Author: Ben

The majority of female politicians walked out of the Spanish parliament on Wednesday after remarks by PP spokesman Eduardo Zaplana towards the deputy prime minister, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega.

Referring to her donning traditional African costume as part of an official visit to Mozambique, he said, ‘How much parliament would gain if you, as one who is so fond of dressing up from time to time, would for one day, even just a day, dress up as the deputy prime minister and do your duties.’

What amazed us though, is that despite the very reasonable demonstration by the women in the face of this chauvinist diatribe, not one male politician had the ‘huevos’ to get up and leave in support as well. It’s obviously still very much ‘us and them’ in Spain, even when there is political gain to be made…

Those naugthy Spanish teenagers are planning a macro-botellon (mass outdoor drinking session) across Spain tonight as a two-fingers up to the authorities. These ‘botellons’ were outlawed several years ago after complaints from residents that were fed up with raucous behaviour, and vomiting and urinating all over their neighbourhood plazas and parks.

Police are ready to fight back with 300 Euro spot fines and the parliarment is even considering an emergency change in the law to ensure the minimum drinking age is set to 18 all over Spain. But is this all media hype? Only tomorrow’s papers will tell…

Y aqui en español.

PRI’s The World has some great reports from Spain that you can listen to over the net. I particularly liked these short reports on: El Gordo Lottery, Flamenco (in Boston!), Electric cars in Cordoba, and, my favourite, human castle madness (photos here).

Thanks got to Beth for letting me know about these. Remember, if you know about any interesting material on Spain, please contact me and hopefully I can spread the word on the blog.

Technorati Tags: spain, radio

The Guardian has an interesting article on the repercussions of the March 11th bombings two years ago. I wish we had been podcasting then. We were living 100 m from Atocha station when the bombs went off, without doubt the most shocking few days of my life… and I was just an unaffected bystander…

Technorati Tags: spain, ETA