13/02/2014. Carlos Dardé. The First Spanish Republic was proclaimed on 11 February 1873. It was not established due to a big wave of opinion, or the duty of a well-established party in the country, but to the manoeuvres of royalist parties which King Amadeus of Savoy was unable to neutralize and which made his continuity on the throne unviable. The (federal) Republican Party, which had been founded in November 1868 and had won appreciable parliamentary representation in the following elections, would only decline since then. “Nobody has destroyed the Spanish Monarchy, nobody has killed it; the Monarchy has died due to internal decomposition”, would state the republican Emilio Castelar.

12/02/2014. José Luis Restán. He looks calm, or, more precisely, happy. He has that light of his in the eyes, that gentle smile he always gave everyone, even when he was fully aware of the hardness of a circumstance or an account. Those who have had the fortune to see him and to talk with him say so. His physical strength is clearly declining, but he is still lucid and present, very aware of having made the gesture which God asked him to do for the sake of the Church.

30/01/2014. Mira Milosevich. On January 22, the protests against the Ukrainian government claimed the lives of three victims according to official sources or five according to the opposition. The sorrowful fact is tragically ironic because it happened on the Day of National Unity which celebrates the independence achieved in 1919. But there are at least two more paradoxes.

27/01/2014. Jorge del Palacio Martín. 'Ecco l'Italicum'. With this expression, Matteo Renzi presented last week to the public the new draft for the electoral reform to be discussed in the Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Following the tradition of using Latin expressions to name the electoral laws–'Matarellum' (1993) and 'Porcellum'(2005)–the new law has been dubbed Italicum. According to the young secretary of the Partito Democratico, the name reflects the regenerative spirit that inspired the law: 'farà nascere one Nuova Repubblica' Renzi stated. 

24/01/2014. Alejandro Arratia. The murders of Monica Spear and Henry Berry last January 6 on a road in Venezuela burst into the media as a novelty news, but the unfortunate reality is that this is a usual event in Venezuelans' everyday life. The profile of the young people killed determined that this violent action should appear on the pages of local events. A German newspaper titled it, "Violence gets a face". With this couplethousands of victims have managed to escape oblivion. How long will the incriminating beautiful face keep demanding punishment for the performers and politicians responsible for the crime?

23/01/2014. Eduardo Inclán. On 14 January, President François Hollande declared his intention to launch in the coming months a project to reform France's territorial administration, particularly with regard to the 22 regions and 101 departments into which the country is divided. This project that has gone unnoticed by the press due to the lack of a text which can be analysed deeply and the juicy budgetary reforms simultaneously presented.

17/01/2014. Miquel Porta Perales. A federal court in Washington and another one in New York have issued a pair of conflicting decisions on the call-tracking program, known as the "Snowden case" or the "cyber-spying case." The former questions the constitutionality of the tracking program while the latter states that the practice complies with the law.

14/01/2014. Mira Milosevich. The Russians often say that St. Petersburg is their head, because it symbolises Russia's rational and necessary approach to the West, Moscow, their soul, because it preserves the Russian tradition, and Volgograd their heart, because it is their bridge to the Caucasus. The double bombings on the railway station and on a trolley bus (29 and 30 December), with a balance of 34 dead and dozens injured, is a stab in Russia's heart for different reasons.