The WikiLeaks cables reveal

US officials offered to help Spain claim an undersea treasure haul of gold and silver coins discovered by a controversial American exploration company in return for Spanish assistance in the recovery of valuable art looted by Nazi Germany, according to embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

In a conversation with the Spanish culture minister, César Antonio Molina, the US ambassador in Madrid, Eduardo Aguirre, sought to tie the treasure found off the Iberian peninsula by Odyssey together with attempts by an American citizen, Claude Cassirer, to recover a painting by Camille Pisarro that hangs in a Madrid museum.

"The ambassador noted also that while the Odyssey and Cassirer claim were on separate legal tracks, it was in both governments' interest to avail themselves of whatever margin for manoeuvre they had, consistent with their legal obligations, to resolve both matters in a way that favoured the bilateral relationship," the embassy reported in a cable on 2 July 2008.

The offer was made after the Spanish government claimed ownership of half a million gold and silver coins found on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean by Odyssey's underwater robots. The company had provoked Spanish fury by landing the treasure at Gibraltar and flying it straight to the US.

The so-called Black Swan treasure, which Odyssey said came from an unidentified shipwreck, had been valued at about $500m.

Molina refused to tie the Odyssey case to the Pisarro painting, according to the embassy. "The minister listened carefully to the ambassador's message, but he put the accent on the separateness of the issues," the cable reported.

He promised, nevertheless, to meet Cassirer to discuss what could be done about the painting, Pisarro's Rue St Honoré. Après-midi. Effet de Pluie, which currently hangs in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid.

Spain claims that the Black Swan treasure find comes from a Spanish galleon, the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, which sank off Portugal's Algarve coast in 1804. The vessel had just returned from Montevideo when it was attacked by four Royal Navy ships, and was carrying half a million coins that had been minted in Peru.

Descendants of the 249 Spanish sailors who went down with the ship joined the Spanish government's case against Odyssey in a court in Altanta, Georgia. The court ruled that the cargo belonged to Spain; Odyssey has appealed.

The company claims that up to 70% of the treasure the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes was carrying did not belong to the Spanish state at the time, and so the vessel was effectively on a commercial mission. That means the cargo cannot belong to the Spanish government today, it argues.

The leaked cables reveal that the US embassy had the previous year handed over to Spanish authorities the customs documents filed by Odyssey when it flew its hoard of coins into the US in mid-2007.

Embassy officials warned Spain's director of customs, Nicolas Bonilla,"that the information was confidential and to be used only for law enforcement purposes".

58 years in gaol

Vlad Costel, known as “the Rumanian Godfather”, directed one of the major networks for prostitution in Alicante, a Mafia operation that deceived, threatened, tortured  and exploited women, some below the age of consent.

The girls were recruited in Romania and brought over to Spain by bus; Costel’s son in law,  Constantin Aurelian Tudor, otherwise known as 'Tarzan' was in charge of this part of the operation. He was also responsible for placing the girls once they were in the country.

Some of the girls knew that they were coming to Spain to work as prostitutes, many though were told that they would be working in the hotel trade or in people’s houses. Some were even given false contracts for three months. The ones who were under age were given false passports to get them here.

If the girls did not earn enough money or tried to escape, they were told their families back in Romania would be killed. If they tried to enlist the help of one of their clients, they were beaten with copper cables. The ones in the clubs would be locked up to prevent the from leaving.

The centre of operations was the Godfather’s house in  Gran Alacant from where the network spread across the whole province and beyond including the Las Palmeras (El Altet) and El Castillo (Alicante) clubs. 

The Godfather is now behind bars. However, we know that when one criminal is caught, others will  step up to fill the gap. Hopefully, the sentence that Costel  and his gang received will be sufficient to deter too many from following in his footsteps. 

The digital book is not for me just yet

Writing about all the things you could do with newspaper got me thinking about what other items are now becoming redundant in this digital age.

Records were largely made redundant by CDs which are now under threat by MP3 downloads. Cine film was superseded by digital tape which is now falling foul of DVDs, built in hard drives and memory cards and of course films on VHS tapes have given way to DVDs. I am sure I have missed a few things out there and left the odd gap but not to worry.

What is interesting me most at the moment is the digital book.

Before we came to Spain we had loads of books, enough to fill a large bookcase twice over. We pruned that down to three shelves full (in total about 3m). Amongst those there are reference titles which get thumbed from time to time. The rest are all non-fiction and cover everything from gardening to barbecuing with a fair emphasis on cooking. Some of the books have been read from cover to cover, some have been dipped into and others barely touched and yet they all take up space and gather dust.

Aside from all that factual stuff, Pam is an avid reader of novels and regularly stocks up on paperbacks to see her through a season or two.

Wouldn't it be great if all those books could be stored on a simple device the size of a very slim notebook computer? Well of course they can and there is a growing choice of tablets you can buy which do just this.

The one I have investigated in a bit more depth is the Amazon Kindle which is not badly priced, has good capacity and some interesting features.There are a couple of stumbling blocks though.

First off, the device is grey scale which would be useless for all those travel and photography books in my collection. For Pam’s novels though that would not be an issue. What would be though, is the fact that many of titles she would buy are just not available in digitised format yet and those that are cost more than the paperback format. Over 480, 000 or whatever Amazon claim might seem like a lot of titles but pales in comparison to the number of books that are actually in print.

All that means is that I am kind of put off the idea, at least for the moment. It might be worth watching for developments though.

Was it a party or an propaganda campaign?

The Mayor of Orihuela, Monica Lorente invited the residents from Orihuela Costa to a pre-Christmas lunch last Sunday but the opposition party CLR suspect her motives.

They say that the party (free transport, drink and food) was to be all paid for out of local taxes. Further more, the party just happened to coincide with a pre-election function to weigh up support following the outbreak of the Brugal scandal. They describe it as a dirty trick to drum up support for the PP party.

To be fair, I think that the comment smacks of sour grapes on behalf of the CLR party. If people went and had a jolly good time and had to endure a bit of propaganda, then that was a small price to pay.

The ex-mayor faces the possibility of more time in gaol

On the 10th April 2006, the mayor of Bigastro at that time, José Joaquín Moya approved a special plan for the construction of a solar farm in the public park, La Pedrera. On the same day he went ahead and granted a licence to Eurener to build the solar farm; no other company was given the chance to bid for this work. On the 16th November, heavy machinery arrived and started to plough up the land in preparation for construction.

When the Servicio de Protección a la Naturaleza de la Guardia Civil (Seprona) complained to the CIty Council several days later, Moya signed a decree suspending the licence for the work. By this time though, much of the local flora along with pine trees had already been destroyed.

In order for this work to go ahead on non urbanizable land, there had to be a declaration of community interest and a declaration of environmental impact approved by the Generalit. The City Council and Eurener therefore sent the file to the Valencian Autonomous Government for approval and they turned the plan down.

Also implicated in this affair was the municipal technician who, according to the public prosecutor, should have been aware that what was being undertaken was contrary to the norms of city- planning – in fact illegal.

In relation to this issue, the Anti-corruption public prosecutor for the Vega Baja, Pablo Romero is seeking a prison sentence of 15 months for the ex mayor and a ban on him holding public office for nine years.

Other investigations

There are other on-going investigations related to city-planning irregularities involving both the current mayor and the ex-mayor: the exchange of land in a green zone to allow factory units to be built, the installation of gas tanks in an area designated as park land and the authorisation to auction rustic land to build an aparthotel – all of which took place between 2005 and 2008.

This weekend in Bigastro

	Saturday 11th at 8pm A recital by the wood and wind quintet, “Manuel Moya” Ana Belén Sánchez Mazón (Flute) Germán Moya Pomares (Oboe) Germán Guillén Alcocer (Clarinet) Diego Carillo Soler (Horn) Antero Ojanto (Bassoon)
	Gala for the disabled The Association of Disabled La Pedrera, along with the Council of Social welfare and Culture have organised this gala to raise funds. Price: 5 € (which goes to the Association)

So many uses

I have to admit that without the help of online newspapers, I could not write this blog. Most of the newspapers I read are local to be in keeping with the title of my blog. However, I do read the British papers as well.

Amongst the ones that I read online used to be the Times but not anymore because now they charge for it. I can understand why, after all you do get the same news that others have to pay for when they buy the paper version. However, I would argue that there are several important differences between the online paper and the paper copy which justifies you paying for the latter.

For one thing, you can’t easily read the online edition on the way to work by train or by bus and not at all on a plane. Even if you have a snazzy smart phone, you need a decent 3G connection to download the pages.

Secondly and perhaps more important, when you have finished reading the paper copy it can be used for a great many things.

• you can screw the paper up and use it to light a fire (my father taught me how roll it properly to make the paper burn longer)
• you can also use a newspaper to draw the fire up the chimney to get it going (a highly dangerous practice my father also taught me)
• you can use it to wrap items up that you want to store (not recommended for items that might get soiled by the newsprint)
• you can lay it under carpets to stop the floorboards wearing the backing (with the added bonus that when you come to change the carpet, you can relive the old news)
• in fact you can lay newspaper under anything that needs padding
• you can make party hats out of them
• use it in the garden to blanch celery or to protect plants from frost
• put it on your car windscreen to stop it frosting over
• in school you’d use newspaper to make papier mache and to cover the tables when gluing and painting
• they are great for making the tails of kites from (not the kite itself though)
• fold one and use it as a fan to keep you cool
• stuff your wet shoes with one
• crumpled newspaper and vinegar is great for polishing windows and mirrors
• put a paper over your head when it is raining to keep your head dry or to keep the sun off at cricket matches
• on the terraces at Liverpool FC they would roll up the Daily Post and use it as a funnel when they could not get to the toilet (not recommended if the person in front is bigger than you)
• my mother used newspaper to copy paper dress patterns
• if you were our grandparents you might have cut it into squares and used it as toilet paper (only if you had an outside loo of course)
• again, if you were our grandparents you would have used it to cover the windows when you were decorating (why did they do that?)
• poor people (not our families you understand) used to line drawers with them
• you can convert newspapers into logs to burn (my father tried this and then found that it was cheaper to buy coal)
• you can use it to stuff up a draughty doorway or window
• you can lay it on the floor to keep it clean when you come in from the garden or workshop (I am desperately trying to remember who used to do that in “Last of the Summer Wine”)
• put newspaper on the floor when you polish your shoes
• according to our teacher, the British use newspaper to wrap fish and chips. We did have to point out to her that the fish and chips are actually wrapped in clean paper - the newspaper was just to keep them warm on the way home
• you can stuff it down your jersey when you are cycling downhill (many a rider has relied on a copy of L'Équipe to keep his chest warm whilst descending the Col de Tourmalet)

That is why I believe they are justified in charging for newspapers because they are a value added item – online news just isn’t.

How would the police find a stolen snowman?

Since the weather has been bad in Britain, the police have been inundated with calls from people requiring assistance.

Last week, people were phoning the police to report children who were snowballing. To be fair, a well hurled icy snowball can do some damage if it hits your windows, your car or worst of all you.

Although the police might have tolerated those complaints, a lady in Chatham, Kent went too far. She phoned the emergency 999 number and told the police that someone had stolen the snowman from her garden. Apparently she genuinely believed this was serious because she’d used pound coins for the eyes and teaspoons for the arms. The lady in question has now been advised about what constitutes a genuine emergency.

The story begs the questions "How would you find a missing snowman?" Missing snowman - description - white, made of snow about 1.5m tall when last seen (could be much smaller by now) and "How on earth do you steal a snowman, it's not like you could bundle it into the back of a van is it?"

PS and they talk about Scousers - build a snowman in Liverpool and it will stay there until it melts; Southerners obviously have no scruples about such things :-)

Dull but mild

	You can’t have it every which way at this time of year, it is after all winter.  It is either dull and mild or sunny and cold.
	A cloudy start to the week with drizzle. Temperatures will be mild.  However, by Friday, temperatures will drop again. By next weekend we should see clear skies and sunshine return. With clear skies though, the thermometer will plummet.

Even more red faces

When you find an article advertised at way below its real price, it is tempting to think that you have hit upon the bargain of the century. My daughter bought some jewellery from what she thought was the Hong Kong branch of Tiffanys only to find that it was fake. Still only she (and you now) know that.

I read in the papers today that eighty people bought what they thought were brand new campervans from an Alicante businessman for between 12,000 and 15,000 Euros. The official price of these vehicles is 40,000 Euros. They must have thought all their Christmases had come at once.

Initially, a Barcelona company had sold the vehicles to France, but they were damaged in a flood in 2008 so sold to a junkyard.

The vehicles apparently ended up in the Czech Republic and Germany. Their plate numbers where changed and then put up for sale. Many of these campers had undergone ITV inspections in various Spanish provinces, leading Guardia Civil investigators to believe these were ‘fixed’. The vehicles were then sold as new, as though they were fresh from the factory.

The campervans parent company became aware of the alleged fraud when they received requests for vehicle parts for vehicles which had been taken off the road.

Now, following an investigation by the Guardia Civil and the Police, the 80 people who bought the campers are not able to drive them. In addition to the possible fraud and forgery, the Guardia Civil have deemed them un-roadworthy.

The moral: anything that seems too cheap to be true often IS.

That’s not the way to do it

The Spanish government declared a "state of alarm" yesterday for the first time in three decades, assuming sweeping powers that allowed the military to take control of the country's airspace and order Spain's striking air traffic controllers to work or face prison.

Military law was applied from midday yesterday, allowing them to be arrested and charged if they did not return to work. Spain's military code allows sentences of up to two years for those who disobey an order to work from the defence ministry. "If they do not go to work, they will be committing a crime of disobedience according to the military penal code," the deputy prime minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, warned after an emergency cabinet meeting.

The measure appeared to work. By late yesterday evening, Rubalcaba said that more than 90% of the controllers had returned to work. But he added that it could still take up to 48 hours for air traffic to return to normal after Spanish airspace reopened during the afternoon. It was also unclear if strikers would seek fresh ways to continue their protest.

In a country that has 20% unemployment and is suffering massive cuts in government spending, the 2,300 well-paid air traffic controllers are hardly gaining public sympathy for their cause. They earned an extraordinary average of €350,000 each last year, thanks to generous overtime rules. Those who worked most overtime earned up to €900,000, with 160 earning above €600,000.

So what has upset them? The government passed a law restricting overtime and tightening working conditions earlier this year. They also plan to privatise Barcelona and Madrid airports. Even if they only receive their basic pay following the changes, that is a hell of a lot more than 90+ per cent of Spanish workers not to mention the 20% who are unemployed.

For a union trying to make its point, calling a wild cat strike at the start of a public holiday was perhaps not a clever move. Most unions will tell you that the only way to win your cause is with public support. Without it you are battling with two enemies of which the public are the ones you need to worry most about.

Going nowhere

The Spanish military was called in to take control of the country's airspace yesterday after air traffic controllers staged an unauthorised walkout over working conditions. The controllers called in sick en masse.

At 9:30 am, an emergency Royal Decree was signed ordering the Ministry of Defence to call in the army to take control of air traffic in all the national territory. An emergency cabinet meeting was scheduled for 9am this morning where they will likely declare a State of Emergency.

The controllers, who are the best paid in Europe with annual salaries of up to one million euros, have been in dispute with the socialist government for a year over plans, ratified this week, to partly privatise the Spanish state airports authority, AENA.

Their timing could not be worse. There are two public holidays next week on Monday and Wednesday with many taking the Tuesday off as well, so Spaniards along with other travellers would have been at the airports ready to get away.

The good and the bad

The bad news is that it is going to be really cold again tonight with temperatures hovering just above zero. The good news is that the cold spell will then give way to milder weather with daytime temperatures in the low 20s and at night time in the teens.

Health and safety issues

Bigastro City Council set up a table at the weekly market on Thursday to mark the International Day to Combat AIDS.

The Councillors for Health and Welfare, Isidro Ricart and Mª Carmen Alonso were on hand to give out information about the preventative measures that people can take to avoid the disease and of course to pin the red ribbons onto lapels.

A week last Thursday, 25th October, the two councillors were at the market giving out information about the Day Against Violence (especially violence against women). On this occasion the ribbons were black.

Next Friday, 10th December between 5:30pm and 8pm you can do your bit by donating blood at the Auditorium “Francisco Grau” . In Tony Hancock’s time you used to donate a pint*, I’m not sure how much they take now that we have gone metric.

* Recall the classic line from “The Blood Donor” – one episode of Hancock’s Half Hour from 1961 -"I don't mind giving a reasonable amount, but a pint! That's very nearly an armful! I’m not going around with an empty arm.”

The new nick

The new location for the local police station will be opened next Friday, 10th December, by the Assistant Representative to the Government in Alicante, Dña. Encarna Llinares.

The current location, although centrally placed, is way too small and offers very little parking facilities for the police vehicles. The new location, situated on the ground floor of the old San José de Calasanz school building, offers a lot more space and better parking.

As an aside, the young men in cars that used to gather outside the San José building have now moved up to the park at the bottom of our estate. Particularly at the weekends, there are as many as half a dozen cars parked either in the San Isidro park or on the two roads alongside it.

It makes you wonder why these young men choose to congregate in this way. I find it hard to believe that they drive up here just to have a chat but I would not want to accuse them of anything more sinister. No doubt the police are keeping an eye on the situation.

PS Nick is English slang for a police station - so called because that is where you get taken when you get caught or "nicked". Like in Spanish, there are a lot of colloquial terms in English.

That’s not (n)ice!

This satellite picture from today’s papers in Britain shows the country covered in a blanket of snow and ice and weathermen predict that it could stay that way for another week.

Petrol stations are running out of fuel, shops are running out of stocks, cash machines are running out of money, ships bringing toys for Christmas can’t get into port and stocks of salt are running low. There are problems on the roads, on the trains and at the airports.

Most bizarre of all though, amidst all this chaos, the police are being inundated with phone calls from people complaining of children throwing snowballs.

Will she give refunds for dull days

Angeles Duran, 49, from Vigo in the north-western region of Galicia, applied for ownership of the Sun after learning that similar claims had been made by an American on the Moon, Mars and Venus.

Although the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prevents any government from staking their claim over celestial bodies it does not extend to private individuals, an opinion backed by her notary after consulting legal bodies in Spain.

Last week Miss Duran was issued with a document that declares she is "the owner of the Sun, a star of spectral type G2, located in the centre of the solar system, at an averaged distance from Earth of around 149,600,000 kilometres" (93 million miles).

She now plans to profit from her property and wants to charge those whose benefit from its energy and claims to have met representatives from Spain's Ministry of Industry to discuss levying a fee on photovoltaic plants for converting the sun's energy into electricity.

"When you have a property it makes sense to make use of it. Power companies profit from the rivers which belong to everyone so I hope to take advantage of the sun."

Miss Duran has come up with a plan that will distribute profits made from the Sun across Spain with half the proceeds going to the government, 20 per cent to the nation's pension fund, 10 per cent dedicated to ending world hunger and ten per cent on research. She says she will keep 10 per cent of the earnings from the Sun for herself.

More red faces

Art thieves drove off in a van filled with 22 sculptures and paintings worth an estimated €5m from a warehouse in Getafe near Madrid.

The van carrying the artworks had been parked inside a warehouse belonging to the Crisóstomo transport company on Friday after arriving from the Stefan Röpke gallery in Cologne, Germany. The thieves drove off using a key left in the van's glove department.

Only about half of the artworks, which were being returned to Spain from a gallery in Germany, were insured, according to David Fernández of the Juan Gris gallery in Madrid. "I have been furious and upset about this since Monday," he said. Monday was the day when some of the works should have been delivered to his gallery and five others in Madrid and Barcelona. "Nothing like this has happened to us in 40 years."

Christmas in Orihuela

The Christmas lights in Orihuela will be turned on December 13th - worth a visit I think. And those who might worry about the cost of all the electricity consumed by the lights, don’t  worry, all the bulbs are low energy.

Another must see is the Belén, situated in the plaza Marqués de Rafal which this year will commemorate the poet Miguel Hernández with a figure that reads some of his poems.

Brrritain grinds to a halt - again

The British government have ordered an urgent audit of the country's snow-readiness today as much of the country struggles with the early winter weather. Road, rail and air links are all reportedly in chaos.

Yesterday:-

• More than 2,000 schools closed and the NHS trust in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, was reduced to appealing for local people with 4x4s to help transport medical staff. Midwives went to work in Hexham, Northumberland, on a dairy farmer's tractor. In Scotland, Forth coastguard said it used a 4x4 to collect intensive care nurses from their homes and transport them to the Queen Margaret hospital in Dunfermline.
• Britain's second biggest airport, Gatwick, was closed all day and not expected to reopen until this morning after runway clearing was repeatedly foiled by fresh snowfalls.
• Network Rail conceded that a third of trains were delayed or cancelled by early afternoon, after earlier estimates that 80% of services were on time. But a spokesman said that both the group's own staff and train operators had their "full severe weather mitigation measures in place".
• On the roads, four hours of continuous snowfall in Yorkshire, Kent and parts of the east coast saw motorways close or shrink to a single lane, while cities such as Sheffield spent most of the day without buses and the Humber and Forth bridges were closed.

How do other countries cope?

Drivers in Sweden are required by law to fit their vehicles with winter tyres, local authorities have to keep the roads clear, and shop owners have to ensure the pavement outside their business is non-treacherous.

As soon as there's snow or ice, the councils are out putting salt on the streets as a legal requirement. In the very north of Sweden, that doesn't work, so they get out the snowploughs instead. When things get really bad, she added, the snow chains come out and warm sand is scattered over airport runways.

The Canadians, too, are well adjusted to the cold.

When winter comes, snow tyres, chains and studs are snapped up, some streets are declared no-parking zones because they lie on snowplough routes, giant snow melters are fired up for the winter, and caravans of snowploughs are dispatched to runways and highways.

Britain never seems to expect or be prepared bad or good weather. When it is too hot, too cold or too wet, chaos ensues. People throw their arms up in disbelief and say “how are going going to cope?” And the answer is they don’t.

To be fair, Britain does not normally get such extremes of weather so it could be argued that the measures taken in countries like Sweden and Canada where they expect large snowfalls are justified.

However, the estimated cost of the current freeze is £1.2bn a day. Surely it would make economic sense to at least be reasonably prepared for this sort of bad weather at least get the gritters out on the roads as the snow is falling not two or three days later when hundreds of motorists have slid off them.