Tag: spain

AGAIN? Spain Hit by Widespread Phone and Internet Outages Less Than a Month After Mass Blackouts

Led by a Socialist government and devoted to ‘Net-Zero’ climate fantasies, Spain has of late become increasingly unstable country when it comes to its unreliable infrastructure.

Not even a month ago, the country was plunged into darkness by a massive blackout, and today (20) a widespread internet and phone outage caused alarm in the population.

The Telegraph reported:

“Spain was hit by phone and internet blackouts on Tuesday morning, just weeks after a power failure plunged the country into darkness.

Landline and mobile services were brought down across the country after a botched system upgrade by Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica.”

The outage disrupted the lives of the population, and was particularly harmful to the work of emergency call operators.

The problems began at 2am local time, and initially affected land-lines mostly.

“Regions thought to be affected by the blackouts include the Basque Country, Andalusia, Aragon and Extremadura.”

A spokesman for telecom giant Telefonica said around lunchtime that the issue was resolved.

“The spokesman added: ‘This morning we had an incident that affected the fixed communications services of some companies and public services. We have been working from the outset to restore these services, which have now been fully recovered’.”

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Spain’s Prime Minister Labels Israel a “Genocidal State,” Escalates Diplomatic Tensions

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez ignited an international firestorm on Wednesday after publicly calling Israel a “genocidal state” during a heated parliamentary session, marking the first time the socialist leader used such language, despite his government’s long-standing alignment with anti-Israel rhetoric.

The remarks came in response to Gabriel Rufián, a leftist Catalan MP, who accused Sánchez of hypocrisy for maintaining trade ties with Israel amid its ongoing military campaign in Gaza. Sánchez, pushing back sharply, stated:

“I want to make one thing clear here, Mr. Rufián. We do not do business with a genocidal state, we do not.”

The statement, echoing the language of Sánchez’s far-left coalition partner, the Sumar party, represented a new level of official condemnation. Until now, the prime minister had refrained from personally using the term, even as Spain formally joined South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging genocide by Israel.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemned Sánchez’s statement and swiftly summoned the Spanish ambassador, Ana Salomon, to its Jerusalem office for a formal reprimand. The Ministry accused Sánchez of spreading inflammatory and unfounded accusations, saying his words distort the reality of the ongoing conflict and ignore the suffering of Israeli victims.

Elsewhere in Europe, similar rhetoric emerged. Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema, addressing the city council, referenced the term “genocidal violence” and cited Holocaust scholars critical of Israel’s actions. Her remarks were also met with swift pushback. Israeli Ambassador to the Netherlands Modi Ephraim said he was “deeply dismayed,” calling her speech a distortion of both historical memory and present-day realities.

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Planning to withdraw cash in Spain? You could now face a €150,000 fine

Thinking of pulling out a large amount of cash from your bank account in Spain? A new rule is now in force — and ignoring it could cost you dearly.

New rules in Spain: cash withdrawals over €3,000 under strict control

From now on, anyone withdrawing €3,000 or more from a Spanish bank must notify the Agencia Tributaria (Spain’s tax agency) in advance. If you’re planning to take out €100,000 or more, you’ll need to give at least 72 hours’ notice. For smaller sums over €3,000, a 24-hour notification is mandatory.

The warning must be filed through the tax agency’s official website using a digital certificate, Cl@ve PIN, or electronic ID card. You’ll receive a receipt that must be shown at the bank when withdrawing your cash.

Fail to notify? You risk a fine between 1 per cent and 10 per cent of the amount withdrawn — starting at €600 and climbing up to a massive €150,000, depending on the seriousness of the violation.

Banks are now required to block withdrawals if they detect missing paperwork, and must report suspicious transactions to the authorities, even if amounts are repeatedly just under the threshold.

Spain steps up fight against tax fraud and money laundering

This tough new measure is part of a wider strategy to crack down on tax fraud, money laundering and terrorism financing.
Authorities say that cash remains a key tool for illegal activities, making tighter monitoring essential.

Interestingly, it’s not just massive withdrawals that will raise red flags.
Even frequent small withdrawals — say, €800 or €900 at a time — could draw unwanted attention if not properly justified.
The message from the Spanish government is clear: every move involving large sums of cash must now be fully traceable.

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Spain Blackouts Prompt EU Push for More Censorship Under “Preparedness Strategy” Citing “Disinformation” Threats

These days, no event, incident, or occasion, regardless of its nature, appears to be too big or too small to use as an excuse to promote more censorship in the name of “combating disinformation.”

Last week, Spain and Portugal lived through an embarrassing episode of widespread electricity blackouts – and the current consensus is that the reason is even more embarrassing: old infrastructure, fraught with its own problems – that are only compounded by endless attempts to work “green” energy sources into it.

Trillions of dollars is the figure that experts are mentioning as needed to get the EU’s electricity grid up to speed – or rather, balance the reality with the aggressive “progressive” policy pushes so that a similar crisis is averted going forward.

But a conversation about these topics is apparently a hard one to have for the EU bureaucracy.

Instead, it, through the mouth of Commissioner for Preparedness, Crisis Management and Equality Hadja Lahbib, prefers to effectively misguide, and deflect away from that, and onto the key talking points that are sure to provoke a sense of paranoia among citizens: cyberattacks and supply chain disruptions (as a result of this type of threats).

In other words – instead of addressing actual problem(s), the focus is being shifted to how information around them should be best managed, to somehow score public opinion points.

Speaking for Spain’s El Mundo, Lahbib mentioned the EU Preparation Strategy, and the Union Strategy for Preparation – apparently, her “shorthand” for the formal, and oddly phrased, “EU Preparedness Union Strategy.”

It is a set of measures meant to “counter foreign information manipulation and disinformation more systematically” by fully using the EU’s Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) toolbox, the censorship law Digital Services Act (DSA), and the censorship initiative – the upcoming European Democracy Shield.

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Spain hit by more blackouts as ‘tens of thousands’ left without power in Canary Islands a week after nationwide outages

A power outage hit several areas of the Spanish island of La Palma in the Canary Islands on Thursday, just a week after national outages.

Local media reported that thousands of locals and holidaymakers across the island were left without power for nearly two hours after a blackout occurred at around 10am local time.

The affected areas included Los Llanos de Aridane, Breña Alta, Santa Cruz de La Palma and Fuencaliente.

More than twenty towns were left without in the dark in these areas, stretching from north to south of the island, before Endesa and Red Eléctrica begun working on restoring power.

Javier Llamas, the mayor of the town of Aridane, told a local radio station at around midday that: ‘More than half of the power outage has already been restored.’    

Local media reports explained how the power outage could potentially affect up to 30,000 people in La Palma.

‘The source is unknown for now, but everything points to a problem at the Los Guinchos power plant,’ La Radio Canaria said.

La Palma Island Council urged residents to remain calm, avoid overwhelming emergency services, call 112 only if absolutely necessary, and prioritise saving battery life on mobile devices. 

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Three children ‘rescued’ from home after ‘COVID syndrome’ parents kept them locked inside for 4 years

Three children have allegedly been found living in prison-like conditions following COVID ‘lockdown’ rules, long after pandemic restrictions ended.

A German couple living in Spain have been arrested after allegedly locking their three children inside and forcing them to abide by pandemic restrictions, such as wearing masks, for the past four years.

The siblings, eight-year-old twins and a 10-year-old, were dramatically rescued from the ‘house of horrors’ in Oviedo on Monday (April 28) after being locked up inside since around December 2021.

Once freed, cops noticed the children acted unusually to being outside, as they touched the grass and appeared intrigued by a snail.

An investigator also said: “As soon as we got them out, all three children began to breathe deeply, as if they had never been outside before,” according to New York Post.

The authorities learnt of the children’s situation after a neighbor filed a complaint on April 14 that the youngsters had not been attending school, according to El Comercio.

Yet while Oviedo Police Chief Javier Lozano said there was nothing ‘initially’ that sparked concern, cops grew suspicious after surveillance on the home revealed the 53-year-old father was the only person to leave the residence to pick up groceries and mail.

Other neighbors reported the rest of the family had not left the home since December 2021.

When police approached the family, the father reportedly ‘agreed’ to let them in while they spotted the mom, a 48-year-old German-American woman, putting three masks each on the children, per El Mundo.

It is also reported that she told officers to ‘be careful’ since her children were ‘very sick.’

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Is The New York Times Serious With This Headline About the Spanish Blackout?

Spain made a huge announcement this year: it is now 100 percent powered by renewable energy. Green warriors unite! The planet is saved. Global warming is over, except that it’s not. And like Solyndra, this entire method of powering a nation was exposed as a fraud and a scam. There was an 18-hour blackout because the grid couldn’t handle it. The best part is that The New York Times had this headline for the fiasco: “How Spain’s Success in Renewable Energy May Have Left It Vulnerable.”

Fact check: If the grid goes down, or is “vulnerable,” then the renewable energy push was not a success: 

Spain’s power company, Red Eléctrica, proudly declared on April 16 that enough renewable energy had been generated to cover demand. “The ecological transition is moving forward,” it said. 

Less than two weeks later, Spain and Portugal experienced an 18-hour blackout that disrupted daily life, shutting down businesses and schools and crippling trains and mobile networks. 

Officials have given few details on the cause of the outage. But the incident exposed how Spain and Portugal, promoted as success stories in Europe’s renewable energy transition, are also uniquely vulnerable to outages, given their relative isolation from the rest of the continent’s energy supply.

“This disruption serves as a clear warning,” wrote Pratheeksha Ramdas, an analyst at Rystad Energy, a consulting firm. “Future grid failures could have even more severe consequences,” she added. 

The widespread outage raises questions about the resilience of the power infrastructure in Spain and Portugal — and to an extent, Europe. The two countries have invested heavily in building renewable energy sources like wind turbines and solar farms. 

More than half of Spain’s electricity came from renewable energy as of last year, up from about a quarter 15 years ago. That rapid increase has put Spain at the forefront of Europe’s transition to renewable energy and led to much lower electricity prices and less reliance on fossil fuels. 

This shift, though, may also have made the grid more prone to the sort of disruption that occurred on Monday. “When you have more renewables on the grid,” Ms. Ramdas said, “then your grid is more sensitive for these kind of disturbances.” 

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NatGas Generators Rescued Spain From Net Zero Death After Power Collapse

We want to congratulate Portugal and Spain for achieving net zero earlier this week, well ahead of the 2050 target.

Europe’s dangerous and radical shift to unreliable net zero energy has been nothing short of a disaster and an embarrassment for the far-left liberals high in their castles in Brussels. 

The progressives ramming green ideology down our throats seem completely divorced from reality, having steered the West toward a bleak future built on unreliable green energy—much of it sourced from China.

Meanwhile, China is rapidly expanding its reliable coal and nuclear power generation. One can’t help but wonder whether leftist politicians are inadvertently sabotaging the very foundations of the West. 

The inconvenient truth for Western liberals is that fossil fuel power generation is what restarted Spain’s power grid after the worst power blackout in a generation. 

“SPAIN’s black start after the cascading power failure relied heavily on gas-fired and hydro generators to re-energise the grid and establish synchronism,” commodities analyst John Kemp wrote on X. 

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Power Restored In Spain, Portugal As Net-Zero Becomes Headache For Brussels

Spanish power distributor Red Eléctrica announced on X early Tuesday that 99% of the country’s power capacity had been restored following a daylong, unprecedented blackout that plunged much of Europe’s Iberian Peninsula into chaos and darkness.

As of 0700 local time, Red Eléctrica stated:

  • 99.95% of the demand recovered (25,794MW).
  • We continue working from the Electrical Control Center for the complete normalization of the system.

The outage paralyzed digital payment systems, disrupted communications, and brought various modes of transportation networks to an apocalyptic standstill. While a Spanish judge has launched an investigation into whether a cyberattack was responsible, early indications suggest the culprit is likely net zero.

Here’s an excerpt from Michael Shellenberger at PUBLIC, who provided an uncomfortable truth about the unhinged liberals in Europe who have been hellbent on retiring fossil fuel power and nuclear generation plants, swapping for unreliable solar and wind:

Despite all these warnings, political and regulatory energy in Europe remained focused on accelerating renewable deployment, not upgrading the grid’s basic stability. In Spain, solar generation continued to climb rapidly through 2023 and early 2024. 

Coal plants closed. Nuclear units retired. 

On many spring days by 2025, Spain’s midday solar generation exceeded its total afternoon demand, leading to frequent negative electricity prices.

The system was being pushed to the limit.

And today, at 12:35 pm, it broke.

…

Spain’s blackout wasn’t just a technical failure. It was a political and strategic failure.

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Spain’s blackouts are a disaster made by Net Zero

‘We face a long night’, warned Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez yesterday evening, after much of Spain, Portugal and south-west France were plunged into darkness by the worst power outage in European history. Tens of millions of people were left without electricity. Trains were halted, planes were grounded and the internet was shut down. Modern life ground to a halt across the Iberian Peninsula. Although the exact causes of the blackout have yet to be declared, we can be certain of one thing: the risk of such outages will only get worse as we embark on the path towards Net Zero.

Spain and Portugal are increasingly reliant on solar and wind power. Renewables were supplying 80 per cent of electricity just before the outages. The blackouts were triggered by a rapid loss of power – of around 15GW, the equivalent of 60 per cent of Spain’s national electricity demand. It is not clear what exactly led to this loss, although a cyber attack has been ruled out. What matters is that a renewable-heavy grid is far less able to absorb this kind of shock than one that runs on traditional energy sources.

Coal and gas plants, or hydroelectric dams, have what is called ‘inertia’ built into the system, whereas wind and solar do not. The spinning turbines used in traditional energy generation will not immediately grind to a halt when there is a fault, acting as a buffer against power outages. ‘In a low-inertia environment’, explains energy expert Kathryn Porter, ‘if you have had a significant grid fault in one area, or a cyber attack, or whatever it may be, the grid operators therefore have less time to react. That can lead to cascading failures if you cannot get it under control quickly.’

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