Regional parliament legislators in Catalonia have voted back into office a president who has promised to stage a hugely controversial referendum on independence from Spain. Artur Mas, head of the Convergence and Union group, was re-elected president Friday in a 71-63 vote.
Mas called early elections in November having proposed the referendum after Spain rejected demands to grant the region special fiscal powers. But his party did worse than expected in the election and was left needing a provisional partnership agreement with Catalonias pro-independence Republican Left.
Spains national government says any referendum proposing a change in the regions status within Spain would be illegal and unconstitutional.
Polls show Catalan residents are evenly divided over independence, but a majority opposes it if it means exiting the European Union.
Europe was mostly united under Rome. Then it fell apart and spent the next fifteen hundred years, more or less, coming kinda sorta back together. Now it's going the way of Rome. Again.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
