Word: spain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...visit there, but he would not recognize it now. There's a water park and countless neon-lit fountains that burble in sync with songs like "Pretty Woman" and "Somewhere over the Rainbow." The town centerpiece is a long promenade with 800 palm trees, sleek benches designed in Valencia, Spain, and an artificial river lit neon blue. Working through the night, workers built the place in three months. Construction unions, Saakashvili joked, would come to Georgia only "when everything is already built." One of the renovated plazas will host a giant civic New Year's Eve concert featuring Julio Iglesias...
From Day One, countering Europe's supposed slide into a godless secularism has been high on Benedict's agenda. Recently, that defense of the church's values has been looking almost like a counteroffensive. On Oct. 17 in Spain, the traditionally Catholic right turned out perhaps as many as 1 million people in the streets of Madrid to oppose plans by the country's center-left government to loosen abortion laws (allowing 16-year-old females, for example, to terminate their pregnancies without parental consent). And on Tuesday, in a Vatican meeting with the new European Union envoy...
...sport. As he describes it, the only people who regularly fill the stands are tourists. "You get all these drunken tourists who come and yell their heads off as an animal is brutally killed. And they're only there because they think they're in a normal part of Spain, and that's what you do in Spain." (See pictures of Spain's Madcap Tomato Festival, La Tomatina...
...Josep Rull, congressman for Convergence I Unio (CiU), a centrist nationalist party, objects to that depiction. "This is not about Catalonia rejecting Spain," he says. "We have our own long tradition of bullfighting. This is about Catalans rejecting bullfighting from within our own tradition because our values have changed...
...enough to pass the ban. "There are some within the party who see bullfighting as a tradition worth protecting," says Rull. "But there's a larger group - I count myself among them - that believes we shouldn't treat the torture of animals as a public spectacle anymore." (Read "In Spain, No Olé for Bullfights...