If you’re looking for an eminently sensible warning againt misinterpreting the PSOE’s electoral upset of the PP, see Edward’s post below. This here is just my own ?0.02 cast in about the margins.

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Trying to get away from the emotionally traumatising, this article caught my eye. Clearly it relates to my earlier post, and does have a Spanish connection, if only a rather tangential one.
I thoroughly endorse what the Financial Times has to say. We need multilateralism now more than ever. We should not simply think ‘Europe First’, [...]

Steve Bell’s If… cartoon in the Guardian today (and presumably for the rest of the week) is a little tale called For A Fistful Of Euros. However, it’s about the arguments over policy towards the Euro between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, rather than an expose of us.
While the Guardian does make Bell’s editorial cartoons [...]

By now virtually everyone must know the results of the Spanish elections. I suppose the real questions people are asking involve how to interpret them. I would advise against jumping to hasty conclusions here. I picked up one comment on Crooked Timber to the effect that:

“anybody who decided to vote Socialist after the bombings [...]

Who did it? - Maria Farrell on the questions raised by Madrid

Reports from Spain indicate a victory for the Socialists in the election, taking 43% to the PP’s 38%.
(Live results in Spanish can be found here and here)
Meanwhile in Russia, Vladimir Putin seems set for a landslide re-election, with exit polls predicting he’ll get almost 70% of the vote.

from Fareed Zakaria:
“Some in Spain have argued that if an Islamic group proves to be the culprit, Spaniards will blame Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. It was his support for America and the war in Iraq that invited the wrath of the fundamentalists. But other recent targets of Islamic militants have been Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, [...]

At one o’clock in the morning Spanish time Angel Acebes appeared on TV here to inform Spanish citizens that the authorities were in possesion of a video showing a man who purports to represent Al Qaeda. In the words of the New York Times:

The man in the video, who was speaking Arabic with a Moroccan [...]

Another search for Radovan Karadzic has ended in failure

Ok, it’s 8:20 on Saturday afternoon. I’d promised no more posts, but now there is some real news. Interior Minister Angel Acebes has just informed a press conference that 5 people have been detained in Madrid.
They have been detained in connection with a mobile phone and phone card which accompanied a pack of explosives that [...]