Spanish PM Sanchez's shake-up of Socialist party eclipsed by new sexual harassment scandal
Francisco Salazar offered his resignation as a deputy in the organization's secretariat and asked for the allegations to be investigated, the Socialist party (PSOE) said in a statement.
The PSOE said it would begin an investigation immediately, adding that no allegations had been made through it usual channels.
Online left-wing news website elDiario.es quoted a PSOE employee who accused Salazar of making obscene comments about her clothes and body, invitations to dine alone with him and offers to sleep at his home while working in a role junior to him at Moncloa Palace, the prime minister's official residence.
Reuters was not immediately able to contact Salazar for comment.
The scandal involving Salazar came just as Sanchez was scheduled to speak at the PSOE's headquarters in Madrid, where he was due to announce measures to assuage members of his party concerned about the damage to its reputation and its ability to survive.
On Monday, a Supreme Court judge ordered that former PSOE official Santos Cerdan be held in pre-trial detention after he was accused of orchestrating kickbacks in exchange for awarding public works contracts.
Cerdan denies the allegations, which are part of a wider corruption inquiry threatening to destabilise Sanchez's government.
The minority coalition led by the Socialists relies on a loose alliance of nationalist and far-left parties to pass legislation. Until now, those allies have said they do not plan to support the conservative People's Party's call for a no-confidence vote that would precipitate an election.
Senior party figures arriving at the PSOE headquarters were met with boos from protesters gathered across the road and were forced to raise their voices when declaring their support for Sanchez as the crowd chanted "out!, out!"
While some said they were confident that the measures Sanchez was set to announce would defuse the scandal, others appeared more sceptical.
Castile-La Mancha Governor Emiliano Garcia-Page described the scandal as one of the most serious in the half century since the restoration of democracy in Spain following the death of dictator Francisco Franco.
"The leadership needs to understand that if it doesn't offer an exit, if it doesn't offer solutions, then it's part of the problem," he said.
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Telegraph
3 hours ago
- Telegraph
Spanish government investigates judge who charged PM's wife with corruption
The judge who charged Pedro Sánchez's wife with embezzlement of public funds is under investigation after complaints by a close ally of the socialist leader. Félix Bolaños, the Spanish justice minister, made two complaints against Judge Juan Carlos Peinado after he interrogated him in the case against Begoña Gómez, who is married to the Spanish prime minister. She is alleged to have used state funds to pay her assistant Cristina Álvarez, an employee of the prime minister's office, for help with personal matters, which she denies. Ms Álvarez has also been charged with the same crime in connection with Ms Gómez's academic post at Madrid's Complutense University, where she ran a course despite not having a degree. The prime minister has denounced the latest charges against his wife as Right-wing 'lawfare', designed to bring down his broad Leftist coalition government. Mr Bolaños, a Sánchez loyalist, was questioned as a witness in the case last April. He was the prime minister's secretary-general when Ms Álvarez was hired in 2018. The case has dominated the polarised world of Spanish politics for the past 16 months. The General Council of the Judiciary, which oversees the legal system in Spain, has opened a probe into Judge Peinado over allegations he distorted the minister's testimony. In a testy interrogation, the judge accused the minister of answering 'evasively' and told him: 'I don't know why you're smiling.' The Supreme Court later turned down the judge's request to open a case into the minister. The opening of an investigation into the judge is a first step which could lead to a case that could carry a sanction. In the latest blow against Mr Sánchez's embattled government, which is embroiled in a separate labyrinthe corruption scandal, Ms Gómez must testify in court in September on the embezzlement charges. Her case began in April last year with accusations of influence peddling and corruption in business. It has since mushroomed to include professional intrusion and misappropriation before the newest charge of embezzlement, which was reported on Tuesday. Shortly after the investigation was first revealed last year, Mr Sánchez withdrew from public life for five days of reflection over his future. He refused to speak to anyone except his family after criticising attacks by the Right-wing media on his wife before finally resolving to stay in office. Mr Sánchez has also faced claims that Socialist party (PSOE) officials created a job especially for his musician brother, David. The prime minister has been battling for his political survival since Santos Cerdán, his long-term ally and former party secretary, was arrested in June on charges of bribery, criminal conspiracy and influence peddling. A police report revealed his alleged involvement in charging companies for accessing public works contracts in his home region of Navarre and elsewhere. Mr Cerdán backed Mr Sánchez from party outsider to winner in two primary processes a decade ago, playing a key role in his ascent to power. Two other members of the prime minister's inner circle – Jose Luis Abalos, the former transport minister, and aide Koldo Garcia – have also been embroiled in the investigation. They deny any wrongdoing. There was further embarrassment for Mr Sánchez, who prides himself on his progressive and feminist policies, when secret recordings underpinning the investigation emerged. In them, former comrades of Mr Sánchez discuss the merits and evaluate different sex workers, which the prime minister said he found disgusting.
Times
6 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
6 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.
