Well, little by little the details are getting clearer. According to the Spanish daily El Pais the police now know the identity of six Moroccans who are thought to have participated in Thursday’s bombing.
According to the newspaper one of those responsible is Jamal Zougan from Tangiers who has been identified from photographs by two [...]

Two versions of the Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero story, Fox and Bloomberg, choose for yourselves.
BTW: anyone out there help me: what is the Blair/Labour Government official position right now on the UN and troop withdrawal? Just to put this in some sort of perspective.

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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.

Read more… or Read more right here… »
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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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Maybe it’s the presence of Talos in the comments section, or maybe it’s the arrival of the Athens Olympics on my personal horizon, but something this morning is carrying me back to the world of the Greeks, and to some early ideas of how best to secure objectives in the face of adversity.
First metis [...]

Ok: it’s just gone half past six, and demonstrations all over Spain are getting ready to go. Meantime I will leave you with the following thoughts:
I think it must be difficult for anyone outside Spain to understand just how complicated this situation here is. As everyone by now knows, the Spanish police are following two [...]

Update: Friday morning 8:30 CET. The uncertainty about the authors of this crime continues. I think having been fairly forthright at the start, prudence on my part is now what is called for while the investigation continues. Meanwhile I think it is important we don’t lose sight of the magnitude of what has happened: 198 [...]