24/ Witness two: the bus driver, Mr. Keegan, 30 years on the buses. The first girl came downstairs and told him Mr. X “sat down beside her and made her feel uncomfortable.” He told her to sit downstairs and he’d keep an eye on things.

Another false rape claim thrown out of court.

What happens when their parent or granddad or brother puts a hand in their underwear? You assume kids apply rational logic. Grooming makes sure they DON’T distinguish what’s good and bad.

"Part of the workshops involved sharing participants’ own experiences of instances when they felt uncomfortable. The scenarios depicted in the video series came up very frequently in all the workshops." Solidarity with DRCC

"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty." This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart. Let's look at the data. First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%. But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time. Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect. Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings. What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families. Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities. Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior. Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods. So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012). And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real. Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic. It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative. It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory. It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive. And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy. The alternative is simple and old. A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition. Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.

AfD inquiry uncovers hundreds of child marriages in German state: Data reveals girls as young as eleven from countries including Syria, Pakistan and Iraq, married to adult men: gript.ie/germany-hundreds-of…

THE PEOPLE WILL RECLAIM SOVEREIGNTY: BEO'S NATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO RESTORE THE POWER OF THE IRISH ELECTORATE THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA OF DEMOCRATIC ACCOUNTABILITY BEGINS ON 31 OCTOBER 2026. The BEO national campaign will challenge one of the most fundamental failures of democratic accountability in Ireland: a Government can abandon the promises on which it secured the people's votes, pursue policies diametrically opposed to its electoral commitments, lose the confidence of the public, and still remain in power for as long as it retains its parliamentary majority. The people are expected to accept the consequences, voice their objections, and wait until the next general election, with no general constitutional mechanism to compel an earlier return to the electorate. We will campaign for a clearly defined, rules-based constitutional mechanism through which the Irish people can trigger a fresh general election when a Government has materially departed beyond an established threshold from the mandate on which it was elected. This is about reclaiming popular sovereignty, restoring meaningful democratic accountability, and establishing the principle that the authority to govern belongs ultimately to the people, not to a political establishment entitled to retain power simply because it can command enough votes in the Dáil. NO INTIMIDATION. NO SUPPRESSION. NO SURRENDER. Any attempt to intimidate, suppress, obstruct, or silence BEO through coercion, authoritarian measures, or the abuse of institutional power will be met in kind by BEO. BEO will not be intimidated into silence, nor will the exercise of our fundamental democratic rights be surrendered to those who would prefer that the people remain powerless. The more determined any attempt to suppress this campaign becomes, the more determined our resolve will be to expose it, challenge it, and mobilise public opposition. We will answer suppression with resistance, intimidation with defiance, and the abuse of power with an uncompromising demand for accountability. Our commitment to popular sovereignty is not conditional upon the approval of those who hold office. It is precisely when those in power seek to silence the people that the defence of their democratic rights becomes most essential. FROM PUBLIC ANGER TO DEMOCRATIC ACTION From 31 October, BEO will confront this democratic deficit and advance the case for meaningful, enforceable accountability between elections. We will seek a national conversation about the introduction of a clearly defined, rules-based mechanism through which the Irish people could trigger a fresh general election when a Government has departed beyond an established threshold from the electoral mandate on which it sought their votes. This campaign is founded on a simple principle: the people must have more than the right to complain, protest, and wait. They must have a meaningful constitutional means of requiring their representatives to return to the electorate when the conditions for such a decision have been met. The precise criteria, safeguards, and constitutional arrangements must be developed through serious public debate, but the objective is clear: to restore the people to a position of meaningful authority over a Government that claims to act in their name. POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY MUST BECOME A LIVING REALITY BEO believes that popular sovereignty must be more than a declaration in our Constitution. It must be reflected in the practical mechanisms through which the Irish people can hold those who govern them to account. THE NATIONAL CAMPAIGN BEGINS ON 31 OCTOBER 2026. The Irish people should have the power to demand a fresh electoral mandate when their Government has materially abandoned the one on which it was elected. That is the conversation BEO will take to the nation. A NEW DAWN IN IRISH POLITICS. A NEW STANDARD OF ACCOUNTABILITY. THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THE FINAL SAY.

Revolt is spreading in France and antiracism is at its core. Students at Henri IV School in Paris sing "We are all antifascists".

Majority of voters see immigration as a positive thing, but it’s a tighter call than before irishtimes.com/politics/2026…

📽️ What happens when the world's biggest exporter of one of the most important substances for modern civilisation decides to stop exporting it? We might be about to find out. 🛢️Primer on US diesel and the coming fuel crunch, inc why it could be especially grisly for Britain👇