As the Spanish economy struggles under the weight of its debt, Spanish public television directors have urged its representative at the Eurovision Song Contest, Pastora Soler, not to win because Spain cannot afford to stage next year’s contest. Under the rules of the contest, the public broadcaster of the country that wins the contest will have to host the competition the following year.
Spain’s education system came to a grinding halt on Tuesday after teachers and students across the entire education sector – from kindergarten to university – went on strike to protest the 3 billion euros ($4 billion) in education spending cuts that were approved by the government last week.
The protest was the first ever strike that had been jointly coordinated by Spain’s five main teachers’ unions; and saw all but three of Spain’s 17 regions participating in the stoppage.
The Spanish government will use billions of euros in public money to bailout the country’s fourth largest bank Bankia if it deems it necessary, said Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on Monday, who had previously insisted that no additional state money would be used to clean up the country’s banking sector.
Speaking in a radio interview with Onda Cero radio, Rajoy confirmed the Spanish government was preparing an intervention for Bankia, though he would not say exactly how much funds would be needed.
Spain’s banking system is in a fragile state. Already, bad property loans are threatening to bring the system down like a house of cards, while international pressure means that the government has little manoeuvrability to support the system if further disruptions occur. Needless to say, the Spanish government is desperate to have the banking sector solve its own problems without a bailout from either the state or the EU. But will this be possible?
Spain’s unemployment rate may have climbed to 24.4 percent for the first quarter of the year last week, but at least one organisation is taking this opportunity to offer a lifetime job for any interested party.
In the last year, the Roman Catholic Church in Spain has attempted to go on a nationwide recruitment drive for new priests, after enrolment in seminaries had fallen by over 25 percent in the last decade.
Spanish universities could raise their tuition fees by as much as 50 percent this year, claimed a report by El Mundo on Thursday, after the nation’s education minister Jose Ignacio Wert raised the proposal during a meeting with university representatives.
With the aim of saving 27 billion euros ($36 billion) in 2012, the Spanish government has announced almost 17 percent in budget cuts, a budget that the government says is the ‘most austere’ since the country became a democracy in 1977.
Despite violent demonstrations and protests that took place in major cities across Spain, the Spanish government insisted that the cuts were vital to avoid financial ruin.
High-end escorts in the Spanish capital of Madrid are refusing to have sex with employees in the banking industry, said a report by the International Business Times on Wednesday, unless their banks opened up credit lines for cash-strapped families and firms.
Local authorities from the tiny village of Rasquera, in the northeast region of Spain, have voted to lease out a small plot of their land to a local cannabis advocacy group that would grow, harvest and package marijuana in the village – creating 40 jobs in the process.
The town hall councillors of Rasquera, which has a population of 900 people, approved the plan on Wednesday night in a 4-3 vote, which would hopefully allow the village to pay off their 1.3 million euro ($1.72 million) debt in two years.
Telefónica, the Spanish telecommunications company, has won full control of Vivo, the mobile phone venture it had with Portugal Telecom in Brazil,
after raising its bid for a third time, to 7.5 billion euros, thereby overcoming opposition from the Portuguese government.
The deal, worth about $9.8 billion, was announced Wednesday by the Spanish stock market regulator.
The agreement is expected to end a lengthy tussle between two European telecommunications operators
