"La principal virtud de la democracia es que deja obsoleta la revolución"
"La revolución consiste en imponer tu fantasía política a todos los demás"
"Los científicos deberían ir a donde les lleve su ciencia, no sus ideas políticas"
"Pensar suele reducirse a inventar razones para dudar de lo evidente"
"No es una de las dos Españas la que nos hiela el corazón, sino la atroz semejanza entre quienes creen que hay dos"
THE WASHINGTON POST.- Was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a Soviet spy in the 1980s?
A report Wednesday night by Israel’s Channel 1 News seems to indicate that he was a KGB agent for a period of time, although the Palestinian Authority very quickly denied the claims, calling them another Israeli slur against the struggling president.
The news report, which was based on research carried out by two Israeli professors, revealed that the cryptic information was hidden in documents from the Mitrokhin archive, a collection of handwritten notes by KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin. Mitrokhin smuggled his notes out of Russia in the 1990s when he defected to Britain. Cambridge University's Churchill College made the papers public in 2014.
In the documents, the report says, just few lines refer to the now octogenarian Palestinian leader: His codename was “Krotov” or Mole and he worked with the Soviet secret police and security agency in Damascus circa 1983.
Gideon Remez and Isabella Ginor, the two researchers from the Truman Research Institute at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that Abbas worked for the KGB under Mikhail Bodganov, who was then based in Damascus and is now Russia’s special envoy to the Middle East.
EL PAÍS.- La encuesta preelectoral del Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), hecha pública este jueves por el organismo dependiente del Gobierno central horas antes del pistoletazo de inicio de campaña, pronostica en Galicia una victoria muy holgada para el PP de Alberto Núñez Feijóo. El sondeo otorga a los populares el 25-S una estimación de voto del 44,9% y entre 40 y 41 diputados, lo que supondría rebasar con entre dos y tres representantes el mínimo de 38 que necesitan los conservadores para retener sin problemas el poder que ostentan en la Xunta desde 2009. Feijóo salvaría de esta forma la única mayoría absoluta del PP en una comunidad autónoma y lo haría además sin apenas desgaste con respecto a 2012, cuando se coronó con 41 diputados y un 45% de las papeletas.
THE TELEGRAPH.- RT, the Kremlin-backed broadcaster formerly known as Russia Today, has offered Nigel Farage his own television show, as part of a major revamp of the channel's programming.
The former Ukip leader is one of a number of outspoken public figures, including the columnist Katie Hopkins, who is understood to have held talks with the pro-Moscow broadcaster.
RT executives are said to regard the US presidential elections, in November, as an opportunity to beef up its English-language programming, prompting concern in Whitehall over the increased reach of the channel, which is seen to follow a slavishly pro-Kremlin editorial line.
Sources at RT said that Hopkins, the right-wing commentator, was in advanced talks to host a lifestyle programme.
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM.-Former Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit famously called Germany’s hip capital “poor but sexy.” Indeed, according to a new study, Berlin is the only major capital city in Europe that depresses its country’s per capita GDP.
The Cologne Institute for Economic Research set out to see how GDP would be affected if a country had to cope without its capital city (link in German). Without London, Britain would be 11% poorer on a per capita basis. France would lose 15% of per capita income if it didn’t have Paris, where its biggest companies, like Total, Renault, and Peugeot have their headquarters. Greece would take a 20% hit without Athens.
But Germany, the biggest economy in Europe, could do without Berlin, from a financial point of view: the average German would be 0.2% wealthier if they didn’t have to support the relatively poor—but sexy!—city.
