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Brussels finally stepped in yesterday and corrected the President of Galicia, Emilio Perez Touriño, over the amount of forest and woodland that had been burned over the last twelve days. Mr. Perez Touriño, along with the pro-Socialist media had agreed that the amount of damaged land from the fires was 65,000 hectares. However, a statement from the EU Forestry Commission in Brussels stated that in fact the total area of land affected by the blazes amounted to 86,232 hectares.
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It has been revealed that Pedro J. Ramirez, the editor-in-chief of the highly successful daily paper El Mundo, has apparently decided to forego the services of Jesus Cacho, who up until this point had be the head of the economics section of the paper, and in the process unveiled several corruption scandals, including that involving Mariano Rubio, when he was the head of the Bank of Spain. It would appear that the disagreement between the two ‘reached boiling point’ after Mr Cacho started a series of pieces that were highly critical of the Banco Santander and its president Emilio Botin.
It has been revealed that the Socialist Government is setting out proposals to include foreigners who are not members of the EU countries and who are legally resident in Spain on the electoral registers for the 2007 autonomous elections. If made law, the new measures would envisage increasing the voters by 150,000 in Alicante Province and 355,000 across the Valencian Community. These proposals have also been fully supported by the Partido Popular and in principle, it is proposed to use international agreements of reciprocity with other nations in order to ensure that foreign citizens living in Spain could participate as much as possible in taking important decisions in their country of residence.
It has taken 34 years, but finally earlier this week, the twinning agreement between Javea and the French town of Thiviers was signed in France. 160 people from Javea who traveled to France to witness the ceremony have now returned and stated their intention to propose that an area of the town carry the name Thiviers. Part of the signing ceremonies included a ‘living chess’ game featuring pieces that represented the history of Thiviers. The agreement was signed by Eduardo Monfort the mayor of Javea and Michel Jaccou the mayor of Thiviers.
The head of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Shergh Nabil Kahuk, stated yesterday that as long as the Israeli Army remains in the area, any disarmament of Hezbollah would be quite impossible. He added: “As long as Israel remains on Lebanese soil no talk of surrendering our weapons can take place as for us the threat remains in place.” Meanwhile, some troops of the Lebanese Army have been dispatched to the area as the first contingent of a UN peacekeeping force that may well take between ten days and two weeks to become fully operational.
Following the ‘Critical’ status that was set for airports in the UK, it has now been revealed that as many as 20,000 bags checked in by British Airways passengers have gone missing with half of them piled up at airports waiting to be delivered back to their owners. BA has cancelled some 700 flights since last Thursday, and is also considering seeking compensation from airport operator BAA as a result. Willie Walsh the Chairman of British Airways stated that the Airports Authority ‘had no adequate plan to deal with the emergency’. The airline in a later statement fully laid the blame with BAA for the baggage problems.
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