Spain

A Spanish court has found Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and six other senior officials guilty of crimes against humanity for their role in the 2010 raid on Gaza-bound aid ship, Mavi Marmara.
Nine activists were killed, including one Turkish-American, and dozens injured when Israeli commandos boarded the lead ship of a Gaza-bound flotilla, Mavi Marmara, when it attempted to breach the blockade of the Palestinian territory. Spanish activists were also on board the ships.

Confusion reigns in the Democratic and Republican primaries. Huffington Post political reporters write, “It’s Time to Admit: Nobody Knows Anything about the 2016 Campaign,” now that “the old ‘rules’ of presidential politics no longer seem to apply.”

teleSUR | October 3, 2015 A group of victims of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco called Friday for the creation of a truth commission that would investigate the crimes of the dictatorship that ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. Spain, which never fully investigated the era of dictatorship, is set to have legislative elections on […]

RT | September 29, 2015 The head of the regional government in Catalonia has been indicted for unconstitutionally calling a referendum on independence from Spain last year. This comes just two days after his party and other secessionist forces won a regional election. Recently, Artur Mas has promised his fellow Catalans that if pro-independence parties […]

Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change.
The post History Doesn’t Go In a Straight Line appeared first on BSNEWS.

For me 2015 began with a suicide. I was on my way to Berlin with an early train just after midnight on 1 January. About 8 am our connecting train from Hamburg stopped approximately 25 kilometres down the line because someone had apparently gotten up early that morning and travelled to a point in the middle of nowhere to jump in front of it. Since our train was approximately 45 minutes late, this person not only had to contemplate his way to the tracks but wait perhaps impatiently for the wheeled engine of his demise to do its work.

In May, voters grasped Spanish political orthodoxy and shook it like a rag doll:

The anti-austerity party Podemos claimed its biggest victory in Barcelona, where activist Ada Colau seized control of the city hall. Podemos and Ciudadanos… made advances across the country that will give them a chance to shape policy for the first time.

Neoliberalism, the privatization and commoditization of everything that moves, has experienced a great run over the past three decades, jump-started in the 1980s by PM Thatcher and President Reagan, christened in 1951 by Milton Friedman.

I’m no economist but I have been wondering how Syriza plans to bypass German-imposed austerity as long as it sticks with the euro. Depressed economies recover by devaluing their currency so that they can become more competitive. But Greece is currently tied to the euro, which means it cannot devalue and must continue to compete, despite its deathbed economy, against far larger and stronger economies like Germany’s.

Over the past decade fundamental changes have taken place in Southern Europe, which have broken with previous political alignments, resulting in the virtual disappearance of traditional leftist ’parties, the decline of trade unions and the emergence of ‘middle class radicalism’.