The Portuguese Police have arrested Emilio Vázquez Blanco, former Organization Secretary of the PSOE in A Coruña and former regional parliamentarian in Galicia, as part of an alleged corruption scheme involving a former advisor of the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) and related to the awarding of irregular contracts in municipalities of the neighboring country.
Focusing on migration and the humane treatment that migrants deserve, both those who embark on a cayuco on the African coasts and risk their lives to cross the Atlantic and the Latin Americans who leave their countries and set out on the path to seek a better life, is the main reason why the Canary Islands are one of the stops of the Pope on his first visit to Spain.
Vox has toned down its public disagreements with the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) ahead of the upcoming visit of Pope Leo XIV to Spain. The party wants to reduce the rhetorical clash with the bishops, focused on the migration debate and national priority, a divergence that has been ongoing for a long time. In this regard, the attendance of the organization’s secretary general, Ignacio Garriga, at a conference by the president of the prelates, Luis Argüello, this May in Madrid should be understood.
La Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) claims 109,140.79 euros from Begoña Gómez, wife of the Prime Minister. The University has appeared in the case against Gómez in the Madrid District Court, courtroom number 410, under the direction of Judge Juan Carlos Peinado.
The flood of ongoing legal cases against the political and family environment of Pedro Sánchez – from his wife, Begoña Gómez, and his brother, David Sánchez, to the former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the last two secretaries of organization of the PSOE, the former minister José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán – keeps all Government action overshadowed and increases political pressure from both the opposition and the partners and allies of the investiture. But the head of the Executive insists on contrasting his management with the political, media, and judicial “noise” in which he is increasingly involved. He already argued last Wednesday from Rome, after meeting with the Pope, that this whole succession of open investigations, in his opinion, “does not at all challenge” the Government’s action in these eight years of mandate, which he also intends to push forward until the legislature is exhausted.
The principle of ‘national priority’, which involves prioritizing Spaniards over immigrants in access to public services, and which has been incorporated into the government agreements of Vox and PP in Extremadura and Aragón, is supported by four out of ten respondents in the May barometer of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), published this Friday.
The first session of the trial against David Sánchez, brother of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, proceeded slowly. David Sánchez arrived at the Audiencia de Badajoz, where he is being tried for the 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 calmly into the interior of the Palace of Justice.
When the trial for the Kitchen operation started almost two months ago, there was doubt in the National Court about whether the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior during Mariano Rajoy’s government – with Jorge Fernández Díaz and Francisco Martínez in it – would end up stabbing each other to avoid being tagged with the “X” of the parapolice plot, financed with reserved funds, to steal compromising information for the Popular Party whose treasurer was Luis Bárcenas. With the extremely high-voltage confrontation they both protagonized during the investigation as a precedent, it did not seem far-fetched that they would go into hand-to-hand combat with a every man for himself attitude. But yesterday, that idea vanished: there was a non-aggression pact.
It is about “toppling a government, not at the polls but with other tricks,” warned Minister Óscar Puente yesterday, in the face of the flood of legal cases pressuring Pedro Sánchez. “The PSOE will not tolerate it, we will not bow to anyone’s attempts to disturb our democracy through methods that are not democratic,” warned the Minister of Transport from Congress.
The National Police have arrested at least ten people in a large-scale anti-jihadist operation carried out in several provinces, including Barcelona, according to sources close to the investigation cited by EFE.