Shorouk Express
Valencia toughens penalties for urinating in the street or abandoning furniture, Spanish PM to meet Chinese President next month and more news from Spain on Monday March 24th.
Spanish PM to meet Chinese President next month
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will travel to China next month to meet with President Xi Jinping, just seven months after his last visit to the country, a government spokeswoman announced.
The Socialist premier will also visit Vietnam during his trip to Asia, the spokeswoman added without giving exact dates for his tour of the two nations.
The trip comes as the European Union is rethinking its global trading relationships amid turmoil caused by the trade war launched by US President Donald Trump against competitors and partners alike since he took office in January.
Sánchez called for a “fair trade order” during his last trip to Beijing in September 2024 as tensions between China and the EU were escalating over the bloc’s decision to impose hefty tariffs on Chinese-made electric cars.
The EU argues the tariffs are needed to protect European manufacturers from unfair competition from state-sponsored Chinese firms.
Valencia toughens penalties for urinating in the street or abandoning furniture
Valencia city council is to increase fines for urinating in the street or leaving furniture next to rubbish bins.
A modification made to the city’s cleaning ordinance approved last week establishes fines that will range from €750 for minor offences to €3,000 for very serious offences, with an upward scale for sanctions depending on the impact on public health, hygiene and the safety of local people and environment.
There will also be tougher penalties for leaving building waste, not cleaning up animal excrement, dumping waste in an uncontrolled manner or graffitiing on protected buildings.
READ ALSO: Does Spain have a dog poo problem?
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Catalonia tests court judgements written with artificial intelligence
Catalonian courts are testing artificial intelligence (AI) technology as part of a pilot plan that seeks to speed up the drafting of court rulings.
The aim is to drastically reduce the time judges spend on them. While it takes a magistrate an average of two hours to write up a draft ruling, an AI assistant can do it in just twenty minutes. State broadcaster RTVE reports that this could mean annual time savings of more than 600 hours of work per judge, which would allow the courts to manage a greater volume of cases with the same number of staff.
The initiative, promoted by the Catalan government, will initially be applied to less complex procedures, such as claims for mortgage clauses or transport litigation.
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‘Surf and turf’ protest in northern Spain against factory and mine
Thousands of people on boats and on land staged a “surf and turf” protest in the northwestern region of Galicia on Saturday against a planned textile factory and the reopening of a copper mine.
Protesters in the coastal town of A Pobra do Caraminal decried what they said were the environmental risks posed by both facilities.
Organisers — who termed the rally a “surf and turf” protest — said they had suspicions about the plans by Portuguese company Altri to build a factory to make lyocell, a semi-synthetic textile.
They said they feared it was just cover to build a cellulose plant that would pollute the region’s Ulloa River and its Arousa Estuary.
The site of the factory is in Palas de Rei, close to a section of the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route used by hundreds of thousands of people every year.
The organisers — calling themselves the Platform for the Defence of the Arousa Estuary — said they also opposed the planned reopening of an open-cast copper mine in Touro, just east of the city of Santiago de Compostela. The mine was closed in 1986.
Manoel Santos, a regional representative for Greenpeace, said the Altri textile factory “could spell the death of the Arousa Estuary”.
Galicia’s regional government has declared the factory to be ecologically viable.
A spokeswoman for Greenfiber, Altri’s subsidiary in charge of the project, denied any pollution risk. She told Galician public television that the factory “scrupulously respects all EU environmental rules”.
