Coal Miners' protests get more violent as rockets fired at a Civil Guard helicopter

The coal miners’ strike is continuing and the protests are getting more dramatic. They have been on strike since May 30 after the announcement of a 60% cut in the grants for coal, announced in the State Budget. It’s a cut of 200 million € and many of the man are the third generation in the mines. The document will be debated later this week in the upper chamber of the Senate, but already the miners say they are disappointed as no member of the PP has added any amendment. A miner has been arrested for launching rockets against a Guardia Civil helicopter in Asturias, although the exact location of where that happened has not been released. We know the rockets did not hit the craft and the miner will appear in court shortly. Protests in the region today saw at least ten roads and three railway lines blocked by barricades, according to the Government Delegation. Six miners remain underground in Teruel in protest at the cuts, and a union representative says they will not come up until a solution is found. The P.P. Mayor of Ponferrada, Carlos López Riesco, who has not been supporting the claims of the coal industry, had to take refuge in a bar after being attacked by miners in the street.

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Torture charges as immigrant drowning case is re-opened

The Senegalese immigrant, Laudling Sonko, died when the Guardia Civil allegedly slashed his float and threw him back into the sea in 2007.Another immigrant interception in the Strait from earlier this monthThe case of the 29 year old Senegales immigrant, Laudling Sonko, who drowned in the waters off Cueta during the night of September 25 2007 when, allegedly, the Guardia Civil slashed his float and threw him back into the water as he was trying to enter Ceuta illegally. The man did not know how to swim and perished in the water. The case is to be reopened after the prosecutor in Ceuta has been contacted by the Attorney General’s Office which in turn has been contacted, last February, by the United Nations Committee against Torture, and which says Spain could be condemned for the incident and which has demanded a full investigation. The UN Torture Committee says that Spain broke international conventions in the actions which led to the immigrant’s death. The denuncia was presented by the Spanish Commission for the Help for Refugees, CEAR, whose lawyer, Alberto Revuelta, said that the resolution considered it shows that the events were a breaking of Article 16 of the Convention against Torture, describing his treatment as ‘cruel, inhuman, and degrading’. An original case was archived and a previous request from the Ceuta Prosecutors’ office to reopen the case was not successful. They could only inform Sonko’s family; a sister lives in Almería. Sonko’s body had been buried in an unmarked grave in the Santa Catalina cemetery in Ceuta.

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