Spanish views from a small town

On Tuesday, a  ten year-old British boy on the beach in Benidorm saw a strange silver and green fish swimming near him and tried to touch it. The fish, trying to placidly swim amidst strangers, decided he'd had enough and bit him. The boy surely ran howling from the water after the bite and the beach was temporarily closed while authorities searched for the fish. Up to here, fine. There are always species out there that resent man's intrusion on their beaches. But from there it just happened to blow out of proportion. The British newspaper, The Daily Star, ran the story on its front page with a photo of a great white shark and the headline, "Jaws Attack Off Benidorm". Immediately the story was plastered everywhere. A shark attack on a populated beach in the Mediterranean! No beach is safe anywhere! The truth was the boy was given first aid treatment for the small, circular bite just above his waist at the beach and that was that. The fish wasn't found and the sh...

Europe as a region seems to have a short memory span. Around seventy years ago at the end of World War Two, it asked for clemency as millions of its citizens began migrating for many reasons; looking for loved ones, a new chance at life, or as a result of ethnic cleansing and redistribution of borders. They tried to go mostly to North America, Australia, and South America. Now Europe is being asked for clemency by millions from the Middle East and Africa escaping from bloody civil wars, uprisings, and meteorological devastation. But Europe has become deaf. These days we are seeing news about the island of Kos, in Greece, just off the coast of Turkey. Thousands upon thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, all the way to Pakistan, are arriving each day on boats. But it's not just Kos, it's all the other Greek islands that are right up against Turkey's coastline. In the month of July, about fifty thousand people arrived in those islands. I...