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What Measures Are In Place In Spain To Help People With Autism?

Published

4 hours ago

October 27, 2026

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What measures are in place in Spain to help people with autism? — Around 1 in 100 people in Spain are thought to be on the autism spectrum. Photo: Alireza Attari/Unsplash

Spain has recently introduced legal reforms aimed at improving the lives of people on the spectrum, but the country still has plenty more to achieve in terms of healthcare, education and employment access for children and adults with autism.

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Chiapas

A Double Femicide And A Lynching Force Mexico To Confront Its Cycle Of Violence

Published

1 hour ago

October 27, 2026

Elena San Jose

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In photographs, she is seen smiling or hugging her grandmother, celebrating her ninth birthday and eating an ice cream. Ariana Velázquez’s dream was to work in the countryside, but she disappeared a week ago and was found dead only a few days later, along with Miriam Cruz, 55, the woman who appears beside her in almost all the pictures.

Granddaughter and grandmother were murdered by two men in a community in the northwestern Mexican state of Chiapas on October 19, the same day the girl, then 12 years old, was last seen. The brutal crime was swiftly followed by the lynching of the two accused men, one decapitated and the other severely beaten — a fresh eruption of violence in a country that has failed to break the cycle.

“I want to ask the people of Ostuacán gathered in the Central Park to trust that the law will be enforced,” wrote Chiapas Governor Eduardo Ramírez in an “urgent statement” posted on his social media accounts while the crowd gathered outside the town hall. “Vigilante justice does not restore peace and only brings more pain and legal consequences for innocent people.”

The appeal proved futile, and so did, for the most part, the police presence guarding the two suspects in the double murder: Armando “N,” alias El Melo, and Andrés “N,” alias El Cera. State prosecutors say the two acted out of revenge. Both men were dragged from the municipal building and subjected to mob violence and collective frustration.

“It is a vortex in which the system itself is unable to contain violence through any means other than violence itself,” says Matilde Domínguez, a violence expert at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who believes that what authorities truly fear is “social unrest.” “Access to justice is institutionally out of reach, and the system is telling you that violence is what grants you access. What the state should do is regulate it.”

According to Manuel Pérez Aguirre, from the College of Mexico A.C. (Colmex), in addition to both perceived and real impunity, there is the weakness of municipal police forces, “the most fragile link in Mexico’s security chain.” “There are nearly 2,500 municipalities, and in the vast majority we have police forces of 20 or 30 people split across shifts, which means basically 10 or 12 people have to provide security for large populations,” he explains.

Underlying all these factors, both experts argue, are deep-rooted cultural dynamics that make lynching a relatively common recourse in rural areas and on the urban fringes of central and southern Mexico. The lynching last weekend took place in the ejido Xochimilco Viejo, in the town of Ostuacán, which has just over 3,000 inhabitants.

The figures paint a stark picture on both fronts. According to Mexico’s Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, 28 women were murdered in Chiapas between January and September of this year alone. The rate per 100,000 women ranks the state 10th nationwide and slightly above the national average.

Data from a 2021 survey on household relationships by Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI) does not paint a much more encouraging picture. Although Chiapas is the state with the lowest reported prevalence of violence against women, 48.7% of women aged 15 and older said they had experienced some form of violence in their lifetime, while 26.9% reported suffering violence in the previous year.

On the very day the Chiapas Attorney General pointed to revenge as the motive behind the double femicide, state authorities also announced that a man in the municipality of Sabanilla had been formally charged with aggravated sexual abuse; that two others had been arrested in Escuintla and Tuxtla for aggravated child sexual abuse; that another suspect had been detained in Chiapilla for aggravated domestic violence; and that yet another had been arrested in Siltepec for aggravated sexual abuse. Taken together, the steady stream of cases exposes the grim reality faced by women across Mexico.

On the other front, the reality is just as stark. The Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich documented 2,818 lynchings in Latin America between 2010 and 2019, 30% of them in Mexico. This year, the NGO Causa en Común documented at least five such cases in addition to the one in Chiapas: two in the State of Mexico and one each in Aguascalientes, Baja California Sur and Tlaxcala. Although this case was triggered by a brutal crime, Pérez Aguirre explains, “an actual offence is not always committed; many times it is the population acting on its own beliefs.”

The motives vary and periodically make headlines: theft, kidnapping, murder, or simply the suspicion that someone was responsible for a crime. In this case, the femicide has been confirmed by authorities, who say the involvement of the two suspects has been “fully established.” The surviving suspect faces a possible sentence of 100 years in prison, the maximum penalty sought by Chiapas Attorney General Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca. Prosecutors have also opened a homicide investigation into the death of El Melo, who was killed during the lynching. Both El Melo and El Cera fled the scene after the murders but were arrested shortly afterwards. Although prosecutors say the killings were motivated by revenge, they have not disclosed what prompted it.

In any case, the verdict offers little comfort to those still mourning the two victims and grappling with questions that will never be answered. “Why kill a girl who was only just beginning to live her life?” asks Salomé Cruz, Miriam’s niece, on Facebook. “Her dream was to work in the countryside. That’s what she longed for most,” she writes of young Ariana.

The missing-person bulletin could not capture the life she hoped to build. Instead, it reduced her to a handful of characteristics that tried, unsuccessfully, to define her: 12 years old, dark complexion, slim build. Brown hair, 32 kilograms, 1.4 meters tall. Straight nose, small nose, thin lips. Distinguishing marks: none.

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Benjamin Netanyahu

Netanyahu’s Future Hangs In The Balance In A Decisive Election For The Entire Middle East

Published

3 hours ago

October 27, 2026

admin

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“The most important in the country.” “Crucial for the future of the Middle East.” “A historic crossroads.” Israel is holding elections this Tuesday — the first since the Hamas-led attacks of October 2023 — which have been described in many ways because they are decisive. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is staking his future — both political and personal — on the vote, after, against all odds, completing a four-year term leading the most right-wing coalition in the country’s history.

Since 2022 a lot has happened in Israel: protests against the judicial reform proposed by Netanyahu, the brutal devastation of Gaza, runaway settlement of the West Bank, clashes with Lebanon and Syria and, above all, tensions with Iran… All of which will weigh from the moment the polls open at 7.00 a.m. local time until they close at 10.00 p.m. The last permitted polls, published Friday, indicate that Yashar, the center-right party of former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, will receive the most votes and that the Jewish opposition bloc it belongs to will have a slight lead over Netanyahu’s coalition. But even so it will need the sidelined Arab parties, which represent Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, to build a majority.

The mood in Israel is that the public wants an end to the Netanyahu era and that, although the prime minister is a political animal not to be underestimated, this time the numbers will probably not add up in his favor.

Polls estimate that his party, Likud, will win about 21 seats, compared with the 32 it won four years ago. Adding the support of religious and ultra-nationalist parties, it could reach about 50 of the Knesset’s 120 seats, still far short of the 61 needed for a majority.

His refusal to create an independent commission to investigate what happened on October 7, 2023, and the security failures committed, his clear interest in evading justice — which seeks to put him on trial for corruption — and the limited results in the many conflicts the country is involved in, such as Gaza or Iran, all risk costing him at the ballot box. “We need change now,” protestors chanted in the streets of Tel Aviv last Saturday, where several thousand people gathered to call for the end of the Netanyahu era.

Yossi Mekelberg, professor of international relations at Regent’s University London and an associate analyst for the Middle East and North Africa program at the British think-tank Chatham House, urges “not to underestimate how important these elections are.” Mekelberg says the last elections of similar significance, “although not to this level,” were those in 1992, won by Labour’s Yitzhak Rabin, which led to the signing of the Oslo Accords. He adds that on October 27 the stakes include whether Israel “ends up becoming a pariah state” in the eyes of the world.

Lengthy negotiations

The prime minister heads to the polls facing criticism from much of the world and an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes, but with the backing of Donald Trump. “When you go to the Polls please remember that Bibi [Netanyahu] has been an outstanding Warrior Prime Minister!” the U.S. president said on Sunday, before suggesting that together they would launch another war against Iran: “We have to finish the job that we started!”

Netanyahu faces a heterogeneous bloc of Jewish opposition parties that represent half the country and range from traditional right to socialist left. Aware of the moment’s importance, they have put aside their differences to try to defeat the prime minister. Together they could add up to about 56 seats.

The two Arab lists (which represent Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, one-fifth of the national population) are expected to be the kingmakers the opposition will need if the arithmetic does not go their way, after the opposition largely refused during the campaign to make deals with them. Together they could win 15 seats, thanks to unprecedented mobilization by their voters, who feel discriminated against and treated as second-class citizens in Israel, especially since the 2023 attacks.

In Israel’s electoral system — which consists of a single constituency where voters almost always back their own parties — a handful of votes can change the landscape, due to the 3.25% electoral threshold. This is the percentage of votes a party needs to win seats. If a party falls short of this threshold, it is excluded from the Knesset and all its ballots are discarded. If it exceeds it, it enters parliament directly with four representatives. In 2022, for example, the pacifist Meretz party fell about 4,000 votes short of reaching this threshold. Had it succeeded, it would have shifted the balance of power in the Knesset.

It is very likely that Israel will not have a new government or a new prime minister by Tuesday night and that arduous negotiations and calculations will be needed to form a majority. “And even if Eisenkot manages to do it in the coming weeks and ends the Netanyahu era, there is a deeper question. Will Israeli policies change?” asks Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of the think-tank Ofek (horizon in Hebrew). “For that we will need commitment and international pressure more than ever, so the balance and decisions tilt to the right side.”

The Palestinian issue has been largely absent from Israel’s election campaign and no candidate has, for example, presented a plan for Gaza’s future. The Strip has been devastated by three years of bombardment that has left some 75,000 Palestinians dead, according to UN figures.

Stoking fears

Iran, however, has been present up to the 11th hour. On the eve of the elections, Channel 12 reported an “unprecedented” and very tense confrontation between the prime minister and the IDF chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, that took place Sunday at an air base. The reason: a military operation approved by the government that could have triggered a war with Iran.

Zamir interpreted that Netanyahu was guided more by the political gain a new war would bring him before the elections than by a real threat and demanded a legal authorization signed by government representatives to proceed, according to Channel 12. With Netanyahu issuing daily threats, the danger was that a Tehran on high alert would interpret the action as an offensive move. One of the right-wing opposition candidates — his former defense and foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who is not exactly a moderate — filed a lawsuit against Netanyahu on Monday for treason and accused him of having “lost his way.”

Dozens of combat aircraft from the Israeli Air Force crossed Syrian and Iraqi airspace on October 19 to reach the border with Iran, Israeli and U.S. sources told Axios. Israel presented it as a deterrence exercise, but U.S. sources had the impression they were waiting for the Iranians to open fire, thereby creating a justification for an offensive.

The other last-minute controversy in the campaign was an image created with artificial intelligence simulating a nuclear bomb falling on Tel Aviv. Netanyahu posted it on his social media, citing a far-right activist who warned of the risk of a “second Holocaust.” The message to voters was clear: this is what Iran will do if you don’t re-elect me this Tuesday.

Eisenkot replied: “Netanyahu, you’re hysterical. As in every election campaign, he resorts to the same method of lies and intimidation tactics. This time, threatening Israeli citizens with mass destruction.”

Indeed, the prime minister tends to press the button of lies and Israeli fears at the last minute, but his latest moves mostly make him appear nervous because the race looks so tight. Even more so when — as the opposition recalled after the image circulated — just a year ago (after the first Israeli strike on Iran) Netanyahu boasted of damage to Tehran’s nuclear program that would last “generations.” In September, during a speech to a half-empty UN General Assembly, he claimed to have “destroyed” Iran’s nuclear weapons capability. Six months earlier he had said Tehran was no longer a “threat to Israel’s existence.”

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Amazon

Estas Lámparas De Pared Funcionan Sin Cables Y Se Controlan Con Mando A Distancia

Published

11 hours ago

October 27, 2026

Luis Campo Yanguas

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Estas lámparas de pared se pueden instalar de dos formas.

¿Eres de los que disfrutan personalizando el ambiente de tu hogar cada día? Unas buenas velas aromáticas o poner tu lista de reproducción musical favorita de Spotify puede ser de gran ayuda, pero existen dispositivos que transforman cualquier espacio de una manera sencilla y práctica.

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Estas lámparas de pared incluyen un mando a distancia. Las lámparas de pared ofrecen diferentes modos de iluminación. Estas lámparas de pared son inalámbricas.