A Spanish newspaper has published an article lauding the "heroism" of volunteers who fought for Hitler against the Soviet Union. The piece highlights only the hardships they faced - and doesn't bother to tell the whole story.

The article was published by one of the country's major newspapers - the ABC - early in February. It came just ahead of the anniversary of Spain's main WWII battle. No, Spain did not partake in it - but its volunteers did.

The Blue Division - named after blue shirts of Francisco Franco's Falangist movement - was officially known as the 250th Infantry Division of Nazi Germany's Wehrmacht. It was created in 1941 as a volunteer unit, to show Spain's devotion to Hitler's cause without openly drawing the country into the war.

More than a year on from a child safety content moderation scandal on YouTube and it takes just a few clicks for the platform's recommendation algorithms to redirect a search for "bikini haul" videos of adult women towards clips of scantily clad minors engaged in body contorting gymnastics or taking an ice bath or ice lolly sucking "challenge."

A YouTube creator called Matt Watson flagged the issue in a critical Reddit post, saying he found scores of videos of kids where YouTube users are trading inappropriate comments and timestamps below the fold, denouncing the company for failing to prevent what he describes as a "soft-core pedophilia ring" from operating in plain sight on its platform.

He has also posted a YouTube video demonstrating how the platform's recommendation algorithm pushes users into what he dubs a pedophilia "wormhole," accusing the company of facilitating and monetizing the sexual exploitation of children.

We were easily able to replicate the YouTube algorithm's behavior that Watson describes in a history-cleared private browser session which, after clicking on two videos of adult women in bikinis, suggested we watch a video called "sweet sixteen pool party."

Clicking on that led YouTube's side-bar to serve up multiple videos of prepubescent girls in its "up next" section where the algorithm tees-up related content to encourage users to keep clicking.

Bart Strickler drank his first beer at 9, smoked his first joint at 10. By the time he was in middle school he'd already done acid, cocaine, LSD, Quaaludes and anything else he could get his hands on.

"I shouldn't be here," he says numbly. He takes a deep breath as the past flutters across his face.

"I shouldn't be here."

The 52-year-old Strickler sits at the end of a long table in a rehab center on Main Avenue, backlit by a single window.

His arms are covered with "jail tats" from his 15 years in federal prison on aggravated assault and weapons charges. "I am trying to beat meth before meth beats me."

He fiddles with a scar on his left wrist: "That was from the second time I tried to kill myself. The first time I had a shotgun, cocked and in my mouth and getting the nerve to pull the trigger when my damn neighbors came to the house."

Your online data is a bit like single-use plastic: there's tonnes of the stuff and it's very hard to get rid of. When you die, your physical body will slowly decay, or be sent to a crematorium or dissolved in a tank filled with potassium hydroxide. But that pesky digital corpse? That's going to be around for a while, like a data soul stuck in online purgatory, never to receive salvation. Unless, of course, you set it free.

All you need to do is organise a cyber funeral. Thanks to recent changes to privacy legislation in Europe and South Korea aimed at protecting the living, we now have more power than ever over our personal information - even from beyond the grave. While this may have felt like a gimmick in the past, cyber funerals - where our personal data is removed from the web posthumously - are slowly becoming a viable option.

But why might you want to book yourself in for an appointment with an online undertaker? While friends, family - or even a legal team - might tidy up someone's offline affairs, a digital legacy is still left to chance. An online funeral can help expunge articles or blogposts that mention spent convictions or ensure social media accounts and other online ephemera are locked down and left in good order. Simply put, when you die in the real world, it's only right and proper that you also die on Facebook. And Instagram. And Google.

Digital undertaking is the act of erasing and tidying up your public data after you die. It's a relatively new idea, but one that's already taking off in South Korea, according to the Korean Employment Information Service. Think of it as a ghoulish version of the European Union's right to be forgotten legislation.

For most digital undertakers, the tricky task is to contact the social media companies, search engines or even media companies who publish personal information, and request for it to be deleted when their client dies. If that doesn't work, then companies - be they in South Korea, the USA or UK - can bury search engine results by flooding Google with new, conflicting data about the deceased.

On Saturday, head of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces' (SDF) Media Centre Mustafa Bali told Sputnik that the remaining militants from the Daesh terrorist group were entrenched in a small area of Baghouz, the last village in Syria to be held by the notorious group.

Hundreds of Daesh terrorists are refusing to surrender in the Syrian village of Baghouz, where they are making their last stand, despite being surrounded by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and facing inevitable defeat, The Hill reported on Monday.

The SDF's top commander commented on the situation, saying that Baghouz is one of the few remaining areas that are controlled by Daesh.

In a recent article, Matt McManus drew a valuable distinction between postmodern culture and postmodern philosophy. Postmodern culture, he argued, was first theorized by neo-Marxists to refer to what they saw as a new phase of capitalism, characterized by heightened skepticism and a preoccupation with subjectivity. However, one need not adopt Marxist social theory in order to agree with the basic point that the social conditions which characterize twenty-first century liberal democracies make it difficult to take our beliefs for granted. The unprecedented degree of cultural and religious pluralism on offer in developed nations today undoubtedly has an impact on what we can take to be certain.

Charles Taylor in his masterpiece A Secular Age called this process "fragilization," the basic idea of which is that it is more difficult to believe in something wholeheartedly when that belief is not shared by the people one is surrounded by (indeed, we might call this sociology of knowledge 101). So, there is a real sense in which we do in fact live in a post- (or what I would prefer to call "late") modern culture, whereby our awareness of the existence of "other options"-made especially acute as a result of recent digital technologies-fragilizes our beliefs, leaving us without firm epistemic anchors. This illuminates a significant but seldom acknowledged reason why postmodern philosophy finds traction today.

A terrorist group posted a disturbing image showing an explosion at a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper.

The photoshopped image shows an explosion at the top of the AON tower in downtown Los Angeles. In the foreground there's a man in a uniform with his face hidden and holding an ISIS flag.

The building is on Wilshire Boulevard in the city's financial district. It is the third largest building in Los Angeles.

"You have to take this very seriously because the fact is that skyscrapers here in Los Angeles have been a target by terrorist organizations," said Steve Gomez, a terrorism and security expert.

Iran says it has arrested six people suspected of involvement in last week's deadly suicide bomb attack on security forces in the southern province of Sistan-Baluchistan.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said on February 18 that it had arrested three "terrorists" in safe houses in the cities of Saravan and Khash.

Sistan-Baluchistan Province's public prosecutor Ali Movahedi said that three other people accused of being involved in the February 13 suicide bombing that killed 27 IRGC members were arrested, according to the semiofficial Fars news agency.

The IRGC said that 150 kilograms of explosives and 600 kilograms of "explosive materials" as well as weapons and ammunition were confiscated in the raids in Saravan and Khash.

Those arrested had "produced, guided, and supported" the vehicle used in the attack, the Guards said.

In the attack, one of the deadliest on Iranian security forces in years, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a bus that was transporting IRGC troops. A militant Sunni Muslim separatist group called Jaish al-Adl (Army of Justice) claimed responsibility for the attack.

A school running a community arts center in Ohio was forced to stop advertising a party game where kids are instructed to 'eliminate' the president with toy guns, after it sparked national outrage.

The game entitled 'President' had been advertised as a part of Nerf gun-themed party organized by the Olmsted Performing Arts community center in Berea, a suburb of Cleveland.

"There is one president with body guards. Everyone else tries to eliminate or shoot the president," read the description of the game on the center's website, since deleted.

The brief description doesn't include any specific reference to President Donald Trump, but the tense environment around his presidency, complete with high-profile threats, helped create concern and outright anger among the community, believes Ohio resident Julie Berghaus.

On 16 February, the Russian Defence Ministry's Centre for Reconciliation in Syria said that terrorists from the Idilb de-escalation zone had attacked Tall-Salhab and Kibriya in Hama Province as well as the Hara settlement in Aleppo over the past day.

At least 15 died and 30 were wounded as a result of a double suicide attack in Syria's Idlib, the Turkish NTV broadcaster reported citing local sources.


Two blasts took place in the city centre and preliminary reports indicate that they were caused by the detonation of two cars loaded with explosives, according to NTV.