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Pro-Independence parties win Catalan elections
Jordi Oriola Folch    Off_Guardian , 17 February 2021
off-guardian.org/2021/02/16/pro-independence-parties-win-catalan-elections/


For the third time in a row, the Catalan pro-independence movement wins with an absolute majority in the Catalan elections. It has won resoundingly with 74 seats, more than the 68 that establishes the majority (in the previous elections it had won with 70). This time also with 51.22% of the votes, making it the majority among the voters.

The elections were due next year, but they were brought forward because the Spanish courts overthrew Catalan President Joaquim Torra for having disobeyed an electoral board that ordered him to take down a banner criticising the imprisonment of Catalan politicians. The President refused, citing freedom of expression, and the Spanish judiciary considered that the contempt was sufficient to force the removal of the President of the Parliament of Catalonia and cause the elections to be brought forward.

Furthermore, after consulting experts on the pandemic, the provisional Catalan executive decided to postpone the elections for five months until the third wave of Covid-19 had subsided. However, yet again, the Spanish judiciary interfered forcing the elections to be held on 14th February.

This is the same Spanish Justice that keeps 9 Catalan politicians and activists in prison, that has issued search and arrest warrants against 7 exiled Catalan politicians (which the German and Belgian courts rejected because they did not see the accusations as justified or because they understood that there were no guarantees of a fair trial in Spain), it is the same Spanish Justice that maintains the search and arrest warrant against a Majorcan musician –exiled in Belgium– for singing against the King of Spain and that is imminently going to imprison another Catalan musician, Pablo Hasel, for also having sung against the King.

In this context, and despite having the entire state apparatus and the Spanish press against them, independence has won again, and has done so obtaining a larger absolute majority than ever and with over 51% of the votes. In front of the pro-independence movement, we have the former Spanish socialist health minister during the pandemic, who has had the full support of the state, the press and unionism in general, and also the Spanish extreme-right of VOX, which has burst onto the Catalan Parliament with 11 seats.

Given this scenario, the Spanish state and the European Union cannot deny the right of self-determination of Catalan society, which must be expressed in a referendum with democratic guarantees, transparency and without foul play.

All in all, democracy is about allowing citizens to decide at the ballot box, not about violating their will with the application of laws that should in fact serve to guarantee there is a framework that respects what societies want for themselves.

Jordi Oriola i Folch is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and founder of Transforma Films. His work has been broadcast on television stations around the world and touches on issues of human rights, sustainability, democratic participation and community work, historical memory and the economic crisis. He has also taught audiovisual classes in the Basque Country, Catalonia, South America and Africa. He can be reached through his website or twitter.



https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-02-08/spain-approaches-end-of-phase-1-of-covid-vaccination-campaign.html

El Pais - PABLO LINDE
Madrid - 08 FEB 2021 
Spain approaches end of phase 1 of Covid vaccination campaign

Spain’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign is entering the final stages of the process of immunizing residents of senior residences, while the majority of healthcare workers have also received their first jab – many have also got the second. Meanwhile, the final part of this first phase, inoculating adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care, has begun in the Canary Islands, Murcia and Navarre. This process is expected to get going in the rest of the country before the middle of February.

EL PAÍS has collected statistics in an attempt to take a snapshot of where the vaccination process has got to in Spain and these are the principal conclusions. Despite a year having passed since the first coronavirus infections having been detected in the country, the system for collecting data on the health crisis is still deficient. The Health Ministry has not centralized the collection of information on the vaccination process and just 11 of the country’s 17 autonomous regions have supplied sufficiently detailed figures.
The process is both complex and flexible. The first three groups in phase 1 of the campaign overlap in order to optimize the process, and so that it continues without pause. Healthcare workers started receiving the vaccine before the process finished in senior residences, and adults with need for daily assistance will start being immunized before all healthcare staff have had their doses.

Along the same lines, some regions are already planning for the over-80s – who are the first group in phase 2 – to start the process before phase 1 has finished. There are around 380,000 adults with need for daily assistance, and they are a complicated group to vaccinate given that home visits are often needed. It could be more efficient to vaccinate non-dependent seniors at the same time – this group is made up of 2.8 million people and accounts for six in every 10 Covid deaths in Spain. In January of this year, more than 1,300 people over the age of 80 died every week with the disease.

To complicate the situation further, not all of the approved vaccines are going to be administered to everyone. The AstraZeneca vaccines, which will start arriving in Spain this week, will only be given to people aged between 18 and 55, given that this is the group where clinical trials have proved it to be effective. For now, the Health Ministry has decided that it will be used to immunize healthcare workers who are not on the front line, and next week a decision will be made on which section of the population to prioritize – it could be essential workers or young people with underlying health conditions.
This, in effect, is what some regions are already doing. It is not completely clear which healthcare workers are being immunized in phase 1, and in many cases, the authorities have opted to give all staff in hospitals their doses, independently of their role. In Madrid, for example, a higher percentage of healthcare workers have received the second dose of the vaccine than among seniors who live in residences. This is despite the fact that senior residences – where more than half of official Covid deaths took place in Spain, according to the Health Ministry’s figures – were the absolute priority of the central government’s vaccination plan.

That said, the available data suggests that immunity is not far off for residents of the country’s senior residences. With the information supplied by the regions, nearly all residents and staff have got their first dose, and the majority of regions have administered the second dose to more than half of the recipients.

The process in residences is being delayed due to outbreaks in some of these centers. According to regional health departments consulted by EL PAÍS, this is not presenting a problem given that the process is simply being postponed where there is a high number of people infected.
Data supplied last week by the Catalan regional authorities show that the vaccines are starting to have an effect, and that number of new infections is rising less inside such residences compared to outside. Fernando Simón, the director of the Health Ministry’s Coordination Center for Health Alerts (CCAES), also said on Thursday that outbreaks in these centers are falling and that comparisons made by the ministry between the over-65s who live in residences and those who do not show a lower infection rate among the former.

The full protection offered by the vaccines, however, does not arrive until a week after the second dose. With the extreme levels of transmission that are currently being seen in Spain – the 14-day cumulative number of coronavirus cases per 100,000 inhabitants is around 750 – it is no surprise that the virus is finding its way into senior residences during this process, infecting inhabitants, and even claiming the lives of those who have been inoculated. The risk after the first shot is low, but it still exists.
The latest data from the Health Ministry shows that all regions have administered more than 70% of the doses that they have received. The authorities insist that the problem now will not be the capacity to deliver the vaccines, but rather the number that Spain will receive. From this weekend onward, that number will rise, with, for example, AstraZeneca sending 1.8 million doses this month. And it will go up even more in March, which is when a new vaccine – from Janssen – may be added to the list. The vaccination process for adults with need for daily assistance even if they are not in residential care will be a good means to measure the agility of the system.
With reporting by María Sosa, Isabel Valdés and Lucía Bohórquez.
English version by Simon Hunter.









Leftinspain
I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view.

INEQUALITYWealth map of Spain: These are the country’s richest and poorest areas

6/6/2019

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Madrid and Barcelona are home to the 10 neighborhoods with the highest annual per capita income

elpais.com/elpais/2019/06/03/inenglish/1559572022_095131.html?id_externo_rsoc=FB_CM_EN&fbclid=IwAR2S3nBuP213lZSjEcAQMJej-UZYTtnvKpVIwFSfz5iXGSBt5GG9CIh7chg

From El Pais in English, JESÚS SÉRVULO GONZÁLEZ, 4 June 2019

The wealth map of Spain depicts a country whose prosperity is concentrated in a triangle formed by Madrid, Barcelona and the Basque Country, while the southern region of Andalusia harbors the country’s poorest areas, according to figures recently released by the Spain’s INE official statistics office. And when it comes to the country’s richest and poorest towns, Pozuelo de Alarcón, on the outskirts of Madrid, wins the wealth title while Nijar in Almería languishes at the other end of the spectrum.


According to the research, both the Spanish capital and Barcelona attract and drive a large proportion of the country’s economic activity, with the Basque region as the third point of prosperity. Based on data from 2016, the 86,000 residents of Pozuelo de Alarcón earn an average per capita income of €25,957 a year. The runner-up is Sant Cugat del Vallés, a town of 90,000 located northwest of Barcelona, and placing third is Getxo, which lies 12 kilometers from Bilbao.
While 10 of the richest neighborhoods in Spain are in the Madrid region, most can be found along an axis running northwest from the city. The study by Urban Audit – a European Union project that the INE partnered with to map out the country’s income inequality by studying 405 municipalities with over 20,000 inhabitants – also provides information about other indicators such as life expectancy, education, foreign population and employment rates.
he study additionally analyzes some of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the main cities. The research here found that the country’s most affluent areas were concentrated in Madrid: El Viso with an average income of €42,819, Recoletos with €40,681, Castellana with €35,816 and Piovera with €35,680.

It is, however, a very different story in the south and southeast of the country, where Seville’s Polígono Sur has an average income of €4,897 – the lowest in the country – and Los Pajaritos, also in Seville, has an average income of €5,389. Seven of the 10 most impoverished neighborhoods are in Andalusia, although San Cristóbal, a small Madrid neighborhood of 18,000 residents, is also on the list.
Of the 10 cities with the lowest average income, nine are in Andalusia, namely Níjar (Almería), Los Palacios and Villafranca (Seville), Alhaurín el Grande (Málaga), Vícar (Almería), Isla Cristina (Huelva), Barbate (Cádiz), Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz), Arcos de la Frontera (Cádiz) and Adra (Almería). Together with Mazarrón in Murcia, they make up the poorest municipalities in Spain with an average annual income per capita of less than €7,100, based on 2016 tax returns.

The list of the richest and poorest towns has not changed much in recent years. Pozuelo, Las Rozas, Boadilla and Majadahonda are all rivals for the title of wealthiest municipality, and are constantly knocking each other off the pedestal. Towns with the lowest average income include Alhaurín el Grande, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, La Línea de la Concepción and Barbate.

One of the socioeconomic indicators is unemployment and, according to the INE, the municipalities with the lowest jobless rates in 2018 were Sant Cugat del Vallès (6.2%), Pozuelo de Alarcón (6.4%), Las Rozas and San Sebastián (both with 7.2%). Another 10 cities had rates below 10%. On the other hand, those with the highest rates of unemployment were Linares (32.8%), La Línea de la Concepción (29.9%) and Sanlúcar de Barrameda (29.0%).

Pozuelo and Majadahonda have the highest life expectancy with Pozuelo’s inhabitants living to an average age of 85.9 and Majadahonda’s to an average age of of 85.3. Alcorcón comes in third with an average life expectancy of 84.9. Conversely, La Línea de la Concepción was the only one of the 126 cities in the study whose life expectancy rate was below 80.

In 2016, the average number of offspring per woman in Spain was 1.34. The cities with the highest number of children per woman were the North African exclave cities Melilla (2.349) and Ceuta (1.81), followed by Lorca in Murcia (1.68.) Those with the lowest were San Cristóbal de la Laguna with 0.97, Gijón with 0.99 and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Torrelavega, both with 1.01.

English version by Heather Galloway.
 
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    I am a  bit of an anomaly, a British  migrant, an expat if you like,   living in Spain, who sees life from a left point of view. 

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