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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.

On re reading “Flat Earth News” after a gap of ten years

21/3/2019

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Flat Earth News
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I first read this book when it came out in 2008. 
In March 2019 I am reeling from the power of propaganda. 
I see people I know and respect accepting the propaganda that the British government, the most incompetent in my memory, puts out. They are keeping people diverted by the catastrophe that is Brexit, a catastrophe totally of the making of their own making, to divert British people from the shame that is the poverty and deprivation suffered by so many people in Britain.  So much so that the UN has complied a report on poverty in Britain. It details the number of children living in poverty. In Britain, one of the richest countries in the world, in 2019. 
And also In March 2019, in Spain,  I see people I know and respect accepting the idea that the Catalans are the enemy and that the government of Mariano Rajoy, one of the most corrupt in living memory, was correct to ban a referendum about independence and to encourage violence from the police drafted into Cataluña from other parts of Spain to prevent voting.  
And that while members of the political class walk free despite the evidence of their corruption, Catalna politicians were imprisoned for over a year without trial.
In Spain they have been accused of treason and sedition, crimes that do not exist on the statute books of many counties. For organising a referendum. And the Spanish press goes along. 
Ten years later I can see how the changes in media ownership and practice that Nick Evans described so vividly have worked to the disadvantage of independent journalism. 
Nevertheless, I am shocked at how much from the past I have forgotten and I how much bad stuff I take for granted now.
Do I remember that the press conspired with the government of the time to hide the full impact of the defection of Kim Philby?  I did not. But the defections of Burgess, Maclean and then Philby were before my time.
Do I remember the way the press covered up the conspiracy to persuade the public in so many countries that there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq? Yes I do but not quite how eagerly the press agreed to be muzzled by Alistair Campbell, the master of spin to divert the press from government misdeeds.   Or how much evidence there was that lies were being told
"Media outlets pick easy stories with safe facts and safe ideas, clustering around official sources for protection, reducing everything they touch to simplicity without understanding, recycling consensus facts and ideas regardless of their validity because that is what the punters expect, joining any passing moral panic, obsessively covering the same stories as their competitors. Arbitrary, unreliable and conservative . . . this flow of falsehood and distortion through the news factory is clearly being manipulated, by the overt world of PR and the covert world of intelligence and strategic communications . . . the boundaries of acceptability have slowly slipped backward . . . what was scandalous is now merely normal. Somewhere out there, the truth is dying." (pp. 255-256)
What shocked me utterly, particularly after the attack on the mosques in Christchurch and the murder of so many people, was the analysis of the Daily Mail in Flat Earth News. 
Warranting a chapter to itself, his analysis of Daily mail stories explains so much about the racism that became overt during and after the referendum to leave the European Union. The hatred and prejudice against refugees and immigrants generally, and particularly against people with dark skins who can be conveniently grouped together as Muslims, whether they are or are not, did not just  happen during the disgusting referendum campaign, it has been around for  more than ten years. In fact it has always been so. Only the victims of their campaigns of hatred change. During the 1930s, their target was Jewish people in European countries where fascists had taken control.  How many lives might have been spared if British people had not read that their country was in danger of being swamped? By Jewish people.
 Sigmund Freud was saved because he was sponsored to come to live in London. His sisters died in Nazi concentration camps. 
I cannot help thinking that the dire warning of the dangers of false news circulating on the internet come at a very convenient time for the Mainstream Media. The ability to use different news sources and to verify information is one of the biggest changes in my lifetime. Living in a small town in Spain, with a very limited public library, I have the means to access information that was only available to academics ten years or so ago. 
Investigative journalists are no longer silenced because none of the conventional papers will publish their stories.  Friends in other countries can send links to coverage that it wold be impossible for access otherwise. I find it so refreshing to see the world through other eyes, in different languages. 
But it is clear to me that this freedom is under threat. How much more difficult now for countries to launch illegal wars and invasions when there are reports from the countries in question telling a completely different story.
But so many people my age fear this freedom to find out for themselves, and prefer to have their story written for them.
And so we must continue to analyse the information being put out through conventional media, and challenge lies and misinformation and lack of information each time we encounter it.  They are still extremely influential, as the referendum campaign in Britain demonstrated. 
And there are still investigative journalists like Nick Davies and academic media departments like those at LSE, Cardiff and UAE, among others. We must support them.
I thoroughly recommend reading this book to get motivated. 
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2799233-flat-earth-news

Nina Davies 
21 March 2019

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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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