Raphael Minder, writing in today's New York Times, talks about Spain's economic crisis with two dinosaurs of Spanish politics: Manuel Fraga, Franco's minister of propaganda in the sixties and later president of Galicia, and Santiago Carrillo, former secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party. For the latter, the crisis provides an opportunity...
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Last week Human Rights Watch issued a critical report on the work of the United Nations' Human Rights Council, founded in 2006 in place of the UN Commission on Human Rights and up for review in 2011. HRW's report takes a comprehensive look at the Council's successes and failures, calling on the...
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Seventy years ago, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, the ruthless dictator of the Dominican Republic, welcomed the first group of Spanish Republican refugees, initiating one of the most contradictory and tragic episodes of the postwar Spanish diaspora--an event on whose  commemoration in the DR Público reports today. Trujillo's generosity toward the thousands of Spaniards fleeing Franco and...
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In a rare interview, Garzón has told the Spanish radio network Cadena Ser that he is reasonably pessimistic about his career at this point. Speaking from the house of his friend José Saramago--the recently deceased Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner--where he participated in the presentation of a biography on the writer, Garzón...
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Amnesty International urges the parliament of Catalonia not to ban the use of full-face covering veils in public:

"Any wide-ranging ban will violate the rights to freedom of expression and religion of those women who choose to wear a full-face veil as an expression of their identity or beliefs," said...
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In a report released yesterday, Human Rights Watch calls out France, Germany, and Britain for using intelligence obtained in other countries through torture:

"Berlin, Paris, and London should be working to eradicate torture, not relying on foreign torture intelligence," said Judith Sunderland, senior Western Europe researcher at Human Rights Watch....
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Joseph Waltz writes in the Monthly Review on the conversations that John Gerassi--son of a Spanish Republican general and author of The Premature Antifascists, on the Lincoln Brigade--had in the early 1970s with Jean-Paul Sartre:

“Wow,” Sartre replies, “you really want to put me on the spot today…OK...
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La mula, a new internationally-produced Spanish-language comedy set during the Spanish Civil War--co-written and directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino)--may never see the light of day, Variety reports:

Three of Europe's highest-ranking film executives -- U.K.'s John Woodward, Spain's Ignasi Guardans and Ireland's Simon Perry -- are battling to save...
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The official map of mass graves dating from the Civil War in Andalusia, released after a five years of research, offers an inventory of almost six hundred different unmarked burial sites.  The mass grave at the San Rafael cemetery in Málaga is assumed to contain more than four thousand bodies, making it the...
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Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:

If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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