The Leader Daily Briefing – Wednesday 10 January 2024

Here is The Leader daily briefing with the news from around Spain, things to do locally, the forecast for the day, and other notable events Today in Spain.

News Around Spain

Congress will hold an extraordinary plenary session on Wednesday to debate the entire amendments to the Amnesty Law registered by the PP and Vox, the deficit objectives and what is known as the ‘expenditure ceiling’ and the validation of three decree laws approved by the Government last December, including that relating to measures to alleviate the effects of the economic crisis. This plenary session has to be held at the Senate headquarters because the Congressional chamber will be under construction throughout January due to the installation of touch screens in the seats. It is expected that later this month another plenary session will debate the reform of article 49 of the Constitution aimed at replacing the term “handicapped” with “people with disabilities.”

The Guardia Civil arrested a man as the alleged perpetrator of a crime against public health, by producing and marketing canned food, seizing another 131 boxes with some 4,100 jars of preserved tuna from a factory without any type of health control or health measures. In addition, it lacked a health registration or activity licence. Following the inspection, the samples were analysed, it was detected that the histamine limit was higher than the 77% established for this type of preserves. In total, the Guardia Civil has seized more than 2.5 tons of food prepared for distribution without any type of health control.

More than 4.7 million travellers chose Renfe for their trips during the Christmas holidays, during the period which ran from last December 22 to January 8. During this period, Renfe has put nearly 20,000 high-speed and medium-distance trains into circulation and achieved an average punctuality rate of 95%. To meet the high demand of travellers during the holidays, the company offered more than 5 million seats to travel on its trains, reinforcing the usual offer on the most demanded services, which are those that connect Madrid with Andalusia, Catalonia, and the Valencian Community, and Galicia.

The Council of Ministers approved the National Plan against Radon, an odourless, invisible, radioactive gas naturally released from rocks, soil, and water. Radon can get into homes and buildings through small cracks or holes and build up in the air. Over time, breathing in high levels of radon can cause lung cancer. The Plan describes the risks derived from exposure to it, analyses the situation in Spain with respect to protection measures and includes the strategies and actions that will be developed by the different administrations during a period of 5 years. One action will raise awareness among the public, professionals, and administrations about the effects of radon on health and, in particular, in combination with tobacco.

The Provincial Court of Asturias has sentenced a bank to compensate a client with 5,828.35 euro for the fraudulent use of a credit card by third parties after downloading the entity’s app. The victim fell foul of smishing, a receiving a fraudulent data capture link through an SMS text message, which resulted in unauthorised charged being made to the account. The ruling indicates that the lack of coherence of the message when addressed to the client or the omission of some punctuation marks cannot be considered sufficient to alert a person that this message is fraudulent. Nor can an average user be considered aware that the website they accessed was a Russian domain. The court emphasises that carrying out anti-phishing campaigns warning its clients of cyber dangers was not enough to avoid the banking entity’s responsibility in this case.

To read these articles in full, visit SpainToday.news

Things to Do Today

The Pascual Flores pilot boat is open for visitors in Torrevieja on Wednesdays through to Sundays until 29 January.

For more local events, pick up The Leader newspaper every Monday, and This is Torrevieja for Torrevieja events.

Local Markets

Midweek markets can be found today at Guardamar del Segura, La Mata (Torrevieja), San Isidro, and San Miguel de Salinas.

The roads will of course be busy around those locations.

Traffic and Travel

Although normality has mostly returned to the roads, with the usual hotspots busy once again, coinciding with the weekends of the winter months, an increase in traffic is expected on the main routes, national roads, and motorways towards rest areas, second homes and mountain areas for practicing winter sports. We will look at that in more detail nearer the weekend.

Flight wise, with 21,200 flights scheduled for Wednesday across Europe, we still have that potential problem of capacity issues over France whilst new equipment is being tested for the next 4 weeks, resulting in some flights between the UK and Spain diverting over the Bay of Biscay, resulting in longer flying times and knock on delays. Strong winds are forecast over the northwest of Spain, which would see the diverted aircraft having to pass through that potentially turbulent area. Overall, 80% of the affected flights on Wednesday will be exclusively in France.

Although anyone working in the sector, or the emergency services would testify, Euro Control may have made a fatal mistake by exclaiming that they expect a particular day in which they used the infamous “Q” word (if you don´t know what that means, sorry, but there is no way seasoned commentators would ever explain).

Finally, although it shouldn’t affect us in Spain directly, a military exercise will take place over the Black Sea, from 10th to 11th of January 2024.

For information and updates about driving in Spain, visit N332.es

Midweek Weather

Just a reminder regarding the weather that rain is expected in many places on Wednesday, with some localised flooding possible, and then later in the week the temperatures will drop with snow being the star of the show in some locations throughout the country.

Locally, in our region, we are expecting rain of over 5 mm today.

For the next 10 days we will see a maximum temperature of 20°c on Monday, minimum of 9°c on Saturday, and the windiest day a week on Saturday with gusts of up to 66 kmph.

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