Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Quick news roundup: Interior minister Perez Rubalcaba said that the ETA terrorists caught near the Franco-Spanish frontier with a car and 165 kilos of explosives were planning an attack "with victims" for today or tomorrow, supposedly to coincide with the State of the Nation parliamentary debate. They were going to set off the bomb by hand with detonating cord in order to foil frequency inhibitors.

The Yemeni police have arrested eleven suspects in the bombing that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemeni citizens. Yemen is also saying that Al Qaeda wants to put pressure on the government because it is holding Qaeda members in jail, and that the specific goal of the bombing was to hurt Yemen's interests and image.

I'm surprised at how little attention the Yemen bombing has received in the international press. Seems pretty important to me. By the way, TV3 is reporting that this was the bloodiest terrorist attack in the history of Yemen, which isn't true if you count the attack on the USS Cole.

This is important: The European Commission has hit Telefonica with a €150 million fine for abusing its dominant position in the Spanish Internet market. Telefonica has been charging its competitors so much for access to the ADSL system that they can't compete on price. Brussels says Spaniards pay 20% more than other European citizens for Internet, while 20% fewer Spaniards are connected and the growth in the number of connections is 30% less. I remember reading somewhere that Internet speed in Spain is close to the slowest in Europe, far behind more technically sophisticated places. This is by far the biggest telecoms fine ever handed out by the EC, ten times more than any other.

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