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News, June 2005More NewsA few more news items and where to find more news about Spain: Water reserves:In a year of drought, water reserves are important. At 14th June the reservoirs were at 57.1% of capacity, with rivers at 41% of last year's flow. In the south the situation is especially critical. The Tajo river (Tagus) has a flow of just 6 cubic metres as against 116 at Valdecañas, close to the Almaraz nuclear power station in Extremadura. The Tajo basin has some big hydro-electric schemes, which have mostly had to be turned off due to lack of flow, available reserves being fed to towns and agriculture. The Segura basin, covering the Manga Menor tourist area and heavy industry of Cartagena is most worrying, with under 15% of capacity. Pools could be closed this summer, but the sea is likely to be unaffected! At just below 30%, the Valencia area (Costa Blanca) is also facing a difficult year, while the Costa del Sol and Costa Brava/ Barcelona have about 40% of reserves. At this time of year reserves are traditionally at their highest, after the spring rains. Personal Debt25 Nov '04. 43% of homes have some debt and the average among them is 22,000 Euros, mostly mortgages. Those least likely to be in debt are precisely the (otherwise) worst off! Low income families and pensioners are most able to survive, apparently, without incurring debt. Only just over 20% of home owners have an outstanding mortgage. 80% of the families surveyed owned their home. Of great alarm is the 8.5% of families who owe three times - or more- their income. Bank of Spain figures based on a survey almost 2 years old of some 5,000 homes. Christmas 2005 will see terrestrial digital TV in Spain with 20 channelsNew Year '05. The service, which will give similar service and interactivity to digital satellite TV, will gradually grow from then and the analogue services will end in 2010. This means everyone will need to replace their sets -or get new digiboxes- within the next five years. The price of the decoder is about 60 Euros at present. It is estimated that currently there are 50 million sets in 12 million homes across Spain. 4 million Spaniards have Broadband accessJune 2005. The number of Spaniards with broadband access is growing rapidly. of the 4,034,317, over 3 million are ADSL users, the remainder being cable. Well 70% of all users (in fact 2,8 million) are linked directly or indirectly to Telefonica's ADSL service; (most other operators are actually resellers of this service!). Madrid and Barcelona have over 50% of users, while another 30% are in other cities. 9 provinces have less than 10,000 connexions. The urban/rural divergence is clearly growing and those who have access at all tend more than ever to be moving quickly to broadband. Only 15% of the territory is covered by ADSL, leaving 4 million phone customers unable to use broadband. 35% of the population is likewise unable to use cable. Data from the Internet Users' Association. According to earlier official surveys by the National Statistics Institute in December 2002 the number of people with access to the Internet was only 17.4%, but a year later had grown to 24%. By the end of July '03, the number of ADSL lines was 1,343,823 with Madrid and Barcelona way ahead, emphasising the gap between town and country in technological advance. (El Mundo, TVE) Spain produces 200,000 tonnes of 'techno-rubbish' (old TVs, mobiles, computers, CDs, etc.) every year, of which much remains at home in garages and attics. No laws yet help us to know what to do with it all. A campaign run by the government between September 2004 and spring 2006 aims to improve rural internet access possibilites. In September 2004 still only 25% of homes have access to internet. During 2004 25% of computer sales were laptops, demonstrating the growth in demand for portable computing solutions and in particular for computers equipped with Wifi and other unwired options. Catalonia and Andalusia are experimenting with WiMax, the 35 megabit wifi solution available over a 50km distance. According to a survey for Durex, in 2003, 25% of Spaniards used the Internet for sex (Protestante Digital info.). This is a bit hard to believe, taking into account the percentage of Spaniards with access at that time (cf paragraph above). www.elmundo.es has over 6 million unique monthly visitorsEl Mundo, as well as a very popular printed paper, is Spain's most widely read electronic news service and first crossed the 6 million mark in January 2005, . The number increased rapidly over 2004,with events like 3/11 and the Royal Wedding, reaching 6,289,783 in January.Since then growth has stagnated. Other papers lag, with dailies specialising in sport having most success: www.marca.com has reached 3 million and www.as.com is now above a million, with the second general daily www.abc.es also just above the million. 'Circulation' stats are the speciality of www.ojd.es which can be read in English. From all the surveys of electronic media, it is clear that they are by far the most read among office workers. More info at http://ojdinteractiva.ojd.es/listadomedios.htm April 2005: The printed version of El Mundo has not suffered from its electronic daughter. In March it hit 1.387.000 copies sold daily, an increase of 5.6%, strengthening its posistion as Spain's nº2 daily newspaper. Nevertheless, this is still way behind El País, which sells over two million copies. The digital version of El País is, sadly, only available beyond the 'cover' by subscription. Yet neither of these papers sells as many as Marca, the sports daily, with over 2.5 million copies. Old News archivePast news is not all forgotten by P4S! Such items as can be found on the news pages at the end of every month are being filed in our archive. Your response and concerns are also of interest to us. Don't hesitate to let us know them: http://www.prayforspain.com/home/index13.html Law Online23 January '04 The official gazette of Spanish law has just opened an online service of all Spanish law since 1968, including regional and EU legislation (all in Spanish/ regional languages): http://www.boe.es/g/es/iberlex/ Finally, more news from the churches is always available at the Protestante Digital and Protestantes sites:
This week on Protestante Digital: (most recent update 24th June)Jericho Plan for Madrid in run-up to Palau mission |