Spain Notes, Oct 3: Murcia fire + Sánchez
1/ Two of the three nightclubs in Murcia that were destroyed by fire on Sunday morning were operating without the correct licences. The owner of Teatre also used to own another nearby club, Flamingoville (San Pedro, Murcia) that also went up in flames, in 2019, and also didn’t have a licence.
2/ EFE reported that Teatre had, though, and despite being ordered closed the previous year, somehow then passed a municipal health and safety inspection in March…this year.
3/ An investigating court in Murcia has opened a case for 13 counts of negligent manslaughter due to the fire. If found guilty, any accused could face up to nine years in jail.
4/ The stories of the victims have started to appear: football fans, partygoers, couples, mums, friends, a waitress, a builder, a domestic worker, a chef, a tractor driver…and both parents of three children.
5/ King Felipe formally named Pedro Sánchez as the new candidate for PM, after a brief round of talks with party leaders. He now has a few weeks, until the end of November, to try to make that happen.
6/ Sánchez said just before lunch that he was “hopeful” for what might now be achieved in the next parliament and that a right-wing PP-Vox “government of involution” had just been rejected. He said he would concentrate on the one hand on “social progress” and on the other on “coexistence between Spaniards and coexistence between the peoples of Spain”.
7/ El Mundo reports the government is already working on a 2024 budget plan…with the regional nationalists, in order to be able to try to govern the country in some way for the next four years beyond the confidence debate.
8/ Feijóo (PP) said Sánchez now had “less support than he did a month ago”. This is not true. The vote was 178-172 for the Speaker’s vote in August and 178-172 for the vote against Feijóo last week.
9/ Vox is obviously against the idea. Abascal said yesterday after his audience with the King that his party was launching “an alert” about “the enemies of Spain and of the constitutional order”. They are, he announced, “at the gates of taking over the core institutions of the state”.
10/ Such language is reminiscent of Pablo Iglesias’s “antifascist alert” after the regional elections in Andalusia in 2018, when Vox got its first decent results.
11/ In the Almendralejo (Extremadura) deepfake AI porn photos case, the prosecutor is now investigating a total of 26 teenage boys, five of whom are under the age of 14, so not criminally responsible. The rest are aged 14-17. “Around thirty girls” constitute the victims.
12/ Madrid has found some 14 million year-old elephant remains while building a logistics centre for firefighters: jawbones, tusks and other bits of eight examples of the Gomphotherium genus, that have now been handed over to the regional archaeological museum.
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