The municipality of Cantoria was left without telephone and internet for two days after a digger working on the new motorway cut through the fibre optic cable which connects the town. The construction company carrying out the work has been criticised for not contacting the council or offering any explanation for what happened. The lack of telephone line meant that the town council, the town's banks and a large number of the town's businesses were unable to carry out their usual functions due to their dependence on internet.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Marijuana not tomatoes
The owner of one the greenhouses which make up the sea of plastic you see from the motorway past Almeria has been arrested for his cultivation of marijuana on an industrial scale. The man, identified only by his initials J.E.V.A., Spanish, aged 40, was arrested in connection with the discovery of a plantation in the Santa Maria del Aguila area of El Ejido. The Guardia Civil say they found growing in a greenhouse 500 cannabis Sativa plants which had a total weight of approximately 3,000 kilos. There were also two greenhouses used for drying the plants and preparing them for sale. A luxury car was seized at the time of the man's arrest and the Guardia Civil are continuing investigations looking for the accomplices who must have been involved in an operation of this scale. Spanish law does not consider the possession of small quantities of marijuana for personal use a crime, although it is illegal to consume or be in possession of any quantity in any public place. Cultivation of marijuana for its sale or distribution is considered a serious offence punishable with several years' imprisonment.
Hertz open office in Almeria
One of the biggest car rental companies in the world, Hertz, has opened a car rental office in Almeria airport. The general, commercial and operations director of Hertz España, Jaime Soriano, told the press that the one of the company's obligations was to provide service any place it was demanded and that the Almeria airport was growing and currently receives more than a million passengers a year, a sufficiently positive indicator for the company to decide to provide its services there.
Hertz was founded in 1918 and was until fairly recently a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, it has over 5,100 rental locations all over the world and this year its second quarter worldwide revenues were 2.3 billion dollars, up 4.6% year-over-year.
Electric company checking for fraud
The electricity generation and distribution company Sevillana-Endesa is currently carrying out a campaign of fraud detection in the coastal towns of Almeria. The campaign involves the company's Unidad de Control de Perdidas No Tecnicas (non-technical loss control unit) or CPNT which localises metering anomalies and frauds and, once detected, normalises the power supply and negotiates with the customers the conditions of payment for the electricity not billed. The CPNT always works more during the summer because of the number of holiday homes on the coast.
The fraud detection plan last summer dealt with 426 cases of fraud, with a deviation of 5.9 million kilowatt hours worth 571,699 euros. In the whole of 2007 they dealt with 847 cases, with 9.4 million unbilled kilowatt hours worth 1.1 million euros.
Garrucha to ‘semi’ pedestrianise main street
The Garrucha town council approved in a recent meeting how they are going to spend the 530,000 euros they have been given as part of the Provincial Plan of the Almeria government. The money is to be used to turn the Calle Mayor in the town into a pedestrian area or at least semi–pedestrian, plans are under way for its semipeatonalización. This means widening the pavements along the street, placing benches and planting trees and improving the traffic which regularly grinds to a standstill in the town.
The contract for the works will be tendered out by the provincial government as they are footing the bill as part of their twelve million euro Provincial Plan. Once a company has been contracted the works will take six months to complete.
Beware – stressed out teenagers
If a teenager living near you has been appearing more nervous than usual or has bigger than usual bags under the eyes and other signs of exhaustion it might not be as a result of their social life but of their cramming. For three days this week 777 young people who have been attending 50 different schools and colleges around the province have been taking the selection exams for the University of Almeria admissions for this academic year, their last opportunity to gain a university place for themselves this year. They are taking the pruebas de selectividad in five centres around the province; one in the university itself (where 392 students are sitting the exams) and the others in Aguadulce (104 students), El Ejido (146 students), Huercal-Overa (95 students) and Albox (40 students).
The university entrance examinations are taken simultaneously in all of Andalucia and consist of two parts, the first a general paper on three subjects studied by all baccalaureate students: a commentary on a philosophical or historical text, an analysis of a text in Spanish, and an analysis of a text in a foreign language. The other part is specific to the type of baccalaureate course the student has been studying, e.g. science and technology or humanities.
The majority of students take these exams in June at the end of the academic year. This June 2,037 students took the selectividad exam in Almeria of whom 93 per cent passed.
Mojacar ex-mayor loses slander case
Carlos Cervantes Zamora, ex socialist mayor of Mojacar, lost the case brought against him in 2004 for slandering the environmental group Salvemos Mojacar. The legal proceedings were started by the group after Carlos Cervantes referred to members of the association as manipulators and shameless and 'canalla', which could be roughly translated as riff-raff, in press meetings and interviews with the local media. The comments were widely published in a provincial Spanish language newspaper at a time when the ecologists had just founded the group and the negative image diffused by the media could have seriously prejudiced the association.
This is the second time the ex-mayor has been condemned for the same case. The first hearing was held in 2006 and Carlos Cervantes was condemned in his absence as he did not attend the trail. The sentence was later ruled invalid due to the accused not having been informed of the hearing date correctly. The case was next heard in June 2007 but the hearing was annulled due to the judge being the same as in the first trial. The trial was heard a third time in the provincial court in Almeria in February this year, again the accused did not attend but his lawyer did, and no denial was made of the accusations, the lawyer instead tried to argue their justification without success.
Salvemos Mojacar asked for 30,000 euros damages and that Carlos Cervantes be fined 8,000 euros. In the judge's sentence the environmental group were awarded 2,000 euros damages and the defendant was ordered to pay a fine of 1,000 euros and condemned to costs. Salvemos Mojacar has stated that it will use the money awarded to it towards the costs of the court cases they are currently fighting against Playa Macenas in Mojacar, Mundo Aguilon in Pulpi and the PORN(Plan de Ordenacion de Recursos Naturales – natural resource plan) in the Cabo de Gata natural park.
Lubrin Gastronomic fair
The residents of Lubrin are currently organising their Feria de Alimentacion Rural or rural food fair which has taken place a since the year 2000 as part of the celebrations for the day of the Virgen del Rosario, one of the town's patron saints, celebrated on October 7th. This year they are also organising an Artisans' market to coincide with the celebrations and which will take place on the weekend of October 11th and 12th.
There will be various stalls, a bar with wine tastings and tapas of local products like lamb and kid, local cheese and vegetables. The market will be held by the church and spaces are being made available for stallholders to camp overnight or leave their vans.
For more information either for stallholders or visitors you can contact Mary Richards at the Oficina de Turismo Municipal Lubrín, telephone Tuesday – Saturday 10.30-13.30 and at other times on the mobile number 607 702 622 and by Email at turismolubrin@hotmail.com.
The Municipal Tourist Office can also arrange visits to Lubrín with a meal, tapas route or a taste of our local products, for groups and individuals.
Brits meet with Almeria planning chief
Brits meet with Almeria planning chief
Members of the Abusos Urbanísticos Almanzora No (AUAN) committee, accompanied by their legal and planning representatives met with Luis Caparros, the Almeria housing and territorial planning delegate and Jose Ortiz Mallol, Director General de Inspección de Ordenacion del Territorio y Urbanismo, the head of the Junta de Andalucia organisation which was set up to control and prosecute planning irregularities.
In a statement after the meeting Luis Caparros said that the Junta de Andalucia and the town councils of Zurgena, Albox, Cantoria, Arboleas, Partaloa, Albanchez and Lubrin were to collaborate in drawing up plans for local inspections which would detect properties outside planning regulations and that individual files would be drawn up specifying the exact legal situation of each of the properties. He went on to add that the Junta had an obligation to collaborate with the justice system and that it would comply with any court decisions regarding the affected properties. The regional delegate said that the general plan for inspection of housing, town and territorial planning was awaiting its approval in December and that the provincial government had promised its total and permanent collaboration on the plan. He warned that those irregular properties that had problems, that is those without basic services or outside consolidated urban nuclei, would have no solution.
In a statement issued by the AUAN, a local organisation which is campaigning to bring about the proper legalisation of the estimated 5,000 cases of land and houses in the Almanzora Valley currently considered to be "illegal", said that the meeting was both constructive and cordial but no detailed information on the mechanics of a solution appears to be available at this time despite the representatives of the Junta re-iterating their determination to provide a solution to the complex situation of illegal houses within the law and with respect to the rights of the homeowner, regardless of their nationality.
Property sales down 40 per cent from last year
Figures have just been released for property sales in the province of Almeria for the first half of the year and they show a dramatic decrease compared to the same period last year. The figures for new homes in urban areas, second hand homes in urban areas, building plots and properties with land in rural areas all show a decline: The sale of fincas rusticas, properties in rural areas, is the market sector which has slowed the least with 3,903 sold in Almeria in the first semester compared to 4,320 last year, a decrease of 9.7 per cent. The sale of 'solares' or building plots seems to show a certain optimism for the future with 1,554 sold in the first six months of 2007 compared with 1,395 this year, a reduction of 10 per cent, a sign that property developers are continuing to invest in possible long term prospects. The number of new homes sold from January to June this year totalled 5,382, the same period last year registering 6,322 sales, 15 per cent less this year. As for the sale of second hand homes there has been a drop of 45.5 percent from last year's first half sales; 3,119 in 2008 and 6,859 in 2007. The total number of homes in urban and rural areas, business premises, and plots sold up to the end of June this year was 23,755, the total for the first six months of last year was 39 ,558, a 40 per cent drop this year. We have no figures on the number of estate agents which have closed.
President announces rescue package for housing
The socialist president of Spain, Jose Luis Zapatero, has announced a package to help the housing industry survive the crisis presently affecting it. In a move which is aimed at helping the property constructors and promoters rather than individual homeowners or buyers the president unveiled two important projects. One was the approval of real estate investment companies, quoted on the stock market, which will enjoy special tax breaks and will hopefully provide an impulse for the rental market and encourage investment in the property sector. The second was the provision of a new line of state loans to construction companies which will allow them to use borrowed money for purposes other than construction on the provision that unsold homes those companies possess are made available on the rental market for a specified period.
The move comes at a time when the European Union is predicting zero growth in Spain for the last months of the year although Zapatero himself was more optimistic with government forecasts slightly higher than the EU figures. The credit line which will be made available will start at three billion euros although this could be increased in the future. It will be administered by the Instituto de Credito Oficial, which is part of the ministry for the economy and works to help Spanish companies become more competitive. The president said that the measures should work towards providing liquidity for companies which have accumulated large stocks of property. Unemployment in Spain has recently risen to more than 2.5 million, more than ten per cent of the workforce and inflation stands at around five per cent.
Police find bale of hashish on beach
The local police in Berja had a surprise whilst on a routine patrol by the Balanegra beach in the municipality of Berja. There on the shore they spotted a bale which had been washed up by the tide, they recovered it and on later inspection at the police station they discovered it was a bale of hashish weighing about fifty kilos. The investigation remains open while police try to discover where the drugs came from.
Reports of the end of the world have been greatly exaggerated
The European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN (Centre Europeen de Recherche Nucleaire) successfully steered a stream of protons finer than a human hair around a 27 kilometre circuit that has cost 630 thousand million euros and has taken nine years to construct. They were able to accelerate the particles close to the speed of light within a total vacuum at a temperature of minus 271.3ºC – colder than outer space. Founded in 1954, the CERN Laboratory sits astride the Franco–Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 20 Member States.
The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC is a particle accelerator which has been installed in a tunnel 27 km in circumference which housed a previous machine, the Large Electron Positron collider, LEP. By studying collisions at higher energies than ever before, physicists working with the LHC will make further progress in understanding the mysteries of how our Universe is made and how it came to be. A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel electrically charged particles to high speeds and magnetic fields to contain them. There's a good chance that you have spent a good portion of your life staring at a particle accelerator (perhaps making some progress in understanding the mysteries of our universe) as the good old fashioned cathode ray tube you have in your TV – if you haven't moved on to plasma - has one behind the screen.
The aim of the six experiments to be conducted with the LHC are varied; two will be actively searching for signs of the Higgs boson, a key undiscovered particle that is essential for the Standard Model of particle physics to work. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the existence of a particle, known as the Higgs boson, which gives mass to other particles. Currently, the mechanism by which particles acquire different masses is unknown, and finding evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson would solve this fundamental mystery of nature. The experiment which has led to predictions of the end of the world is the ALICE experiment, in which the LHC will collide lead ions to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang under laboratory conditions - a nanosecond of intense heat and pressure that will convert energy into matter and 'create' new particles. The worry of some is the possibility that a tiny black hole could be created which could then expand to swallow the earth. The scientists at CERN argue that nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already. Actual collisions of particles in the LHC are a treat we may have to wait a year for.
The World Wide Web was invented at CERN by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to help particle physicists around the world to communicate. No one at the time could predict the enormous impact it would have on our concepts of information, knowledge and spam mail. Now, to deal with the enormous amount of data that will be generated by the LHC, CERN is leading work to create a "computing Grid" that will harness vast amounts of computer power through networks across the world transforming the internet into a giant global supercomputer. At the moment the grid is relatively small; the processing power of roughly 100,000 home computers, distributed around the world and connected by a fibre optic 15 Gb per second internet connection. This is about 15,000 times faster than a standard home connection and you could download two high definition feature lengths films every second – but it's still not enough to transfer all of the data that will become available.
There is no doubt that the LHC will be in the news on a regular basis in the future and we can only hope it will inspire a new generation of physicists and other scientists. We can only begin to imagine what may be discovered. The LHC was built to help scientists to answer key unresolved questions in particle physics. The unprecedented energy it achieves may even reveal some unexpected results that no one has ever thought of!
Many happy returns for Google
You know your company's done well for itself when its name gets a dictionary entry, to 'google' something is now accepted English and it was first heard just ten years ago. In September 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc. with four computers and a working capital of 100,000 dollars. Now both of them are worth billions - the world's richest people under forty - and the company made a net profit of almost 900 million euros in the second quarter of this year (the first quarter was even more profitable – even Google is feeling the pinch). From the humble garage beginnings which are almost obligatory for hi-tech companies to nineteen thousand employees in offices all over the world and a dominance of computer searches and advertising that even has Microsoft worried.
It's not all been plain sailing with criticism aimed at the company for its retention of what could be sensitive information about the 650 million people who make use of its search engine (Google have just announced that from now on they will only keep search histories for nine months), concerns about the company monopolising internet searches thus controlling the flow of internet traffic and advertising and the scandal of the 'Great Firewall of China' when Google bowed to allow Chinese government censorship of its searches – at the time a search for Tiananmen in Google would not bring up references to the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Now you can walk the streets of the U.S.A., Australia, Japan or France with Google's Street View, look for your swimming pool with Google Earth, see supernovae and galaxies forming with Google Space, watch videos of just about anything you can imagine and a lot more you could never imagine on Youtube. You can now even browse the internet with Google's new web browser 'Chrome', a minimal design that remembers where you go and what you search for (if you want it to) to make browsing an intuitive experience although I always find it disconcerting when my computer seems to know what I'm thinking about.
And the future? Google on a phone, or any other mobile device that can connect to the internet, near you soon, and on your internet connected TV, fridge, dishwasher… With Apple's 3G I-Phone, with built in GPS and an accelerometer, and Google Street View the view turns as you do, detecting your movements and moving the scene on the phone screen to correspond, highlighting shops or whatever you might be looking for. Or you could just look up and see it for real.
Andalucia to introduce ‘dignified death’ law
In what will be a pioneering law in Spain the Junta de Andalucia have started the project which will become the law for a dignified death. It will give patients the right, within the limits of national law, to end their lives by deciding not to receive treatment. The law will also oblige all medical institutions, public and private and including those run by religious orders, to respect the wishes of their patients. Doctors and other health professionals must respect their patients' decisions, without imposing their own opinions, be they religious, personal, moral or professional.
In a survey of opinion on health care in Andalucia last year 93 per cent of those surveyed agreed that everyone has a right to die with dignity. The law will guarantee that patients receive all the clinical information on their case whenever they want it with a comprehensible prognosis and diagnosis to help make their decision. Palliative care will be available in terminal patients' homes whenever possible if the patient wishes. These patients are also guaranteed an individual room in hospital and can be accompanied by their family at all times if they want.
The Andalucian law will not cover euthanasia as it does not come within the region's legal competence however the Spanish government has announced it is planning legislation allowing 'assisted suicide' which should become law sometime next year.
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