By Mike Elkin
 
With Spanish national elections two days away, a former Socialist town councilor was assassinated around midday today. Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and opposition leader Mariano Rajoy agreed to cancel the remaining campaign events and have convened a parliamentary session at 7pm to respond to the attack. Government officials attributed to violent separatist group ETA, but no group has claimed responsibility.
 
“The Spanish democracy has shown that it won't allow challenges from those who defy its basic principles and its essential values," said Zapatero. "It hasn't allowed them in the past, it won't allow them now and it will never allow them. Together… we will defend our institutions and our freedoms.” 

The gunman shot dead 42-year-old Isaías Carrasco, who worked at a highway toll station and was a councilman in the town of Arrasate-Mondragón in the Basque Country between 2003 and 2007. He was shot three times as he left his home with his wife and daughter.
 
ETA hasn’t targeted a specific person for assassination since May 2003. It's widely believed that the group is trying to influence the outcome of the election. The separatists, who have killed around 850 people over the past 40 years, appear to be following the precedent set in 2004 when the Madrid train bombings by an Al Qaeda-inspired group tipped the scales in favor of the Socialists. Or perhaps ETA wanted to send a bloody reminder to the country that has been focusing its political attention on the ailing economy and immigration.

It’s hard to say how this attack will affect the elections on Sunday. The initial reaction from the Socialists and Rajoy’s Popular Party (PP) has been one of solidarity in the face of a common enemy – a solidarity that has been absent since the Socialists won the last election. The political atmosphere of the past four years and especially this campaign has been tense and angry. And while the PP consistently attacked the government’s anti-terror policy, namely Zapatero’s decision in 2006 to open talks with ETA after it declared a ceasefire, a collective political response is more likely than not.

 When U.S. president George W. Bush called on Africa the other day, he was greeted with a rare show of bonhomie. Chalk it up to mosquito diplomacy.  After all, few continents on earth are more plagued by bug-borne diseases.( 80 percent of the 1 million deaths a year caused by malaria are logged in sub-Saharan Africa.) Like some Bill Gates manqué, Bush handed out thousands of bed nets to grateful crowds in Benin, Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda and Tanzania. Too bad the Exterminator stopped there.

  Plenty of folks across the Atlantic could also use some pest control. Not least in Brazil, where an old scourge has come roaring back. Latin America's largest nation is in the throes of one of its deadliest epidemics of dengue fever on record - far deadlier, in fact, than officials let on. According to O Estado de São Paulo, 324 people died from dengue fever in 2006 and 2007. That's 45 percent more dengue-related deaths than the Brazilian health ministry acknowledges. What's behind the numbers gap? An actuarial sleight of hand.