Spain to reopen borders on 21 June but other countries are adopting more targeted approach
France and Germany became the latest European countries to reopen their borders as the continent emerges from its three-month Covid-19 lockdown.
Speaking on Sunday evening, France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, said the country’s Schengen borders would be open from Monday and its non-EU borders from 1 July.
Continue reading...‘Third-century’ artefacts with hieroglyphics and Basque words referred to non-existent gods and to René Descartes
A Spanish archaeologist whose staggering discoveries included one of the earliest representations of the crucifixion and proof that the written Basque language was centuries older than previously thought has been found guilty of faking the finds.
The saga began in June 2006 when Eliseo Gil presented artefacts excavated from the Roman town of Veleia, near the Basque city of Vitoria.
Continue reading...South Africa warns pandemic could last up to two years; Indonesia reports largest daily rise in infections
Moscow has partially lifted its lockdown despite Russia reporting thousands of new daily cases and Spain’s government said face masks would remain mandatory in public as Europe continued to emerge from the first phase of its struggle against Covid-19.
Concern mounted, however, over the spread of coronavirus in Africa and elsewhere, with Nigeria confirming 600 deaths from a previously undetected outbreak and South Africa warning its pandemic could last up to two years.
Continue reading...More than 500 Moroccans remain in limbo, far from home and with few resources to support themselves
On 14 March, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, ordered the country into Covid-19 lockdown, saying “extraordinary decisions” needed to be taken as the country struggled with a “health, social and economic crisis”.
The Moroccan authorities had taken their own extraordinary decision the day before, when they ordered the shutdown of the border crossings that connect the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla with the rest of the country. With the only land borders between Africa and Europe closed, many citizens from both continents found themselves trapped.
Continue reading...Residents of towns in Castilla y Léon region told to stay away from banks of Pisuerga River
Police and specialist wildlife officers are using boats and a drone to search a stretch of river in north-west Spain after three sightings of what is thought to be a Nile crocodile.
People in and around the towns of Simancas and Tordesillas in the Castilla y León region have been told to stay away from the banks of the Pisuerga River while the search continues.
Continue reading...Inocente Orlando Montano accused of planning atrocity aimed at stopping peace talks
A former Salvadoran army colonel who served as a government security minister will appear in court in Madrid on Monday to face trial over the murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in 1989.
The attack, at the Central American University (UCA) in San Salvador, was planned and authorised by senior military commanders and was an attempt to derail peace talks aimed at ending the country’s civil war.
Continue reading...Surrender of Breda, immortalised by painter, was significant moment in Dutch war of independence
Anyone wandering along a quiet street in central Seville at 8.30pm on Saturday would have witnessed the odd sight of a 17th-century Dutch governor wearing a Covid-19 mask as he once again handed over his city to Spanish forces.
The Surrender of Breda, a significant moment in the Dutch war of independence immortalised in Diego Velázquez’s eponymous painting, was brought to life by a historical reenactment group to mark the 395th anniversary of the event, and the Spanish painter’s 421st birthday – both on 5 June, albeit 26 years apart.
Continue reading...Satisfaction levels across the continent have risen and fallen, but nowhere have they plunged as for Boris Johnson’s government
All across the continent, most Europeans now trust their leaders generally, and how they have handled the coronavirus pandemic in particular, a little less than when the crisis began – but nowhere has public confidence fallen as far and as fast as in the UK.
Even leaders seen as having managed Covid-19 the most successfully, such as Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel and Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen, have suffered slight dips in popular satisfaction as the weeks have worn on.
Continue reading...Spanish resort ‘like a ghost town’ as UK’s Covid-19 lockdown keeps its best customers away
There’ll be no craic at the Shamrock tonight, says Lisa Griffin, who has run the Irish pub in Benidorm for 25 years.
Griffin’s 15 staff, who include a four-piece band, are on furlough and no one knows what will happen when the Spanish government’s scheme comes to an end on 30 June.
Continue reading...Barcelona-based firm is thought to have fought off bids from Unilever, L’Oréal and Shiseido
The celebrity makeup artist Charlotte Tilbury has handed a control of her namesake makeup and skincare empire to a Spanish fashion and fragrances business in a deal that could have valued the company at up to £1bn just seven years after she started it.
Tilbury, 47, personally owned between half and 75% of the company until signing a deal with the Barcelona-based Puig will likely have handed her a cash payout worth tens of millions of pounds. The Spanish firm also owns brands including Paco Rabanne, Jean Paul Gaultier and Nina Ricci.
Continue reading...Four found guilty of sexually abusing woman in southern city of Córdoba in May 2016
Four of the five men who gang-raped a young woman at Pamplona’s bull-running festival in July 2016 have been given additional prison sentences after being convicted of sexually abusing another woman in southern Spain two months earlier.
The Pamplona rape shocked the country and nationwide protests erupted after the five men were initially convicted of the lesser offence of sexual abuse.
Continue reading...In the northern region of La Rioja, one medieval town has suffered a particularly deadly outbreak. And in such a tight-knit community, suspicion and recrimination can spread as fast as the virus. By Giles Tremlett
When we first spoke, in mid-April, María José Dueñas began weeping within seconds. Her parents’ home town, Santo Domingo de La Calzada, had the worst death rate from coronavirus in Spain, she told me on the phone. “I’m so scared,” she said. Dueñas told stories of police clambering through windows to rescue the dying, who were too weak to open their doors. Regional politicians, meanwhile, refused to give town-by-town figures for the dead, stoking anxiety and encouraging conspiracy theories. Santo Domingo’s locked-down residents, she claimed, were being deliberately kept in the dark as the virus silently stalked the town.
Dueñas does not live in Santo Domingo, a town of 6,300 people set among patchwork fields of cereal crops in the northern Spanish region of La Rioja. She was born there, but now lives 28 miles away in Logroño, the capital of this wealthy region, best known for the rich red wines that bear its name. Her angry, sometimes wildly conspiratorial outbursts on local Facebook groups – some of which have been deleted against her will – mean not all her old neighbours will welcome her back.
Continue reading...As Covid-19 causes workforce shortages, UN urged to urgently investigate worsening conditions in Spain’s strawberry industry
Women picking strawberries in Spain for UK supermarkets are facing new forms of exploitation, unions and lawyers warn, as the industry is hit by labour shortages caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
This week a coalition of rights groups and lawyers have appealed to the United Nations to urgently investigate allegations of deteriorating working conditions and a lack of protection for workers against Covid-19 infection.
Continue reading...Podemos leader enlists Portugal and Italy to lobby for policy as depression looms for coronavirus-ravaged southern Europe
It’s been proposed, probed and pushed to the margins of the European Union for more than two decades. Now, as Europe reels from tens of thousands of coronavirus deaths and millions of lost jobs in the worst recession for generations, ministers from Spain, Italy and Portugal say the time has come to revive a radical idea: a pan-EU minimum income.
“This is the moment for debates about social protection,” Pablo Iglesias, Spain’s deputy prime minister for social rights and leader of Podemos, told the Guardian. “Anyone who finds themselves in a vulnerable situation should have access to protection mechanisms that allow them to fill their fridge and care for their family.”
Continue reading...Elsewhere, Italy’s president warns Covid-19 ‘is not over’, and former UK PMs join calls for a coordinated global response
Germany lifted its blanket European travel ban as coronavirus lockdowns across the EU continued to ease, with officials saying new cases in western Europe were now in steady decline.
Parisians reclaimed their cafe terraces and Berliners took back their bars as normal life inched closer to returning in many parts of the continent.
Continue reading...Police in Fuenlabrada, near Madrid, arrest man who played bingo with 83-year-old victim
Spanish police investigating the murder of an 83-year-old woman who was robbed and killed a year ago have arrested a man in his 80s with whom she used to play bingo.
Officers began their inquiries on 22 May last year after the woman’s care worker became worried by her failure to answer calls.
Continue reading...From Spain to Denmark, even those who have coped with coronavirus are aware the world has changed dramatically
Her customers may be back and there are, miraculously, more of them. Spring is here; the sun is out. No one wants to dwell on what happened; everyone wants to pick up their lives again, same as before.
“But still,” says Sophie Fornairon, “things have changed.”
Continue reading...Pakistanis urged to ‘live with the virus’; employee in Israeli prime minister’s office tests positive for Covid-19; Czech Republic will welcome foreign travellers from 15 June
UK ministers have been accused of not taking seriously the threat posed to black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) Britons by Covid-19, after it was reported that the release of an official review of the issue had been delayed over fears of potential civil unrest.
According to Sky News, officials are concerned about the effect the publication could have amid global anger over the death of George Floyd, an African American man who pleaded for air as a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee on his neck.
Related: Ministers accused of not taking Covid-19 threat to BAME Britons seriously
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Continue reading...The pope warns that people are more important than economies as countries ease lockdowns
Global coronavirus infections have passed the 6 million mark as Latin America hit the grim milestone of 50,000 deaths with Brazil alone accounting for half of those fatalities.
With at least 369,000 deaths confirmed worldwide since the pandemic began in China in January – and that number believed to be an underestimate – Brazil’s virus death toll of 28,834 has now surpassed that of France with the country reporting 33,274 new infections in the past 24 hours.
Continue reading...From Berlin to Madrid the movies are back, albeit with hygiene and distancing restrictions
As Madrid’s spring evenings warm into summer nights, cinema-goers are parking up to watch Grease. In Munich, they are taking al fresco seats to follow the adventures of a communist kangaroo with a penchant for boozy chocolates, and in Prague they are witnessing a croaky vigilante work out some profound childhood traumas.
As Europe begins to stir from its Covid-19 lockdown, people bloated by two-month boxset binges have a new way to feed their entertainment needs as they emerge, blinking, into the daylight. Or, rather, the twilight.
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