While Spain’s unemployment rate was more than 20% in 2011 (see Bloomberg, The Independent and Google Public Data), the Spanish government spent more than 8.4m euros on their royal family in the same year!
“The Spanish news website ABC said the family did not disclose how much was spent on clothes, hair styling or other personal items”. (From the BBC News website)
A student fee protester on the main campus of the University of Birmingham, UK. Photo by me.
There was a story on forcing women to take virginity tests during anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt earlier this year.
Follow the latest development on this story from Al Jazeera English, BBC News, CNN and Reuters.
This paper was on the desk of the British Prime Minister David Cameron on the 10th of December this year.
Yalda, a traditional Persian festival, is the celebration of the longest night of the year.
To use technical terms 
, Yalda is the eve of the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere which usually occurs on 20 or 21 December each year.
Yalda Night is still celebrated by many Persians around the world. Here are some photos of Yalda shopping this year in Iran:
From Fars News Agency:
From Mehr News Agency
From ISNA
HIV This Week is a good blog provided by the office of the Chief Scientific Adviser to UNAIDS.
Once upon a time when I arrived in Britain….
Photo by me.
This little old-fashioned gate of the University of Leicester was beside the Percy Gee building which housed the Students’ Union and a number of University services.
From my experience in Madrid, I realised that Spaniards take pride in two aspects of their tradition: Tapas in Spanish cuisine and Flamenco music and dance. In order to get a sense of both, I went with a couple of my colleagues to the Villa Rosa restaurant in Madrid where we could watch the Flamenco dance and eat tapas.
The following clip was recorded at the same restaurant by someone else:
Street Flamenco in Madrid (recorded by someone else):
To understand more about Flamenco visit the following two links from the BBC’s Learning Zone Broadband website:
