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Q&A: What To Know About The Next Two Solar Eclipses In Spain

Published

3 hours ago

August 17, 2026

admin

Esme Fox – esme@thelocal.es

Published: 17 Aug, 2026 CET. Updated: Mon 17 Aug 2026 15:41 CET

Q&A: What to know about the next two solar eclipses in Spain — People react as they observe the total solar eclipse from Tarragona, Spain. Photo: Josep LAGO / AFP

If you missed last week’s total eclipse in Spain, you’re in luck because there will be two more solar eclipses coming up in 2027 and 2028.

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Cuba

Katrina Castro Versus ICE: US Accuses A Former Cuban Judge Of Being Communist

Published

2 hours ago

August 17, 2026

Carla Gloria Colome

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At 1.30 p.m. on Sunday in South Florida, the Broward Transition Center front desk officer will ask visitors to leave all their belongings, except for keys, in the waiting room lockers. About 20 people are grouped together — women who drove several miles, men on their day off, bored and impatient children. All are asked to pass through a scanner so they can access the interior of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enclave, which has a capacity for about 700 detainees.

When another officer opens the door to the facility’s dining room, each visitor will look for their relative, locate them, and embrace them as if their lives depended on it. Katrina Castro-Menéndez is the only one who remains seated. She looks like the schoolgirl her parents have forgotten to pick up.

“Katrina?” the journalist asks from a distance. Katrina, 41, stands. She has dark skin and old, noble eyes, a gray uniform and a rosary that hangs from her neck. She is the former Cuban judge who was detained by ICE officers last June outside her home in Cooper City. She bursts into tears. This is the first time Katrina has received a visit in detention. Neither her husband, Deyni Rojas González, nor her 15-year-old daughter can go to the Broward center. The authorities do not allow her husband in because he does not have either residency or citizenship. Neither have they been able to see Katrina for several days through the usual authorized video calls available to detainees as her husband’s ID as a beneficiary of a humanitarian parole program in the United States has expired.

The dining room is filled with people and voices. Guards talk around one of the tables; there is a man who goes every Sunday to see his ex-partner, Adys Lastres Morera, whom ICE arrested for being the sister of Ania Guillermina Lastres Morena, the executive president of the Cuban military conglomerate GAESA, the consortium in the crosshairs of Donald Trump’s administration, which controls 40% of the Cuban economy. They sit across from each other catching up. Alina Rosales Aguirreurreta, the daughter of Cuban General Ulises Rosales del Toro, was also detained in the Broward center.

Driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the U.S. government intends to target not only Cuban institutions that allegedly pose a threat to U.S. national security, but also people or family members who have links with institutions such as the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. After the last sanctioned entities were announced in recent months, Rubio said anyone “providing services to these sanctioned actors is at risk of being sanctioned themselves.” Although the warning is mostly aimed at entities or individuals with economic ties to Castroism, ICE has lately been targeting relatives of Cuban ministers, officials or senior public officials in the U.S.

Katrina, however, was not born into Cuba’s elite, but rather into a modest family in the province of Matanzas. She wanted to get out of there and study and she finally got to do so at the University of Havana where she read law and graduated as a lawyer. She was then sent to the court in Cárdenas as part of her social service to the country. She became a judge and in that position she earned 190 pesos a month (around $7). “That’s why no one wanted to work there, because that was the salary,” she says.

She then worked at the Municipal Court of Central Havana. “They were simple cases. My sentencing framework was between three months and a year. It was generally fines. There were no important cases. It was the man who stole the bicycle on the corner, or the one who stole the fruit from a shop,” she explains.

But now the Trump administration claims that Katrina cannot be in the U.S. for several reasons: one, for having tried to obtain immigration benefits through fraud or willful misrepresentation. Another, because she is a judge, and if she is a judge, she has to be a member or affiliate of the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party, according to the authorities. In this case, the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC).

Now it’s Katrina’s word against that of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The federal agency insists that Katrina said she was not a member of a Communist Party. However, according to documents consulted by EL PAÍS, the authorities insist that her work as a judge in the Cuban judicial system implies an affiliation or association with the Communist Party that should have been revealed.

Katrina stresses she never belonged to the party. Although the PCC’s statutes admit people over 18 years of age, it is exceptional. Most enter after the age of 30. Katrina was only 23 when she became a judge. “The prosecutor will never be able to prove that I was [a member], just as I cannot prove that I was not. They also say that as a judge I would have to have belonged to the party, and that’s not the case. That is an inconsistency,” she says. EL PAÍS confirmed with at least three other judges that belonging to the PCC is certainly not a mandatory requirement to occupy the position of judge in the Cuban justice system.

During the visit, Katrina looks out a window. She stops for a few minutes to think, then says, “I know that I will never set foot out there again.” It’s not a complaint, just a truth. She is a lawyer. She is convinced that probably nothing she says will convince the prosecutor or the judge who is hearing her case.

The unexpected arrest

Katrina left her position as a judge in 2014 and began working as a lawyer at the Bufete Colectivo de Centro Habana. In 2019, she got a student visa to study a master’s degree in human rights at the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosí in Mexico where she had been told that practicing the profession “was going to be complicated,” but she did not want to return to Cuba. She began working with human rights organizations, especially the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL) foundation, which has been accused of promoting the fall of Castroism. This meant she would not be able to work again in Cuba, even if she wanted to.

When she was about to start her doctorate, Katrina decided to go to the U.S. where she planned to work as a lawyer. To do so, she needed to revalidate her university degrees. On August 13, 2021, she presented herself at a border point in Arizona, and was released with an I-220A status, the same one that has recently kept more than 500,000 Cubans in legal limbo.

While she had no legal documents, Katrina lived a peaceful existence in the U.S. Her daughter went to school, Katrina working as a cleaner and her husband as a gardener. On June 12, her husband left the house at about 6 a.m. Two hours later, while her daughter was sleeping, Katrina got into her 2017 Chevrolet Trax and saw a black Cadillac parked behind her. She remembers thinking it was badly parked. She started her car but another vehicle cornered her. “I thought they were going to ask me about a neighbor. I had no idea. So I rolled down the window and they said, ‘What’s your name?’ I said, ‘Katrina.’”

Six officers approached her. While one twisted her arm, another told her: “Katrina, you have been detained by immigration, you have to get out of the car.” She began to cry. “My daughter, my daughter is in the house,” she said. “Yes,” they replied. “We know that your husband left earlier and that your daughter is at home sleeping. Your husband is going to come back and take care of your daughter, but now you are coming with us.”

After a while, her husband received a call. “I was working when an unknown number called me,” he said. It was Katrina. “She told me: ‘Deyni, it’s me, they arrested me.’” She was taken to the ICE offices in Miramar, and then to Broward.

The authorities wake the detainees at Broward at 6 a.m. to clean. Twice a day they let them go out to the yard to see the sun and touch the artificial grass, do a little exercise or play volleyball. They also have a room with board games. While the facility has come under fire for its lack of medical care, especially after the death of Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian migrant who suffered from blood pressure problems, Katrina says she prefers it to other detention centers.

“It’s very difficult to be here without knowing what’s going to happen. You can be moved at night to another place — a place much worse than this which takes me away from my family. The fact that my daughter is half an hour away gives me strength,” she says. Her favorite time is when she can visit the chapel to pray, something she had never done before. “I feel so at peace when I walk in there, so calm,” she says.

During the conversations she had with EL PAÍS last week, Katrina was particularly nervous as she would soon have her first hearing with the judge. Up to then, she had only had meetings with the prosecutor that didn’t bode well. She knows that every defendant should be heard. But “they don’t want to listen to you. You are guilty and proving otherwise is going to be difficult. They are assuming that I made the mistakes intentionally. No one will ever believe in your innocence,” she says.

Katrina will have to explain several inconsistencies in her immigration process. The first time she signed a Form I-589, an Application for Asylum and Withholding of Removal, it was not she who made the application, but a law firm which asked not to be named. The lawyers asked her to tell them why she believed she was an asylum seeker, but they were the ones who filled out the information on the application, for which they charged $3,000. “I saved that by cleaning floors and not buying anything for my daughter,” Katrina says.

In the application, the lawyers stated that the former judge had not been a member of any political organization or group. However, when another attorney later filed Form I-485, or Application to Register Permanent Residence under the Cuban Adjustment Act, Katrina answered a series of questions that didn’t align with her previous answers. When asked if she had ever been a member, participated or been associated in any way with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society or similar group in the U.S. or anywhere else in the world, including any military service, Katrina answered yes. She said she had belonged to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the organization sanctioned by Marco Rubio, and to the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC).

Katrina had told the truth, but it wouldn’t go in her favor. The CDRs are a mass organization created in Cuba in 1960 with the aim of guaranteeing surveillance in the neighborhoods. All Cuban citizens automatically become part of them after the age of 14. The FMC includes all women over that age. There is no question of not belonging, it is simply part of the ordinary life of Cubans within a totalitarian system. For decades, joining this type of organization is a prerequisite to getting a house, a car, a television or a steady job. Many people have been active in these groups, less out of conviction and more out of necessity. Generations of Cubans have belonged to these same organizations and have later received protection in the U.S.

However, when asked if she had belonged to a Communist Party, Katrina replied emphatically that she had not. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security insists this is a lie. “Under penalty of perjury, you omitted your connection with the Communist Party as a criminal judge in the Municipal People’s Court of Central Havana,” says the procedural file from the DHS.

“So you were from the Communist Party?”

On August 5, Katrina came before the judge for the first time. The judge was astonished that she didn’t have a lawyer, but Katrina said she would defend herself. The judge wanted to know if she had lied during the asylum process. “I didn’t lie, I did my process with that lawyer. He never interviewed me, he only asked me why I was applying for asylum. I never had the slightest idea that something was wrong with my process,” she said. Then the judge asked about the FMC and the CDRs. “Yes, I belonged to the CDRs, which all Cubans, men and women, belong to. I also belonged to the FMC, which all the women who live on the island belong to. And I was from the FEU (University Student Federation), because I studied at the university, like all students,” she replied.

“So you were from the Communist Party?” the judge asked again, and Katrina again said, “No, I have not been a member of the Communist Party in any country in the world.” After the session, Katrina was relieved. She had been allowed to speak, to tell her truth before the law. She still harbors hope, the possibility that tomorrow she will be allowed to go home. But most of the time she thinks her definitive departure from the U.S. is imminent. Preparing for this eventuality, she thinks about what she will say to her daughter, a conversation that she has rehearsed during confinement. “How do I tell her that we are going backwards? To a country where there is no electricity three days in a row? A country where all people do is get up and breathe, because they have nothing to do? What will become of my family without me? And what am I going to do without my family?”

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ElPais

Family Of Former Mexican Federal Police Officer Killed On Ukraine Frontline Faces Agonizing Wait For His Remains

Published

3 hours ago

August 17, 2026

Andres Rodriguez

family-of-former-mexican-federal-police-officer-killed-on-ukraine-frontline-faces-agonizing-wait-for-his-remains

The last time Mario Alberto Lover Martínez communicated with his family was around June 7, 2025. He placed a call from the front line to Ciudad Ixtepec, in Oaxaca, for his mother Amalia’s birthday. He had been an elite soldier in the now-defunct Mexican Federal Police who enlisted in February last year along with other foreign volunteers in the Armed Forces of Ukraine to fight in the war with Russia. His family had a WhatsApp group that notified them whenever he was going into combat. Ernesto Zárate, his cousin, says his report that time was brief. He said he would return and sent videos of his unit saying a joint prayer before the mission. However, two days later they received a message from his commander, a Colombian named Dante, who informed them that their relative had died in a border area between the two countries due to a simultaneous drone bombardment and bursts of gunfire. More than a year after his death, the official report states he is “missing in action.” His body remained on the ground. It is unknown whether he was recovered, and his family still awaits the repatriation of his remains with no certainty that it will ever happen.

Although there are no official figures, Lover’s case is one of many on the list of former members of Mexico’s Federal Police force — disbanded during Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term — who decided to enlist as mercenaries in Russia’s war in Ukraine, which began more than four years ago. Jesús López Zamora, leader of Policías con Dignidad, Valor y Justicia (Police Officers with Dignity, Courage, and Justice), said that in 2025 at least 18 members of that division were fighting as part of the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine — known as the Foreign Legion — and that 35 were waiting for the green light to travel to the front lines, according to El Universal.

Lover was 37 when he decided, in February 2025, to travel to Ukraine. His career began at 18 when he enlisted in the Mexican army, specifically at a military zone in Chiapas, where he remained a little over eight years before joining the now-disbanded Federal Police, where he served for five years. While in that force, Lover sought to join the Gendarmerie, the elite division created during Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration. To that end, he specialized by earning a law degree through an internal program and received intensive training, including exercises with U.S. Marines in Monterrey, Sonora, and Sinaloa, as well as instruction in military strategy and technology from instructors from the Middle East.

With the arrival of López Obrador’s administration and the transition of the Federal Police into the National Guard, a conflict arose because seniority and benefits for personnel were not respected. Lover became a key figure in that discontent and his name stood out after a viral video in which he confronted Omar García Harfuch — who in July 2019 was head of the Mexico City Secretariat of Citizen Security — during a protest that blocked the capital’s airport.

Sophia Huett, a security specialist, says the Federal Police developed capabilities that were recognized and respected internationally. She says that, in addition to that training, they had the hardest thing to acquire: real field experience. Officers who for years were deployed in highly complex places such as Michoacán, Guerrero, Chihuahua, or Tamaulipas, facing criminal organizations and working under extreme risk.

“After 10, 15, or 20 years of living like that, you don’t only have technical knowledge, you have a professional identity. That’s why Ukraine seems to me an extreme expression of something much broader: when the Federal Police disappeared, Mexico allowed a human capital that had taken years and many resources to build to disperse,” the consultant explains.

Faced with the lack of labor agreements and economic need, Lover worked for a time as head of security for public officials and senators. Eventually, he accepted a job offer in Ukraine that was circulating among former federal colleagues, promising good salaries, life insurance, and residency after a six-month contract.

Lover traveled to the U.S. to undergo psychometric, physical, and weapons tests. He told his mother it was a training trip. Zárate says they do not know with certainty who processed his evaluations. After asking other family members, they suspect these were elite military groups which do not have direct contact with governments. “They operate as clandestine recruitment networks. Mario returned to Mexico and, apparently, it was the Foreign Legion that shortly afterward told him he was fit to travel to Ukraine.” His cousin says Lover flew to Germany and then took a train from Poland to enter Kyiv.

According to Zárate, his relative did not go to Ukraine only because the pay was higher than in Mexico, but also because since childhood he had always displayed a “fascination” with military matters. The monthly salary promised ranged from 16,000 to 20,000 pesos (between $900 and $1,200), although Jesús López Zamora, leader of the former Federal Police, says the amount can rise to 70,000 pesos (more than $4,000). “Pay increases depending on the front where they are deployed, the danger of the missions, and bonuses for rescuing comrades,” Lover’s cousin adds.

“We are talking about crossing half the world to enter a conventional war zone, facing drones, mines, artillery, and bombs, with a real chance of being wounded or killed. It’s hard to think a decision of that magnitude is explained solely by receiving 20,000, 50,000 or 70,000 pesos. For many police officers, this is a vocation and a way of life. For years you have a mission, a team that depends on you and on which you depend, discipline, structure, risk and a very concrete sense of purpose,” Huett adds.

However, the contract, even though for only six months, is compulsory. “If you try to leave early, they treat you as a deserter with prison penalties. Mario already wanted to go back because things were not as they had been painted to him, but he had to finish his contract,” Zárate recounts.

The Mexican embassy in Ukraine, which has followed the case from the start and provided support to his relatives, has told them there is nothing left to do but wait. Recovering the remains is considered complicated due to the time elapsed and the climatic conditions of the area, because of last winter. In addition, to claim any financial compensation, a family member must travel directly to Ukraine to undergo DNA testing, which represents an unsustainable economic burden for his relatives.

Arcelia Lover, the ex-Federal Police officer’s sister, explained that because there is no official confirmation of death, the repatriation process is stalled. “We have been told that all the paperwork we filed must wait until the Government of Ukraine reaches a truce with the Russians so they can hand over the body.”

“Another problem is that Mario joined a Foreign Legion from the U.S., and it asks recruits not to report to the Mexican consulate upon arrival. In his photos, Mario wears the uniform with the U.S. flag on his arm; he was not registered as Mexican per se,” Zárate adds.

The Mexican government does not report how many of its citizens have participated in the war in Ukraine. According to media reports and unofficial sources, at least seven Mexicans have died in combat in Kyiv’s ranks between 2024 and 2026. For about two years, the embassies of Russia and Ukraine in Mexico have traded accusations over this situation. Moscow’s diplomatic representation considers the recruitment of Mexican and other foreign fighters a violation of the Vienna Convention, while Kyiv’s mission has denied the existence of “mercenaries” and says those who fight do so of their own volition.

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Balearic Islands

British Tourist Among Slew Of Hotel Guests Robbed By Crooked Employee Using Room Key Cards In Spain’s Mallorca

Published

8 hours ago

August 17, 2026

Alex Trelinski

British tourist among slew of hotel guests robbed by crooked employee using room key cards in Spain's Mallorca A HOTEL maintenance worker in Porto Cristo, Mallorca, has been arrested by the Policia Nacional for stealing property from guest bedrooms.