Catalan

I met Jesus – and he’s an old Spanish gardener

From our US edition

As the old Jewish proverb goes, “Man plans and God laughs.” But nothing, in my experience, makes Him clutch His sides quite like hearing about my Mediterranean gardening ambitions. Every winter, my horticultural memory performs a factory reset. I somehow forget the summer mornings when the thermometer climbs past 90°F by 8 a.m. and the plants wilt by noon. The brutal, arid wind that strips moisture from the leaves faster than I can water? Erased from my mind. What blight? And the way perfect fruit splits overnight after a thunderstorm? Never happened. Come spring, I’m suddenly possessed, clicking “add to cart” on tomato varieties with names like 1980s cocktail bars: Pink Jazz, Green Zebra, Cosmic Eclipse.

jesus garden

MEPs have missed their chance to protect human rights

The European Parliament is always eager to lecture the world about human rights. To a degree, this annoys the world's despots and we should, of course, never underestimate how ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’. But the Parliament’s overall influence on foreign affairs is still limited. On Tuesday, however, MEPs received an opportunity to actually make a difference when it came to protecting human rights. The European Parliament had to decide whether to lift the immunity of three Catalan nationalist MEPs – former Catalan government leader Carles Puigdemont and former ministers Antoni Comín and Clara Ponsatí – that are facing criminal charges in Spain for their roles in organising an independence referendum in 2017.