Almost 100 girls under 13 were raped last year as the number of serious sex assaults in Scotland rose to the highest on record, according to a shocking report.

Police Scotland warn rape is at the "highest level of recording", with sex crimes overall having risen by almost 15 per cent to 12,267 between April and December last year.

Data shows 98 girls aged under 13 were raped - a surge of more than 36 per cent on the previous year and the highest number recorded in the past three years.

Overall, 2,241 serious sexual assaults were reported between April and December, up 169 on the previous year, according to the force report.

How cognitive and influence warfare is being waged against you

We have all experienced it, you're scrolling through social media and a post catches your eye, it makes a claim or shows you something that makes you say to yourself, "there is no way that's true," or it invokes an immediate emotional response and before you know it, you have begun typing a comment laced with vitriolic outrage.

But pause there for a moment. Before your fingers hit the keys, before you share it, before you screenshot it and send it to three friends who you know will be just as furious as you are.

Ask yourself: Why that post? Why right now? Why you?

Here is what most people don't realize in that moment, that reaction you just had? That flash of anger, that spike of fear, the intoxicating certainty that you have just witnessed something outrageous and undeniable? That may not have happened to you by accident, it may have been engineered.

Leaks from two cars contained, official says; no evacuation ordered

Twenty-three cars of a Union Pacific train derailed today (March 18) in the Houston suburb of Richmond. No evacuation has been ordered, although officials say leaks have been detected from two cars carrying ethanol.

"Both leaks are contained," Fort Bend County Fire Marshal Justin York said in a press conference carried by KRIV-TV. "It is not posing any threat to the public and air monitoring is ongoing as a precaution. There is no need for evacuation at this time."

York said the situation "remains active and under assessment as crews continue to evaluate all railcars. ... This is a complex operation and will take time to complete safely."

For decades, the oil market hierarchy was simple:

Light sweet crude - oil that flows easily and has low sulfur content, making it cheaper and easier to refine into gasoline and diesel - was the premium product. It's easy to refine, high in gasoline, and priced accordingly.

Heavy sour crude - thick, high-sulfur oil that requires complex refineries to process - was the discount barrel, the ugly duckling that requires expensive, complex refineries to unlock its value. It traded at a permanent discount to light crude, sometimes $15-20 cheaper. Refiners who could process it made money on the profit margin between buying discounted crude and selling refined products.

That hierarchy is now history - most likely permanently.

In three weeks the global oil market has inverted. Heavy sour crudes — led by Russia's Urals, Canada's Western Canadian Select, and Venezuela's Merey — are commanding unprecedented premiums over light sweet crudes.

40% of interviewees are foreigners

A diversity hiring policy affecting the recruitment of judges and public prosecutors in Berlin has come under renewed scrutiny after the city's justice senator warned that the system may conflict with Germany's constitutional requirement that public offices be filled strictly on merit.

The policy, introduced in 2021 under then justice senator Dirk Behrendt of the Green Party, stems from amendments to the Law to Promote Participation in a Migration Society, known as the PartMigG. The legislation was adopted by Berlin's House of Representatives with support from the then-governing coalition of the Social Democrats, Greens, and the Left.

Under the law, recruitment procedures must ensure that applicants with a migration background are invited to interviews in numbers reflecting their share of the population. In Berlin, around 40 percent of residents fall into that category, defined by the Federal Statistical Office as individuals who themselves, or at least one parent, were not born with German citizenship.

There was chaos aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford after a major onboard fire knocked out a big swathe of living quarters, leaving hundreds of US sailors without beds in the middle of a live war deployment, in what marks a much bigger incident than what the Pentagon previously disclosed

The fire occurred last week, raising immediate questions of whether it was hit by an Iranian drone or missile attack, as Tehran has claimed, amid Pentagon insistence that it was none of these - but just an accidental fire.

Already the crew and ship are strained to their limits, given the carrier is on its way to achieving a record deployment, entering ten months. The crew has reportedly been informed that they will be deployed into May, which would make an entire year at sea, after the prior Caribbean deployment focused on the Venezuela anti-Maduro operation.

Something nefarious has been happening right under our noses: Men, enabled by wealth and social status, have been abusing or assaulting women with apparent ease — and then bragging about it.

The conviction of the Miami-raised Alexander brothers by a federal jury in New York on Monday has been dubbed by some as a "reckoning" for rich and powerful men who believe their money will shield them from accountability. That's correct, but it's also a reminder that, as recently as 2021, according to prosecutors, young men who were around during the peak of the #MeToo movement still felt emboldened to deprive women of their bodily autonomy.

Even the dead aren't immune to the oil shortage sparked by the Iran war.

Gas-based cremations are now being halted in parts of several predominantly Buddhist and Hindu countries because of worsening fuel shortages triggered by the ongoing conflict, according to reports.

The largest crematorium in India's state of Maharashtra was forced to temporarily stop all gas-fired cremations because of the scarcity of fuel, India Now magazine reported.

Vaikunth Dham, located in the city of Pune, relies on three gas-fired furnaces to carry out its sacred funeral services.

The facility said it will rely on electric and wood-based cremations moving forward.

The world spent fifty years and hundreds of billions of dollars building Strategic Petroleum Reserves so that no geopolitical rupture could fully sever modern civilization from energy. The United States alone holds just over 400 million barrels of crude oil in salt caverns beneath the Gulf Coast. On March 11, 2026, the International Energy Agency authorized a record 400-million-barrel emergency release from member-country reserves, the largest coordinated drawdown in the Agency's history. Energy insecurity has institutions, stockpiles, and doctrine.

Fertilizer insecurity does not.

No country appears to maintain a fertilizer reserve system remotely comparable in scale, doctrine, or strategic importance to the petroleum reserve architecture built after the oil shocks of the 1970s. Today's policy response to the Hormuz crisis is not a nutrient reserve release. It is an improvised attempt to rebuild shipping and insurance capacity on the fly. This structural asymmetry, now exposed with violent clarity, may prove to be one of the most consequential oversights in the history of modern statecraft. The Strait of Hormuz, a 21-nautical-mile corridor of shallow water between Iran and Oman, does not merely carry twenty percent of the world's oil. It carries a significant share of the molecular foundation underlying half the planet's food supply. UNCTAD estimates that roughly one-third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through Hormuz. The Fertilizer Institute separately estimates that exporters exposed directly or indirectly to the conflict account for nearly 49 percent of global urea exports, nearly 30 percent of global ammonia exports, and nearly half of global sulfur trade. That combination makes Hormuz not merely an energy chokepoint, but one of the most concentrated nutrient chokepoints in the global food system. Since late February 2026, commercial traffic through that corridor has effectively collapsed. UNCTAD reports daily ship transits fell by approximately 97 percent. As of mid-March, neither belligerent has shown willingness to negotiate. Trump rejected allied efforts to launch ceasefire talks on March 14. Iran's foreign minister stated on March 15: "We never asked for a ceasefire." And the spring planting clock is ticking toward a deadline that no diplomatic breakthrough can extend, because seeds do not negotiate, soil chemistry does not pause for geopolitics, and the quadratic yield response curve of cereal crops does not bend to the will of men who have never planted a field.

$750,000 in New York is not generational wealth. It's a two bedroom house in Queens.

Rocket surgeon Zohran Mamdani has a new tax idea making the rounds in Albany: slash New York's estate tax exemption from more than $7 million to $750,000 and crank the top rate up to 50 percent.

People think the eye-popping number is the 50 percent rate, which is clearly meant to sound like a blow against billionaire dynasties. But as is often the case with policies put forth by wannabe communist heroes and faux-academic sounding imbeciles with zero private sector or real world experience, the devil is in the details and the policy will harm those it claims to protect.

How? The real giveaway is the threshold. That's where the proposal stops being a tax on the ultra-rich and starts looking like something else entirely. Because $750,000 in New York is not generational wealth. It's a two bedroom house in Queens.