After a two-day summit with Xi Jinping, Donald Trump has not yet decided whether to approve the sale of US weapons to Taipei worth 14 billion dollars. The Chinese leader warned him that Taiwan was a red line. That a mismanagement of the island issue could put both countries in “an extremely dangerous situation.”
The tragedy has hovered over the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in the MotoGP race. Àlex Márquez suffered a brutal accident halfway through the race (lap 12 of 24) when his Ducati collided with Pedro Acosta’s KTM as they were fighting for the lead. The rider from Cervera went off into the gravel, fell violently, and narrowly avoided being hit by his bike and crashing into the wall before turn 10.
Los Mossos d’Esquadra suspect that the perpetrator of the Esplugues crime was suffering from a psychotic episode at the time of committing the acts. This has been confirmed by the Minister of the Interior, Núria Parlon, in an interview on RAC1, in which she also denied that the action had a terrorist motivation. “A priori, the detainee is a person who was in an altered state and probably has some kind of problem that has nothing to do with jihadism,” she stated. The Mossos have not found any neighbor who heard the arrested person utter jihadist slogans. For this reason, for now, the investigation has fallen to the Esplugues Investigation Unit and has not been transferred to the Central Information Unit, which is responsible for matters related to terrorism.
The Spanish Agency of Medicines and Medical Devices (Aemps) has banned the sale and ordered the withdrawal from the market of all units of about twenty slimming products for containing sibutramine, an active ingredient suspended in the EU since 2010 due to its association with several serious adverse effects.
El Partido Popular already managed to provoke the irritation of the governments of Pedro Sánchez and Emmanuel Macron, by blocking a week ago in the Senate the friendship treaty that both leaders sealed at the Hispano-French summit held in Barcelona on January 19, 2023. And now some controversial words from former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy – in which he pointed out that the French national football team is playing the World Cup, in his opinion, “without French players” – have the effect of lighting a match on a barrel of dynamite.
The Ministry of Finance has set to work to begin holding bilateral meetings with the autonomous communities (and cities) to address the reform of regional financing. The department has reported that this Monday it sent letters to the ministries of the common regime communities, as well as Ceuta and Melilla, with the aim of arranging dates.
Los Mossos d’Esquadra are finalizing a detailed report on the 48-hour whirlwind trip to Quito (Ecuador) during which Jonathan Andic claims he lost the phone he was carrying in Montserrat the day his father died. In his judicial statement, the son of Isak Andic, investigated for the alleged homicide of the latter, stated that his phone was stolen during a brief outing in the Ecuadorian capital. He said he traveled for a business matter, about which he has not yet provided concrete details.
The extraordinary meeting of EU interior ministers was not the showdown many anticipated, but a delicate exercise in political balance. The meeting, requested by 22 Member States at the initiative of Italy and Denmark following the Ceuta migration crisis, ended with a declaration of principles but, as expected, without concrete decisions. Italy eased tensions with Pedro Sánchez’s government but now proposes that the EU lead the relationship with Morocco to contain migratory surges at the southern border.
The Ministry of Health, with Mónica García, wants to make it clear that the law supports the Government in imposing a mandatory quarantine on the 14 Spaniards (13 passengers and one crew member) traveling on the cruise ship ‘Hondius’ affected by a hantavirus outbreak. This was in response to what was said last Wednesday by the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, who spoke of a “voluntary” confinement at the Gómez Ulla hospital in Madrid.
Salvador Illa has reached the midpoint of his term with the promises fulfilled of achieving an institutional normalization of the country and stopping the excuses and lamentations to seriously address the shortcomings that Catalonia presents. The problem is that when the difficulties are raised…
