Attacks this summer killed a six-year-old girl and spread fear in Spanish coastal resorts.Batasuna is suspended by order of Judge Baltasar Garzon and awaits a banning order from MPs But the crackdown has not deflated Eta’s support. None the less, despite an offensive against Eta’s political wing, Batasuna, the violence has not declined. The latest operation, “the fruit of closer and more intense collaboration between French and Spanish security forces”, made Eta “weaker than ever”, Mr Acebes said. All four were taken to Bordeaux police station for questioning, where they declined to speak.Up to a hundred Eta suspects have been seized in the past year, 70 in Spain, 22 in France and others in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Venezuela and Uruguay. The woman’s companion, Bruno Josie, a Frewnch national, was also detained. Ms Gallaraga, a member of the radical Basque youth group Segi, is accused of renting safehouses to Eta militants operating from France. Mr Aznar, the conservative opposition leader at the time, escaped unhurt.Also detained was Saroia Gallaraga, 21, the French-born daughter of an Eta militant who fled to France in 1972.

The judge, who taught law at a university in Madrid, was shot three times in the head in his study in 1996.Ms Mugika Go?Mr Olarra Guridi’s companion in a Madrid commando, is wanted over a car-bomb attack on the Prime Minister, Jose Maria Aznar, in 1995. Police searched their flat and took away documents.Mr Olarra Guridi is on an EU list of wanted terrorists accused of nine killings, including that of the president of Spain’s Constitutional Court, Francisco Tomas y Valiente, in one of the most high-profile Eta killings of recent years. Their car bore false plates and they carried automatic pistols. Several Eta militants detained recently said Mr Olarra Guridi had given them orders from France.The couple were detained in a supermarket car park in Talence, near Bordeaux in south-west France, after a three-month police surveillance operation. Mr Olarra Guridi was said to have been Txapote’s right-hand man. Spain’s justice ministry urged France to hand them over swiftly for trial in Spain.Police said the separatists, originally from San Sebastian, who went on the run to France in 1996, had taken charge of Eta’s military apparatus after the organisation’s former commander Francisco Javier Garcia Gaztelu, or “Txapote”, was captured in February last year.

as they are the ones who gave the orders, supplied the material and, most importantly, selected the targets”.Mr Acebes also said the two, a couple, were the “most brutal and most wanted terrorist leaders” that security forces had pursued since 1994. A police swoop on two Eta military chiefs has dealt a heavy blow to the Basque separatist organisation by decapitating its armed structure in France, Spain’s Interior Minister said yesterday.
The minister, Angel Acebes, hailed the detention of Juan Antonio Olarra Guridi, 35, and Ainhoa Mugika Go?32, on Monday night as “magnificent news … The Russian government also must give its approval, and crossing that bureaucratic hurdle is still years away.Russia trails only China in production of potatoes, which are known as the “second bread” and feature in most meals (AP). The most promising solution is a genetically modified potato but, in a country steeped in traditional ways,persuading people to plant and eat it will be hard. They scientists have given a disease-resistant, conventionally bred potato to a Russian seed company, which promised to market it quickly.The Colorado beetle may be a tougher challenge. The fungus thrives in European Russia’s moist climate and its spores can travel airborne for several miles. It could destabilise the entire region,” said K V Raman, a professor from Cornell University who visited Russia last month as part of a team trying to avert such a crisis.The problem is not yet on that scale, but Ms Patrikeyeva, a potato expert at St Petersburg’s Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry, said Russia was losing half of its potato crop to disease and insects.Scientists from Cornell believe they have found a solution to one of the main culprits, potato late blight.