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Why You Can’t Donate Blood In Spain If You Don’t Speak Spanish

Published

1 day ago

September 30, 2026

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Esme Fox – esme@thelocal.es

Published: 30 Sep, 2026 CET. Updated: Wed 30 Sep 2026 13:14 CET

Why you can't donate blood in Spain if you don't speak Spanish — You may not be able to donate blood in Spain if you don’t speak Spanish. Photo: ESTEBAN VEGA LA-ROTTA / AFP

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There’s a little-known rule in Spain that you must be able to understand and communicate in Spanish if you want to donate blood here.

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I tried donating blood. My Spanish wasn’t the problem. The problem was that I lived in the UK during the 90s. Mad Cow Disease is a neural disorder that can take decades to activate.

ElPais

Tennessee Governor Halts Executions After Christa Pike Survives Two Lethal Injections

Published

37 mins ago

October 1, 2026

Abel FernandezAP Associated Press

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Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has halted the one remaining execution for 2026 after a woman named Christa Pike on Wednesday survived two injections of pentobarbital, a situation described as unprecedented.

The Tennessee Department of Corrections has confirmed that Pike, who was due to be executed for a 1995 murder, survived the lethal injections. She was taken to hospital, where she was receiving “life-saving measures,” according to a statement from her legal defense team cited by the BBC.

The pentobarbital injections were administered just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court authorized, without providing an explanation in its ruling, the carrying out of her death sentence in Tennessee, where she was convicted of the 1995 murder of a fellow student. The execution was scheduled for Wednesday morning but was stayed by a federal appeals court just one hour before it was due to take place. Pike is the first woman on whom an execution order has been carried out in the southeastern state in more than two centuries.

At 8:26 p.m. local time, according to witnesses, the contents of both syringes containing the lethal injection chemicals had been injected, but Pike “still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring,” her attorneys stated in a brief filed with a federal court. They added that Pike “has not lost consciousness and still has a pulse,” and that the curtains in the execution chamber “have been lowered twice.”

Tennessee Department of Corrections spokeswoman Dorinda Carter told reporters at the scene that she could not immediately provide information about what had happened. It is unclear what will happen next following the two failed execution attempts.

In May, a medical team spent more than an hour unsuccessfully attempting to insert an intravenous line into Tony Carruthers, an inmate at Riverbend maximum-security prison in Nashville, the capital of Tennessee, to administer a lethal dose of sedative. In that case, State Governor Bill Lee ordered the execution to be halted and later granted him a one-year stay of execution.

The Tennessee Supreme Court had rejected a request to stay the execution last week, and the U.S. Supreme Court had done the same on Tuesday. Tennessee Governor Lee, a Republican, had also denied a petition for clemency.

But with about an hour to go before the execution by lethal injection at the Riverbend facility, where witnesses had already gathered, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit — which reviews decisions by federal courts in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee — ordered a stay of the execution to consider the defense’s arguments that evidence regarding the abuse Pike suffered during childhood and adolescence had not been presented to the jury during the original trial.

Following the appeals court order, the Tennessee Attorney General’s office stated in a release picked up by a local television station in Jackson, Tennessee, that it would “continue to defend the enforcement of the legally imposed sentence” while that “technical issue” was being resolved. While the six conservative justices on the Supreme Court voted to lift the stay of execution, the three progressive justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — voted against it. In their dissent, they argued that the decision cleared the way for the “State to execute Pike before litigation over her conviction has properly run its course in the lower courts.”

The murder of Colleen Slemmer

Pike was convicted in 1995 of murdering 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a fellow student at a vocational training center for young people in Knoxville, eastern Tennessee. According to the case record, Pike and two other youths, including her then-boyfriend Tadaryl Shipp, led Slemmer to a secluded spot, tortured and killed her. The boyfriend, who was 17 at the time, was sentenced to life in prison. The other person testified against both and received parole.

According to the Tennessee Supreme Court ruling, Pike told police she believed Slemmer was trying to take her boyfriend away from her and initially only wanted to fight with her, but ended up killing her instead.

The ruling says Pike had told a classmate the day before that she was going to kill Slemmer and admitted to police that she struck, kicked and cut the young woman’s throat. Slemmer tried several times to escape the attack, which lasted more than half an hour. Pike said she had hit Slemmer several times in the head with pieces of asphalt. Slemmer died from the head injuries, court documents say.

Pike’s lawyers have asked that her death sentence be replaced with life without parole, arguing she suffered sexual abuse and mental health problems during childhood and adolescence. The defense says the attorneys who represented Pike at trial failed to present evidence of the abuse she endured to the jury.

They also note that seven people, all men, who were sentenced to death in Tennessee for crimes committed at age 18 have had their sentences commuted. No one else that age has been sentenced to death in the state since Pike, 30 years ago.

The abuse allegations that appellate judges will review

According to the clemency petition, Pike was the victim of sexual violence in childhood and suffered assaults between the ages of two and five by her grandmother’s boyfriend. At 11, a neighbor raped her, and Pike reportedly told her mother, who did not believe her, according to a summary of the petition prepared by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI). The neighbor was arrested on charges of indecent acts with a minor but was not jailed. At 17, she was raped again by a stranger, the petition says. Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the clemency petition, Pike’s lawyers said her mental health problems prevented her from “stopping herself.” “I was an 18-year-old with a mental illness. It took me many years to even understand the gravity of what I had done. And even longer to accept how many people I affected. I took the life of someone’s daughter, sister, friend. I am now horrified to think I was capable of such a crime,” Pike said in the petition, according to the AP.

According to the DPI, new death sentences for crimes committed by people aged 18 to 20 are rare in the U.S. justice system. In 2005, in Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the death penalty for crimes committed by people under 18. Since then, only 58 death sentences have been imposed for crimes committed before age 21. Between 2020 and 2025 those sentences represented 5% of new death sentences.

Colleen ‘is not with me every day, every hour, every minute’

Slemmer’s mother, May Martínez, had opposed halting the execution and said she would travel from Jacksonville, Florida, where she lives, to witness it. She described her daughter as a happy young woman who liked skating and family games.

“[Colleen] is not with me. She is not with me every day, every hour, every minute,” the mother said in an interview this month with a local station, lamenting that attention on the case has focused on Pike and sidelined her daughter. “It’s as if Colleen never existed,” she said, adding that she hoped the execution would bring some peace to the family.

There have been 29 executions in the U.S. so far this year. On Tuesday, 77-year-old Curtis Beasley was executed in Florida for a 1995 murder — the 16th execution in Florida this year. In July, Florida executed two people on the same day, something that had not happened since 1964. In August, Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee carried out executions on the same day, which had not happened since 2010.

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Spain’s PM Welcomes Burnham’s Openness To UK Rejoining EU

Published

2 hours ago

October 1, 2026

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Conor Faulkner – conor.faulkner@thelocal.com

Published: 1 Oct, 2026 CET. Updated: Thu 1 Oct 2026 16:03 CET

Spain's PM welcomes Burnham's openness to UK rejoining EU — Britain’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez walk through Central Park on September 22nd 2026. (Photo by Toby Melville / POOL / AFP)

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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has welcomed the fact that his British counterpart is attempting to recalibrate the UK’s relationship with the EU, calling Britain a “sister nation” and stressing that “Brexit was a huge loss”.

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ElPais

The Just-World Hypothesis And Other Mental Traps That Guide Us, But That We Can Avoid

Published

4 hours ago

October 1, 2026

Olga Carmona

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We like to believe we are rational. That we make decisions based on data, that we analyze reality objectively and that our opinions stem from clear thinking. But the human mind works differently: it is full of shortcuts, biases, distortions and prejudices whose purpose is to simplify complexity and make the vertigo of uncertainty manageable.

Among them, one of the most dangerous and widespread is the just-world hypothesis: the idea that we live in a world where people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. This belief, deeply rooted in the collective imagination, holds that if you work hard you will do well and that if you fail it is because you did something wrong, and it serves a psychological function: it helps us feel the world is predictable and controllable. Thinking that things happen for fair reasons can give us a sense of security: “If I do things right, I will be safe.” But it also has a problematic side, because it can lead to blaming victims or minimizing situations of injustice, inequality, illness, poverty, harassment, or violence.

But this is not the only cognitive distortion we fall into. Some, like confirmation bias — seeking information that supports our ideas and ignoring what contradicts them — are ubiquitous on social networks, where algorithms amplify them and drive polarization. Others, like survivorship bias, are pervasive in meritocratic views of professional success. We celebrate those who “overcame adversity,” while ignoring those who, in similar circumstances, could not make it, overlooking many variables and turning exceptions into rules.

A third is black-and-white thinking, in which everything is either white or black, good or bad. In an era of information overload, nuance tires people. Simplicity wins. Black-and-white thinking often appears when there is anxiety, insecurity, perfectionism, emotional fatigue, or a need for control. Splitting reality into extremes can give a false sense of clarity. The problem is that life almost never works that way. Most situations are ambiguous, mixed or gradual. In other words, this bias, like all the others, deceives us.

Distortions and biases are so deeply rooted for several reasons:

1. They save mental energy. Thinking calmly, considering nuances, and questioning beliefs requires a lot of effort. By contrast, a bias offers a quick conclusion. The brain often prefers a fast answer to a complete one.

2. They give us a sense of control. Some biases help us feel the world is more predictable than it really is. The problem is they can also lead to unfair conclusions, such as assuming that someone who suffers must have “done something.”

3. They protect self-esteem. Many biases serve to preserve the image we have of ourselves. For example, the self-serving bias: “If I pass, it’s because I’m capable.” “If I fail, it’s because the exam was unfair.” Sometimes this explanation may contain some truth, but if it becomes automatic it prevents learning.

4. They are connected to emotion. When there is fear, anxiety, anger, shame or insecurity we think less clearly. Intense emotion narrows our perspective and makes certain biases surface more strongly.

5. They are reinforced by experience. When a person repeatedly interprets reality in a particular way, that mental pathway becomes more automatic. If the idea is repeated for years, the brain retrieves it quickly whenever a failure occurs. Not because it is true, but because it is well-practiced.

Moreover, these biases have a social function and help people belong to a group. We adopt beliefs or prejudices not only because we have reasoned them, but because they connect us to a family, a culture, a profession, a community, or an identity. Therefore they appear from a very early age and become automated. From a young age we learn ways of interpreting the world such as: “If I make a mistake, I’ll disappoint people,” “If someone gets angry, it’s my fault,” “If I’m not perfect, I’m worthless,” “If I don’t control everything, something bad will happen.”

These ideas may arise from family, school, social, or emotional experiences. Over time they stop feeling like thoughts and begin to feel like “reality.”

The just-world hypothesis, confirmation bias, black-and-white thinking, and all the other mental shortcuts are not individual faults: they are part of the human brain. But we can choose not to let them guide us. Thinking better is an act of ethics, of humanity, and, in an increasingly polarized and oversaturated world, also an act of resistance.

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