Presentations and Investigstion

Presentations will begin on Tuesday afternoon. The criteria for which you will be graded on are the following: Content, Coherence & Organization, and Speaking skills. As you know, the final due date for the investigation is on Thursday, December 4th. See you on Tuesday.

Class canceled on Tuesday November 25th

I must cancel class on Tuesday because I am taking my politics and terrorism class to the Mosque in Alicante. We are going there to talk with their cultural representative and have some drinks and snacks. If anyone is interested in going, we are meeting at 3:30pm at the Havana cafe on the Rambla. Please let me know if you are coming by posting a comment so I can arrange with them.

The presentations are scheduled for next week starting on December 2, 2008. Please be ready on that day to present your investigations.

A new 21st century paradigm

The more you ponder on the financial crisis, that was precipitated by the "sub-prime" loans and exposed all sorts of high risk investments, the more you question the rational behind it all. As huge bailout packages are being presented by governments worldwide, the essential lesson that we learn is a very interesting one.

When the economy is booming all the benefits remain private, but when there is a crash the errors are collective and the loses are socialized. Please shed some light on this and debate this new private-public paradigm.

ETA Bombs Spanish University

International Herald Tribune

October 30, 2008

MADRID: A car bomb injured 17 people Thursday at a university in the northern Spanish city of Pamplona after police searched the wrong campus for explosives following a telephone call purportedly from the Basque separatist group ETA warning of an imminent attack, Spanish authorities said.

The government blamed ETA for the incident.

The bomb exploded in a parking lot at the University of Navarra at 11 a.m., according to the Interior Ministry in Madrid. Few students were in the area where the bomb exploded because of rain.

"We could have had an enormous tragedy at the University of Navarra," Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba told a news conference in Madrid. "The bomb simply went off when nobody was around."

Police received a warning call in the name of ETA an hour before the explosion, Rubalcaba said, but the caller did not specify which university would be attacked.

Police first searched the campus in nearby Vitoria, which meant that officials were not able to evacuate the Pamplona university in time — the usual police procedure following ETAwarning calls. The Pamplona campus was evacuated following the explosion.

The bomb may have contained up to 220 pounds of explosives, according to Spanish press reports. Most of the injuries were caused by flying glass.

The attack was the sixth since 1979 on the university, which is located in the northern region of Navarra, one of several Basque-speaking provinces which ETA would like to turn into an independent state.

Authorities speculate that the attack was a response to the recent arrest of three suspected ETA leaders in Pamplona and another in Valencia.

ETA ended its most recent truce in December 2006 when talks with the Spanish government broke down.

ETA has killed more than 800 people in its nearly four-decade fight for an independent Basque state in parts of southern France and northern Spain. In recent years it has been severely weakened by recruitment problems and hundreds of arrests in both Spain and France.