Society's ChildS


Red Flag

Crimes of rape have tripled in six years across Spain

unhappy
Spain has seen an alarming rise in sexual violence over recent years, culminating in a record-high number of rapes, which reached 5,206 incidents in 2024, according to new official statistics from the Ministry of the Interior.

With an average of 14 rapes per day across the country, the figure nearly triples the 1,878 cases reported in 2019 when five daily incidents were reported. The upward trend has remained consistent year-over-year since 2018, aside from a brief dip during 2020 due to Covid-19 restrictions.

Regional breakdowns show that communities like Catalonia, Madrid, and Andalusia report the highest numbers, although increases have been noted throughout all regions of Spain. Cases involving minors, nightlife-related assaults, and attacks perpetrated by groups of offenders are also on the rise. The grim reality presented by these numbers translates to a woman being raped every hour and 45 minutes in Spain.

Remix News reported in November last year on a La Rázon report that revealed 91 percent of those convicted of rape in Catalonia are foreigners, with immigrants comprising just 17 percent of the region's total population.

Stop

Newark airport experiences another terrifying air traffic control outage, bringing flights to a standstill

airline tower
© REUTERSUnited Airlines Station Operation Center • Newark Liberty International Airport • May 9, 2025
Almost 80 flights have been cancelled and more than 60 delayed at Newark airport after yet another equipment outage brought more chaos to the the NYC-area hub.

A 45-minute ground stop was ordered on Sunday morning by the FAA following the outage at Newark's ATC facility, officials told WABC. Then, a short time later a different outage hit Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport — the busiest in the country.

"Runway equipment issues" resulted in delays and ground stops for nearly all flights arriving at Atlanta.

Bizarro Earth

Smartmatic hid meeting with Dem megadonor Reid Hoffman, who financed its suit against 2020 Election

reid hoffman linkedin israel aipac super pacs
© Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for LinkedInBillionaire venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman
Smartmatic, the electronic tabulator company suing Fox News for alleged defamation following the 2020 election, failed in a February court hearing to disclose a meeting with Democrat megadonor , newly unsealed court documents allege.

Following the 2020 election, both Fox News and Newsmax "hosted commentators who aired concerns that tabulators were not secure, were vulnerable to voter fraud, and had possibly changed Trump votes to Biden votes," as described in these pages by Logan Washburn. Smartmatic sued, arguing the comments amounted to defamation. Fox previously settled a suit with Dominion Voting over similar allegations while Newsmax recently settled with Smartmatic for $40 million, according to NBC.

As Washburn reported, Fox had previously expressed concerns about a "deep-pocketed 'third party' behind the suit" — allegations that Smartmatic denied in 2023, according to Reuters. But reporting from The Washington Post revealed Hoffman invested millions in Smartmatic, as the company sued news outlets for their reporting about the 2020 election. In July 2024, the Post reported that Hoffman had "connected with Smartmatic chief executive Antonio Mugica through friends of friends" and was "boosting" its lawsuit against Fox.

Comment: Reid Hoffman has had his fingers in a lot of legal pies trying to derail Trump, most notably bankrolling E. Jean Carroll's rape accusations against Trump.


Star of David

I was in the BBC documentary 'The Settlers.' This is the part of my story they didn't tell.

Mohammed Hureini  Louis Theroux BBC 'The Settlers'.
© Screenshot, 'The Settlers'Mohammed Hureini speaking to British journalist Louis Theroux in the BBC documentary film, 'The Settlers'.
I met Louis Theroux to share my story as a Palestinian under the constant threat of displacement. While the film is an important look into the Israeli settlers trying to erase us, there is one crucial part of our story that was left out.

The BBC documentary The Settlers, directed by Josh Baker and written by Louis Theroux, has recently aired to much international attention. It aims to give Western viewers an inside look into the minds of Israeli settlers - those who occupy Palestinian land in the West Bank, often with open ideological commitment to ethnic cleansing and supremacy.

The film achieves its goal to a certain extent, as it exposed the raw, unfiltered language of settlers who speak brazenly about displacing Palestinians from their ancestral homes.

But while the documentary was willing to give settlers the microphone to lay out their dangerous visions for the future, it fell painfully short in giving equal weight to the lived reality of those whose lives are being shattered by those very ideologies.

Comment: The Zionist reaction was immediate:




The full documentary. Watch for the megalomaniac, arch-psychopath settler leader Danielle Weiss:





Books

Former Harvard dean, leading international relations scholar Joseph Nye dead at 88

Harvard Kennedy School professor Joseph S. Nye Sr.
© Jack R. TrapanickHarvard Kennedy School professor Joseph S. Nye Sr. speaks with HKS lecturer Hannah Riley Bowles at an Institute of Politics forum in February 2024. Nye died on Tuesday at age 88.
Former Harvard Kennedy School dean and prominent international relations scholar Joseph S. Nye Sr. died at 88 on Tuesday.

HKS Dean Jeremy M. Weinstein announced Nye's death in an email to faculty, staff, and students Wednesday afternoon.

Nye, who served as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs under President Bill Clinton, was one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary international relations theory.

Nye was best known for developing the theory of neoliberalism alongside Princeton professor Robert Keohane. He also coined the term "soft power" in the 1980s to describe a country's non-military sway on the world stage.

Comment: So Nye played a strong role in shaping the neocon mindset. It's sinister ramifications still echo today, in the many failures of the US' exercise of "soft power".


Arrow Up

Record civilian casualties from Ukrainian strikes last week - Moscow

Map Ukrainian civilian strikes
© Rodion Miroshnik; TelegramMap of Ukrainian strikes on civilian targets registered between April 28 and May 4, 2025
Fifteen people lost their lives during the period, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry's war crimes investigator.

Ukrainian forces have killed 15 civilians and injured 142 over the past week, including eight minors, according to Rodion Miroshnik, the Russian Foreign Ministry's ambassador-at-large tasked with documenting Kiev's alleged war crimes.

Writing on his Telegram channel on Tuesday, Miroshnik noted that the past seven days had been the deadliest for civilians since the beginning of the year. He stressed that Ukraine's forces had launched at least 1,974 munitions at civilian targets in Russian territory over the past week.

The strikes have affected multiple regions, including the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics (DPR and LPR), the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as Belgorod, Bryansk, and Krasnodar.

Comment: 'Someone' is calling the shots. Cui bono?


Attention

US aid mission in Gaza more disastrous than acknowledged

Damaged pier
© Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu/Getty ImagesView of damaged floating pier, set up by US to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians • May 27, 2024
A watchdog has reported dozens of injuries, millions in equipment losses and minimal results.

The US military's humanitarian pier mission in Gaza last year resulted in far more injuries, damage, and operational failure than previously publicly acknowledged, an investigation has found.

The mission, formally known as Operation Neptune Solace, was launched under the administration of former President Joe Biden in 2024 after the US failed to persuade Israel to expand overland access for humanitarian deliveries. The US military constructed a temporary offshore pier and floating causeway to transfer aid from ships to the Gaza shoreline without entering Israeli or Gazan ports.

The Pentagon had since acknowledged that the mission encountered certain challenges, such as rough weather conditions, which caused damage to the pier but did not disclose the full scope of the problems.

According to the Department of Defense Inspector General's report, which was published last week, the mission caused 62 injuries among personnel, including the death of Army Sergeant Quandarius Stanley, who was critically injured aboard a Navy vessel in May 2024 and died five months later.

Comment: Netanyahu: Thumbs up. Biden: Clueless.


Attention

Interior Secretary warns U.S. at risk of Spain-style blackouts

Burgum
© ALL INUS Interior Secretary Doug Burgum
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum warned the United States is at risk of suffering from blackouts that recently brought most of Spain to a halt due to over-subsidizing intermittent renewable energy sources.

"We just saw in Spain, they were celebrating on April 12th of this past month that they'd shut down their last coal plant. A week after that, they were celebrating the fact that they had their first day of 100% renewables on their system," Burgum said in an interview with All-In podcast co-host David Friedberg. "Then, the next week, they were a global news story because people were trapped in subways, all airline flights canceled, hospitals were panicking with a lack of power because they had a rolling blackout and grid failure."


Comment: 'Gone' with the wind.


Star of David

More please: UK's Virgin Atlantic permanently cancels Israel flights

virggin atlantic air plane
Virgin Atlantic permanently suspends flights to Israel May 8, 2025
Airline becomes third to abandon the racist occupation - UK media ignores

Virgin Atlantic has permanently cancelled its flights to Israel's Tel Aviv amid the risks associated with retaliation from Israel's neighbours for the Zionist regime's bombing attacks and its genocide in Gaza.

The airline had initially planned to resume flights to Tel Aviv in October this year but has now permanently ended operations to Israel, following the path taken by Turkish Airlines and Pegasus Airlines, which have also announced the end of their flights to Israel.

A statement from Virgin Atlantic reads:
After careful consideration, we have taken the difficult decision to cancel our services between London Heathrow and Tel Aviv.
The decision appears to have been entirely ignored by 'mainstream' UK news media.

Camcorder

Be not enticed to tyranny: Oppose the surveillance state

Surveillance
© ShutterstockLicense plate surveillance
Targeted by smart doorbells or license plate readers, but tempted just to shrug off losses of privacy? The cumulative price of surveillance is higher than we can imagine.

A surveillance state is being erected around the American public at an alarming rate. In many urban and suburban settings, anyone traveling on public streets or sidewalks will have his image captured by the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. A leisurely stroll around the neighborhood, as well as any conversation along the way, might be recorded if the city uses surveillance-enabled street lights. Even our own front yards might not be safe from the prying eyes of the state if a neighbor has a "smart" doorbell that shares data with law enforcement.

Rural areas are not exempt from this intrusion. Automatic License Plate Reader cameras (ALPRs, often contracted under the brand name FLOCK), are being placed on rural highways and on county lines in an increasing number of areas. Audio and video surveillance now cover remote corners of the Amazon Basin. Satellite technology could ensure that, one day, no square foot of the planet is unobserved.