Time USA - 07.10.2019

10 Time October 7, 2019

TheBrief News

For 44 years, spain’s Former dicTaTor

Francisco Franco has shared a mausoleum

with some 34,000 victims of the three-year

civil war he started in 1936. Many of the dead

who lie at the Valley of the Fallen, a sprawl-

ing monument outside Madrid, fought against

his military overthrow of Spain’s democratic

government and installation of a conservative

Catholic autocracy. But his grave draws far-

right sympathizers to the site, and each day a

group of Franco supporters lays flowers there.

That controversial situation will now end,

after Spain’s Supreme Court, rejecting a legal

challenge from Franco’s family, ruled Sept. 24

that the government of caretaker Prime Min-

ister Pedro Sánchez may exhume Franco’s re-

mains and rebury them in a public cemetery.

The move comes after a long-simmering

political battle that has divided Spaniards.

“It really galvanizes the left, but the right

would rather just not touch it,” says Lluís Or-

riols, a politics professor at Madrid’s Car-

los III University. “Their voters have slightly

more ambivalent feelings about the Franco

era.” A 2018 poll for Spanish daily El Mundo

found that 63% of voters in Sánchez’s center-

left Socialist party backed the exhumation,

compared with just 13% of supporters of the

center- right People’s Party (PP). Last year,

lawmakers from the PP and center-right party

Citizens abstained from a vote on the matter.

WILDLIFE

Natural celebrity

Inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s famed hobbit Frodo Baggins, scientists in New Zealand named a

newly discovered insect Psylla frodobagginsi. Here, more pop taxonomy. —Alejandro de la Garza

FUNNY FUNGI

A species of

mushroom found in

Malaysia reminded

scientists so much

of a sponge that in

2011 they called

it Spongiforma

squarepantsii, after

the Nickelodeon

cartoon SpongeBob

SquarePants.

STAR SPIDER

Actor Tobey Maguire

played beloved

comic-book hero

Spider-Man in three

films— inspiring

researchers to

acknowledge him

in 2015 by naming

a newly identified

species of spider

Filistata maguirei.

COMPUTER BUG

In 2018, scientists

dubbed a genus of

insect Kaytuesso,

after a droid that

joined the Star Wars

universe in the

2016 movie Rogue

One. The name is a

phoneticized version

of the robot’s name,

K-2SO.

NEWS

TICKER

Outrage after

8-year-old

shot in Rio

Brazilians criticized

the “shoot to kill” law-

enforcement policy of

the Rio de Janeiro state

governor after resi-

dents of a Rio favela

neighborhood said

stray police bullets

killed an 8-year-old girl

on Sept. 20. A record

1,249 people were

killed in police raids

in the state in the first

eight months of 2019.

Climate body

releases bleak

oceans report

Because of climate

change, once rare

natural disasters

linked to high sea

levels could become

annual events,

per a Sept. 25

Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate

Change report on the

world’s oceans. Seas

are rising faster than

before, the report

said, and some island

nations will likely

become uninhabitable.

Controversial

Indonesia laws

spark protests

On Sept. 24,

thousands of students

in Indonesia protested

a planned new criminal

code that would

outlaw extramarital

sex and criticism of

the President, as well

as a new law they say

weakens a national

anticorruption body.

More than 300 were

treated at hospitals

during the protests.

Few defend the human-rights abuses that

occurred under the 36-year-long Franco re-

gime. During the civil war and in political

purges in the years after, 114,000 Spaniards

were disappeared. Fierce censorship, political

repression and the persecution of minorities

continued until Franco’s death in 1975.

But unlike many other modern democra-

cies that emerged in the wake of recent dic-

tatorships, Spain has largely failed to inves-

tigate the crimes in the country’s past. Last

year, Sánchez announced the creation of a

truth commission to confront the crimes of

the Franco regime; he has said the recent

push for exhumation was guided by “a deter-

mination to heal the suffering of Franquis-

mo’s victims.” But many argued that in the

case of Franco’s remains, it would be better

to move on, citing the family’s rights and the

preservation of an important historical site.

Some also accused Sanchez of opportun-

ism at a crucial time for politics. The Social-

ists won an April election but not enough

seats to govern. One week before the ruling,

Spain’s fourth elections in four years were

announced for Nov. 10. “Sánchez has spent

a year playing with [Franco’s] bones to try

to divide us... but this no longer matters to

many Spaniards,” Albert Rivera, leader of the

Citizens party, said of the ruling.

Whether it matters to Spaniards or not,

Franco’s body will be moved “as soon as pos-

sible” to a public cemetery on the outskirts of

Madrid, according to Sánchez’s deputy. But

with analysts warning that November’s poll

won’t break the stalemate, the Prime Minis-

ter’s future is far less clear. —ciara nugenT

GOOD QUESTION

Why is Spain digging

up the body of

Francisco Franco?