three-month tourist visa when the owner of the travel agency where she worked asked that she accompany her to Spain after the wealthy boss received kidnapping threats.
Her Colombian employer, who had businesses in Spain, provided housing and a job. Within three months, Sánchez had her first work permit. Danso entered Spain after a hazardous boat trip from Morocco to the Canary Islands. This followed a three-year journey by foot and sometimes bus that took him through Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Algeria, and Morocco. On the way, he worked as a fisherman, painter, and shoemaker. His only employment since has been as a temporary house cleaner and dog walker.
Waves of strangers.
Sánchez and Danso represent two faces of immigration in Spain, one successful, the other the embryo of impending problems. The country has absorbed more than three million foreigners during the past decade, and immigrants now constitute more than 10 per cent in a total population of 44 million people. In the process, Spain has become a test of how well a modern European nation can integrate waves of strangers, frequently from radically different cultures.
The verdict is still out, but there are signs that trouble lies ahead. "The children of these first-generation immigrants are going to suffer from the politics of non-integration," warns Kamal Rahmouni, president of the Moroccan Workers and Immigrants Association in Spain.
This comes as a remarkable change for a nation that, just a generation ago, was one of Europe's most homogenous and poor countries. Its successful transition from dictatorship to democracy and the nation's subsequent integration into the European Union transformed it from a country of emigration to a magnet for the poor from South America, eastern Europe, and, more recently, North and sub-Saharan Africa.
Help wanted.
With the fastest-growing economy in the 13-member Eurozone in recent years, an ageing population, and one of the lowest birth-rates in the world, Spain needs labourers willing to do the manual tasks—building houses, picking fruit, serving tables, and taking care of children and the elderly—that native-born Spaniards no longer accept at any price.
"Spain cannot afford not to have immigrants," says Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio, a Colombian immigrant who as a member of the Madrid region's autonomous parliament is one of only three foreign-born elected officials in Spain. "Its economic structure, economy, and demographics need the foreign workforce."
Indeed, with government programs to help immigrants limited and dispersed among regional authorities, the principal integrating factor has been the red-hot Spanish economy. Growth, fuelled largely by the construction industry, averaged 3.1 per cent over the past five years, and unemployment plummeted from almost 25 per cent in 1994 to 8.6 per cent last year.
But as the economy cools, especially in the construction and agriculture sectors that employ large numbers of immigrants, there is concern that the relatively painless assimilation by newcomers into Spanish society may be a thing of the past.
Polls show that immigration has become a major concern, with many Spaniards blaming immigrants for crime and other problems. Furthermore, social workers, government officials, and law enforcement officers are casting nervous looks northward to France, where disenfranchised second- and third-generation Muslim immigrant youths took to the streets in nation-wide riots more than two years ago. They fear a replay of the same scenario unless Spain can avoid some of France's mistakes, such as creating ghettos where immigrants live apart from mainstream society.
But it may already be too late. "We have been incapable of creating an integration model in Spain," says Emilio Gallego Zuazo, secretary general of the Spanish Federation of the Hotel and Restaurant Industry, which counts more than 20 per cent of foreign-born workers among its 1 million-plus members. "It's been a bit laissez faire, without planning, structure, or investment. In the long run, this can have important consequences."
These concerns have only grown since the March 11th, 2004, Madrid commuter train bombings that killed 191 people and that investigators attributed to the al Qaeda network. Of the 28 men brought to trial in the attack, only nine were Spanish citizens.
The subsequent arrest of hundreds of alleged Islamic militants in connection with the bombings or suspected of recruiting fighters for terrorist networks in Iraq and elsewhere further increased apprehension about Arab immigrants. "Muslims are suspected in advance, and we must dedicate every day to proving we are good people," says Rahmouni of the Moroccan workers organisation.
Spanish Ministry for Health investigating Herbalife
The Ministry for Health and Consumer Affairs is investigating possible links between the dietary products and liver toxicity
The Ministry has published a report that looks at an investigation that was started to try and establish the cause of nine cases of hepatic poisoning, which were registered between 2003 and 2007 and possibly linked to the use of products from Herbalife Internacional España S.L.
Similar cases have been reported from other EU countries and in Iceland, Switzerland and Israel, totalling 37 in number.
The dietary products for weight loss and well being are well known around the world thanks to the selling techniques of the company.
This latest statement from the Spanish Ministry of Health says that proving any link between using these products and the cases is not easy to establish, although in some of the examples it seems a the link is more likely. As the products are sold directly to the home in most cases, the Health Ministry suggests that any person who thinks a product may be causing them any prejudicial effect, to contact a doctor and the health authorities.
The Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products has already sent out these and other recommendations to pharmacists and doctors across the country.
More information from the Ministry of Health helpline 901 400 100 or in Spanish at www.msc.es/novedades/herbalife.htm
French supermarket giant Carrefour plans movie download store
Latest to launch a movie download store, and the latest amongst the supermarkets to try their hand, is France's Carrefour.
The world's second largest retail group after Wal-Mart is to offer download-to-own and download-to-rent films and TV shows in Spain, France, Belgium and Italy. President Christophe Geoffroy commented, "It's very important for Carrefour to have more than one point of sale.
“We have to be in contact with the consumer in their homes as well as in-store. We know full well that the market forecast for VOD is low at the moment, but we are convinced that it will develop over the coming years and we want to provide a legal solution for customers to see the best possible content."
In the UK, Tesco plans to begin offering movie downloads, but it is not yet clear whether supermarkets can replicate their impulse in-store DVD purchases and turn them in to specific online sales.
Wal-Mart closed its download store in December after making what was said to be only "peanuts" in relative terms.
MasterCard rolls out mini PayPass cards in Spain
MasterCard is teaming with Spanish banking groups La Caja Insular de Ahorros de Canarias and EURO 6000 to trial a miniature version of its contact-less PayPass card, which is small enough to attach to a key ring.
MasterCard will conduct initial trials of its Mini Card in the city of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with 400 customers and 15 merchants, mostly restaurants and pharmacies. A second phase will see the cards rolled out to over 5000 customers.
The PayPass technology will enable customers to pay for purchases of less than EUR40 by tapping their mini plastic card against a specially equipped reader at the selected merchants.
In the past MasterCard has added its PayPass technology to wristwatches in conjunction with Turkey's Garanti Bank and Taiwan's Chinatrust Bank. Meanwhile key fobs featuring the contact-less system are available to Citibank cardholders in the US.
Last October Visa launched its Micro Tag, a chip-based key ring attachment embedded with its payWave contact-less technology.
However American Express ditched its Express Pay contact-less payments key fob last month following poor customer take-up of the device.
