Word: spain
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...weddings took place at the Pazo de Meirás in northwestern Spain on Friday. In one, held in the chapel of the faux-medieval palace, the real Leticia Giménez-Arnau, great-granddaughter of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, married her Salvadoran boyfriend in what was no doubt an appropriately austere ceremony. In the other, considerably more rambunctious celebration, an actress playing Leticia arrived at the wedding scene in a convertible driven by a Moorish guard (complete with requisite fez). Greeted with fascist salutes and the extravagant leering of a pompous archbishop, the lovely bride was given away...
...That claim goes all the way back to 1938, when, with the Spanish Civil War still under way, authorities in the region organized a collection to buy the palace and give it to Spain's new dictator. Ever since, Franco and his descendants have used the sprawling compound, with its three reconstructed towers - Napoleon's troops burned the originals - and six hectares of gardens, as a vacation home. More than three decades after her father's death, Carmen, Franco's sole child, continues to summer there every year...
...English-speaking countries have been simplifying their spelling for centuries: Spain, France, Germany, Russia, Norway, Ireland, Indonesia and Japan, among others, have all instituted such reforms; Portugal in May amended its spelling to follow the simpler Brazilian rules. Since 1755, when the English language was standardized in Samuel Johnson's aptly named Dictionary of the English Language, many variant spellings have become widely accepted on both sides of the pond. In 1864, for instance, the U.S. government officially changed the spelling of words like centre and timbre to end in the variant -er; more recently, at the beginning...
...Take Britain. Just as it did in Ireland and Spain, consumer confidence in the U.K. swelled in recent years on the back of rising housing prices. But in all three countries, red-hot housing markets have suddenly gone cold. With jittery banks slashing the range of available mortgages, and rocketing gas prices nudging inflation to 3.8% - well above the Bank of England's 2% target - demand in Britain's housing market has been choked. House prices fell 1.7% last month, according to Halifax, a major mortgage lender, and a total of 8.8% over the past year. That's hit Britain...
...counterparts, 2008 is proving painfully difficult. Globally, banks could write down as much as $450 billion more over the next three to four years, according to research from Deutsche Bank. Lenders, it says, are short of funds equivalent to 4% of their balance sheets, with those in Ireland, Spain and Britain finding fund-raising particularly tricky. As the U.S. sputtered over the past year, Europe's economies initially drew praise for motoring on. But housing markets in Ireland, Spain and the U.K. have turned down fast in the past few months and food and fuel bills have soared. Europe...