Spain's right-wing opposition and other conservative groups marched through Madrid on Saturday evening to protest at the Socialist government's plans for peace talks with armed Basque separatist group ETA.
The march, organized by the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) and backed by the right-wing Popular Party (PP), brought together people opposed to plans by Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to start peace talks with ETA, following the latter's declaration of a permanent ceasefire.
The PP claimed 1.1 million people turned out for the march under the banner of "Negotiations, not in my name," but police put the number at 200,000.
PHOTO: AP
They gathered in Madrid's Plaza de Colon (Columbus Square) at 6pm brandishing placards saying "Zapatero, traitor" and "War on ETA."
The "interlocutors that the government considers valid are assassins that have killed nearly a thousand people," said AVT president Francisco Jose Alcaraz, whose brother and two nieces were killed in an ETA attack in 1987.
ETA is blamed for causing more than 800 deaths during a four-decade campaign for an independent Basque homeland -- comprising parts of northern Spain and southwestern France. But the group has not been held responsible for any deaths since May 2003.
On March 22 this year, ETA declared a permanent ceasefire, opening the way to direct dialogue with the government and to negotiations between the political parties in Spain's northern Basque region.
PP leader Mariano Rajoy said he hoped the government "takes good note of presence of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who say that in no case can we negotiate or pay a political price to a terrorist organization."
But Zapatero said earlier on Saturday that he was convinced he had the support of most Spaniards in opening talks.
"The great majority of Spaniards know what it means to submit to the pain and horrors we have experienced and at what point it is worth making peace," he said.
The PP was ousted by the Socialists in March 2004 after PP leaders blamed ETA for the devastating Madrid bombings of four days earlier, despite increasing evidence that they were the work of Islamic extremists.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS