Spanish News Today Editors Roundup Weekly Bulletin Oct 13

Flight fails

The airlines are having a terrible week of it, with one drama after another it seems. On Tuesday, Air Europa, Spain’s third-largest carrier, contacted all of its customers informing them that their system had been hacked and that the fraudsters had managed to grab the numbers, expiry dates and CVC PINs of around 100,000 bank cards.

 

They advised anyone who had booked a flight through their airline to immediately call the bank and cancel their cards although to date, there’s no evidence that the criminal have used any of them for fraudulent activity.

 

This is the second infiltration the company has endured since 2018 and Air Europa has confirmed that the cyberattack was carried out by a group of Russian hackers through a technique known as web skimming. Last time this happened, the fraudulent use of 4,000 cards was detected, just under 1% of those stolen.

 

 

There was chaos at Luton Airport earlier this week when a massive fire in the Terminal 2 car park forced the closure of the entire facility and dozens of flights were cancelled to and from Spain.

 

While more than 100 firefighters and three helicopters tackled the blaze, Luton suspended all activity until 3pm, and although operations returned to normal after that, the knock-on effect lasted well into the following day.

 

A few days before, there was major panic on a British Airways flight from Barcelona to the UK when four passengers became seriously ill amid talk of “unknown fumes” in the cabin. Ambulance crews, a team of firefighters and a hazardous response crew rushed to the runway as soon as the plane touched down in Heathrow and the poorly passengers were treated by paramedics.

 

Ultimately though, the chemical readings inside the plane all came back within the normal range so the authorities are still trying to figure out what happened.

 

Just the previous day, a Ryanair flight travelling to Hamburg in Germany from Palma de Mallorca was forced to make an emergency landing due to an in-flight engine failure. The Boeing 737 MAX carrying 201 passengers was forced into a holding pattern for around 80 minutes in order to burn enough fuel so it could land safely.

 

Over to Jet2 now and passengers were left shocked and appalled when a 61-year-old British man dropped dead just as the plane was getting ready to take off from Spain’s Reus Airport in the Costa Dorada, near Barcelona.

 

The unfortunate passenger had lost consciousness by the time paramedics arrived on board and despite their best efforts, he was pronounced dead of a suspected heart attack there in the cabin.

The plane was originally scheduled to depart for the East Midlands shortly after 11am but it ended up being delayed for seven hours.

 

Shoppers in the Region of Murcia are excited for a new addition to the popular Parque Almenara shopping centre in Lorca after it was announced that Primark would be opening its third Murcia store.

There are already Primark stores in the Nueva Condomina and Espacio Mediterráneo shopping centres in Murcia capital and Cartagena, respectively, and the opening of a new one in the Region’s third city, Lorca, has been greeted with enthusiasm.

Primark is one of those beloved brands that never fails, and it’s not only great for shoppers, but also for the local community as it will create many new jobs and bring in an estimated 1.5 million more customers to the mall every year.

While there is as yet no set date for the new Primark to open, it will certainly be before the end of the year. In the meantime, a new Leroy Merlín DIY and hardware store is due to open later this month, while there will be other additions such as sportswear shop Base, which will open in November 2023; multi-brand fashion chain Cool (selling Levis, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Armani and more), due to open before Christmas; and a Fitness Park gym opening in early 2024.

Sounds smashing, about as smashing as the car that ploughed through a wall in Murcia’s Camposol urbanisation last weekend. The silver hatchback left the road after coming off a roundabout on the main Avenida de los Covachos dual carriageway near Camposol Sector B, mounting the pavement and crashing through a brick wall.

Thankfully, nobody was injured and the car ended up in an undeveloped plot of land, so no harm was really done. The driver of the vehicle fled the scene before the police arrived, but the registered owner has been reported to the Guardia Civil.

Local residents have been complaining for some time about how fast cars speed down this stretch of dual carriageway, where the limit is supposed to be a slow and steady 40kmh. Now it remains to be seen whether the car was insured and if that insurance will extend to repairing the partly demolished wall!

Across the Region of Murcia as a whole, the flu jab season started at the beginning of this week, with vaccines being given out to the elderly and vulnerable people such as those with weakened immune systems, as well as health workers and staff in nursing homes. Given the surge in coronavirus cases in Spain right now, the annual flu shot is being combined with a Covid booster to provide extra protection, and unvaccinated children between 6 months and 5 years old are also being given the jab.

What’s new this year is that Murcia, following the advice of Spain’s Ministry of Health, will be including smokers in the risk group for those eligible to receive a joint flu-Covid shot. Presumably this is because smoking reduces the immune system and makes people who smoke more susceptible to catching viruses. But it raises a lot of questions about the ethics and practicalities of such a policy.

For instance, how will the smokers be identified and contacted to come for their flu jab at the health centre? Will there be signs up at the tobacconist’s inviting them to go along? And what if someone who doesn’t normally smoke but wants to be vaccinated out of turn pretends to be a 40-a-day chain smoker to try and cheat the system? How will authorities prevent this?

And, perhaps most perplexingly of all for non-smokers, why should smokers be allowed the ‘privilege’ of being vaccinated and protected against disease when it was their choice to weaken their immune system by smoking? Growing old is inevitable and most people do not contract a serious immunodeficiency disease on purpose, so it makes sense for such people to be vaccinated, but smoking is a lifestyle choice, so should smokers be given preferential treatment when it comes to getting vaccinated?

In any case, anybody who wishes to can get vaccinated with the influenza-Covid jab, but must wait until after the campaign to vaccinate everyone else has ended in mid-November.

If you’re looking for something to do in Murcia, a visit to the Experiencia 43 centre, home of Licor 43, ‘Spain’s favourite liquer’, is always recommendable. The visitors’ centre in Cartagena has two guided tour packages to choose from, both of which involve a visit to the museum and production plant of Licor 43, as well as a guided tasting session of the company’s line of yummy flavoured liquers.

Tours are offered in a variety of languages, including English, and it is hard to find anyone who says they did not enjoy this unique experience. The only problem might be finding volunteers to be the designated driver on the return journey!

Aside from this, there are loads of things going on in Murcia this weekend, from Oktoberfest in San Javier to a shopping fest with great discounts in Cartagena and the annual Fiestas in Torre Pacheco, and much more!

There was a horror crash that rocked the Andalucía city of Cadiz after the brakes failed on a city bus last Monday afternoon, leaving three people dead and one in a critical condition in hospital.

It happened at 3.45pm on Monday October 9, when the vehicle lost control while it was coming down from the Puente de la Constitución bridge, swerving into the opposite lane of traffic and smashing into pedestrians on the footpath.

It seems that the bus’s brakes didn’t work, despite the vehicle having passed its ITV roadworthiness test just two months before. Three people were killed when the vehicle mounted the pavement at speed, and an 86-year-old man from Portugal had to be rushed to hospital for emergency surgery to save his life.

The driver, who had worked as a bus driver for the company for the last 10 years and tested negative for alcohol on a breathalyser test, was also taken to hospital although he didn’t sustain any injuries. Incredibly, none of the 30 students from the Faculty of Nursing and Physiotherapy who were travelling on the bus were harmed.

As if that weren’t bad enough, last weekend there was yet another beach drowning on the Costa del Sol, despite the fact that the summer tourist season is now over. The good weather was still continuing, of course, and it just goes to show that it’s not only in summer that such unfortunate accidents can happen in the sea and in swimming pools in Spain.

This time round, it was an elderly foreign man who was pulled unconscious from the water at Marbella’s Playa Cabopino beach. Those onlookers who pulled him from the water called emergency services and, while they waited, tried to revive the man with CPR, but to no avail.

When emergency responders arrived, the man was sadly pronounced to have died right there on the sand. His wife also had to be treated by medical staff at the scene before being taken to the Costa del Sol Hospital in Marbella.

If anything, while it can be inviting to go for a swim in the sea on a sunny October day, it is all the more important to take care in the water in autumn and winter as conditions can be colder and choppier than they first appear.

A rescue of a different kind had to take place on a city street in Almería capital last weekend after a horse was found, malnourished and slumped on the ground, by street cleaners. It’s unclear where the animal came from, who she belonged to and how she ended up there, but police were quickly called and transferred her to the Municipal Zoosanitary Centre, where she is now being treated and cared for by specialised staff.

They say she is already recovering well and eating plenty, getting her strength back up. Now it just remains for whoever abandoned her there to be found and hopefully prosecuted for the crime of animal mistreatment.

After so much grim news, it’s nice to end on a lighter and sweeter note. This week, that’s provided by UK Ambassador to Spain, Hugh Elliott, who presented a heartfelt and really quite thoughtful gift of homemade Seville orange marmalade to the Mayor of Seville.

This was at the first Seville Hay Forum this week, where Elliot personally gifted Seville Mayor José Luis Sanz with several jars of the sticky stuff that he had actually made himself, using an old recipe handed down from his grandmother!

“At home it was always my job to make the marmalade,” he joked. With this homemade present, Mr Elliott was reversing a custom dating back to 1906, when Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg began shipping the bitter Seville oranges back to the British royal family from Spain after she married King Alfonso XIII.

And it’s fair to say the mayor was touched.

“I don’t usually like marmalade but I have to say that this one has ‘un toque especial’ [a special touch]. It is sweeter than other marmalades. From tomorrow, it will become part of my family breakfast table,” Mr Sanz enthused.

The Ambassador summed it up nicely: “Diplomacy is not just about negotiations and international treaties. For me, diplomacy is about sewing links and celebrating the things that unite us.”