The first session of the trial against David Sánchez, brother of the Prime Minister, took place this morning at a slow pace. Sánchez arrived at the Audiencia de Badajoz, where he is being tried for alleged crimes of influence peddling and malfeasance, at 9:40 in the morning. He got out of the car, put on his blazer, and entered the Palace of Justice calmly.
Blow after blow, almost without respite, the Government and the PSOE watch with bewilderment and astonishment, with alarm and concern, the flood of judicial cases pressuring Pedro Sánchez. This Thursday, with the president’s brother, David Sánchez, sitting in the dock at the Badajoz Court, after agents from the Civil Guard’s central operative unit (UCO) again raided the Ferraz headquarters on Wednesday to gather data on the plot allegedly orchestrated by the former organization secretary, Santos Cerdán, following the indictment of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the pending sentence for former minister José Luis Ábalos, or the ongoing process against the wife of the head of government, Begoña Gómez.
It is now the turn of former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz to give his explanations about his role in the so-called ‘Operation Kitchen’, a parapolice operation to steal documents about the PP’s slush fund from the party’s former treasurer Luis Bárcenas, who threatened to hand them over to the judge in the Gürtel case.
The court judging the Kitchen case, the alleged parapolice operation to spy on the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas between 2013 and 2015, finished yesterday hearing the recordings submitted as evidence in the case and today will begin to listen to the ten accused, including former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz and former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez. The Prosecutor’s Office is requesting 15 years in prison for both.
The group that was formed in April 2024 to disrupt judicial processes – and those who led them – with little success consisted of nine people, although not all with the same role. There may be more, but now, Judge Santiago Pedraz limits it to them, assigning them the roles of leader, his second-in-command, financiers, and executors. All of them have been caught, as always happens, by new facts that have appeared in another case. Now they will have to provide explanations. Who are they, what connects them, what drives them?
When her husband died two years ago, Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) began writing Ghost Stories (Seix Barral/Edicions 62), a book that helped her face the abyss of “vanished time,” start the grieving process, and adjust to life alone after 43 years of marriage. If the one who left, a victim of cancer that the author describes with harshness but without losing her sense of humor, had not been Paul Auster, it would be the same, she admits, because this work is not a biography of the novelist, but a lost love song. “The most painful reality in this world is not loving someone and losing them to death, but the inability to love,” she argues.
Enrique Riquelme (Cox, Alicante, 1989) took up the challenge from Florentino Pérez and entered the arena of Real Madrid to run in the elections on the upcoming June 7. His speech is forceful against what he considers a project to privatize the club by the current president.
The teachers’ strike called for this Thursday in Vallès and Maresme is affecting traffic on the main roads of both counties. According to Trànsit, the C-32 is closed in Mataró towards Barcelona. The same road is also closed in Cabrera de Mar towards Palafolls due to a demonstration.
Shortly before getting bogged down in the Iran war, Donald Trump launched the Peace Board, the initiative with which the US president sought to consolidate the pacification and reconstruction of Gaza. The project was surrounded by doubts from the start, and the passage of time seems to be proving the skeptics right: four months after its establishment, the body lacks official funding and has not made any progress on the ground.
After Monday’s bombings of missile sites and vessels, the ceasefire, decreed a month and a half ago, was back on life support on Wednesday, very fragile. The United States directed attacks against an Iranian drone operation and a ground control base near the Strait of Hormuz, to which the Persian country claimed to have responded with an offensive against a U.S. airbase in Kuwait. All this occurred hours after President Donald Trump denied information that he was about to reach an agreement with Tehran.