Spain: 37.5M foreign tourists visited in first half of 2023
Wall Street tumbles to its worst loss in months as rally stalls
Wall Street tumbled to its worst drop in months on Wednesday as its torrid rally that critics called overdone lost more momentum.
The S&P 500 sank 1.4% for its sharpest tumble since April. It was the second straight loss for the index after it hit a 16-month high last week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1%, while the Nasdaq composite fell 2.2%.
On the winning side was CVS Health, which rose 3.3% after it reported a milder drop in results than expected. Humana climbed 5.6% after it topped expectations for the latest quarter.
They were among the relatively few stocks to rise. Only about a quarter of the stocks in the S&P 500 climbed.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 63.34 to 4,513.39. The Dow dropped 348.16 to 35,282.52, and the Nasdaq sank 310.47 to 13,973.45. The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 27.33 points, or
Spain received 37.5 million international tourists in the first half of 2023, a 24% increase from the same period last year, the government announced Wednesday.
The figure is lower than for the same period in 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic, when 38 million tourists arrived. But officials say the numbers are a sign that international tourism has rebounded strongly since the health crisis.
Visitors from Britain topped the tourist list, totaling some 8 million, followed by some 5 million tourists from both France and Germany.
Spain is heavily dependent on tourism, which accounts for 12% of gross domestic product.
The northeastern region of Catalonia, including Barcelona and the Costa Brava, was the most visited area.
Environmentalists sue to stop Utah potash mine
Environmentalists filed a lawsuit on Monday to prevent the construction of a new potash mine that they say would devastate a lake ecosystem in the drought-stricken western Utah desert.
The complaint against the Bureau of Land Management is the latest development in the battle over potash in Utah, which holds some of the United States’ largest deposits of the mineral used to fertilize crops worldwide.
Potash, or potassium sulfate, is currently mined in regions including Carlsbad, New Mexico and at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, where the Bureau of Land Management also oversees a private company’s potash mining operations.
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance argues that, in approving a potash mining operation at Sevier Lake, the bureau failed to consider alternatives that would cause fewer environmental impacts.