Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

A Belgian court on Wednesday sentenced a woman to seven years in prison after rejecting claims that early menopause, stress, and a household overrun by 60 chihuahuas explained months of sadistic abuse that resulted in her husband being locked up and tortured for weeks on end.

The court heard how the 48-year-old Belgian male victim escaped from his home in Grobbendonk on March 18, 2025, barefoot and wearing only underwear and a T-shirt, when he fled a dog kennel where his wife, Anna V., had locked him. He staggered to a nearby home and knocked on a kitchen window, begging for help.

“He had used his last bit of strength to escape. The man was completely disoriented,” public prosecutor Hanne Hendrickx told the court as cited by HLN, explaining that a passing cyclist recognized the victim as his neighbor and helped police establish his identity.

According to the prosecution, the man had been regularly beaten, starved, humiliated, and imprisoned. “Photos show that at the beginning of the relationship, he was a strong, healthy man. In photos taken after the fact, we see a burned skeleton. There wasn’t much left of the victim,” Hendrickx said.

The defendant initially told police and emergency services that her husband was depressed and harming himself, a claim briefly accepted. She was even allowed to sit with him in the ambulance until a paramedic heard her whisper, “You have to be quiet,” and noticed the victim becoming visibly anxious. She was then removed from the ambulance and arrested.

The couple had only married in August 2024.

Investigators concluded the man had been beaten with fists and household objects, including a chair and a cooking pot, and was kicked when he fell to the floor. He was forced to clean the excrement of around 60 chihuahuas using bleach, but only barefoot because his wife had hidden his shoes, causing corrosive wounds. A camera had been installed to ensure he worked continuously.

According to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, the man was repeatedly deprived of his liberty, locked several times in a garden shed and a dog kennel, and once in a dark cellar without food or water. “Fourteen days before his escape, she also doused him with boiling water because two dogs had died and, according to her, it was his fault,” Hendrickx said.

Video evidence found during the investigation showed the defendant filming and laughing at her husband’s humiliation. Freddy Mols, the victim’s lawyer, told the court, “My client narrowly escaped death. He endured terrible things for a year. He was found suffering from dehydration and malnutrition, and was completely disoriented.

Prosecutors demanded an eight-year sentence, and while defense lawyer Romy Geysen called it “by far the most horrific case I’ve ever received,” she argued that her client’s mental state had changed since the abuse. She cited financial stress, the growing number of dogs in the household, and hormonal changes. “Moreover, she was in early menopause, which meant she couldn’t control herself,” Geysen told the court.

Speaking briefly, the defendant said, “I was so tired. I couldn’t handle it anymore, and I took it out on him. I now realize what I did to him. That should never have happened.”

The judge dismissed the mitigating remarks and sentenced the defendant to seven years in prison. She had also previously been fined €3,600 for the mistreatment of the dogs.

The victim’s lawyer has also requested €10,000 in damages to help with any therapy that may be needed in the future.

Read more here….

An estimated 453,230 accounts were shut down in the United Kingdom in the last year, a stunning figure that has drawn outrage from the country’s leading conservative lawmaker.

Nigel Farage

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage called the shocking figure “appalling” and slammed European rules that he believes “makes it cheaper for banks to close accounts over unusual transactions.” Farage, who was elected to the British Parliament in 2024 and leads the conservative populist Reform Party, is no stranger to debanking, having had his accounts closed by Coutts in 2023.

So what’s the banks’ excuse? “Financial crime reasons,” they said, according to documents obtained by The Telegraph under Freedom of Information rules.

The Telegraph reports:

It comes ahead of the introduction of new rules which will force lenders to give customers longer before they close accounts – at least 90 days’ notice – as well as offer clearer explanations of why they shut the accounts.

But the requirements will only apply to accounts opened after April 28 this year and will be subject to exemptions to allow banks to comply with financial crime rules.Financial institutions are allowed to close accounts for commercial reasons, and if they suspect criminal activity. There is no legal right to a bank account in the UK, unlike in countries such as France and Belgium.

Banks have faced criticism over their failure to explain to customers exactly why accounts have been closed. This is often blamed on anti-money laundering and other financial crime rules which lenders must follow.

Nonetheless, British officials defend closing the accounts, claiming they were shut down after a thorough review.

“Banks must comply with strict legal and regulatory requirements in terms of verifying customers and preventing financial crime. As a result, a small proportion of accounts are closed, but only after extensive review and investigation,” a UK government spokesperson told The Telegraph.

“Fighting financial crime is one of our priorities. Fraud makes up over 40 pc of crime in the UK, robbing people of their hard-earned money,” An FCA spokesman said in a separate statement.

“It’s important banks and building societies play their part, including closing accounts they have suspicions about. Only a tiny fraction of accounts are closed – and we expect firms to act proportionately and treat customers fairly.”

While British officials don’t appear to see the problem with the surging number of closed bank accounts, critics across the pond in the United States see the escalating situation as a cautionary tale.

Adam Smith Institute’s Maxwell Marlow told The Telegraph: “The scourge of debanking continues to blight the British public and significantly impacts the Square Mile.”“Our finance system thrives through freedom – it is why we were the centre of global capitalism for so long, and we became rich from it. If we choose to reject these principles by ignoring this issue, our liberties and prosperity will be punished collectively,” Marlow added.

Across the pond – in August, President Donald Trump took a series of actions to thwart “debanking,” which was pervasive during the Biden administration, signing an executive order aimed at preventing financial institutions from denying services based on customers’ political or religious beliefs.

The order, titled “Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans,” directs federal regulators to scrutinize banks for past or present policies that may have encouraged discriminatory practices and to impose remedies such as fines or consent decrees where violations are found.

The order also requires the removal of “reputational risk” considerations from supervisory guidance, which the administration argues have been used to pressure banks into restricting access for certain lawful industries or individuals.

Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardian.org,

Supermarket shelves have never been fuller, yet diets have become poorer. Across the world, food systems praised for their productivity now deliver an abundance of calories alongside widespread micronutrient deficiency, ecological collapse and rural precarity.

This is the outcome of an agricultural model that equates food security with yield and mass production with nourishment. Sustained by billions in subsidies, industrial agriculture increasingly resembles a welfare state for agribusiness and retail giants whose profits depend on public money.

Nutritional decline

Corporate-driven industrial agriculture claims to feed the world but too often delivers empty calories while starving populations of nutrients. Consider that high-yield rice produces empty calories while becoming nutritionally impoverished. Since the 1960s, the concentration of zinc and iron in wheat and rice in India has fallen by 30 to 45%. In contrast, millets and pulses deliver far higher levels of protein, zinc and iron per square inch.

This is not unique to India: Rothamsted Research in the UK has evaluated the mineral concentration of archived wheat grain and soil samples from the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. The experiment began in 1843, and their findings show significant decreasing trends in the concentrations of zinc, copper, iron and magnesium in wheat grain since the 1960s.

At the same time, nutritionally dense millet acreage in India has declined by 60% over the last seven decades. The decline is a result of structural shifts in Indian agriculture following the Green Revolution.

In the UK, the logic is similar, albeit expressed differently. Ultra-processed foods dominate, monocultures deplete soil and calories are abundant while nutrition is undermined. Obesity coexists with micronutrient deficiencies; grass-fed livestock and diverse rotations have largely been replaced by input-intensive systems, while supermarkets dictate production priorities and shape farming.

Industry PR frequently attempts to justify its role by implying the world would starve without its seeds and chemicals. The industry justifies this claim through the enduring myth of the Green Revolution; a narrative Prof. Glenn Stone and others have effectively debunked. The claim that industrial seeds ‘saved’ India from mass starvation, for instance, is less history than PR.

In reality, the Green Revolution represented a pivot towards input-intensive farming that displaced existing productivity gains in favour of a model that mandated dependency on proprietary seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides supplied by an increasingly concentrated global industry.

Displacement and precarity

When traditional farming is destabilised through state withdrawal, corporate inputs, global supply chains and monocultures, it becomes financially unviable for many farmers. Rural communities are removed from the soil. In India, this displacement is leveraged as part of a broader neoliberal strategy, clearing land for industrial-scale corporate agriculture.

In rural Britain, young people leave for cities as rural life becomes economically untenable and villages lose schools, healthcare and transport. Meanwhile, farmers rely heavily on subsidies, rural development grants and agri-environment schemes.

These payments mainly stabilise industrial supply chains and supermarket profits. In the UK, more than half of farm income comes from subsidies rather than market sales and larger farms disproportionately capture payments. In effect, subsidies sustain monocultures and high-volume production for supermarkets.

UK subsidies like the Basic Payment Scheme and its successors provide a non-market floor for farm income. They therefore function as an indirect subsidy for retail giants. By covering the farmer’s basic survival costs, the taxpayer effectively lowers the break-even point for producers, allowing supermarkets to use their purchasing power to negotiate farm-gate prices that are frequently below the actual cost of production.

So, the taxpayer pays to keep the farm viable, only for the supermarket to extract the resulting value through suppressed prices and high retail margins.

Mugging the public

These national subsidy regimes are embedded within a transnational agricultural input economy dominated by a small number of food retail, agrochemical and seed corporations, including firms such as Bayer and Syngenta, which sell proprietary seeds and chemicals at prices the farmer could not otherwise afford.

In the UK, publicly supported farm incomes stabilise demand for proprietary seeds, pesticides and fertilisers integrated into supermarket-led supply chains, ensuring predictable markets for input suppliers even as farm-gate prices are driven down.

The farmer is squeezed by both sides (inputs and retail), and although the mechanisms might differ per country, the underlying logic is consistent: the state absorbs risk while private firms profit from farmer dependence on proprietary inputs and chemically intensive production systems. We see a globally integrated system of public risk management for agribusiness.

While India still (however precariously) attempts to buffer the producer (through mechanisms like the Minimum Support Price for crop assurance and the Public Distribution System to stabilise consumer costs), the UK system has been fully utilised to de-risk the balance sheets of private giants.

The British public is being ‘mugged’ twice: once at the tax office and again at the checkout. At the same time, the state is subsidising a third ‘mugging’: a taxpayer-funded public health collapse. By bankrolling volume over nutrition, the government pays corporations to manufacture a health crisis, then taxes the public to treat the fallout. The taxpayer funds the hollow calories, the supermarket margins and the resulting chronic diseases whose cost falls on the NHS.

Welfare scroungers

The media too often vilifies the poor (whether families in the UK or struggling farmers in India) for needing public support. However, the biggest ‘scroungers’ are not families supposedly ‘fiddling the system’ but the shareholders of retail and input corporations whose profit margins are underwritten by public money.

In the UK, the agricultural sector is ensnared in a subsidy trap that functions as a taxpayer-funded life-support system for corporate retail. While the annual farming budget has remained largely stagnant at £2.4 billion since 2007 (effectively a significant cut when adjusted for inflation) it remains the only thing standing between many British farmers and bankruptcy.

According to Defra’s 2024/25 statistics, these payments now account for 30% to 55% of farm business income. Without this public intervention, the majority of UK farms would operate at a net loss. This means that the current market price for food is a policy choice to protect the margins of retail giants such as Tesco, which recently reported an adjusted operating profit of £3.13 billion.

In India, every time a farmer scans their fingerprint to purchase a subsidised bag of fertiliser, they trigger a transfer of public funds to chemical manufacturers. According to policy analyst Devinder Sharma (in numerous articles in The Tribune newspaper), by fixing the retail price of urea while guaranteeing cost recovery, the government has created a low-risk environment for input-intensive agriculture.

The average Indian agricultural household earns just ₹10,218 ($113) per month, while chemical companies—buffered by ₹1.91 lakh crore ($23 billion) in public funds—remain highly profitable.

Whether through the stagnant grants of the UK or the biometric pipelines of India, the state has become the ultimate guarantor of a high-input, high-cost agricultural model that would otherwise be commercially unsustainable for producers.

Towards a new system

In the UK, breaking this model requires a structural dismantling of the ‘supermarket state’. A genuine transition would necessitate land reform that decouples land value from real estate speculation alongside a strengthened retail code that mandates a minimum producer share of the retail price, ensuring value is not siphoned off by shareholders before it leaves the farm gate.

The current predatory model is a conscious political choice. An alternative is required—one rooted in community resilience, ecological health and nutritional sufficiency rather than corporate extraction. This shift is already visible in fragments of resistance emerging in both India and the UK.

In India, the revival of millet cultivation in Odisha demonstrates how subsidies can be reclaimed for social justice. By linking minimum support prices (MSPs) to decentralised procurement and school meal programmes, the state has transformed millets from ‘forgotten foods’ into pillars of nutrition and soil health.

In the UK, community-supported agriculture, seed-saving networks and local co-operatives act as quiet secessions from the corporate supply chain. While inheritance tax and market consolidation threaten land access, these projects prioritise health per acre and local autonomy, ensuring that the value created by the soil remains within the community rather than being siphoned off to retail headquarters.

The path forward requires a fundamental decoupling of food from the logic of extraction. This means a transition from a state that subsidises shareholder dividends to one that invests in soil sovereignty, small-scale farming and the long-term health of its people.

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is absolutely freaked out about Donald Trump, and says the ‘world order’ is at risk of disintegrating into a “den of robbers” where the unscrupulous simply take what they want. 

Wait, you mean: 

– Like Ukrainian oligarchs busted embezzling $100M IN US taxpayer money (for starters)?

– Like the Panama papers?

– Like the Siemens bribery scandal where German officials took $1.4 billion to secure contracts?

– Like the UK’s BAE Systems arms scandal in which millions in bribes made their way to Saudi officials?

– How about the Danske Bank money laundering scandal? 

– Or the worldwide pandemic industrial fraud complex? 

We’ll give you a minute to recover…

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier delivers a speech at his Bellevue Palace residency in Berlin, Germany, November 9, 2025. Maryam Majd/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

Steinmeier’s comments appeared to refer to actions such as Trump’s ousting of Venezeula’s dictator president Nicolas Maduro over the weekend – which the Sour Kraut (⌐■_■) said constituted an attack on global democracy ‘like never before.’ Because whatever you think of Maduro or Trump plucking him out of bed, he was definitely a poster child for democracy, right?

Next, Steinmeier turned his ire towards Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine as a watershed – with Trump’s behavior representing a second historic ‘rupture.’

“It is about preventing the world from turning into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want, where regions or entire countries are treated as the property of a few great powers,” he said, adding that active intervention was needed in threatening situations – and that countries such as Brazil and India must be convinced to protect and maintain the world order. 

Hey Frank, why does Germany shut down public pools in the summer these days? Is it because you let a bunch of people in who “take whatever they want?”  

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The Swedish Migration Board, the authority charged with deciding who may live in Sweden and under what conditions, has been described by internal sources as an organization largely staffed by personnel with a migration background who often speak their own languages and seek to prioritize those from their own country of origin to establish a greater cultural foothold in Sweden.

Swedish news outlet Samnytt spoke to long-serving employees of the organization who blew the whistle on its structural weaknesses and its inability to adhere to the agency’s requirement for neutrality on migration policy.

“Currently, the majority of the staff have a background other than Swedish. Many do not even have Swedish citizenship. And they speak their own language with their own group,” said one source who has worked within the authority for several decades and is still employed there.

They explained that the authority employs around 6,000 people and largely operates in open-plan offices, where employees are free to choose where they sit. In practice, this has led to, ironically, a distinct lack of integration.

“Kurds normally sit together with other Kurds, even if there are different clans among the Kurds, Somalis sit with other Somalis, and Syrians with other Syrians, and so on,” the source said.

“What affects us the most is that everyone speaks their own language, meaning you don’t understand what is said between groups and employees,” they added.

Earlier attempts to require Swedish as the working language within the authority have reportedly been abandoned. Instead, according to Samnytt’s source, parallel linguistic environments have become normalized within the very institution responsible for assessing integration, residency, and citizenship.

“This not only affects language, that people don’t understand each other or what is being said, but it also causes different groups to form within the authority, clans that are involved in bringing their own clan members or relatives from their home countries here. They have brought the Middle Eastern clan mentality into the authority,” the source said.

The Migration Board’s transformation is described as having accelerated during the 2015 migration crisis, when Sweden received more asylum seekers than its system was designed to handle. During that period, the authority’s role shifted from neutral administrator of the law to an increasingly politicized actor.

The source estimates that around 35 percent of employees at the Migration Board are Muslim and described a noticeable change following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

“Many may have been more moderate Muslims, but after Oct. 7 you could see that more and more Muslim women started wearing the hijab,” the source said. “Songs about ‘from the river to the sea’ could also be heard from the coffee room inside the Migration Board,” the source said.

Employees who object to this culture or raise concerns internally are reportedly ostracized and accused of disloyalty. “What has become unpleasant is that we who feel that things are not going right at the authority, and it is usually Swedes, have to talk behind closed doors so that no one hears,” Samnytt was told.

“You are removed from your position, perhaps placed in the reception,” the source said when asked what happens if an employee speaks openly about their concerns. “It is difficult to fire someone here, since the union is quite strong, but you are simply removed from influence, and all opportunities for a career within the authority disappear.”

When asked what message should be sent to responsible politicians, the source was unequivocal. “Shut down the entire agency. It can’t be changed,” they said.

“If you change the name or transfer responsibility to other agencies, the same people will follow. It will be the same thing again. If you want to change this, you have to take a completely new approach, with new people.”

The allegations come amid previous controversies surrounding the Migration Board. In February 2024, a 30-year-old Iraqi man employed as an administrator at the authority was reported to police on suspicion of data breaches, misconduct, and accepting bribes. According to documents seen by Samnytt, the man may have earned millions of kronor by selling residence permits to other migrants.

The agency has also faced criticism for social media posts explaining how asylum seekers could go back on holiday to countries they claimed to have fled.

The full exposé can be read in full here.