Holy Family
The Basilica of Sagrada Familia in Barcelona has been completed after 144 years. In February the final arm of the cross was placed on the 172-meter-tall tower of Jesus Christ, completing the structure. Pope Leo XIV inaugurated and blessed the Catholic temple during his visit on June 10, 2026. The idea of the church, in the 1870s, came as a response to a growing rejection of the Catholic Church and faith. Construction began in 1882, and in 1883 architect Antonio Gaudi took over as chief architect of the project. Gaudi combined Gothic and Art Nouveau into an awe-inspiring home for God. Only anarchists in 1936 and a COVID scare in 2020 managed to shut down work on the church.
AI Data Centers
Estimates show that $8 trillion will be spent on data centers in the next six years. The huge data center structures are generally despised not only because of the skyrocketing electricity bills they bring, their noise, and water depletion, price increases in chipped devices or even job theft. They are generally unwelcome because of their huge scale, their sheer ugliness and the rising likelihood that they will herald the age of surveillance, loss of freedom and strict control of individual behavior. The data center energy consumption that is currently at around 430 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually — that is 3% of global electricity demand, or the energy consumption of Japan.
Bermúdez found Guilty
In one of the most horrific murders in Roatan’s history, Gilbert Santiago Reyes Bermúdez, an American one-time resident of the island, was found guilty of aggravated murder of three women: Dione Beatriz Solórzano, Nikendra McCoy and María Antonia Cruz. The murders occurred on Jan. 7, 2024, but their bodies were only found two days later inside a vehicle abandoned in a housing community. Reyes left Honduras on Jan. 8 and was arrested in March 2024 at the airport in the Dominican Republic on a warrant. After extradition to Honduras he was found guilty by a court on Roatan and is awaiting sentencing. Honduras abolished the death penalty in 1956.
Israeli base in Iraq
While the U.S. has constructed around 20 military bases in the Middle East over the past 20 years, Israel has constructed two military bases in Iraq. The first base was established in the Iraqi desert in late 2024 and in 2026 Israel established a second base there. The bases had landing strips in a dry lakebed 110 miles southwest from Karbala. When an Iraqi farmer appeared in the area he was killed by an Israeli helicopter, as was an Iraqi soldier the following day. The U.S. military knew about Israel’s plans and persuaded Iraqi authorities to turn off their radars under the guise of protecting U.S. aircraft, creating an opportunity for the Israelis. Israel has its sights on an old Soviet Sitalchay air base in Azerbaijan and is negotiating establishing a base in Somaliland.
Amnesty in Spain
Obtaining Spanish citizenship has never been easier. You can marry a Spaniard and apply for one after just one year or stay there illegally and apply. A “marriage of convenience” might cost you as little as 6,000 euros. Pedro Sánchez’s government advertised that Spain could legalize 500,000 illegal immigrants and provide them with proper documents and a path to citizenship; leaked documents suggest that this number could be as high as a million. That is in addition to the 300,000 asylum seekers in line to receive a Spanish passport as well. With a native Spanish birthrate of 1.1 children per woman at an all-time low, 33% of all children in Spain are now born to foreigners. Many of the estimated 120,000 Hondurans living in Spain are eligible for legalization of their status.
