Princess Letizia gives birth to a girl

The future queen of Spain gave birth to her first child in the early hours this morning. The baby is a girl and is called Leonor.

Letizia arrived at Madrid's Ruber hospital last night accompanied by Prince Felipe and a crowd of journalists started to gather at the gates. It was the second time she had attended the clinic with contractions. Just after midnight the Zarzuela Palace sent mobile phone text messages to the journalists waiting outside saying that the Princess had been admitted into the hospital in order to give birth.

An hour or so later, Prince Felipe appeared to thank the journalists for waiting in the cold rain and to announce the birth by cesarean section of their baby daughter, Leonor. He said that his wife had been conscious throughout the birth, and he had been at her side, that mother and daughter were both well, and that he and Letizia were radiant with happiness.

The fact that the royal couple's first child is a girl is bound to reopen the debate about a possible change in the Spanish constitution regarding succession rights. At it stands now, succession to the Spanish Throne is set out according to the rules of male-preference primogeniture. But this is generally accepted as being out-dated and most Spaniards would probably support a change in the constitution in favour of lineal primogeniture (inheritance by the oldest surviving child without regard to gender). The Socialist government included such a change in its electoral manifesto, although of course the whole debate about constitutional change in Spain at the moment is dominated by the Catalan issue.

Bird flu in Spain

The Spanish government announced today its first major plan aimed at trying to contain the threat of bird flu in Spain by putting new controls on bird farms surrounding some of Spain's wetlands which support both migratory and resident waterfowl all year round.

The Spanish Minister of Agriculture, Elena Espinosa, presented the plan to ministers from Spain's regional governments this morning. As a result of a new government emergency order, 18 wetland parks in Spain (including Doñana, Alicante, Valencia, the Ebro delta, and Tablas de Daimiel) will be considered areas at risk from bird flu because they are home to a periodically high concentration of migratory birds flying from Europe to Africa and vice versa. According to Spanish Agricultural Ministry figures, each of the 18 wetlands receive on average 6000 migratory birds each year.

Any open-air breeding of birds in a 10km radius around these high risk wetlands will be forbidden in a new measure to avoid any newly bred birds from coming into contact with migratory birds which could be carrying the deadly bird flu virus. According to El Pais, over 1500 open-air fowl breeding farms in Spain could be affected by the new measure.

Espinosa told reporters this morning that Spain's regional governments had until Thursday to decide whether any other wetlands should be included in the list of risk zones. Thereafter the new order will be published and put into practice immediately until the European Union decides to review the situation.

Wife of Nigerian president dies in Spanish clinic

Stella Obasanjo, wife of Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, died yesterday in a private plastic surgery clinic in Marbella, Spain, after having had surgery there last week. She was almost sixty.

According to declarations made last night by the Director of Spain's Institute of Legal Medicine, Mrs Obasanjo was recovering from an operation she had had last week in a private clinic called Molding Clinic in Puerto Banus, Marbella, when she started to feel ill. The exact nature of the surgery she received has not yet been made public and nobody from Molding Clinic seems to have made any declarations to the Spanish media.

Mrs Obasanjo was taken to Marbella Hospital in the early hours of Sunday morning, but was dead on arrival. The results of the autopsy started yesterday should be made public today.

The Spanish government delegation in Marbella informed the media that the Nigerian president's wife died at 05.50 and that the whole matter has been put in the hands of the Spanish courts. The Spanish government is said to have offered its help to the Nigerian Embassy so that Mrs Obasanjo's body can be repatriated as soon as possible.

Stella Obasanjo was considered to be the Nigerian leader's official wife and she was in Spain on a "private visit".

Spain is EU leader in terms of rise in women workers

According to an article published by El Mundo this morning, the rise in women's employment in Spain last year was the highest among European Union member states.

The number of women workers in Spain rose by 4.6 percent, significantly higher than the EU average of just 1.1 percent.

Italy and Greece rank just behind Spain with rises of 4.3 and 4.1 percent respectively, followed by Ireland (3.3 percent), Luxemburg (1.6 percent) and the UK (1.2 percent). None of the other EU member states reached the EU average of 1.1 percent.

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Latin american summit in Spain

Today the 15th Latin American Summit opens in Salamanca with the presence of government representatives from 22 countries.

All week there has been much speculation about the expected attendance of Fidel Castro, but last night the Spanish government announced that the Cuban dictator would not be attending the summit after all. He had been expected to attend, especially since the Latin american heads of state intend to issue a declaration condemning the US trade embargo on Cuba.

However Castro may have made the decision not to attend because he feared being arrested on arrival. Last week Spain's constitutional court ruled that Spanish courts have jurisdiction to investigate crimes against humanity outside Spain and bring suspected perpetrators to trial, even if no Spanish victims are involved. This means that if the Cuban leader came to Spain, anti-Castro groups could file a legal complaint against him for crimes against humanity in Spain's High Court which, in theory, could lead to his arrest. He probably felt safer at home.

The only other Iberoamerican countries not represented in the Salamanca summit are the presidents of Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala who are coordinating relief efforts in their respective countries following the severe damage caused by the hurricane Stan last month. The governments of these four central american countries will be represented by their foreign ministers. The summit will also be attended by representatives of other international organizations, such as Kofi Annan (UN), Josep Borrell (EU), José Miguel Insulza (OAS) among others.

The leaders will debate three main topics and design a document with their conclusions. The first centres around the social-economic reality of the economy in Ibero America and proposals leading up to 2010 aimed at encouraging development and prosperity in the poorest countries; the second tackles the migration problems between countries within America and between Latin America and Europe, and the third deals with the international projection of the iberoamerican community. During the summit Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is expected to announce a Spanish aid package for relief efforts in Central America and a possible joint aid package will also be discussed by leaders.

The summit concludes tomorrow evening.

Spain's government sees support slide away

For the first time since the Madrid train bombings, support for Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero and the PSOE party has fallen below that of the opposition. After what has probably been the Socialist government's most complex fortnight since it came to power 18 months ago, the results of a survey published today by El Mundo suggest that if elections were held in Spain now, the Popular Party would be voted in.

Supporters of Spain's socialist government argue that Rodriguez Zapatero has had a difficult introduction to government by any standards. Natural crises like the severe drought in Spain and severe forest fires this Summer have presented a challenge to the Environment Ministry. Problems with immigration, which have been threatening to come to a head for the past 5 years, have finally peaked, constitutional reform has become an issue for the first time in the short history of Spain's democracy, European funds which financed much of Spain's development and infrastructure during the 80s and 90s have finally dried up with the entry of needier states into the EU, and the government has had to come to terms with an opposition party which, having never come to terms with or forgiven the Socialists for the result of the 2004 elections, refuses to cooperate with government, even in key issues such as terrorism.

The Socialist government has achieved some important goals during its time in power. The amnesty granted to illegal immigrants last year was a bold attempt to reveal the extent of a growing undercover workforce vital to several sectors, notably agriculture, construction and domestic labor, but mistreated by employers. As a result of the amnesty hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom had been living and working in Spain for years and had children attending Spanish schools, received a contract and are now paying taxes and their employers are paying their national insurance payments.

Housing policies and the new state rental agency mean that many more young people and low-income families will have access to more housing options than before, and increased investment in science and tecnology promises to address at last the fact that Spain invests less in research and new technologies than most of its European partners. Even the Spanish congress has woken up to high-tech.

Relations between the Basque government and national government are at last cordial, after years of back-biting and non-cooperation. Indeed the whole style of government in Spain has changed with policies now being debated rather than dictated to Congress. The Spanish Health Minister seems to be making progress in fighting smoking in Spain, child obesity and high alcohol and drug consumption, and gay marriages in Spain are now a reality. Progress has also been made in dealing with domestic violence in Spain.

However, despite the good things, the Socialist government has failed to provide convincing arguments or policies on several very important issues, and Zapatero will need to make some changes in government if he is to regain the support he needs to follow his first term in power with a second electoral victory.

The government is not handling the issue of Catalan autonomy with the intelligence a subject as sensitive in Spain as constitutional reform requires. It is intriguing - to a non-Spaniard - how the only party with members who opposed a wide-ranging democratic constitution at the beginning of Spanish democracy (PP) now portrays itself as the only true defensor of democratic Spain and its Constitution. And how the party whose members returned from exile to push forward the transition from dictatorship to democracy is now being accused of putting the whole constitution at risk by accommodating Catalan separatist demands. In failing to find the right balance between meeting demands of Catalan separatists in Congress while also addressing the concerns of millions of non-Catalan Spaniards, Rodriguez Zapatero has put his government in a very vulnerable position.

The second big problem Zapatero faces at the moment is how to deal with the entry of Africans desperate to enter Spain and Europe and prepared to risk their lives by climbing over the boder fences dividing Ceuta and Melilla from Morocco. Despite the need to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into Europe, most people in Spain have been moved by the images published in the media and testimonies shown on television of these poor, hopeless Sub-saharians. The solutions implemented by the government have failed to convince many. No-one can feel comfortable seeing buses of crying men, handcuffed to eachother, being ferried out of the border area to no-mans land somewhere on the border of Morocco, where they are reportedly forced to get off the bus and are abandoned with no food or water. With the help of Morocco and Spain's EU partners, the government must find a more humane and long-term solution to a problem which is not going to disappear.

The Spanish President also needs to speed up the government's long-promised educational reform (in a recent survey the great majority of Spaniards didn't know what the Education Minister was called or even what she looked like), improve foreign policy (the day after the German elections last month, Rodriguez Zapatero was the only European leader to congratulate Schroeder on his "victory" and express his satisfaction at the "defeat" of the CDU candidate who, according to German media this morning, is infact going to be Germany's next president....), provide convincing alternatives to the problem of water distribution in Spain and to improve his image within Spain and abroad if he does not want to be voted out in the next election.

Time will tell......

Video of solar eclipse in Spain

Grupo Prisa have published this wonderful video of today's solar eclipse in Spain on the special section dedicated to the eclipse in their website.

The moon's path started crossing the sun at almost quarter to ten, and just over an hour later thousands of adults and children all over Spain, duly equipped with special glasses, watched transfixed as the annular eclipse reached its peak and light dropped to twilight level.

By nearly half past twelve the eclipse had passed (at about the same time as the clouds in south-eastern Spain, where the annular eclipse was going to be at its fullest, started to disperse!!).