Giles Tremlett
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/ 6 February 2004

Spanish poll: Civil war talk infuriates candidates

Spain’s bruising general election campaign took another bitter turn this week when the parties began rowing over the civil war. Right-wing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar called on the Socialist Party leader, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, to order his campaign team to stop making references to the conflict that killed at least half a million people.

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/ 23 January 2004

Morocco boosts women

Morocco has approved one of the most progressive laws on women’s and family rights in the Arab world, which will see polygamy almost completely eradicated from the north African country. Last-ditch attempts by Islamist deputies in the Rabat Parliament failed to derail a law that had the backing of King Mohammed VI.

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/ 5 November 2003

Sun, sea and dirty money

A potent brew of laundered money and northern Europeans seeking houses in the sun risks pushing Spain’s Costa del Sol, on its south eastern shores and which is in the throes of a construction boom, into the control of organised criminal gangs, a university report has warned.

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/ 20 March 2003

Digging up the past

The excavation of graves in Spain has reawakened hatred dating back more than 65 years. During and after the 1936 to 1939 civil war, tens of thousands of people were taken by rightwing gangs for night-time ”strolls”, or paseos, that ended with a bullet in the back of the head.

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/ 21 January 2003

A defining moment in history?

They have called it Excalibur, though it was plucked from a pit of bones rather than the stone of Arthurian legend. To the ordinary eye it is a hand-sized, triangular chunk of ochre and purple rock. But to palaeontologists it is proof of a defining moment in the history of the human mind.