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A jihadist group affiliated with Al Qaeda has threatened to carry out terrorist attacks in Catalonia, an autonomous region in northeastern Spain that is home to the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe. The threats were issued by a group called "Africamuslima" in response to efforts by Catalonian lawmakers to increase surveillance of radical Salafists seeking to impose Islamic Sharia law in Spain and other parts of Europe. Catalonia -- a region of 7.5 million people centered on the Mediterranean city of Barcelona -- is home to the largest Muslim population in Spain. Most of the estimated 450,000 Muslims...

Spain’s prime minister has rejected a request by the leader of Catalonia to approve a referendum that would allow the northeastern region to decide whether to secede from the rest of the country. … Polls indicate about half of Catalonia’s 7.5 million inhabitants favor independence. …

Catalonia’s bid for independence from Spain hit another obstacle after the European Commission said any breakaway territory would not be part of the EU. “If one part of a territory of a member state decides to separate, the separated part isn’t a member of the European Union,” the European Commission’s Spanish vice-president, Joaquin Almunia, said on Monday (16 September) at a conference in Barcelona, reports the Wall Street Journal. …

In a Tuesday ruling, Spanish judges found Catalonia’s planned independence referendum to be unconstitutional, but secessionists in the Spanish autonomous region (called a “community” in Spain) have vowed to proceed regardless. Although stifled under the yoke of the Franco dictatorship, Catalonia has long felt cultural and linguistic disctinction from the rest of Spain. In recent years, it developed into a powerhouse of the nation’s economy. However, amid the country’s financial crisis, Madrid has been urging national unity.

With Scotland moving ever closer, Crimea having chosen their own path, and Venice overwhelmingly voting for secession from Italy, the Spanish government has put its foot down on the Catalonia's planned independence referendum. As Time reports, In a Tuesday ruling, Spanish judges found Catalonia’s planned independence referendum to be unconstitutional. Of course, just as in Crimea, this is being ignored by the Catalan government - a region seen as the powerhouse of the Italian economy - who exclaimed "this will have no effect on the process." Via Time, ... In a Tuesday ruling, Spanish judges found Catalonia’s planned independence referendum to...

Venetians have voted overwhelmingly for their own sovereign state in a ‘referendum’ on independence from Italy. Inspired by Scotland’s separatist ambitions, 89 per cent of the residents of the lagoon city and its surrounding area, opted to break away from Italy in an unofficial ballot. The proposed ‘Repubblica Veneta’ would include the five million inhabitants of the Veneto region and could later expand to include parts of Lombardy, Trentino and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The floating city has only been part of Italy for 150 years. The 1000 year–old democratic Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia, was quashed by Napoleon and was subsumed into...

Inés del Río Prada, of the Basque separatist group Eta, was a member of a unit that killed 24 people, including 12 in a car bombing in the centre of Madrid. Her release earlier this week at the command of the European court of human rights (ECHR), prompted a wave of outrage. The Spanish courts had little choice but to let Del Río go free. She had been sentenced in 1989 to 3,828 years in total, but because of a peculiarity of Spanish law dating back to 1973, she could serve a maximum of only 30. Given time off for...

The ax is significant because it predates the documented arrival of European explorers in the region by a century or more. It likely was brought to America by Basque whalers or fishermen who traded it to some coastal-dwelling Indian for animal furs. It then must have been passed from one tribe to another until it was eventually acquired by a resident of the Mantle site. European artifacts also have been found at the late prehistoric Madisonville site in Hamilton County in southwestern Ohio. Although large by Ohio standards, it wouldn't have compared to the Mantle site. Archaeologist Penelope Drooker estimated...

Myths of British ancestry October 2006Stephen Oppenheimer Everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh,...

THE REGION TO BE INVESTIGATED FOR TAX REIMBURSEMENTS Navarra in €1.7bn tax inquiry The Spanish tax authorities are stunned, and they have every reason to be so. A discovery of a tax maneuver involving Volkswagen’s car production in the small region of Navarra in northern Spain, has disclosed that the region is indirectly funded by the central government in Madrid through tax returns that add up to 10 percent of the region’s yearly budget.

AFP - Armed Basque separatist group ETA declared Thursday "the definitive cease of its armed activity" after four decades of bombing and shooting for a homeland independent of Spain. "ETA has decided the definitive cease of its armed activity," the group said in a statement issued in Basque, Spanish, French and English on the website of Basque newspaper Gara. "ETA calls upon the Spanish and French goverments to open a process of a direct dialogue with the aim of addressing the resolution of the consequences of the conflict and, thus, to overcome the armed confrontation," it said. "Through this historical...

A car bomb has exploded in Spain after a warning from the Basque separatist group ETA. The blast happened outside a police station in the northern town of Calahorra. The bomb went off in an area that had been filled with people attending a Good Friday religious procession. The Civil Guard station targeted in the attack and surrounding buildings were evacuated before the blast in the Rioja region. One officer suffered a mild injury in the neck. The phone call was made at 12.20pm (GMT) and the blast happened about 40 minutes later. ETA had issued a warning stating the...

5 January 2008 The Basque separatist group ETA will base its calls for independence on the example set by Kosovo, says local daily Gara. ETA, which the EU considers a terrorist organization, stresses that its fight “is not utopia” and cites the examples of Kosovo and Scotland, it is written on the daily’s website, which has announced interviews with some of the organization’s members. It was not possible to get any details of the interview from the paper’s editors, nor were the names of any of the group’s members mentioned. ETA uses Gara, among other papers, to send messages or...

Basques were fishermen more than 8,000 years ago 06/13/2006 The Basques that settled 8,300 years ago in the Jaizkibel Mountain near the Basque coast were skillful enough to go fishing two kilometres out to sea. The human beings that lived in the Basque Country in the Mesolithic, more than 8,000 years ago, set sail out to sea fishing, something which meant 50 percent of their diet, Aranzadi society of sciences reported Tuesday after examining archaeological remains found in Gipuzkoa. They did not hunt whales, as their descendants many years after, neither tuna nor anchovy as the current Basque fishermen but...

AMSTERDAM — Basque separatist group ETA has sent a letter to the offices of Dutch airline KLM in Spain threatening attacks on tourist targets, Spanish news agency EFE reported on Thursday. Citing police sources, EFE claimed the letter, sent from Vitoria, in the Basque Country, said: "We cannot guarantee the security of foreign citizens". ETA has threatened attacks in the past against tourist attacks and recently sent a letter to several foreign embassies promising to bomb popular tourist sites across Spain. But the letter to KLM represents a departure for the terrorist group and raises the spectre of attacks on...

Basques people, better known as Euskalduna in their language. Basque is the only language in Europe that is not Indo-European in origin. The origins of Basque is a mystery. Some linguists believe it is related to Armenian, Etruscan, Finnish, Hungarian, Indians tribes of America, Ainu, and even the language of lost Atlantis. Basque seems to show some characteristics of Caucasian languages and Armenian. Some scientists believe Ainu and Basque are related to each other. Some even think Basques are directly related to Cro-Magnon humans. Basques live in northern Spain and southern France. Prominent Basques are Louis Daguerre, the inventor of...

Posted on Fri, Oct. 03, 2003 ALEXANDRIA, MINN.Norse stone authenticity put to the test BY TRAVIS REED Associated Press Its authenticity may forever be in question, but the Kensington Runestone is on its way to Sweden, where a group of scientists will study it and lend their opinion to the question of whether the rock is really a centuries-old artifact or a 200-pound hoax. Scientists working with the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, Minn., are traveling with the stone and say they have new geologic findings that suggest it was buried far longer than anyone was settled in western Minnesota. The...

Traditionally the difference between the English and Scots, Welsh, Irish and Cornish was attributed to the foreign influence of invading forces such as the Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings settling in different areas of Britain hundreds of years ago. But Professor Stephen Oppenheimer of Oxford University, believes the difference originates much further back in history... The professor of clinical sociomedical sciences at Oxford University said the Celts of Western Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall are descended from an ancient people living on the Atlantic coast while Britain was still attached to mainland Europe, while the English are more closely related...

History books favor stories of conquest, not of continuity, so it is perhaps not surprising that many Englishmen grow up believing they are a fighting mixture of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans who invaded Britain. The defeated Celts, by this reckoning, left their legacy only in the hinterlands of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. A new genetic survey of Y chromosomes throughout the British Isles has revealed a very different story. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain were real survivors. Nowhere were they entirely replaced by the invaders and they survive in high proportions, often 50 percent or more, throughout...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration widened its financial assault against global terror Friday, ordering U.S. banks to block assets of one organization and seven individuals that the government believes support a separatist group that has mounted terror attacks in Spain. The Treasury Department said the entities have acted on behalf of the Basque Fatherland and Liberty, commonly known in Spain as the Basque ETA separatists. Treasury's action was part of a coordinated effort with European allies to cut terrorists off from their sources of funding, a key component of President Bush's war on terror. The European Union, Treasury Secretary...