🇪🇸 Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old whose eviction from her Madrid home of 70+ years set off Spain's mass housing protests, has died. She had been in hospital with severe anxiety and exhaustion since police and social workers carried her out on a stretcher last month, after an investment fund bought her building. Days later, her lawyer secured a deal letting her return home at her old rent, but she never got well enough to sign it. Thousands marched toward parliament after the news, chanting "This is not a death. It's a murder!" Source: Reuters / Writer: Julie

THREE PAKISTANI TAXI DRIVERS IN ROCHDALE, MOHAMMED SHAHZAD, NAHEEM AKRAM AND NISAR HUSSAIN, RAPED A SCHOOLGIRL BETWEEN 2001 AND 2006. ONE OF THE ATTACKS WAS FILMED IN THE BACK OF HUSSAIN'S TAXI. For decades, social workers and police have known that Pakistani men were using the taxi trade to rape little White girls in towns and cities across the country. Instead of taking action, they protected these men. Successive governments have allowed it to continue. In June 2025 Baroness Casey's national audit into group-based child sexual exploitation found that the taxi licensing system had been exploited by the rape gangs and told the government it needed urgent reform. The government accepted it. Rochdale was one of the towns she was writing about. Rochdale Council had licensed three men who raped a child. The likelihood is that it knew of many more men just like these three. Its own social workers knew taxi drivers were having 'sex' with children. They called one of the girls a 'prostitute'. The child was just ten years old. Greater Manchester Police knew the same. Since 1976 a council has had the power to take a badge off any driver it is not satisfied is fit and proper. There was no need for either a conviction or even a charge. It would be a lie to say the police failed to act. They did act. They closed down investigations and protected the rape gangs. Hundreds of towns and cities like Rochdale had the power to intervene. They had the knowledge. They knew children were being gang raped and trafficked across the country through a network of Pakistani gangs. They all made a political decision to sacrifice little White girls at the altar of multiculturalism and trade them for bloc votes from the Pakistani Muslim communities. Shahzad, Akram and Hussain drove Rochdale’s children for years after the council and the police knew what was being done to her in the back of a taxi. Rochdale Council will not say if or when it ever took their badges off them. No one knows just how many taxi drivers are members of the rape gangs. Heidi Alexander has been Transport Secretary since November 2024. Casey warned her in June 2025. She told the Commons the government was “taking this very seriously”, was reviewing whether councils follow existing guidance, and would hold those that do not to account. The councils are the problem she is asking to mark their own homework. In January 2026 Alexander's department proposed moving the badge from district councils to transport authorities. That was their solution. In Greater Manchester that would move Oldham’s licensing from the council that covered it up to the office Andy Burnham held while it was being covered up. In October 2026 the government said it was still deciding which model to use. It has also promised national minimum standards and a power to suspend a driver on the spot. Councils have had the power to suspend a driver on the spot since 1976. Why does a politician get to decide who drives the children at all? Especially when that politician relies on the bloc vote these men control for them to stay in power? AND TODAY. 263 councils in England decide who drives their children. Every one of them has had the power since 1976 to take a badge off a man without a conviction. Rochdale did not use it. Rotherham did not use it. Oldham did not use it. No law makes a council use it. Nothing Heidi Alexander has proposed would make them. A man banned from working with children can be handed a badge this week in any town in England. The councils that licensed the rape gangs are licensing the next ones.

As a Japanese person, I keep trying to make the arithmetic work, and I cannot. Britain has finally opened a statutory national inquiry into the grooming gangs. Baroness Longfield chairs it. Sixty five million pounds. Three years. The first national hearings begin at the end of this year. Three years. In Rotherham alone the abuse ran for sixteen years while the police, the council and the social workers all knew. So the counting now looks like this. Sixteen years to ignore it. Twelve more years, after the Jay Report, to argue about whether a national inquiry was even allowed to exist. Three years to hold the hearings. A girl who was eleven when it started is a woman past thirty before anyone official is required to sit down and listen to her. In Japan we are taught that Britain built the modern idea of due process. I believe that. I have read about it since I was a boy. So I am asking honestly, not to score a point off anyone. How does a country this old, this experienced, this proud of its own courts, end up with a timetable where the victims age faster than the investigation?

Join me for the Gurian Summer Institute’s Virtual Conference on June 27 - 28 with Recordings and Videos Available through July 12. Co-Sponsored by the Santa Fe Boys Fund, the Kellen Cares Foundation, and the Farrell Family. This conference is an eye-opener for parents, educators, policymakers, coaches, social workers, counselors, and those involved with helping children and families thrive.