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Spain already sells more electric cars and plug-in hybrids than gasoline. With a (big) asterisk

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The plug-in vehicle is expanding in Spain. For the first time, our country has recorded more sales of plug-in vehicles (plug-in hybrids and electric) than gasoline and, of course, diesel cars. Or, in other words, they add up to more than pure combustion vehicles per fuel type and come close to exceeding the sum of both. The data, however, has important nuances. you will have read it. And it makes sense, because the data is striking. For the first time, Spain has added more sales of plug-in vehicles than pure combustion vehicles. The figures for last November are, according to ANFACthe following: Gasoline cars: 21,147 units Diesel cars: 4,979 units Plug-in hybrid cars: 11,999 units Electric cars: 9,316 units Therefore, the duel is as follows: Sum of combustion vehicles: 26,133 units Sum of plug-in vehicles: 21,315 units. The first. The news is that for the first time the sum of cars with plug They have surpassed pure combustion gasoline. Cars that do not have any type of electrification continue to represent 22.47% (28.15% if we extend the photograph to the entire year 2025) but this energy is clearly declining. Cars with a plug have already reached 22.65% market share. But the big change is in the year’s accumulated results. This has shot up to 19.29% when a year ago it stood at 11.06%. Growth between January and November 2025 has skyrocketed by 100.12%. That is, twice as many cars of this type have been purchased. The hybrids. Once again, the non-plug-in hybrid is the best-selling type of car. According to ANFAC data, it was the best-selling type of car last November, with 41,034 units and a market share of 43.60%. This data does not stop growing. In the accumulated of the year, the market share is 41.85% and is almost four percentage points more than in the same period of 2024 (38.09%). In total, they have grown 26.04% in sales so far this year. These hybrids are mostly gasoline. But of the more than 40,000 units last November classified as hybrids, 3,852 of them are hybrids with diesel engines, which begins to give some clues about what we are talking about. Right now, non-plug-in hybrids that run on diesel are 1,000 units away from surpassing pure combustion diesels. Why do we talk about an asterisk? Because in their accounts, the microhybrid cars They count the same as a hybrid. There is no way to know how many of the more than 40,000 hybrids sold in Spain in November 2025 and the more than 437,621 units sold so far this year actually correspond to electric hybrids. What is popularly known as a “Toyota hybrid.” In fact, among the best-selling hybrids so far this year we find cars like the Citroën C4, the Dacia Dusterhe Renault Austral or the Nissan Qashqai. All of them have electric hybrid versions but also light hybrids (also called mild hybrid or microhybrids). In fact, the last two only have versions with the ECO label and although of the four engines, two are mild hybridthey all add up as hybrids in the final count. The controversy of mild hybrid. The controversy with the light hybrid or mild hybrid It comes because it is an effective formula for manufacturers to minimally electrify a car to receive approval from the authorities but with a purely cosmetic impact on the car’s consumption or emissions. With the same engine, a car that uses this type of hybridization barely improves the data approved by its pure combustion brother. In Spain, these cars have some advantages over pure combustion cars despite the fact that their real impact is minimal. In MadridFor example, a car mild hybrid It is exempt from paying 75% of the Tax on Mechanical Traction Vehicles (IVTM) during the first six years. These cars also receive the ECO label from the DGT, which is key when receiving more benefits in Low Emission Zonesspaces where circulation is restricted taking into account the car’s environmental labeling. In some cities they also have advantages such as discounts when parking on the street. A redefinition? It is not expected. Neither when it comes to defining them as hybrids nor when it comes to giving them the ECO label. Recently, in the Congress of Deputies The new Sustainable Mobility Law was approved. It was intended to include the study of a review of environmental labeling, but an amendment by the Popular Party prevented it from being included. this will take place. The creation of a new category or the non-provision of the ECO sticker to these cars is, however, a problem. The main obstacle is what to do with the thousands and thousands of cars mild hybrid that have already been sold and that have received their ECO sticker. Provide different labeling to the new cars, despite the fact that they are in the same situation as the current ones, can create a discriminatory situation, but a retroactive withdrawal of the stickers already delivered is not contemplated either. Photo | juice In Xataka | Catalonia wants to restrict circulation to cars with DGT label B in the ZBE: these are the deadlines and the cities

The largest glacier in Spain is in its final death throes, and this marks a before and after in the Pyrenees

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Although it may be a bit unknown, in Spain we have a glacier: the Aneto glacier, which is located in the Pyrenees. but there is bad news regarding its continuitysince although we knew that it was doomed to disappear, the reality is that the speed at which it is doing so is faster than we expected. And the latest data that has been known is clear: it has been definitively fragmented. It’s a reality. Although it may be an appreciation of veteran mountaineers who are already tired of seeing it, the reality is very different. The conclusion has been drawn after decades of LiDAR data, photogrammetry with drones and analysis of satellite images from 1981 to 2022 which confirm that the Pyrenean colossus has entered a phase of irreversible collapse. In this way, what was once a continuous mass of ice that flowed down the mountain is today an archipelago of fossil ice fractures that is doomed to disappear. Catastrophic data. Thanks to all the technological means that have been used to monitor this glacier, it has been possible to make a chronology of everything that has happened. And in a single year, the ice masses of the Pyrenees They have lost an average thickness of more than one meter. In specific points, the loss of ice reached four meters, which is equivalent to one and a half floors of a building. But the important thing is that this large amount of ice has disappeared in months. The most worrying thing is that this has occurred in a year that was not especially bad in terms of levels nor did it have the extreme heat waves of 2022. It is simply that the system could no longer take it. An evolution. If we look back, in 2022 the Aneto glacier lost a large lower area. But now the body has split in two so the Aneto is three disconnected masses of ice. And this has consequences even in the name, since the smallest part, under the Collado de Coronas, now stops being a glacier and becomes a glacier. If we continue looking back, there are figures that justify this thaw, since since the final of the little Ice Age in the mid-19th century and until 2017 the temperature of the area increased 1.14ºC. However, the turning point is clearly detected in the 1980s, with a dramatic acceleration of the decline starting in 2000. The technology behind. What differentiates this monitoring from observations made in the last century is its precision. The Cryopyr team It is not limited to driving stakes into the snow and seeing its level. It has been decided to use LiDAR technology and programmed drone flights to create digital models of the terrain. These studies, supported by publications in The Cryosphere and Naturehave made it possible to map not only the surface, but also the basal topography. Thanks to this, we know what is under the ice before it melts. And the most shocking thing is that the ice no longer flows. This is very important because a glacier is defined by its movement; When the thickness decreases so much, gravity stops pushing it down the slope. It stagnates. It turns into fossil ice obscured by dust, which absorbs more solar radiation (lower albedo) and melts even faster. And this is what has already ended up condemning it to its disappearance without anything being able to be done to reverse it. The case of Ossoue. If the Aneto is the symbol, the Ossoue glacier which is located on the border of Spain and France, is undoubtedly the sign that anticipated what was going to happen. This is because it has been the most affected of the season with average losses of 3.5 meters thick. And here history gives us a striking visual reference. In 1882, Earl Henry Russell ordered caves to be excavated on the rock at ice level to celebrate parties. Today, these caves are inaccessible holes hanging tens of meters high above the current ice. The future. What will be left when the ice is gone? This is the mandatory question after seeing this piece of ice melt in the coming years. The answer is that we will see lakes that will appear in the high mountains. And we already have a preview of what we will see what the Innominatea lake with turquoise waters that was formed in 2015 at 3,150 meters above sea level and is considered the highest in the Pyrenees. Despite being beautiful, we must not forget that it is the liquid “corpse” of what was once an ice giant. When will it arrive? There is no exact date on which this disappearance will end. What is known from the most recent reports is that if temperature and precipitation trends continue along the same path, all the Pyrenean glaciers will disappear within 10 years. Images | Pablo J Danis Joan Brebo In Xataka | The Arctic was one of the few corners safe from invasive species thanks to the cold. Until climate change came

Russia had managed to manufacture drones and missiles despite the sanctions. So selling Zara clothes was a matter of time

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In recent months, a strange wave of western products has begun to reappear in places where, on paper, it is already they shouldn’t exist. Between geopolitical changes, forced business exits and an increasingly opaque market, certain brands have unexpectedly become visible again, fueling rumors, theories about how they are getting there and who is really pulling the strings of their distribution towards Moscow. Now a giant from Spain has (re)appeared: Inditex. A market that does not close completely. After announcing the end of operations in Russia a few days after the invasion of Ukraine, Inditex left behind its second largest market and sold its business in the country. However, more than two years latergarments with official labels from brands such as Zara, Bershka, Oysho, Stradivarius or Massimo Dutti have once again appeared on the shelves of the Russian channel Tvoenow renamed Tvoe n Ko, which boasts a “constantly updated” selection on social networks and presents the collections as almost clandestine finds. The pieces, which match models from previous seasons and carry prices in euros, are now sold in at least 19 stores Russian companies without there being (according to the official version offered) any contractual relationship between the Spanish company and the local distributor. In fact, they occur two months after the executive director of Inditex, Óscar García Maceiras, will declare to the Financial Times that the conditions “were not met” for his return to Russia. The engineering of the Russian gray market. I was counting a few hours ago the FT that the mechanism that allows the reappearance of these garments is based on the system of “parallel imports” established by Moscow to circumvent the massive departures of Western brands. In this scheme operates Disco Club LLCa Russian company that has recorded 18 statements in accordance, citing Inditex as supplier and presenting itself as its “authorized representative”, despite the fact that Inditex flatly denies having granted such permission. The garments come partly from inventories originally destined for various EU countries and partly from Chinese factories, according to labels and documents customs, in a circuit that takes advantage of legal loopholes and the Kremlin’s lack of inhibition to give formal coverage to a trade that would previously have been considered smuggling. The denial. For its part, Tvoe assures that it does not have direct agreements with Inditex and hides behind confidentiality agreements so as not to detail its suppliers, while Disco Club insist in which he only performed a “punctual technical service.” Burkhard Binder, the businessman linked to the founding of the company and based in Dubai, is disassociating himself from current operations. Inditex, known for its tight control of inventory, distribution and franchises, completely reject any link: he claims not to have authorized Disco Club or any Russian entity to act on his behalf and avoids commenting on how his products arrive in the country since he withdrew. Matter of time. we have been counting: the ability of the Russian economy to adapt in the midst of war has shown that international restrictions, no matter how strict, always find cracks. A country that has rebuilt chains complex supply chains to produce drones, precision ammunition or long-range missiles, despite technological embargoes and industrial vetoes, would not have difficulties reopening the door to much more “simpler” products, such as Western fashion clothing. In that context, the reappearance of garments of Zara in Russian stores is not so much surprising as confirming a trend: Moscow has perfected an ecosystem of parallel imports capable of circumventing almost any blockade, from military components even t-shirts and dresses from past seasons, turning the impossible into routine and the forbidden into a merely logistical problem. Russia, a laboratory of consumption in times of sanctions. The appearance of Zara products in Russia despite the exit from the company illustrates the magnitude of the gray market that Moscow has made official since 2022: an ecosystem that allows consumers to access Western brands through private intermediaries and indirect routes, without participation of the original companies. In this context, the reappearance of the Spanish firm in the Russian commercial landscape is not due to a business return, but rather to a state-run mechanism. commercial evasion that turns its garments into parallel import merchandise. If you like, the phenomenon also reveals the extent to which Russia has rebuilt its global consumption through third countries and front companies, and how even the strictest groups in controlling its supply chain cannot prevent its products from reappearing in a market from which they tried to leave definitely. Image | Pexels In Xataka | Ukraine has opened the Russian ballistic missile that has devastated its cities. Your surprise is a condemnation: your main supplier is untouchable In Xataka | Zara has been selling clothes for years. Now he aspires to sell something more difficult: prestige

this is how we are ‘disneyfying’ the countryside

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It’s best not to beat around the bush: in some parts of the US, raccoons have become a damn hell. The demographic boom in urban areas, the constant invasion of properties, aggressive behavior and the risk of diseases have generated an endless number of problematic situations. In fact, the enormous availability of food from human waste is turning every situation into a problem. And yet, at the same time, we are seeing a curious phenomenon: raccoons are in the process of domestication. Domestication? It seems so. A recent study has evaluated 20,000 photographs of urban and rural raccoons and what they have found is “a clear reduction in snout length.” It is about, as Nardine Saad explains on the BBC, of ​​”a physical change consistent with the early stages of domestication seen in cats and dogs.” It is not the only sign of domestication: according to Artem Apostolov, principal investigator of the work, “attenuated flight (or fight) responses are found” and the animals seem to feel more comfortable around us. Why is this happening? According to Raffaela Leschco-author of the study, “garbage is really the driving force behind all of this.” “Everywhere we humans go, there is trash, and animals love our trash,” said in Scientific American. But the truth is that it is not easy to access that garbage. You need to be bold enough to rummage through the bins, but not enough to pose a threat. And that evolutionary pressure tends to select genetic lines with good behavior. Good behavior and more. For years, scientists have associated domestication with very specific anatomical and morphological changes such as curled tails, droopy ears, depigmentation, smaller brains and reduced facial skeletons. It is something we can easily see if we buy a dog and a wolf. What we are seeing with the raccoon case is that the active domestication hypothesis (the fact that humans captured and domesticated the animals) does not fit well with these data. “The process could actually begin much earlier than previously thought — these authors maintain — especially as the animals became accustomed to human environments.” That is, we believed that we were domesticating the world and, in reality, it was the world that was domesticating us. Image | Joshua J Cotten In Xataka | Neither hunting nor company: we domesticated the dog because we had plenty of meat in the Ice Age

we have normalized that experiences degrade

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Netflix has just eliminated one of the most basic, useful and veteran functions of its service: the ability to send content (cast) directly from your mobile phone to most televisions and Chromecast-type devices. They have also done it quietly, without press releases or major announcements. It’s another straw that breaks an increasingly terrible camel’s back. what has happened. Netflix no longer supports the transmission of its content from a mobile device to the vast majority of TVs or Android TV-type devices. The solution they offer is for you to find your TV remote control and navigate through the native Netflix application on it. According to several users, the change was applied with zero warnings around on November 10, and Netflix did not announce it, although it has updated one of their support pages to indicate that that feature is no longer active. It’s unfortunate. The most embarrassing thing is not only the removal of the feature, but the fine print that accompanies it on that support page. According to the new regulations, support for this casting function is restricted to Third generation Chromecast (or previous ones) that did not come with a remote control can continue to receive that signal. And you can only take advantage of this function in plans without advertising: if you have the plan with adsthe feature will be locked even with that supported hardware. It is a move reminiscent of the one they made in 2019 when they eliminated AirPlay support in 2019 under the excuse of “guaranteeing the quality standard.” Traditional corporate phrases that today sound emptier than ever. A sign of something more disturbing. But let’s not let a tree stop us from seeing the forest, because this is actually another drop in the glass of users’ patience. The journalist and writer Cory Doctorow created the term “enshittification” to define this phenomenon that we are experiencing with streaming platforms: First, the platforms are good with their users to attract them They then abuse them to improve business for their commercial clients. Then they abuse everyone to capture the value for themselves From bad to worse. If we look back, using Netflix in 2018 was objectively a much superior user experience than today. The interface was cleaner, the catalog was not so fragmented by licensing wars, the cast worked universally and pay attention: the company itself I encouraged you to share your password on Twitter as an act of love and technological goodness. Sharing was living until it stopped being so and Netflix began its particular crusade with shared accounts. We have encountered the Inquisition. This is out of control. This time it has not happened like in 2019 with AirPlay, and there is no explanation or argument behind this elimination of the feature. What is clear is that Netflix has decided that your comfort in using your phone as a controller is acceptable collateral damage. With this they manage to force you to use their TV interface, where they control much better the visibility of their original content and advertising. Netflix is ​​not alone in this boat. The degradation of the user experience is a transversal trend in the market, and affects other streaming services. Amazon Prime Video, which was born as a premium service free of interruptions, began to display advertising and has been increasing its appearance gradually and consistently. You can only get rid of it unless you pay extra, thereby somewhat breaking the basic promise of the service: what was previously an added value for being a Prime customer is now an advertising showcase for which, paradoxically, you are already paying an annual fee. Noise. We are seeing the same thing in two services that dominate our leisure time: both YouTube and Spotify have been filled with advertising and the user experience is objectively worse than it was a few years ago. In Spotify, the strategy has also been even more bloody, because there now appear vertical videos in the TikTok style and an absolute visual intrusion. Functionality and minimalism have been sacrificed because what matters is the engagement. Users do not react. The alarming thing about this situation is not that companies try to maximize their profits; that is what is expected. What is truly disturbing is how quickly we, the users, have accepted that that user experience has gone and is going back without us doing anything to prevent it. We have normalized the loss of rights and functions, and although there have been some ephemeral reactions on social networks, these have not gone beyond an anecdote. The elimination of shared accounts from Netflix in 2022, for example, sparked a lot of criticism and comments from users who boasted about leaving the platform. There was certainly a fallbut it didn’t last long: Today Netflix has more users than ever. The philosophy of less gives a stone. This collective passivity is what allows these changes to occur without companies even announcing it. Companies have been training us for years to be grateful that the service simply works. The shittification continues its course, and our lack of protests and actions in this regard is like the gasoline that fuels this terrible trend. In Xataka | Not a Christmas without Netflix Christmas fireplaces. These are this year’s, and they come with gamification included

TIA agents are better ambassadors for the CSIC than we suspected

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If we think about Mortadelo and Filemónwe also immediately think of all the outrages that the TIA agents have to suffer because of the inventions of Professor Bacterio, the translation into the Carpetovetonic language of the iconic mad doctor which is a foundational part of the science fiction imagination. But there is more: a traveling exhibition traces the history of science in the last half century through the creations of Ibáñez. What does it consist of? The Higher Council for Scientific Research has premiered the exhibition ‘The science of Mortadelo and Filemón‘, which will remain open until February 15 before beginning its tour of various Spanish cities. The exhibition brings together 39 covers published between 1975 and 2018, organized into five thematic blocks that examine everything from Bacterio’s chaotic inventions to climate crises and epidemics. Pura Fernández, vice president of Scientific Culture of the CSIC, highlights in ‘El País’ that Ibáñez turned research into an everyday occurrence through humor. The sections. The exhibition structures its 39 covers into five thematic blocks that document the evolution of Spanish scientific thought and that link to CSIC research through QR codes for visitors: ‘A world in motion under the magnifying glass of science’ examines natural phenomena: from glacial retreat to epidemiological crises, including agricultural innovations. ‘Technological innovations incorporated by the TIA’ satirizes inventions that generate more chaos than solutions, questioning whether technology responds to real needs or commercial impulses. Professor Bacterio stars in his own section as the archetype of the researcher isolated from the world: in ‘Bacterio’s laboratory, successes and accidents’ his failed experiments raise dilemmas about ethics and safety in laboratories. ‘Science in the social mirror’ addresses information manipulation, pseudoscience and responsible communication. ‘Emergency science for troubled times’ talks about climate change, air pollution, invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, and Saharan dust intrusions. How it works. Francisco Ibáñez built a visual archive of Spanish scientific development over six decades. What began in 1958 as detective adventures evolved into a satirical chronicle of Spainwhich included technological modernization. Starting in the seventies, with Spain in full transformation, its covers captured real milestones: the takeoff of the space race in ‘El cocoa spatial’, genetic engineering in ‘The people copying machine’ or the phenomenon of drones in ‘Drones matones’, until reaching the climate alerts of the 21st century. His method was far from the anticipatory rigor of Franco-Belgian comic icons such as Hergé (who consulted the zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans and the astronautics expert Alexandre Ananoff in the Tintin album ‘Target: The Moon’) or the historical accuracy of Goscinny in Asterix. His territory was immediate parody: he transformed scientific headlines into slapstick visual, turning Bacterio’s laboratory into a distorting mirror of contemporary research. The CSIC and pop culture. The public body trusted for years in Spanish graphic humor to democratize knowledge. Fernando del Blanco, head of the library of the CSIC Research and Development Center, inaugurated ‘Science according to Forges’ in 2019, bringing together 66 cartoons by the cartoonist published in ‘El País’ between 1995 and 2018. With this one by Mortadelo he shared a methodology: transforming recognizable cultural figures into bridges to complex scientific concepts. Humor allows us to address everything from the Higgs boson to budget cuts in science. Science versus parody. As Pura Fernández comments in the aforementioned ‘El País’ article, Mortadelo and Filemón manage to discredit practices without delegitimizing the need for knowledge. Bacterio embodies a poor application of science: isolation, lack of peer review, continuous risks… However, his inventions address real phenomena. In this way, he emphasizes, the public understands the reading that Ibáñez proposes: Bacterio satirizes malpractice, not science itself. In Xataka | When Ibáñez lost the rights to Mortadelo in 1985, he created a new magazine where they would have another name: ‘Yo y yo’

from working 120 hours to thinking that in 20 years work will be optional

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Elon Musk gained his reputation as a tireless worker when became public that his days at Tesla stretched beyond 120 hours a week and that he even slept in his office at the Austin gigafactory during the production crisis of Model 3. However, the millionaire seems to have changed his mind upon seeing the evolution of AI and has surprised the world with a futuristic vision about work: “working will be optional,” assured the richest person in the world in a recent speech at an investor forum in Saudi Arabia. From 996 to “working is optional”. Elon Musk, famous for defending 80-hour days to achieve great goals, published a message in November 2018 on his social network wrote the millionaire In an interview on the podcast ‘People by WTF’ by Nikil Kamath, Musk has changed his mind and has come to believe that, in a period of “between 10 and 20 years, work will be optional. Like a hobby” thanks to the increase in productivity promised by the evolution of AI and the progressive arrival of humanoid robots like Optimus that Tesla is developing. In his talk with Kamath, Musk compared working to growing vegetables in your own garden: “You can grow your own vegetables in your garden or you can go to the store to buy them. It’s much harder to grow your own vegetables. But some people like to grow their vegetables, and that’s fine. But it will be optional, that way, is my prediction,” said the Tesla CEO. Its formula: universal income. Musk believes that a universal income It will cover all the basic expenses of the population, eliminating the need for mandatory employment. This would allow people to live in the countryside or the city without depending on a job near an office. The businessman added: “You won’t have to be in a city for a job. If you can think of it, you can have it, that will be the future.” This vision of a population financed by a universal basic income aligns with the experiments with basic income funded by Sam Altman, former founding partner of OpenAI and Musk’s current rival. The future of AI comes together. With this change of heart regarding the workday, Elon Musk aligns himself with figures like Bill Gates, who predict that AI will automate almost everything and lead to three-day work weeks in less than a decade. Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom, also pointed out in an interview with The New York Timesto the theory of the three-day week thanks to the increase in productivity. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, it coincided a few days ago with Musk on stage at the Saudi Arabia Investor Forum. There he agreed with the Tesla CEO’s postulate. Huang has long argued that AI will boost the four-day work week, promoting idea generation and projects beyond current capabilities. AI is a concern for Gen Z. While the predictions of technological CEOs come true, the reality is that the evolution of AI has become a serious concern for young people of generation Z who are starting your working career. The first data They already point out that some large companies are reducing hiring in entry-level positions, which were usually occupied by recent graduates. A recent survey from the Deutsche Bank Research Institute revealed that generation Z was “very concerned” about AI stealing job opportunities. As the question moves to older generations, that concern fades away. In Xataka | We still don’t have a four-day week and there are already CEOs dreaming of the next level: working only three days Image | Flickr (Gage Skidmore)

kill all the wild boars that were in the country

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In summer 2020, German authorities found the first wild boar infected with African swine fever. The world was distracted by anemia, but the global pork market shook. Germany was the largest pork producer in Europe and, if we had learned anything from the disease, it is that its voracity knows no limits. With the plague in the heart of the Union, it was a matter of time before it reached everywhere and, however, one small country said no: Denmark. 68 kilometers. That is the length of the border between Denmark and Germany. It seems like a purely colorful piece of information, but in this context it has a very concrete meaning: in Christiansborg they came to the conclusion that the spread of the virus could be stopped. In fact, the Danish government had already started to build a fence one and a half meters high to stop the intrusion of wild boars into the country in 2019. Detections of infected animals in Poland began to make them nervous. However, they quickly realized that it was not enough. And they decided to eradicate them one by one. It is true that in the Danish case this was also relatively acceptable. After all, although eradicating a species is difficult, the Scandinavian country was only home to just over a hundred specimens. The effort was extensive and exhaustive, but by the end of 2021 the government announced that the species was exterminated. In December 2020 they had finished with the last copy, number 157. Denmark is, in fact, one of the countries where the swine fever virus has not yet been detected. Is it viable to do it in Spain? The truth is that no. Spain, according to the Hunting Resources Research Institutehas 1,200,000 wild boars roaming its mountains. It is no longer that the effort necessary to exterminate them would be immense, but that the socioeconomic consequences would also be immense. Dozens of ecosystems would be unbalanced and we would enter a more than swampy terrain. However, things can be learned from Denmark’s decision. Above all, when we talk about this type of illness, the measures must be drastic and proactive. We have been waiting for this to happen for years and we have been extremely lucky that it has happened days after signing the agreement with China that allowed us to ‘regionalize’ the outbreak. Otherwise, the problem would have been enormous. 8,000 million. That is the number, which according to expertsis at stake due to the outbreak of African swine fever in the Sierra de Collsarola. And, for now, it is not at all clear whether we will be able to get out of this quagmire unscathed. Image | Markus Winkler | Danny Kroon In Xataka | 14 dead wild boars have become the greatest threat to Spanish livestock farming in 30 years. And all for a sandwich

that of the US trying to find it before the rest of the powers

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What could perfectly be the beginning of a work of fiction framed in a novel or a film, is taking place right now in some remote part of the planet. The episode of the GBU-39a bomb of American origin, lost somewhere in Beirut, has sparked a silent race between Washington, Lebanon and, potentially, Russia, China and Iran. The loss that can alter a strategic balance. What, on the surface, might seem like a mere failure to detonate a guided bomb becomes a matter of the highest strategic priority when the device in question belongs to one of the most important families of precision munitions. studied, valuable and restricted of the American arsenal. According to JPostthe bomb fell during the attack that killed Hezbollah’s military commander, Ali Tabatabaiand when it did not explode, it was made available to anyone who managed to access it before the American or Israeli teams. Washington solicitous immediately to the Lebanese Government for its recovery, aware that, if it reached the hands of Russia, China, Iran or even Hezbollah, the loss would be much greater than a simple lost device. It would be a direct access to decades of researchadvanced composite materials, guidance algorithms and electronic architecture whose reproduction could transform the ability of various powers to counter or replicate the American model of surgical strike. These types of incidents, in fact, it’s not newbut its context (a capital burned by regional tensions and the active presence of actors with the technical capacity to exploit the discovery) makes it an exceptional threat. A small bomb with huge implications. The GBU-39 is a glider bomb small diameter designed to combine range, penetration and millimeter accuracy within a compact body. just 110 kilos. Its operational concept is simple but devastating: when launched, it deploys wings that allow it to glide up to about 110 kilometers even without an engine, keeping the launching aircraft out of enemy defensive range. Its GPS and inertial guidance achieves errors of less than a meter, which reduces the number of ammunition needed for an attack and increases the survival of the device. The relationship between weight and damage generated is what has made it a benchmark: thanks to its highly efficient warhead, it can destroy reinforced structures without having to resort to much larger bombs. Its size allows an F-35 transport up to eight in its internal hold without compromising its radar signature, and for a single aircraft to carry out multiple attacks in a single sortie. That’s why the United States strictly controls its export, limiting it to close partners and technologically reliable family members. Loading a Gbu39 Washington’s fear. The American concern lies not in the explosive (easy to replicate), but in what the bomb hides: miniaturized sensors, lightweight and resistant composite materials, navigation and data fusion algorithms, microelectronics designed to survive thermal and vibrational stress, and a guidance system robust against interference. All this represents billions in R&D accumulated over two decades. Whether Russia or China could examine an intact GBU-39 would mean accelerate your capacity to improve anti-radar systems, develop countermeasures against precision attacks or even integrate equivalent technologies into their own arsenals of gliding bombs, which are advancing today but still lack American refinement. For Iran or Hezbollah, access to the bomb would have a additional value: would allow studying how to degrade American precision in an electronic warfare scenario, or even replicate part of the design in local munitions. A race against time. The United States has already experienced similar episodes that fuel its current reaction. In 2022, after the crash of an F-35C In the South China Sea, the Navy mobilized an urgent deep-sea recovery operation to prevent the device, with its AESA radarits distributed sensors and its stealth coating, will end up in the hands of Beijing. China itself denied interest, but the precedent from 2001 (when an American EP-3 made an emergency landing in Hainan and its equipment was inspected for months) made it clear that every opportunity for technological dismantling is taken advantage of without nuances. The possibility of a perfectly good bomb resting in a Beirut neighborhood, accessible to state and non-state actors, reproduces this pattern in an environment much more chaotic and close to the territory of pro-Iranian groups. Geopolitics of a lost artifact. For Israel, the lost bomb represents a direct operational risk: its technology in the hands of Hezbollah would allow the design of local countermeasures adapted to its mode of attack. For the United States, the problem is much broader: the proliferation of sensitive knowledge that can fuel Russian military modernization in the midst of a war of attrition, accelerate the Chinese transition towards highly efficient guided munitions or reinforce the Iranian reverse engineering ecosystem. For Russia, China or Iran, however, the discovery would be a capacity multiplierespecially in electronic warfare and in the development of long-range gliding munitions, key in future conflicts. And for Lebanon, caught between American, Israeli and Iranian pressures, the return or not of the GBU-39 becomes a deeply political actalmost inevitably interpreted as a gesture of alignment on a board where every piece counts. Strategic consequences. He incident reveals an inconvenient truth: in modern warfare, a single unexploded device can be equivalent to thousands of pages of classified documentation. The proliferation of gliding bombs (from Russia to China via Türkiye or Iran) means that competition is no longer just about launching ever more precise ammunition, but about preventing the adversary from understanding how to do it the same. If the lost GBU-39 ends up recovered by the United States, the episode will likely remain an anecdote. But if not, its impact could feel in development of new interference systems, in stealth attack doctrines, in the precision of Chinese gliding bombs, in the resilience of the Americans or even in the behavior of the Israeli air defense. Image | Master Sgt. Lance Cheung, Ministerie van Defensie, Picryl In Xataka | No one has seen Israel’s atomic arsenal. And that’s because Israel has an … Read more

The premises that were occupied by the business reopen as tourist houses and apartments

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“That’s one and there’s another one. See that one over there? It was a bar. Now it has four rooms in it.” A neighbor speaks de Vallecas and what he points his finger to are street-level premises that once housed fruit shops, haberdasheries, drugstores, grocery stores, pharmacies or bank branches and have now mutated into homes. Some of them are home to families who have resigned themselves to going about their daily lives in spaces that, warn from a neighborhood association in the area, they are poorly ventilated. Others are dedicated to a business juicier: vacation rental. It is the umpteenth example of the tourism from Madrid. A neighborhood in transformation. The Puente de Vallecas district is changing. And in a way that does not convince a good part of its neighbors. Over the last few years, people who go about their daily lives there have found that premises that previously housed neighborhood businesses, such as fruit shops or bakeries, have lowered the blinds to reopen, converted into something very different. In what? Housing. Or (increasingly) tourist accommodation, spaces designed for millions of tourists who visit Madrid every year. The residents of Vallecas know this from the flow of tourists they see through the streets because it is not strange that the new tourist apartments located on ground floors operate 100% virtually: customers make their reservations through platforms such as Booking, pay and access through code opening systems or the padlock boxes that have become so popular in other destinations. “It is increasing”. The phenomenon is striking enough to have caught the attention of Europa Press, which recently visited the Puente de Vallecas for talks with its inhabitants and some neighborhood associations. The nuances change, but not the discourse: all the people interviewed by the agency agree that the spaces left free by the businesses that close in the area are ‘reborn’ converted into homes, either for families or (increasingly) for tourists. “It’s increasing,” Javier Moral recognizesfrom the Dona Carlota de Numancia Neighborhood Association. The emphasis is not only on this reconversion of spaces at street level, but on what it represents for the life of the neighborhood. Occupied by tourists… and families. In Moral’s opinion, new homes often do not meet “habitability conditions”, which leads him to be suspicious of the real effectiveness of habitability cells. Europa Press explains that within these converted premises you can find tourists who demand cheaper accommodation than those advertised in the heart of Madrid (without giving up being just a few minutes from Atocha station), but also families conditioned by the price escalation of the rent. The problem, Jorge Nacarino insistsfrom the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Madrid, is that “many times” these apartments “do not meet sufficient requirements due to size or ventilation.” The trend is more important than it may seem at first glance because it does not just represent a change in use. By replacing hairdressers, shoe stores or pharmacies with tourist apartments, the neighborhood loses neighborhood “meeting points” and forces residents to travel further and further away to find basic services, such as supermarkets or a bank. The arrival of tourists low cost encourages the opening of new businesses, but above all they are self-service laundries or convenience stores. fast food. Far beyond Vallecas. The change in the use of commercial basements in neighborhoods such as Palomeras Bajas, Entrevías, San Diego or Nueva Numancia is striking, but Puente de Vallecas is not the only area that is seeing how tourism transforms its landscape. not long ago we told you how a company had transformed an old bank office into a public bathroom in the historic center of Madrid. The business ended up going bankrupt, but its objective was clear: to nourish itself avalanche of tourists who visit the city. Precisely to alleviate the effects of growing tourist pressure, the Reside Plan prevents transforming commercial basements into apartments for tourists in the historic center or converting premises into homes on the main tertiary roads. In the case of Puente de Vallecas, this shields certain areas. “Low quality”. Beyond Madrid, other cities that receive thousands of tourists every year, such as Malaga or Santiago, have noted similar changes. In the first, Malaga, the City Council prepared a report which warns that “tourist pressure can cause the expulsion of native and value-added businesses” that end up being “replaced by souvenir shops and other businesses oriented exclusively to tourists.” The report does not stop there and also warns of the creation of “illegal or low-quality accommodation.” In the Galician capital, another study has confirmed that if at the beginning of the 1990s the historic center housed some 645 businesses aimed at residents (grocery stores, clothing and furniture stores, kiosks, drugstores, pharmacies…) today there are only 202. What’s more, food stores as such have collapsed more than 70% during that period. It is not something exceptional. In other cities, such as Valencia, what they call “tourist cages”lodgings for visitors, gated and at street level. Images | Wikipedia and Daquella Manera (Flickr) Via | Europa Press In Xataka | Northern Spain has been complaining about mass tourism for years. Asturias has discovered the bitter consequences of losing it

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