Women represented 16.9% of online gamblers in 2024. Even with that imbalance, regulators say the pace of growth suggests a noticeable generational change in a sector that has long been dominated by men. Authorities recorded 1.99 million active online gamblers across licensed platforms last year. Among them were 335,627 women.
The board, which had echoes of Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries, was overseen by Carmen Polo, the wife of the dictator Gen Francisco Franco. Originally founded in 1902 to stamp out sex work, in 1941, two years after the end of the Spanish civil war, its role was extended to clamp down on female behaviour that deviated from norms laid down by the Catholic church.
Our position has been very clear from Day 1. The facts are clear. The Spanish government is not going to authorize the use of the bases in Rota and Moron for these military actions. No single country should act as a guardian of the world. We have international rules.
Populism may well have been the defining word of the previous decade: a shorthand for the insurgent parties that came to prominence in the 2010s, challenging the dominance of the liberal centre. But no sooner had it become the main rubric for discussing both the far left and far right than commentators began to question its validity: worrying that it was too vague, or too pejorative, or fuelling the forces to which it referred.
Spain's environment minister has written to prosecutors to warn of an alarming increase in hate speech and social media attacks directed against climate science communicators, meteorologists and researchers. In a letter sent to hate crimes prosecutors on Wednesday, Sara Aagesen said a number of recent reports examined by the ministry had detected a significant increase in the hostile language that climate experts are subjected to on digital platforms.
A emotional fitness community that just got $26 million in venture capital thrown at them has installed a phone on Valencia Street that lets you Call a Republican in Texas, perhaps to foster unity, or perhaps just to record you. KTVU ran a Monday feature about a new Call a Republican phone that was just installed right outside the Black Serum Tattoo Shop at Valencia and 14th streets.
The government is preparing a series of measures including a social media ban for under-16s, the prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, said, promising to protect children from the digital wild west and hold tech companies responsible for hateful and harmful content. Sanchez said on Tuesday that urgent action was needed because social media was a failed state where laws are ignored and crimes are tolerated.
Some say we've gone too far, that we're going against the current, he said. But I would like to ask you, when did recognising rights become something radical? When did empathy become something exceptional? It comes days after the Socialist-led coalition government approved a decree that it said would regularise half a million people. The initiative, expected to come into effect in April, made headlines around the world for its rejection of the anti-migration policies and rhetoric seen across much of Europe and the US.
This week, Sanchez did not wait for a joint EU statement to issue judgment on the US's illegal military intervention to capture the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro: he swiftly joined Latin American countries in condemning it. A few hours later he went even further, saying the operation in Caracas represented a terrible precedent and a very dangerous one [which] reminds us of past aggressions, and pushes the world toward a future of uncertainty and insecurity, similar to what we already experienced after other invasions driven by the thirst for oil.
You don't need a degree in political science to understand why so many supposedly centrist European leaders have begun talking about immigration in terms that would have been unthinkable even a few years ago. Far-right parties across the continent have fuelled their rise by seizing on the issue as a political cosh with which to beat their more mainstream and established rivals, whom they accuse of complacency, inaction and a failure to defend borders.
On a dreary Saturday morning, they stream in from all over London, hare along Kent's A-roads, pour off Suffolk and Surrey trains, to converge on this primary school. It's the largest venue the volunteers could hire and the corridors, the loos, even the little library with its impressive range of Julia Donaldsons, are all heaving with grownups. We cram into the assembly hall, where the crowd is declared as the biggest turnout in Green history.