Spain's Pedro Sánchez sorry after top aide resigns in corruption scandal
Amid mounting speculation over his own future, the prime minister called a news conference in a bid to distance himself from the creeping scandal. He said he knew absolutely nothing about the corruption affair and instead pledged to restructure the leadership of his Socialist PSOE party.He rejected calls for early elections, insisting the next national vote would not take place until 2027 and his government would continue its "political project"."This is not about me, and it's not about the Socialist party," he said.Despite his seven years in power, Sánchez heads a shaky coalition, secured after the conservative Popular Party won 2023 elections but failed to form a government. While the opposition demanded answers on Thursday, deputy prime minister Yolanda Díaz from left-wing coalition partner Sumar said she also wanted explanations. It was Sánchez's first appearance answering media questions since a national power outage that hit Spain in April.Speaking from Socialist party (PSOE) headquarters in Madrid, the prime minister said he had until Thursday morning been persuaded of Santos Cerdán's integrity and wanted to apologise to Spanish citizens."There is no such thing as zero corruption," he said. "We shouldn't have trusted him."Sanchez said that like many others he had his faults and asked the Spanish people for forgiveness.He went on to accuse the conservatives of besieging his government on a multitude of issues.Sánchez has faced repeated political crises and in April 2024 threatened to stand down.He took five days to decide on his future in April 2024, when a court decided to open preliminary proceedings against his wife over allegations surrounding her business dealings.Then too he called a televised news conference, and in a moment of high drama announced he had decided to stay on in the job.
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The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Europe wildfires map: Spain deploys nearly 2,000 soldiers to tackle major blazes
Spain has deployed nearly 2,000 troops to help firefighters tackle wildfires that have devastated swathes of the country, as temperatures hit highs of 45C. A severe 16-day long heatwave has fuelled around 20 wildfires, burning more than 115,000 hectares in the regions of Galicia and Castile and Leon over the past week. Meanwhile flames have spread to the southern slopes of the Picos de Europa mountain range and Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez cut his holiday from the Canary Islands short to visit areas devastated by the wildfires, proposing a 'grand state pact' to prepare the country for climate-related events such as wildfires and hurricanes, according to The Times. He said: 'We need to do a thorough analysis of how we can resize our prevention and response capabilities to the climate emergency. We must leave this issue outside of partisan strife. We are all part of the same state, and we must all work in the same direction.' Defence Minister Margarita Robles told radio station Cadena SER that the country hadn't experienced such a fire situation in 20 years: "The fires have special characteristics as a result of climate change and this huge heatwave." She said thick smoke was affecting the work of water-carrying helicopters and aircraft. The Interior ministry says 27 people have been arrested and 92 are under investigation for suspected arson since June. Wildfires in southern Europe have grown so devastating that 155,000 hectares of land have been burnt in Portugal, according to the ICNF forestry protection institute. This is three times the average for this period between 2006 to 2024. About half of that area burned in the past three days. While Portugal is set for cooler weather in the coming days after several woodland fires, the country's resources have been stretched after over 4,000 firefighters and more than 1,300 vehicles were deployed on Sunday, as well as 17 aircraft, according to the Civil Protection Agency. Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service. Scientists say that climate change is exacerbating the frequency and intensity of heat and dryness in parts of Europe, making the region more vulnerable to wildfires. Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Albania have also requested help from the EU's firefighting force in recent days to deal with forest fires. The force has already been activated as many times this year as in all of last year's summer fire season. Recent wildfires in Turkey have killed 19 people and on Sunday, memorials to World War I's Gallipoli campaign were evacuated, as were six villages in the Canakkale province for precautionary measures.. Some 1,300 firefighting personnel backed by 30 aircraft were battling the blaze, according to the General Directorate of Forestry. A wildfire on the peninsula to the north of the Dardanelles Strait led to the closure of visitor facilities at Gallipoli, the site's management said. The area is dotted with cemeteries, memorials and other remnants of battles waged between Ottoman and Allied troops in has been struck by hundreds of fires since late June, fueled by record-breaking temperatures, dry conditions and strong winds.
Times
4 days ago
- Times
Constable or Lowry: which artist best represents Britain?
Paintbrushes at dawn. An art critic and a novelist have started an excitable row about which Spanish painting is the country's most significant. The critic Miguel Ángel Cajigal holds that Picasso's Guernica, a powerful (and internationally famous) antiwar canvas, is the obvious contender, and said as much on the radio. The novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte, who professed himself 'in shock' at this, countered with Francisco Goya's Fight with Cudgels, a picture of two men viciously slugging it out in the mud, painted in the 1820s. 'Picasso painted Guernica, but Goya painted our soul,' he wrote, in what is at the very least a damning indictment of the bad-tempered state of Spanish politics. That you can perfectly well argue for either of these paintings is something that neither man seems willing to accept. But what does it mean, 'significant'? Should such a painting 'define' a nation? Should it speak to its psyche, in the way that Pérez-Reverte apparently believes Goya's brutal scene does? Should it be globally famous, like Guernica — or should it simply stop us in our tracks? • The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for August 2025 And what, then, would ours be? France has Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, of course. I'm writing this in Scotland — would its be Henry Raeburn's Skating Minister, or does it have to have a stag in it? For Britain as a whole — whose national dish could reasonably be argued to be chicken tikka masala, a hybrid of cuisines born out of the colonial project — our 'most significant' artwork is a pretty complex question. Is it Constable's The Hay Wain (1821), evoking a preindustrial view of Britain where a pretty country pub is always just around the corner? Or is that nostalgia, making it unsuitable even if it is something we're sorely given to as a nation? • Read more art reviews, guides and interviews If it's impact you're looking for, you could do worse than Mark Wallinger's Turner prizewinning work State Britain (2007), which recreated Brian Haw's 40-metre antiwar protest camp that sat on Parliament Square in Westminster for nearly 10 years. With exhortations for peace and offerings from the public, including children's toys, combined with images of extreme human suffering, it created an environment that allowed viewers to consider the horrors of war — to contemplate the uncontemplatable. Guernica, in a different way, does the same thing. And Wallinger's work speaks to so much of what we think and know about ourselves. It reminds us of the huge numbers of Britons who turned out to protest against the war in Iraq, and of our affection for the plucky underdog, what the artist called Haw's 'single-minded tenacity'. As an imperfect answer to an unanswerable question, State Britain gets my vote. Nancy Durrant Compared with France, Italy and Spain, Britain has produced few great painters. We're generally better at writing. But there is something novelistic about the painter William Hogarth, whose pictures tell stories and have something very ungrand and deflationary and British about them. They're also genuinely comic. My favourite is Tête à Tête from Hogarth's series Marriage à la Mode. The marriage is already a disaster — the couple are bored, chaotic, unfaithful and overspending. The despairing butler leaves the room with a sheaf of bills. It's full of novel-worthy detail (the dog pulling the woman's cap out of the husband's pocket, the broken-nosed statue on the mantelpiece signifying infidelity). Compare this to the pompous and simpering aristos having their portraits painted in autocratic France at the same time. No country but Britain could have produced a painter as funny, as democratic and as splendidly cynical as Hogarth. James Marriott Here's old industrial Britain: little undistinguished figures, a couple of children, a trader's cart, smoke rising into the grey sky after another working day. Lowry's Going to the Match is more famous and purposeful, but this evening workforce speaks of modest duty. So does Lowry himself: more dutiful than happy, but fond of his home region; anonymous in a raincoat, too diffident to accept a knighthood. Made a coronation artist in 1953, he, as usual, just lovingly depicted the crowds, Queen Elizabeth's golden coach half-hidden in the throng. Libby Purves No painting captures Britain's mixture of pride and melancholy quite like Turner's Fighting Temeraire. The Trafalgar warship is hauled away for scrap, sail giving way to steam. Politicians love it: it's been on the £20 note, quoted in Brexit speeches and wheeled out in essays on decline. I live near Turner's recently restored house in Twickenham: it's open to the public and you can wander around, retracing his steps, trying to fathom his grumpy genius. He saw beauty that others missed, beauty that's all around. And it's British beauty — the picture of constant renewal. Fraser Nelson Though painted in a very different style, John Singer Sargent's vast 1919 canvas Gassed is comparable to Picasso's Guernica in its shock impact, tragic power and its depiction of 20th-century warfare's horrific consequences. It also stands alongside Wilfred Owen's bitterly ironic poem Dulce et decorum est as one of the first works of art or literature to capture the ghastly reality of chemical weapons — in this case, a mustard-gas attack that has blinded or poisoned the line of bandaged Tommies staggering along to, probably, a very short and bleak future. Once seen, it's a painting that haunts you all your life. Richard Morrison The National Gallery's Wilton Diptych is not only this country's most important artwork but its most magical. That we have it at all, one of a handful of English panel paintings to have survived from the Middle Ages, seems akin to necromancy. Thanks to the Reformation in the 16th century, and the activities of Oliver Cromwell a century after that, the earliest chapters of our art history have largely been taken from us. Painted by an unknown artist for Richard II towards the end of the 1300s, this folding pair of panels depicts his coronation before a trio of saints and a host of angels, the latter looking like bewinged girl guides. The Wilton Diptych gives a ravishing — and, to be frank, heartbreaking — insight into our collective loss. Anna Murphy I have chosen Whistlejacket by George Stubbs because a) it is lovely and b) it speaks to my childhood obsession with horses and the fact that for hours I would try — and fail miserably — to draw them (I could just about do the head and neck but never the body and legs, which always resembled those of a panto horse). Horses were, to me (still are, along with dogs), nature's most beautiful animal creation, and Whistlejacket, rearing magnificently, hoofs pawing the air, and with real, conscious character in his face and eyes, is a pin-up. Stubbs, aka 'Liverpool's Leonardo' because of his anatomical attention to detail, dissecting equine corpses the better to understand their bodies, painted the stallion not in a field or even with another animal but alone, isolated, against a plain yellowish backdrop, almost as though he is in a studio, which is pleasing. It creates a sense that he is as aesthetically worthy of a portrait in his own right as any king, queen or castle. Quite right. Carol Midgley You would think from the paintings commonly labelled Britain's favourites, from the likes of JMW Turner and John Constable, that the most important things about us are our sea and countryside. But surely the defining thing about this country was the Industrial Revolution. It not only changed our economics, landscape and demographics, it changed the dynamics of the world. And this is why, for me, the Wolverhampton-born artist Edwin Butler Bayliss (1874-1950) is so important. Self-taught, he painted the blast furnaces, coalmines, factories and collieries of the Black Country with the eye of a French impressionist. A landscape that an American consul to Birmingham once described as 'black by day and red by night', and that is said to have been the inspiration for Mordor in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Turner captured our light, Constable conveyed the beauty of our land, but a painting such as In the Black Country depicts nothing less than the fire in Britain's soul. Sathnam Sanghera
Scottish Sun
4 days ago
- Scottish Sun
Lost girl, 6, sexually assaulted at major waterpark after stranger ‘offered to help her before dragging her into woods'
The attack comes after a significant rise in sexual assaults in swimming pools reported in Germany PARK HORROR Lost girl, 6, sexually assaulted at major waterpark after stranger 'offered to help her before dragging her into woods' Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) A SIX-year-old girl was sexually assaulted after getting separated from her parents at a water park - with the depraved perpetrator still on the run. The horrifying ordeal took place when the suspect approached the child offering to help - but then dragged her to the woods before sexually abusing her. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 3 A six-year-old was reportedly dragged out of a water park before being sexually assaulted in Germany (stock) Credit: Alamy 3 She was sexually abused after losing sight of her parents Credit: Google maps The child lost sight of her parents during a visit to the popular Rulatica water park in Germany. The facility, run by Europa-park, is located in Rust, Baden-Württemberg, near the French border. German police said the sick attack took place on Saturday, August 9, L'Alsace reported. After sexually abusing her, the suspect reportedly left her alone in the woods. She was then found by a local passerby around 10pm the same day. The area she was discovered in was about 5km from the water park, and she was only wearing a swimsuit. The suspect is reportedly a 31-year-old Romanian national. He was living in the local region at the time of the attack, reports say. Cops are desperately continuing their manhunt for the suspect. And they put out an appeal for any information that may lead to his arrest. I was sexually assaulted hundreds of feet in air while on paraglide ride during Tunisia holiday… I felt violated and dirty Police said: "Anyone present in Rulantica or in the wooded area north of the park on Saturday between 8:20 p.m. and 10:20 p.m. who may have noticed the presence of the man and the girl should contact the German authorities." The beloved Rulantica water park can hold a maximum of 6,000 visitors per day. It comes after there were reportedly hundreds of reports of sexual assaults in public swimming pools in Germany - in what has been called an epidemic. In one of the worst hit regions, 74 alleged attacks have been recorded recently with several involving children - including eight young girls in one day. The issue started to raise questions across Germany after a concerning number of reports were made in June. Cops arrested four Syrian suspects, aged 18 to 28, the next month and accused them of sexually assaulting up to eight girls in a public swimming pool in Hesse. The victims were aged between 11 to 16 and had all been at the Barbarossabad pool on the same day. Criminal charges were filed against all of the suspects, who were also been banned from the pool following the harrowing incident.
