It's a very remarkable feeling to read the Guardian's ongoing account of today's general strike in Spain. If this were happening in the U.S., it would have been like, "COPS SKIRMISH WITH JOBLESS UNIONS" or something inexplicable and misguided. Over there, it's like, "This is what workers are protesting, and also the cops hit this one dude at a peaceful labor protest." (The Times however did a nice job this morning.) The general strike is focused on the new government's response to the crippling recession and high unemployment, which has as a central component easing of employment laws, so that it will be easier to make more [...]

In a strange coincidence of timing, considering the horrible news and footage coming out of Japan over the past three days, an international team of scientists working in south Spain believe they have pinpointed the location of the city of Atlantis. This is a major big deal in archeology. Plato wrote about Atlantis in 360 B.C. It was said to have been an engineering marvel located near the "Pillars of Hercules" (as the Straits of Gibralter were called back then), that it was built around an island temple to Poseidon which was surrounded by concentric rings of water and land, like a bulls-eye, and that it was "swallowed up [...]

At midnight tonight, in the city of Valencia on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, the annual Las Fallas festival comes to an end with the burning of the giant sculptures that have been on display in various city squares for the past five days. Made of wood, cardboard and paper mache, and often made to satirize current events, the sculptures (called "ninots," Spanish for "dolls") are up to 72-feet tall and cost as much as $850,000 to build. "Las Fallas" means "the fires," and the festival is believed to have pagan origins, celebrating the end of winter, but the million people it draws come in homage to Joseph, the [...]

Maybe it's the heat, but I could not stop chuckling about this one: "A contortionist thief hid inside a suitcase to raid the baggage on a Spanish airport bus… Officers, alerted to a series of thefts on the service between Girona airport and Barcelona in northeastern Spain, said the man's accomplice would zip him inside the bag, load it into the baggage compartment, and then board the bus. During the 90 minute journey, the flexible felon would emerge, squirm around the hold, rifle through the bags of his more conventional fellow passengers looking for their valuables and then get back inside his suitcase…. One victim became suspicious when she [...]

My knowledge of modern Spanish history—like my knowledge of so much else—is pathetically thin; sure, I know some about Franco and the overthrow of the Republic and the years of darkness and stagnation that followed, but most of what I'm conversant in starts with the limping end of Felipe González's final government and takes me up to now. Half of it probably comes from Almodóvar movies. This makes it even more astounding that I found Javier Cercas' The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination so gripping. The book examines the attempted coup against Adolfo Suárez and the democratically-elected government that took place just thirty years [...]

Government researchers in Spain have announced that the air in Madrid and Barcelona contains cocaine. Unfortunately, the tests are only indicative of areas where drug use is rampant. Worse, one of the scientists says, "Not even if we lived for a thousand years would we consume the equivalent of a dose of cocaine by breathing this air."

"Spanish police have arrested a man who twice escaped from custody by having his wife send fake faxes ordering his release."

I'm not quite sure what the Times means by "personal liability mortgages" in their fascinating story today on the insanity of foreclosures in Spain, because that phrase doesn't really exist in English. But, yow, I did have no idea that repossession wasn't the end of owing money on loans and mortgages, and that mortgage debt was excluded from bankruptcies in Spain. Maybe there are actually ways in which the U.S. looks out for individuals that is better for people than they way it is done in Europe! Huh. Still, it is hilarious to look back at this BusinessWeek article from 2007, which declares Europe's mortgage and housing and [...]

A 38-year-old British mum got sick of her two daughters, ages 11 and 14, "moaning" all the time, so she left them at home with 30 pounds and went off on a five-day holiday in Spain. We wish our mother had seen fit to skip town every once in awhile when we were teenagers; it would have made the nips from the liquor cabinet slightly less obvious.