If,
like me, you've regularly wondered what on earth the law is here on the
reporting of cases in the courts, here's something which will help
you. It's a note on the (absence of) laws on contempt of court in
Spain.
In
the table I cited the other day, the police were the least disliked
institution in Spain. But they may just forfeit this honour after the
news that 8 members of the Catalan police force have been charged
with beating to death a 50 year old man in Barcelona.
Which
reminds me . . . It's the Guardia Civil which is normally cited as
the most highly appraised institution in Spain and I'm assured it'd
be wrong to put them under the 'Police' heading. For they're a
military body. Quite why Spain still needs a military force on top of
national, regional, provincial and municipal bodies, I don't know.
It's been suggested that the system of housing them in barracks away
from their home towns makes them less open to corruption that the
other security forces but I've no idea whether this is true or not.
I
asked a Spanish friend whether there were ever any serious discussion
programs on TV here. Say, something like the BBC TV's Newsnight at 10
every night. She said there certainly were, at 9 in the morning. By
my rule of thumb, this is the equivalent of 7am elsewhere, when no one is
watching. And I've just recalled a suspicion I had years ago that
this was in fulfilment of some legal obligation to get serious
occasionally.
Finally
. . . The theory that women are more adept at learning languages than
men used to comfort me when learning Persian with the mother of my
two daughters. Or, putting that another way, my first wife. Here's an
interesting article on this. Note how the weasel word 'converse' is
used when the writer wants to make the point that women talk more
than men.
I
might add that our Iranian teacher of Persian (Farsi) had a very firm
view on this subject; he insisted that woman learned more quickly
because they has less in their heads to get in the way of new
knowledge. I advised him not to float this notion past my wife.
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