It is indisputably one of the world’s more original languages. For more than half a millennium, the inhabitants of the Spanish Canary Island of La Gomera have communicated over steep slopes and isolated valleys by whistling. Now the whistle language, known as Silbo, has aroused the interest of scientists.
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/ 17 December 2004
A suspected Islamist linked to the Madrid train bombings on March 11 says Spain was targeted because of its support for the United States in Iraq, local media reported on Friday. The former conservative government denied that Spain’s war alliance with the US had turned it into a terrorist target.
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/ 13 December 2004
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Monday proposed an international pact against Islamist terrorism. He was addressing a parliamentary commission investigating the Madrid train bombings. Meanwhile, a Spanish judge on Monday was to question an alleged mastermind of the train bombings.
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/ 6 December 2004
Seven bombs went off in as many Spanish cities on Monday within the space of half an hour, slightly injuring five people, after anonymous callers claiming to speak for the underground Basque separatist group ETA told a Basque newspaper to expect the explosions.
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/ 17 November 2004
One day in 1971, when Spanish farmer Miguel Pereira Gomez came home from the fields, he noticed something strange on the floor of the family house. ”It is a face,” his mother said. Since then, the village of Belmez near the southern city of Jaen has become something of a pilgrimage site for people interested in paranormal phenomena.
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/ 22 October 2004
Loyola de Palacio, the Spanish vice-president of the European Commission, was on Friday quoted by press reports as saying she hoped Cuban leader Fidel Castro would die as soon as possible. ”I hope he dies one day, and I hope to see it,” transport and energy commissioner de Palacio told Spanish journalists Thursday in Brussels.
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/ 22 October 2004
While the European Union attempts to buttress its frontiers against illegal immigration, Spain is discovering that even the most sophisticated police technology is unable to stem the tide at its southern border, a gateway for thousands of Moroccans and sub-Saharans seeking to enter Europe every year.
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/ 28 September 2004
Spanish construction group ACS-Dragados is vying with a Franco-Canadian-led consortium for the right to build a high-speed rail link in South Africa ready for the 2010 World Cup finals, the Spanish financial daily La Gaceta reported on Monday. The 1,2-billion dollar (R7,6-billion) project would link Pretoria with Johannesburg and the Johannesburg International airport, about 80km further south.
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/ 7 September 2004
Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has launched an urgent appeal to fight West Africa’s worst locust plague in 15 years, the Spanish daily El Pais said on Tuesday. Wade spoke to journalists during a visit to the cultural festival Forum 2004 in Barcelona.
He had to change his tires 11 times and once fell to the ground and spent the night in a ditch. But a Russian amputee, Vladimir Ksenchak (65), finally rolled into Madrid on Tuesday after a 5 000km wheelchair trip designed to inspire the disabled and to denounce drugs.
The chief economist of the World Bank predicted in an interview published on Saturday that oil prices will return in a matter of months to a stable level of about a barrel after hitting record highs last week of nearly . Although prices closed down on Friday, many traders predicted that the volatile hikes will continue.
Two people burnt to death after their car was engulfed in a huge forest fire in Spain, officials said on Wednesday as firefighters battled blazes in many parts of sweltering southern Europe. Portugal appealed for more help from its European partners and in France authorities said they had succeeded in containing a large blaze.
Legal action in Spain and the United States taking aim at secret bank accounts of President Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea could become a weapon to help put an end to his 25-year dictatorship, say opposition leaders and activists from the West African nation.
Spain’s Parliament may approve same-sex marriages early next year, Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar said on Wednesday. If the law is approved, it will make Spain the third European country to recognise gay marriages after The Netherlands and Belgium.
The Spanish government is considering monitoring mosques and imams to curb Islamic extremism blamed for the March 11 terror bombings in Madrid, the foreign minister said on Monday. ”We can require of the imam … that it be known what he is going to say in the mosque,” said Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso.
Spain said on Monday it had arrested two more men linked to the Madrid train bombings after a weekend raid in which the alleged mastermind of the attacks and four accomplices blew themselves up. Police further tightened security on public transport, airports and strategic sites including nuclear reactors.
Three suspects in the Madrid railway bombings blew themselves up on Saturday in a southwestern suburb of Madrid as police prepared to storm their apartment, setting off a powerful explosion that killed one special forces agent and wounded 15 police officers, the interior minister said. Saturday’s news further shocked Spaniards, still traumatised by the March 11 bombings that killed 191 people.
Police found a bomb on Friday on a high-speed rail line between Madrid and Seville, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said. Bomb-disposal experts alerted by a railway employee found 10kg to 12kg of explosives, possibly dynamite, under a track about 60km south of Madrid on the route to the southern city of Seville.
A Spanish judge issued five international arrest warrants on Wednesday for suspects in the Madrid train bombings and re-arrested a Moroccan suspect, a court official said. Judge Juan del Olmo was forwarding the warrants to authorities in Britain, Morocco and France.
Examining Judge Juan del Olmo on Friday began questioning two suspects linked to the March 11 train bombings in Madrid, judicial sources said. The sources said Del Olmo was interrogating Faisal Alluch and Khalid Oulad Akcha, arrested last weekend with two other suspects. The four are all Moroccan nationals.
Political leaders from around Europe joined the Spanish royal family on Wednesday in attending an emotionally charged mass for the 190 identified victims of the March 11 bombings in Madrid — amid fears that similar terror could strike other capitals.
The South African Foreign Affairs department said on Thursday afternoon that ”no-one from South Africa has died in Equatorial Guinea” after Spanish newspapers reported that a SA mercenary suspected of plotting a coup in that country had been tortured to death.
New charges for alleged mercenaries
Spanish police have identified six Moroccans who they suspect carried out last week’s bomb attacks in Madrid, it was reported on Tuesday. According to unnamed sources cited by Spain’s El Pais newspaper, five of the men are on the run but one — Jamal Zougam — was among a group of suspects arrested on Saturday.
‘You can’t organise a war with lies’
Power balance blown apart
Another bomb was found following Thursday’s bombings of four Madrid trains that killed 192 people, radio reports said on Friday. The undetonated bomb was found under a pile of luggage which had been deposited after the terrorist attacks in a police station in the southeast of Madrid.
One early spring morning of bloodshed and carnage appeared to have given the armed Basque separatist group Eta, officially blamed for the Madrid attacks, a horrendous increase in its toll of victims, as experts said a group cornered by police might have lashed out in desperation.
Anibal Altamirano said fellow commuters around him were too stunned to move when the first bomb blew apart a train during rush hour on Thursday morning. When a second blast hit the busy Atocha station a few minutes later, everyone fled in panic.
At least 190 people were killed and more than 1Â 000 injured early on Thursday in near-simultaneous explosions on trains in Madrid at the height of morning commuter traffic — only 72 hours ahead of Spanish general elections. Thirteen bombs were planted around Madrid and 10 exploded, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said.
Spanish doctors have amputated an injured arm, attached it to the patient’s groin for nine days, and replanted it on its stump in an unprecedented operation, news reports said on Thursday. The operation was the first in the world in which a reattached limb was amputated in order to join it with another part of the body.
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/ 16 February 2004
Former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said on Spanish radio in Madrid on Monday that at no point had he ever said that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Spanish government based its justification for supporting the war in Iraq on UN claims that Iraq possessed the weapons.
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/ 6 February 2004
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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/ 8 December 2003
Meteorologists in Spain on Monday warned against further severe rainfall and storms following a weekend in which six people died in severe weather conditions. Forecasters predicted additional rainfall of up to 100 litre per square metre and snow at levels above 600m.