Tag: spain

Could renewable energy be to blame for huge Spain blackout? How outage struck days after country’s grid ran entirely on green power for the first time

Widespread power outages hit several countries in Western Europe this afternoon, triggering chaos as rail networks, traffic lights and communications networks went down. 

The shocking blackouts, which struck around 12.15pm CEST have impacted millions of people with almost all of Spain and Portugal affected. 

Parts of France, Andorra and Belgium also suffered outages, according to the most recent reports. 

Several metro and rail passengers were reportedly stranded in Madrid and Lisbon, while the international airports of both capital cities and several other airports across Spain and Portugal were closed.

Spain’s state electricity network operator Red Electrica said on X it had begun to restore power in the north and south of Spain, adding it may take some time to bring the whole grid back online.

Some critics have claimed that Spain’s integration of renewable energy sources into the European power network could have triggered the blackout, though the cause has not yet been established. 

Renewable energy sources – wind, hydro and solar power – met the electricity demand for all of Spain for the first time ever on April 16, according to Red Electrica, which says it is leading an ‘ecological transition’ in Spain’s energy sector.

Other theories include a cyber attack, as analysts pointed out that Europe’s energy grid has suffered a substantial increase in cyber attacks following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Meanwhile, a fire in southern France is reported to have damaged a high-voltage powerline between Perpignan and Narbonne, which may also have contributed to the outages, according to Portugal’s national electric company REN.

Red Electrica is now working with two of Spain’s largest electric companies, Endesa and Iberdrola, to investigate the cause of the outages. 

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Muslims Threaten to Sue Spain in Strasbourg Over Holy Week Processions, Claim They “Offend Islam.”

A group of British Muslims of Iranian origin, led by Anjem Choudary, is threatening to file a lawsuit before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

They allege that Spain’s traditional Holy Week processions are an “offense to Islam” and to the Prophet Muhammad, demanding their immediate ban.

The Muslim group intends to sue Spain in Strasbourg over these Catholic processions, with Choudary arguing that these religious events, rooted in Catholic tradition since 1978, are a “provocation” against Muslims.

“It’s an offense to the thousands of Muslims forced to live in secrecy ,” declared the leader, known for his history of radical statements. The legal challenge seeks to have Spain suspend these centuries-old celebrations, triggering a strong backlash throughout the country.

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The Socialist Autocrat of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, Targets Foreign Property Buyers with a 100% Tax While Daring to Criticize Trump’s Tariffs.

Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez — the most corrupt and autocratic socialist in recent history leading a far-left coalition — has announced a stunning policy: a 
100% tax on real estate purchases by non-EU foreigners.

Recently unveiled, this measure threatens to destabilize Spain’s housing market, scare off investors, and allegedly prioritize housing for locals — all at the expense of economic growth. Yet Sánchez dares to call President Donald Trump’s tariffs “unfair,” revealing a level of hypocrisy that no longer surprises anyone.

Comrade Sánchez presents this tax as a solution to Spain’s housing crisis. He cites data showing that in 2023, non-EU buyers — Americans, Brits, and others — purchased 27,000 properties, often as investments rather than primary residences.

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Spain’s Vox Party Spokesperson Faces Hate-Crime Probe After Calling Out Link Between Immigration & Crime

A Spanish conservative lawmaker is facing a hate crime investigation after a press conference in which he highlighted the link between mass immigration and rising crime rates — a connection supported by official data but often ignored by Spain’s far-left administration.

José Antonio Fúster, national spokesman for the populist Vox party and member of the Madrid Assembly, addressed the media on July 29 last year, where he read out the forenames of several dozen individuals arrested during violent incidents in Barcelona that weekend.

“Sabar, Omar, Nassim, Abdelkader, Salah, Salah, Younes, Karim, Jamil, Amir, Ali, Oussama, Hassan… I can go on. Do you notice any patterns? Do you notice anything?” Fúster asked.

“We do, and this is what we have been denouncing for a long time, that the open-door policy of the Popular Party and the PSOE has direct consequences on the security of Spaniards,” he added.

Though the list he read had the surnames redacted and had already circulated online via party channels, his public use of it has led the National Police to file a report for alleged incitement to hatred. Fúster, protected by parliamentary immunity as a sitting deputy, expressed disbelief upon receiving the notification last week and doubled down on his comments.

“We’re constantly told that immigration and crime have no link,” Fúster said, as cited by Spanish digital newspaper The Objective. 

“But they’re not fooling anyone. The criminals that Spaniards endure in their neighborhoods have names — and we all know them.”

Vox maintains that spurious criminal complaints are part of a wider effort to silence those who raise valid security concerns. The party highlighted charges against MP Rocío de Meer last year for writing, “The future of this country is dark,” in response to the birth of a child named Ayoub in a rural Spanish village, and Jordi de la Fuente, another Vox figure, who is awaiting trial over a 2019 protest targeting an asylum center.

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Spain cancels arms deal with Israeli company worth billions

The Spanish government has canceled a contract to buy ammunition for its Civil Guard police force from an Israeli defense company, Madrid announced in a statement on 29 October.

“The Spanish government maintains the commitment not to sell weapons to the Israeli state since the armed conflict broke out in the territory of Gaza,” Spain’s Interior Ministry announced. 

“Although in this case it is an acquisition of ammunition, the Interior Ministry has initiated the administrative procedure to cancel the purchase,” it added. 

It also said Israeli firms will be excluded from any outstanding tenders. 

The Cadena SER radio station reported earlier that Spain’s Civil Guard police force had agreed to a sale of over 15 million nine-millimeter rounds for $6.48 million from Guardian LTD Israel. 

The announcement comes the week after the Spanish Defense Ministry told local media that it had halted the purchase of weapons from Israel. The European country had said it would stop arms sales to Israel after the start of the war on 7 October 2023.

This decision marks the first signal that the Spanish pledge will include purchases from Israel and not just sales.

Spain has been vocal about Israel’s genocide and continuous war crimes in the Gaza Strip, as well as in Lebanon. 

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez urged other members of the EU on 14 October to suspend the bloc’s free trade agreement with Israel. 

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“A Salary For Being Trans” : Trans Activists In Spain Prompt Outrage After Meeting With Politicians To Forward A “Transgender Pension”

A prominent trans activist organization in Spain has put forward a proposal for legislation that would guarantee transgender people pensions upon reaching 65. The pensions would be issued regardless of whether the transgender applicant had ever paid into the pension throughout their life.

The proposal was put forward by Federation Platform for Trans Rights, who presented it last week to the parliamentary groups of the Congress of Deputies. The group, known colloquially as Plataforma Trans, was founded in 2015 “with the aim of uniting specifically trans collectives and entities and to fight for a new trans law that recognizes gender self-determination and depathologises trans identities.” During the meeting, all parties sent representatives except the right-wing Popular Party and Vox Party.

Calling it the “Trans Memory Law,” the policy would grant people who identify as transgender a lifetime pension, along with priority access to public housing and housing assistance programs.

This was the second meeting involving the Federation Platform for Trans Rights and top Spanish politicians, indicating the group may soon see their plans realized.

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Stone Age builders had engineering savvy, finds study of 6000-year-old monument

The Neolithic farmers and herders who built a massive stone chamber in southern Spain nearly 6,000 years ago possessed a good rudimentary grasp of physics, geometry, geology and architectural principles, finds a detailed study of the site.

Using data from a high-resolution laser scan, as well as unpublished photos and diagrams from earlier excavations, archaeologists pieced together a probable construction process for the monument known as the Dolmen of Menga. Their findings, published on 23 August in Science Advances1, reveal new insights into the structure and its Neolithic builders’ technical abilities.

The dolmen pre-dates the main stone circle at Stonehenge in the United Kingdom by about 1,000 years, but the construction process described in the study would have involved similar techniques and demanded a similar level of engineering.

“These people had no blueprints to work with, nor, as far as we know, any previous experience at building something like this,” says study co-author Leonardo García Sanjuán, an archaeologist at the University of Seville in Spain. “And yet, they understood how to fit together huge blocks of stone” with “a precision that would keep the monument intact for nearly 6,000 years”.

“There’s no way you could do that without at least a basic working knowledge of science,” he adds.

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Reality and Incompetence: The Elites’ Achilles Heels

Last week, as the world Elites sought to fixate the public’s gaze on the escalations geopolitically and militarily in Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia, a rather important development politically took place on Western Europe’s Iberian peninsula. A situation unfolded which might only have been thought possible in a Jason Bourne film. A fugitive on the run from a corrupt government apparatus makes an appearance in a politically fraught situation, turns the tables on his pursuers, and then vanishes from the scene, leaving little to no clue as to how he escaped his pursuers’ grasp. The whole event was a public relations disaster of immense proportions for the Globalist forces struggling to keep their one world government agenda alive. It also inspired hope and fired the imagination of a people who have been ground especially hard under the iron boot of the Elite classes of Madrid for almost a decade.

The situation was the return of exiled Catalan independence leader Carles Puigdemont to Catalonia after a seven year exile to address the people whose independence he has worked for at great personal cost for the last eight years. In 2017, while serving as President of the Catalan regional government, he and the Catalan Parliament held the Catalan independence referendum in which the people of Catalonia voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence. In response to the vote and subsequent Catalan declaration of independence, the Elites in Madrid dispatched a heavily militarized police force to brutally repress the Catalan people. Puigdemont and members of his government fled into exile in a bid to keep the Catalan independence effort alive politically, and they have worked for the independence of their homeland from abroad ever since.

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New Dating Places the First European Hominids in Southern Iberia

One of the most significant controversies in the study of human evolution and migration is determining when and by what route the first hominids arrived in Europe from Africa. Recent geological dating techniques applied to the Orce sites in the Baza basin, Granada, Spain, have discovered human remains that are approximately 1.3 million years old. This finding supports the hypothesis that humans may have entered Europe through the southern Iberian Peninsula via the Strait of Gibraltar, rather than returning to the Mediterranean through Asia. 

New Dating Techniques Reveal Ancient Hominids 

According to a report by the University of Barcelona, the study, led by Luís Gibert of the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Earth Sciences, in collaboration with researchers from the Berkeley Geochronology Centre and Murray State University in the United States, utilized paleomagnetism to date the Orce region. Paleomagnetism studies the inversion of the Earth’s magnetic poles, recorded in minerals, to establish time periods. The new dating involved an area of Orce that had never been sampled before and was protected from erosion. 

“The uniqueness of these sites is that they are stratified and within a very long sedimentary sequence, more than eighty meters (262 feet) long,” explained Gibert. 

This extensive sequence allowed the identification of a magnetic polarity sequence with five magnetic events, placing the Orce sites between the Olduvai and Jaramillo subchron, approximately between 1.77 and 1.07 million years ago. Through a statistical age model, the researchers refined the chronology to a margin of error of only 70,000 years. 

The oldest site, Venta Micena, dates back to 1.32 million years ago, followed by Barranco León at 1.28 million years, and Fuente Nueva 3 at 1.23 million years. 

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Bilderberg 2024: CEOs, billionaires, and govt officials meet behind closed doors in Madrid

The CEOs of Microsoft AI, Google DeepMind, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, BP, Shell, Pfizer, Spotify, Palantir and more are meeting in private with an international cadre of high-level government officials and billionaires like Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel this week.

A huge story if ever there was one, but don’t expect to read about it on the front page – or any other page – of most newspapers.

It’s the 70th annual Bilderberg meeting, and – as has been the case for seven decades and counting now – the mass media is largely refusing to cover it, leaving most of its readership ignorant of the fact that it’s even taking place at all.

Participants will be discussing China, Russia, AI, the “changing faces of biology,” the “future of warfare”… and whatever the hell else they want — it’s off-the-record and the public is not invited.

“Journalists” like Fareed Zakaria (CNN), Bret Stephens (NYT), Zanny Minton Beddoes (The Economist), and John Micklethwait (Bloomberg) will also be present, but not to hold power to account; they’re there to share in it.

The event is taking place from May 30 — June 2 at Eurostars Suites Mirasierra, a luxury hotel in Madrid, Spain.

The group waited until Thursday to publish a partial list of attendees for public consumption.

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