MADRID
A fund which can make up to 99 billion euros available to help Spanish banks merge and restructure is more than enough, the country’s economy minister said yesterday. “The restructuring of the financial system is speeding up and I think the process will be completed in 2010. The funds in the FROB (restructuring fund) are more than sufficient for this,” Elena Salgado said at a conference in Madrid.

THE British widow of the late Spanish humanitarian and aid worker Vicente Ferrer, who passed away in July, is in Majorca this week giving a series of talks and conferences about how the Vicente Ferrer Foundation is continuing to help the poor in India.

Ferrer first volunteered to go to India in 1952 and by the time of his death, the foundation had opened and supported 1'200 village schools serving 125'000 children and employing 2'000 teachers, opened three general hospitals employing 1'300 staff, an Aids clinic, libraries, family-planning clinics and planted three million trees in Anantapur, one of the poorest regions of India. Now his English wife, the former journalist Anna Ferrer and one of their three children, Moncho, are carrying on his work and this is what Anna is talking about this week.

FOLLOWING proposals for the old Lluís Sitjar stadium - the former home of Real Mallorca Football Club - to be converted into Palma’s new exhibition centre, the opposition Partido Popular (PP) on the city Council yesterday proposed an alternative site and have asked the Mayor, Aina Calvo to consider it.

The PP are suggesting that the exhibition ground be located on the Balearic Athletic’s football ground, and whilst concurring that costs of either location will need to be taken into account, the opposition party pointed out that Athletic’s ground is situated at one of the “best accesses”into Palma right on the Via Cintura ring road.

IN a campaign which began yesterday, controlled fireworks and trained Falcon birds of prey will be the principal methods used by Palma City Council technicians in their efforts to remove mass gatherings of starlings from treetops around the city.

The Council explained that every autumn, flocks of starlings in search of favourable wintering grounds generate, noise, dirt, and smell in Palma. The campaign to remove them from the city in no way harms the birds but discourages from settling in urban settings where they become a nuisance and a health risk. Although the use of non-harmful fireworks is effective in frightening off the birds, the Council combines the technique with that of freeing falcons in the midst of the flocks to minimise noise nuisance.