Barcepundit (English edition)

2009-07-13T13:01:00.001+02:00

THE ROAD to copyright piracy is reversible, writes Fred Wilson.

2009-07-13T12:24:00.001+02:00

72 YEARS AGO TODAY, Gibson was awarded the first patent for an electric guitar pickup. And this, the most defining instrument of the 20th century was born.

2009-07-11T12:47:00.001+02:00

SPAIN'S RECOVERY FAIRYTALE:

Spanish Economy Secretary Jose Manuel Campa said on Friday he expects gross domestic product to return to quarter-on-quarter expansion in the first half of 2010, but analysts warn the worst is not over forone of the hardest-hit economies in the 16-nation euro zone.

"We will start to have quarterly growth in the first half," Campa said during a news conference, confirming an estimate given by Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

Most private economists are less optimistic.

Keep reading.

2009-07-10T12:51:00.003+02:00

THE PEOPLE SUFFERING UNEMPLOYMENT the most in Spain are the underprivileged:

The fate of Spanish workers is a story of contrasts. Some have never had it so good; others have never had it so bad. Spain has the European Union’s highest unemployment and one of its less generous welfare systems. It has shed 1.2m jobs in a year. It will soon have as many jobless as Italy and France combined. Pay rises for some have led employers to cut the jobs of others. Two-thirds of workers have armour-clad permanent contracts. But the rest are on short-term deals. They are the people now on the dole.

This two-tier labour market divides workers into a privileged group cocooned from the reality of recession and the disadvantaged on temporary contracts, in unemployment or in illegal jobs. Employers do not invest in training short-term workers and are wary of hiring on permanent contracts. At any hint of a slowdown they shed the short-timers. “That the crisis has hit Spanish employment disproportionately is due to the catastrophic way the labour market works,” argues Luis Garicano of the London School of Economics.

Professor Garicano is one of a group of 100 economists who have called on the Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, to set about labour-market reforms. The calls have fallen on deaf ears.

The end is just brutal:

A two-tier labour market provides flexibility, but on the back of an underclass of temporary workers. This might strike most socialists as unjust. But Mr Zapatero seems happy to keep it that way.

UPDATE. Don't miss the comments; also, make sure you read this at Time: The Broken Hopes of a Spanish Generation. Sure, some of the frustration comes from too high expectations after a long boom. There's also some behaviour similar to spoiled children, used to getting what they want without any effort. For example, it's true that lots of thirty-somethings still live with their parents, but that's because they completely rule out something that is usual in other countries: sharing an appartment with two or three more people. They can only think instead of moving to a place they can actually buy, and this is becoming harder and harder every day (and of course, if you earn, say, €1000 per month, it's much more fun to stay at your parents and getting the food on the table, the place cleaned by mom, etc, and spending most of those thousand euros in having fun going out, partying or travelling, buying clothes or a relatively nice car).

What I mean is that some young people in Spain don't totally realize that growing up has its tradeoffs; you need to choose. But that doesn't mean that, particularly because of the labor regulations, they're having a really hard time while they see middle aged incompetent guys totally glued to their jobs by virtue of their iron-clad contracts. As the Economist piece says in the first link, something needs to change but PM Zapatero won't hear anyone telling this: he's too afraid of the unions taking the streets.

2009-07-09T18:37:00.001+02:00

GORDON CHANG writes on the riots in China: "Ethnic conflict has exposed the Communist Party's vulnerabilities"

2009-07-09T18:10:00.005+02:00

IF YOU EVER DOUBTED that "intelligence" doesn't necessarily equal "smartness":

Spain’s spymaster was forced to quit after becoming embroiled in a scandal over fishing and diving trips to exotic locations he was said to have made at taxpayers’ expense.

Alberto Saiz, director of National Intelligence Centre (CNI), stood down after he lost the confidence of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Spanish Prime Minister.

Not just this: apparently he frequently used the agents as personal valets, making them do some handiwork at his home (it's believed he made a couple divers scrap off the mold underwater the swimming pool at his home).

Spain’s spymaster was forced to quit after becoming embroiled in a scandal over fishing and diving trips to exotic locations he was said to have made at taxpayers’ expense.
[...] Most damaging were photographs, published in the Spanish daily El Mundo, showing the spymaster hauling in a swordfish while on a fishing trip off Senegal.
[...] On one occasion, it said, Mr Saiz used a Falcon jet from the Spanish Air Force to travel from Madrid to Dakar in Senegal for a weekend fishing trip.

But that's not all: in the course of trying to defend himself, he did one of the dumbest phauxtography ever recorded: to deflect claims that he was on that fishing trip in Senegal, he produced an image in which he took the head of an agent with him, who also appeared in the picture, and put it in his body. Unbelievable, you say? Well take a look (he's the one holding the swordfish, and the agent he loaned the head from is dressed in beige, second from right; real image above, phauxtography below):

At least he didn't put the fish's head on himself, you got to give him that...

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2009-07-09T16:59:00.001+02:00

IT'S ALMOST A METAPHORE:

A drunken Briton celebrated an inheritance by trying to give it away to strangers at a Spanish airport, government-run news agency EFE reported on Wednesday.

A drunken (with power) man who wants to congratiate himself to the humanity by giving away for no reason the money he suddenly found on his lap. He's a politician, I'm sure!

2009-07-09T11:44:00.001+02:00

WHITE HOUSE spellz Hobama's name vrong in the treati vith Rusia.

2009-07-08T10:05:00.001+02:00

GREAT MOMENTS in headline writing.

2009-07-07T15:18:00.001+02:00

TEN FASCINATING medical miracles.

2009-07-07T15:08:00.001+02:00

GOT AN IPHONE? Then you have a hearing aid too, if you want.

2009-07-07T10:42:00.001+02:00

DID THE TOPPLING OF SADDAM HUSSEIN lead to what's been happening in Iran these few last weeks? Christopher Hitchens thinks so:

Certainly when I interviewed Sayeed Khomeini in Qum some years ago, where he spoke openly about "the liberation of Iraq," he seemed to hope and believe that the example would spread. One swallow does not make a summer. But consider this: Many Iranians go as religious pilgrims to the holy sites of Najaf and Kerbala in southern Iraq. They have seen the way in which national and local elections have been held, more or less fairly and openly, with different Iraqi Shiite parties having to bid for votes (and with those parties aligned with Iran's regime doing less and less well). They have seen an often turbulent Iraqi Parliament holding genuine debates that are reported with reasonable fairness in the Iraqi media. Meanwhile, an Iranian mullah caste that classifies its own people as children who are mere wards of the state puts on a "let's pretend" election and even then tries to fix the outcome. Iranians by no means like to take their tune from Arabs—perhaps least of all from Iraqis—but watching something like the real thing next door may well have increased the appetite for the genuine article in Iran itself.

There are, no doubt, other determining factors as well.

Read the rest.

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.
Skip to next paragraph

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.