FRENANDO Grande-Marlaska, Spain’s Minister for the Interioralso expressed his condolences at the latest Guardia Civil officer to die of the virus, 47-year-old Jose Antonio who was based in Madrid. He said that all front line personnel now had access to the necessary protective equipment such as suitable masks and gloves. However, he refused to answer a question asking whether the dead Guardia man was...
The Guardia Civil are out in huge numbers to control the movement of people across all regions of Spain, road blocks or on foot they are stopping as many people as they can. Also checking the passengers on public transport using all available manpower to enforce the rules and kerb the spread of the Corona-virus. The request made by the authorities is to prove your actions, the movement must be clear...
ALTHOUGH it might feel more like winter currently, we are actually in spring now. However, statistics just released by the Spanish meteorological service Aemet shows that it was the warmest winter on record this century here and the second highest ever. The average temperature was 1.8 degrees Celsius above normal between 1 December and 29 February. In amongst this were some extreme peaks such as the 29.6...
A routine inspection at a “hostess club” in Erandio (La Rioja) has led to the arrest of a 43-year-old woman on people trafficking and sexual exploitation charges. The checks were carried out by an arm of the police that specialises in crimes against and by foreigners last November. A young woman working there said that she had been deceived while in her native Colombia by the accused who said she had...
TWO people have died and two others are badly hurt after a collision between a Gibraltar Police patrol boat and a high powered speedboat that it was chasing near The Rock. Both the fatalities were on the smaller vessel which had four passengers, a Portuguese national and three men, said to be North Africans from the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. A police spokesman said that crafts such as the one they were...
AN investigation has opened about how several tons of clothing donated for charity relief by the public have ended up being dumped in an abandoned warehouse in the Basque Country. A rural environment protection association has denounced the firm responsible for collecting the clothing, which was tracked to the remote warehouse in the Navarra region. They were originally collected in special containers in...
POLICE have arrested a 40-year-old Belgian man in Torrevieja (Alicante) on suspicion of killing his mother by beating her with a baseball bat. The woman lived on the San Luis urbanisation according to reports and it is also believed that the accused had a restraining order out against him, precluding him from visiting his mother, who was aged 81. The emergency services said that the man called them, saying...
THE Spanish air force pilot who died on a training mission last week has been named as Eduardo Fermin Garvalena, a 38-year-old from Granada. He was flying his C-101 plane last Thursday when it plunged into the sea off the Murcian resort of La Manga. Mr Garvalena was said to be a very experienced pilot with over 2,000 hours in the air whose job in this instance was “to test the limits of the craft.” He...
EXPATRIATE readers may well come across the new £20 note next time they return to the UK after they entered circulation last week. Said to be the most forgery proof yet, the note is made of polymer making them significantly longer lasting than the old paper versions. They also incorporate two windows and a two-colour foil, making good forgeries almost impossible to create according to the Bank of...
AFTER analysing their customer complaints to find out why they had taken a dramatic leap, Valencia’s Municipal Transport Company (EMT) found that 590 out of a total of 736 had been made by the same person. EMT had been criticised by politicians for their 350% jump in complaints but these have now been adjusted down to the “real” figure of 146, actually a fall of 23.5% from 2018. The complainant in...