Well the storms this week did not happen

Well the storms this week did not happen! Very strange they got that so wrong! At least the temperature is dropping just like it does every year!

2022-09-16

CHILD TRAFFICKERS They capture in Murcia one of the leaders of a national network that trafficked with 'minors' The National Police in Ciudad del Sol arrested two people from an organization that charged one thousand euros for each minor brought to the peninsula on planes with the passports of other individuals. They charged about a thousand euros to Moroccan minors under guardianship who were in reception centers in the Canary Islands and transferred them by plane with third-party passports to the airports of Alicante, Malaga, Valencia and Barcelona. This is how an illegal immigration network worked that mainly trafficked in unaccompanied foreign minors -'menas'- and which has been dismantled this week by the National Police in Lorca and in the Alicante towns of Crevillente and Callosa de Segura. The trips of the 'menas', who were always accompanied on the plane by 'passers' of the organization, were paid for by their families, either from Morocco or by other means. The organization investigated by the Unit against Illegal Immigration Networks (UCRIF) of the Police, under the supervision of the Court of Instruction number 4 of San Cristóbal de La Laguna (Tenerife), is made up of at least thirteen people of Moroccan origin, seven of which were arrested last Monday in Crevillente and Callosa de Segura. Within the Region, two arrests were made in Lorca and the National Police has asked the court to order the arrest of the other four members of the criminal group, since they may be in other countries or are still in Spain but with false documentation. Of the seven detainees in Crevillente and Callosa, the Tenerife court investigating the case agreed to imprison the two ringleaders of the network arrested in the province of Alicante. One of them, a resident of Crevillente, is considered by the Police to be the main suspect in what is known as 'Operation Akrón'. The other five arrested in the province of Alicante were released with charges. In addition to the two leaders living in Crevillente and Callosa, the Police place the third person in charge of the group in Lorca. In addition to acting as leaders of the group, the researchers accuse these people of playing the role of catchers of 'ore', whom they also personally accompanied on flights and later took by car to their final destination. Another seven involved appear in the police investigations as the people who provided passports to the ringleaders to use with the minors they brought to the peninsula from Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Lanzarote. The other three investigated were in charge of making the reservations and payments for the flights.

BACK TO SCHOOL NO TEACHERS NO COVID Without distance or mask and in the absence of hundreds of sick teachers. The covid measures, banished, give way to the new Lomloe to teach in competitions and by projects. Schools in Alicante read a protest manifesto before entering class Punctual, schools throughout the province and at all educational levels incorporate without distances or masks, with the exception of school transport, the students of Infant, Primary, Secondary, Baccalaureate and Vocational training. The only ones missing, as the consulted centers confirm first thing in the morning, are the hundreds of teachers on sick leave or even continuity, vacancies that the Ministry has not yet incorporated into the lists of teaching awards, as some unions already warned last week pass. The covid, for which no more measures than those established by common sense should be saved, this year gives way to the new state law, Lomloe, which is what has focused the organization of project-based teaching.

Without bubble groups, all students can interact with each other and there is no longer a strict disinfection and extra cleaning. The windows will only be opened punctually, between class and class because, as the Minister Raquel Tamarit advanced, the necessary energy savings will also have to be taken into account. And regarding the Lomloe, it opens in the odd courses, 1st and 3rd of Primary and ESO this year, changing the traditional teaching for competitions and projects. In the Community, already advanced in these conflicts, the promotion of the course continues, it will only be suspended after a report from the teachers as a whole. The organization of this new pedagogical method starts at half speed due to the delay in the publication of the contents by Education, in mid-August, although the centers have already started drafts. Manifesto in Alicante Coinciding with the start of the course, several schools in the city of Alicante, pending the maintenance of the buildings by the City Council and the Ministry, have read a protest manifesto. Families make the following proclamation:

"The undersigned Ampa request urgent actions for the improvement and maintenance of the schools of the city of Alicante in view of the poor state of the public educational infrastructures of the city of Alicante. In the first place, we ask the Ministry of Education to immediately remove the asbestos roof that is still found in three public schools in the city. We are talking about the health of more than 1,000 boys and girls. Secondly, we request the Departments of Education and Infrastructure of the Alicante City Council to immediately carry out the maintenance work that falls under their responsibility in public schools, highlighting the refurbishment of patios, exterior and interior painting in the centers, the change of windows, conditioning of the perimeter walls, renovation of plumbing, etc. And thirdly, we ask the Alicante City Council to immediately carry out the construction of new schools and improvement of the schools already included in the Edificant Plan, as well as the inclusion in the Edificant Plan of all those schools that have been requesting it for years so that The necessary improvement works can be carried out, such as the construction of gyms, dining room extensions, accessibility works, construction of new classrooms, construction of shaded areas, etc. The AMPA cannot allow years and years of inactivity, lack of maintenance and improvements and we announce mobilizations throughout the school year until both the Ministry of Education and the Alicante City Council carry out the necessary works in the public educational infrastructures. The Ampa do not understand neither the passivity of the regional and local administrations nor the systematic blockade of the municipal government team to carry out such necessary works. We demand that both the Ministry of Education and the Alicante City Council explain the reasons for the abandonment of public schools in the city of Alicante and set a schedule of actions to be carried out. Because the fundamental right to education and freedom of teaching recognized in article 27 of the Constitution cannot be exercised in deteriorated public schools, with poor and insufficient facilities.

GOOD YEAR FOR TORREVIEJA SALT LAKE The salt mine will produce 550,000 tons of salt thanks to the record heat this summer. The start of the campaign was delayed until the end of August due to spring rains - The high temperatures have allowed the volume of water in the lagoon to be reduced, causing it to become saturated with brine and a layer of 10 centimeters of salt to accumulate at the bottom. The salt company expects a production of 550,000 tons of salt during the extraction campaign that has just begun. The salt workers usually start production work in August and conclude in June of the following year, leaving a month of maintenance work in July. The high temperatures have finally allowed the brine saturation process to speed up, to reach 300 grams per liter of water and for the salt to set until it falls to the bottom of the lagoon. The high evaporation has in turn reduced the volume of water in the wetland, reducing its average depth to one meter and fifteen centimeters, which is usual, compared to the more than one and a half meters that the pink lagoon reached at the end of spring due to the episode of continuous rains, as explained to INFORMATION by the engineering director of the facilities, Joseph Pérez. The temperature records have broken records in Torrevieja during this summer reflect that 95% of the nights have been tropical and the thermometer has not dropped below 25 degrees -so it goes-. On August 13, the maximum temperature record of 43 degrees of the entire historical series occurred, which dates back to almost a century -1927-, according to data collected by the station approved by AEMET at the IES Torrevigía. According to the same sources, at the moment, the extraction machine is working in the lagoon -returner or harvester that removes the salt from the bottom- and four tugboats or boats that drag the trains of boats loaded with salt to the "island". It is a platform of land at the end of the motte that has divided the lagoon into two halves since the 1990s. The company rules out the extraction of salt in the western area, the one that borders the Hospital, Los Balcones and the agricultural areas of San Miguel and Los Montesinos, which has been working for years as a brine heater and concentrator. The successive episodes of torrential rains since the end of 2016 have ruined most of the campaigns since then. The DANA of December 2016, accompanied by a storm that left snow in Torrevieja in January 2017, left the salt company's harvest low in that period, although production managed to recover, reaching 600,000 tons in the 2018/2019 financial year.

ALICANTE WANTS YOU TO BE A COMPUTOR Alicante reinforces its commitment to Artificial Intelligence. Although it is still a distant possibility that Alicante could become the headquarters of the future Spanish Artificial Intelligence Supervision Agency (Aesia), a newly created body that fits in with the institutional decentralization policy that the Pedro Sánchez government wants to promote, there is and a firm commitment by Ximo Puig to come to the Community and logically to be Alicante, where the Digital District hub is based, the first option of the Generalitat. In this sense, it is a happy and timely coincidence that tomorrow, Friday, the EUIPO will host the European Forum on Artificial Intelligence, focused above all on AI research applied to health. Organized by Encuentros Now, chaired by Manuel Bonilla, by Ellis Alicante, the EUIPO itself and by Prensa Ibérica, the editorial group of INFORMATION, the Forum has a vocation for continuity. Especially now that Alicante is beginning to make a name for itself in that select group of cities around the world that are associated with the AI revolution, thanks to the presence of ELLIS, of which Nuria Oliver is co-founder and scientific director. Among the participants, a group of names that are all in the elite of AI research, especially in the health section, undoubtedly stands out Lama Nachman, the INTEL researcher who led the team that gave Stephen Hawking back his voice and communication skills thanks to sophisticated equipment when the disease suffered by the scientist was already in a very advanced stage that had almost completely immobilized him. We all remember that metallic voice that she ended up becoming familiar with after listening to it many times and that translated into sounds the contents written in the sophisticated word processor with which Hawking continued to work, write, investigate and communicate until the end of his days. One of the most beautiful miracles of a technology that is going to change the world.

ARE SOLAR PANELS REALLY GREEN? Solar self-consumption soars in Alicante with more than a thousand new installations per month. In the first semester alone, more projects have already been executed than in all of last year. The fever for photovoltaic panels does not stop. As high electricity prices continue and with no sign of the situation returning to normal, more and more companies and individuals in the province are turning to solar self-consumption in an attempt to contain the monthly bill, which remains unsustainable levels for many businesses and families. the figures are eloquent. According to the latest balance of the Ministry of Sustainable Economy, only in the first six months of this year, 5,174 new facilities have been registered in the province, more than all of last year, when they totaled 4,709. But it is that the trend does not stop accelerating, as can be seen if the quarterly data are analyzed separately. In the first quarter, 2,067 installations were registered, while between April and June there were 3,107. That is, more than a thousand new projects every month. "It is the natural response of consumers to the rise in electricity. But make no mistake, this is here to stay and soon it will be rare to see a roof or the cover of a factory without plates," says the president of the Valencian Association of Renewable Energies (Avaesen), Marcos J. Lacruz. With current prices, amortization periods are getting shorter, to the point that in industrial facilities the investment can be recovered in just one year, explains the CEO of Solar Covering, Luis Navarro. "It is already a matter of survival for many companies. Although they can pay the electricity bills, those who do not have plates will be less competitive because their costs will be higher," says the specialist. In the case of individuals, the terms are between two and three years.

WE HAVE NO WATER The Ministry leaves the irrigation of the Segura without water from the Tagus this month. Ecological Transition authorizes a transfer of 7.5 hm3 in September and only for urban supply, while the technicians recommended a shipment of 20 hm3. About to end the hydrological year in Spain, the Ministry for the Ecological Transition has given a last lace to the irrigation of the Segura basin by authorizing only one shipment of 7.5 cubic hectometres through the aqueduct from the Tagus for urban supply. Therefore, this September the department of Teresa Ribera left Levantine agriculture without water from the Tagus despite the fact that the technicians of the Central Commission for the Exploitation of the Tagus-Segura Aqueduct recommended in their report a shipment of 20 hm3 when the reservoirs of Entrepeñas and Buendía in an exceptional situation. The experts, in addition, foresee that the capacity of the headwater reservoirs of the Tagus will keep the Transfer system in an exceptional situation until November, for which they estimate that a maximum of 59.9 hm3 could be transferred in three months. The arguments used by the Ministry for this water cut is that the reserves of transferred water volumes available in the Segura basin (46.1 hm3 for irrigation and consumption) and the authorized volumes pending transfer to date have been taken into account. September 1 (15.3 hm3). In addition, it takes into account the forecast of contributions for the coming months, the estimated future consumption of supply and irrigation and the application of the rule for the next 6 months.

WATER TO BECOME SCARCER Mazón appeals to dialogue and asks the Segura Hydrographic Confederation to return to the Provincial Water Board. 500 people register for the National Water Congress, the main theme of which for this edition is the environment and energy. The president of the Alicante Provincial Council, Carlos Mazón, opened the IV National Water Congress this morning in Albatera, where he to dialogue and rigor to solve the water problem, for which it has asked the Segura Hydrographic Confederation to return to the Provincial Water Board, according to a press release from the Communication department of the provincial institution. Mazón has launched this message at the inauguration of the IV National Water Congress, and in the presence of the president of the basin entity, Mario Urrea.

"Today I extend my hand so that the Government of Spain returns, through the CHS, to the Provincial Water Board to dialogue and try to move forward and solve the water problem that the province of Alicante suffers", said Mazón, who pointed out that "it is unacceptable that this Confederation has abandoned this meeting space after 38 years, in which one can agree or disagree, but in which dialogue and the search for agreements prevail." "Not being at the Water Table is a mistake by Pedro Sánchez and his government," he lamented. Mazón, who has been accompanied at the inauguration by the second vice president and deputy for the Water Cycle, Ana Serna, also mayor of Albatera, by the president of the CHS, Mario Urrea, and by the general director of Water, Manuel Aldeguer, has insisted in discarding 'the water war' and has pointed out that "what is necessary is to sit down to dialogue with the will to listen to the rest and to arrive, rigorously and seriously, at agreements, seeking peace, something that, however, We should not confuse it with surrender, because this province will never surrender”. The National Water Congress began to be organized after the 2019 DANA. Its first three editions were held in Orihuela. It has modified its headquarters coinciding with the change of government in Orihuela.

THE EU BANS CARS BY 2035 Euro 7 regulations: The end of combustion engines? In 2035, the sale of combustion vehicles in Europe will be prohibited since on that date the regulations that will reduce permitted CO2 emissions to zero will come into force. From 2035, therefore, we will only be able to buy zero-emission cars, whether they are electric, hydrogen-powered fuel cells or any other technology that we currently do not have even the slightest reference to. But life for combustion car manufacturers who hope to continue selling this type of model until then is not going to be easy at all. The reason will be the entry into force of the Euro 7 emission regulations, a regulation that the European Union is delaying more than necessary, thus complicating the previous work that all manufacturers must carry out yes or yes. The Euro 7 regulation will be the last of a saga that began in 1987 with the first Euro 0 standard that established the first restrictions on emissions from combustion engines. Since then, the European Union has been dictating different regulations that increased the restrictions by reducing the amounts of pollutants that could be emitted by approved engines. Currently, vehicles sold in Europe must comply with the Euro 6 D anti-pollution regulation. The Euro 6 standard established a limit of 80 milligrams per kilometer of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions for diesel mechanics and 60 milligrams for those with gasoline and also reduced particulate emissions, in practice forcing all diesel engines to be equipped with a particulate filter and a contaminant removal system using a urea filter, the famous AdBlue. The regulations also regulate the amounts of unburned particles, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (CO) that an engine can emit. It is important to point out here that nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, unburned hydrocarbons and particulate matter are all harmful to human health, while carbon dioxide, the famous CO2, is harmless to people, but It is the main responsible, since it is massively generated, for the greenhouse effect and climate change.