There's a scandal brewing over the deaths of three British pensioners from Legionnaires' Disease in the Valencia region. It seems the local authorities knew of the existence of the disease several weeks before this was made public. Allegedly, a news blackout was maintained to avoid damaging the local tourist industry, though the minister of health for the region has said:- "We did what we had to do until we had definitive confirmation of the epidemic." Which took six weeks. In the litigious UK and the USA law suits would already have been initiated but Spain is different.

In the UK, the Home Secretary - Teresa May - has said "It is simply not acceptable that Britain is unable to deport radical Muslim cleric Abu Qatada who poses a serious risk to our national security". This is because of some ruling by a European Court and my translation of her outburst is "We are bloody annoyed but there's sweet F. A. we can do about it."

And now for a special treat. I received an email this morning ostensibly from 'James Taylor'. Though I very much doubt that it was. It's from someone who doesn't like England or the English and it is full of vitriol and bile. I enjoyed reading it and thought you might too:-

hey you fucking English parasite judio[jew] ! go back to your fucking shithole island ! . ...hijo de puta ! [son of a whore]

I am sick of your fuckin bbc news ..every day you keep saying on your news broadcast how Italy , Greece and Spain cannot pay off their debt !...well how about England they owed 90 percent debt ?? ....their fucking pound is has a fake value is worth nothing in reality ! and the U.S. debt is over 15 trillion dollars.... what does Egland produce ?? England is a shit-hole ! the only thing they make in England is crackers and and jam ..English are the parasites of the World they invented Slavery and the drug trade ! you left a good record in Asia ! the Chinese , Hindus hate you ! you started the opium and drug trade ! I hope the European union breaks down so every english slimme living in Spain , France and Italy is sent back to their shit hole Island .!!

The Eglish are the biggest thiefs Manipulators on the planet earth ! ... English slimme !..cocky pigs !! your pound has fake value !.and is control by the zionists-Anglo parasites...the anglo-parasites with the whore queen manipulate the baking system and steal the gold , dimonds and oil from all poor African countries...and you invented the drug trade and slave trade .

what does England produce ?? they cannot even growth enough food to feed their country ! .

London is a bloody ghetto ...full of niggers pakies , muslims and jews ... broken down society ..homeless people eveywhere and drugs attics !!

i hope soon in the near future the pakies an muslims take every English anglo and put them in cages in the london zoo !! i never met an English man who works ! they are the parasites of the world !! and the instigators of all wars around the world !...who likes the English ? the French hate you ! the Spanish hate you , the Germans hate you !...English are the parasites thiefs and manipulators of this planet . who likes the Eglish in Europe ? who ??

Too bad Hittler and Franco didnt't sink your fucking shit-hole Island , I hope the Irish one day do it .!The Irish are the only decent people in that brittania shit islands . ....

ps. English anglos-zionists (Uk , Canada,U.S.) and israel are the instigaters of all wars in the planet....the anglo race with the whore queen manipulate the baking [banking] system and steal the gold , dimonds and oil from all poor African countries...and you invented the drug trade and slave trade . how can you be proud to be English ? parasites of the world. .....blood suckers pigs !.......parasites !! 

Following the retirement of José Luis Zapatero after last year's defeat of the Socialist Party he led, elections were held on Saturday for a new leader for the demoralised party. The delegates came close to choosing the bold option of a 40 year old Catalan woman but, by a mere handful of votes, instead opted for a veteran of two socialist administrations. And someone very much implicated in the resounding defeat by the right-of-centre PP party - Alfredo Rubalcaba. Telegenic he is not, looking rather like a bearded gnome, but he's reputed to be an astute political operator. And he's got at least four years - but probably eight - to get a strategy together and to disassociate himself from failure.

Many thousands of young Spaniards have left the country in search of work. An understandable response to an unemployment rate amongst the young of 50%, and rising. Those who've stayed home include a "rocketing" number who've decided it's probably not wise to turn up for an interview with a tattoo. Removing these can cost as much as 3,000 euros and risk hepatitis, if you go to the wrong place. But hard times demand hard measures.

The husband of the middle child of the Spanish monarchs - the Infanta Cristina - is on trial for corruption. Now a Supreme Court magistrate has called for her to make declarations of what she knows to the court. Which would be quite a media event.

The travesty of justice around the crusading judge Baltasar Garzón has been taken up by the New York Times, which published an editorial yesterday labelling the pursuit of Garzón for seeking answers to questions about Republican deaths in the Civil War an "attack on justice". I guess it's possible this will entrench those elements in the judiciary keen to see Garzón removed from the Bench.

Finally . . . Ambrose Evans-Pritchard feels that France's grand plan of the last fifty years has blown up in her face, "enthroning Germany as undisputed hegemon". More here.

So, the 27 year-old companion of the captain of the Costa Concordia has again defended his actions on that fateful night. Whilst admitting that Yes, the underwear in his cabin was hers. His wife, too, has been defending him against his critics but one wonders now whether she will continue to.

The chap who painted the early murals on the walls of the Facebook office thought that the concept was ridiculous. Nonetheless he accepted shares in lieu of cash payment. Which is why he'll be a multi-millionaire when the company goes public shortly. Lucky bastard.

Talking of money . . . The Spanish government has announced it will be capping at 600,000 euros the salaries of those bankers working in banks that have received government help. With no bonus at all. Can't see this happening in the UK.

England took on Pakistan at cricket again today and promptly bowled them out for a meagre 99. But, with the talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory I mentioned last week, England eschewed the chance to gain a big lead and forfeited six wickets for only 100 runs.

I apologise to all those readers for whom cricketing information will make no sense whatsoever.

Finally . . . Click here for some delightful fotos of African animals in the Cabarceno wildlife park in Cantabria. Handy for the ferry port of Santander.

Long time readers of this blog will know of my detestation of dubbing, which is ubiquitous in Spain. To tell the truth, I've only ever experienced it on the TV as I've never been able to countenance the thought of sitting through a dubbed film at the cinema. Here's an interesting article which rehearses the origins of dubbing and outlines its positives but ends, I'm pleased to say, with the unequivocal statement that "The time has come for contemporary Spanish governments to take the bull by the horns. Just as Franco’s legislation of 70 years ago put the country in a linguistic quagmire, new legislation must now help to put the country on a cultural and linguist par with other European nations." Or, more succinctly, "This ghost of a fascist past must be put to rest". Hear, hear! Bring on the subtitles!

And talking of modernisation, the new right-of-centre Spanish government has announced its intention to allow notaries to both marry and divorce people. Provided they're in agreement in the latter case. Which can be safely assumed in the former, I suppose. It says that the aim is to avoid costly and lengthy legal processes and to alleviate the heavy workload of judges. Which are admirable objectives, of course, but the cynic in me wonders whether this should really be a priority for the government right now. And whether it isn't a great way to compensate notaries for the loss of the fortunes they were making by recording all property transfers during the boom years.

Talking of judges . . . in particular Spain's internationally-known Baltasar Garzón, here's a Spanish take on his current ordeal of three separate - but virtually simultaneous - trials. Like the author, I have difficulty liking Garzón but believe that what he's being subjected to is deeply questionable. On a point of detail, Garzón's lawyers today called as witnesses people who'd lost relatives to the fascist repression. Which is just the sort of testimony the right-wing organisations who initiated the trials wanted to avoid. It will be interesting to see where we go from here.

Finally . . . I've been asked about takings kids on the camino. Does anyone have any experience of this they'd like to share, preferably positive? If so, my email is:- colindavies@terra.es

As I walked to the high street this morning, I heard raised voices in the garden of a neighbour. Peering nonchalantly through the hedge, I saw it was a dispute between the lady of the house and the postman. And, as I reached the gate, I was passed by said postman, muttering rude thoughts under his breath. And I thought - How on earth do you get into dispute with your postman? What can he possible do to upset you? Theories welcome.

At the football match between Everton and league-leaders Manchester City last night, a fan handcuffed himself to one of the goalposts. It seems he was protesting against Ryanair. Specifically against their recruitment policies. Which hadn't favoured his daughter. A novel approach but I'm not sure it will have much of an impact on Ryanair. Who have a pretty thick skin. Everton won, by the way.

Talking about football teams, I noted the other night that one of Manchester United's players - Javier Hernández Balcázar - didn't have Hernández (or Balcázar) on the back of his shirt. What he did have was his nickname - Chicharito. or "little pea". I must say I was a little surprised to see this "Hispanic" custom appearing in the Premier League. I wonder now whether British players will take it up. Will Wayne Rooney, for example, have his affectionate nickname - Granny shagger - on the back of his shirt. I guess not.

In Spain, building permits in November fell to an all time low - 72, 872, compared with 865,561 way back in the different world of 2006.

A few other statistics - More than 300,000 young Spaniards left the country last year in search of work and there are now 1.5 million Spaniards aged over 18 living outside the country. I wonder how many of them have ended up in Germany, where unemployment fell to an all-time low at the end of 2011. Both Holland and Austria also had low rates, but the southern economies are not faring so well. And the EU rate is at a record high of 10.4%.

Finally . . . In the café this afternoon, I overheard the conversation of two young people of 16 or 17. Well, I couldn't not hear it, given the volume at which their most private thoughts were broadcast. Anyway, I decided they were both very intelligent. And then the young man started to tell his companion about a conversation with another young woman. Beginning every single sentence with "I was like . . ." or "She was like . . ." An American import, I guess.

Rail traffic across much of Spain was disrupted on Sunday, after thieves had damaged a kilometre of overhead cables at a station just outside Alicante. Of course, this sort of thing isn't confined to Spain; my own travel plans were disrupted two or three weeks ago when thieves stole cables somewhere between Manchester and Liverpool. And last weekend friends I was visiting told me that rogues had recently stolen all the town's manhole covers, causing closure of all the roads. Apparently, it's all owing to the high prices of scrap metal.

It seems the new right-of-centre government in Spain has decided to raise the heat over Gibraltar and to exclude the Rock's representative from what have been trilateral talks but may now be bilateral again. The Chief Minister of Gibraltar has suggested to Madrid they might have more important things to think about. Like more than 5 million unemployed, for example. Touché.

Although Greece and Italy have cornered all the media attention, things are pretty bad in Portugal, which seems to have the same road map as Greece. Or, as it says here: Portuguese storm gathers as EU leaders fight over Greece. Surging borrowing costs in Portugal have raised the spectre of a second full-fledged contagion crisis in the eurozone, eclipsing the latest efforts by European Union leaders in Brussels to agree on Europe's bail-out machinery and a strategy for Greece.

The word Sisyphean is a popular one for describing the challenges facing Europe's leaders. I've seen or heard it at least three times in the last week. You'll all recall that in Greek mythology Sisyphus was a king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity. And that:- The word "Sisyphean" means "endless and unavailing, as labour or a task".

All of which suggests that the challenges lack solutions. And yet here, in all its entirety, is a positive answer to this question, posed by The Times:- If member states leave the Economic and Monetary Union, what is the best way for the economic process to be managed to provide the soundest foundation for the future growth and prosperity of the current membership?

And this is the answer, which assumes that it's Greece which has to leave the EU. It's from Oliver Kamm. Enjoy:-

The question how best to manage the process of a country’s leaving the euro has an answer. Most approaches have started from the wrong premise, however. The task is not realistically to effect the quickest and most decisive break with the institutions of the eurozone. The “nuclear option” of an extended bank holiday in Greece (to take the most pressing case), in which deposits of euros would be replaced with drachmas, is the simplest answer to the question, but is in fact no answer at all. It would require not only a cessation of commerce but a clampdown on people leaving the country.

Long before this point had been reached, there would have been a run on the banks. Greece, Portugal and Spain all have experience in the past 40 years of dictatorial government. An economic program that, to have any chance of working, would have to curtail liberties that citizens take for granted would stand little chance of even ameliorating the situation.

In fact, there are many historical cases of countries leaving currency unions, but none of them is applicable to today’s events. This paper explains the reasons why this is so. Moreover, the competitive boost of a new drachma would be economically marginal and overwhelmed by the increase in debt servicing costs, leading to wholesale default and the country’s being locked out of the capital markets.

Every proposal for Greece and the other indebted economies to leave the eurozone starts from the premise of this type of “Big Bang” approach, modelled on Argentina in 2001-02, yet it speedily runs into the problems of political turmoil and financial collapse. A dash for the drachma (or escudo or peseta) will hugely aggravate the problems of the eurozone if, as Greece and possibly other eurozone economies disengage, there is no floor under the new (or restored) currency.

This submission proposes instead a way of providing such a floor and thereby enabling countries safely to leave the euro. The proposal is to introduce a new currency (the “New Drachma”) as part of a currency board. A currency board is like a gold standard except that the currency is pegged to another currency and not to a commodity price. The central bank is thus committed to exchanging its monetary liabilities at a fixed exchange rate. It can issue only as much domestic currency as it has holdings of foreign currency given the exchange rate. The New Drachma would be pegged to the euro and that would be the floor.

A peg to the euro would not on its own untie the straitjacket that Greece is in owing to euro membership. The currency board should, therefore, be a dual currency board in which the New Drachma is pegged to two reserve currencies – the dollar as well as the euro. It would be at the discretion of the central bank which reserve currency it gave in return for New Drachmas – but the workings of the market, and the search for dollar-euro arbitrage by market participants in Greece would mean automatically that the New Drachma would be pegged to whichever of the dollar or the euro was the more depreciated currency in each case. This would provide an economic lubricant - a little bit of inflation and depreciation, but with the retention of the monetary credibility needed to make the structural reforms to welfare spending and labour markets that Greece in particular has avoided for decades.

A dual currency board has been seriously proposed in the case of the emerging economies from the former Soviet bloc, but more usually the peg was to a weighted basket of currencies. This has the disadvantage of not being so readily understandable and transparent when the very purpose of a currency peg, for countries leaving the euro, would be to reassure consumers, businesses and investors. For that reason, a peg to the two reserve currencies is preferable. It is a practical course by which Greece and economies with similar problems can leave the euro without sparking a banking collapse, and while keeping open also their access to capital markets and the prospects for structural reforms. The success of the scheme would depend on the willingness of international lending institutions to provide sufficient foreign currency reserves and act as international lenders of last resort to the banking system, but this is a more likely way of securing a successful international rescue than persisting with the current round of negotiations over emergency funding mechanisms.

The proposal does not resolve the problems of the heavily indebted economies; but it does provide a breathing space in which to tackle these countries’ economic difficulties and insulate the risk of contagion. Currency boards are usually interim steps on the way to either a currency union or a fully flexible rate. That would be the choice of Greek and other policymakers and voters once the board had done its work.

There remain huge complications, not least legal challenges from companies investing in Greece. But legal cases take time, whereas this step would be quick and without sacrificing monetary credibility of having a reserve currency. When the euro was launched, its supporters who recognised the design flaws assumed that the necessary institutions would be built as the currency gained credibility. That never happened. But it might happen with the proposed scheme for Greece and the other indebted economies. Exit from the euro with a dual currency board would cause an immediate shift in perception but with market credibility retained and enhanced. Thus could be established a virtuous circle in which debt servicing costs come down, the opportunity to cut costs and improve productivity is presented, without an atmosphere of constant crisis - and sustainable growth returns to southern Europe.

No sooner do I mention public myopia when it comes to footballers' obscenely vast salaries than some journalist cranks out an article on the theme. Not for the first time, I might add. Anyway, here it is.

An American gambling magnate would like to build a European version of Las Vegas in Spain, either in Madrid or Barcelona. What's stopping him is the reluctance of some politicians to alter the tax laws so as to attract investors, even though the scheme will create 261,000 jobs. The head of the Madrid regional government is in favour of the tax breaks but opposition politicians from the Socialist party are not. Which, on the surface, looks a bit odd. Given that there are around 500,000 people without a job in Madrid.

Still in Madrid - Today saw the opening of the third trial in so many weeks of Spain's crusading judge, Baltasar Garzón. Giles Tremlett does justice to the subject in today's Guardian, reporting that:- The already astonishing drama surrounding Spain's "superjudge" hit a new peak as corruption was added to the charges against him and thousands of his supporters blocked streets around the supreme court in Madrid. Click here for more.

And still in Madrid - The city has announced today that it will be bidding for the 2020 Olympics. Or perhaps the 20020 Olympics. The logo has come in for a bit of ridicule. Which is British understatement. See here for the story.

Finally . . . Europe. The Greeks appear to be not too happy about German proposals to turn their country into a satrapy of Brussels with some unelected bureaucrat as the satrap, exercising power over everything to do with taxing and spending. Odd people. Mind you, they could have avoided this development by implementing the measures they agreed to implement a year ago.

As to the wider picture, here's an overview from Sam Fleming of The Times:- Inter-governmental relations within Europe are even more tumultuous. Already the new Spanish Government of Mariano Rajoy is demanding that the country’s deficit targets are eased in the face of unemployment that has just passed the five million mark. Mario Monti, Italy’s Prime Minister, has been publicly seeking more recognition from Germany of the sacrifices his nation is making, warning of a popular backlash against Teutonic austerity. In France, the Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande has put forward a “back to the Seventies” electoral program that will dismay the Germans. While Berlin urges its partners to lower costs, trim budgets and galvanise economic competitiveness, Mr Hollande is planning a lower retirement age, higher taxes on the rich and big business, and 150,000 state-aided jobs. If he wins the election, as many analysts expect, Mr Hollande threatens to reopen negotiations on the German-led fiscal compact that European leaders are aiming to settle today. This may prove to be a hollow threat but it is still explosive. It will be formidably difficult for political leaders to avoid further fumbles as they grope their way through 2012. Despite the efforts of central bankers, we may find ourselves back on the edge of the precipice before long.

Is this really what monetary union was intended to foster?