OpenAI has become the “Fast Food” of AI. And that means that for Sam Altman the business is attention, not AGI

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It was sung that OpenAI was going to launch its browser, so the Yesterday launch of the Atlas browser It didn’t take us too much by surprise. What is important is the fact that the company does not stop constantly releasing products and services. The pace is the most extraordinary we have experienced in recent years, and the obvious question is, what is OpenAI pursuing with this strategy? OpenAI is the great machine churros AI products of the world. In recent weeks we have seen how OpenAI has not stopped launching new AI services and products that have managed to flood the market. Some examples: And that’s not counting the Recently announced agreements with NVIDIA, AMD and Broadcom which make it clear that the pace of OpenAI announcements is absolutely dizzying: too many new things too often. Because? The hype race as a business priority. That extraordinary flurry of releases suggests that OpenAI’s big corporate priority is not so much the vaunted pursuit of AGI as it is dominating the conversation and, above all, the attention economy. What OpenAI wants is for us to be constantly talking about it, and the truth is that these launches are not exactly small: they all pose notable changes in its ecosystem and in the technology industry itself. Smokescreen. And such frenzy also acts as a strategic smokescreen. With this bombardment of releases (browser, applications, SDKs, improved models), Altman and his team not only generate more hype, but saturate the competitive space. Rivals barely have time to assimilate or replicate a feature when the next one has already been announced. Towards an operating system. The launch of Atlas is an especially significant move. With it it seems to be clear that OpenAI no longer wants to be a simple layer, the engine of AI, but a complete operating environment in the style of WeChat or the App Store. In fact wants to be the Windows of AIbut either it turns out well, or it is going to be the mother of all bubbles. Expectations attract new users (and investors). These constant movements also mean that these products also generate new expectations, even if only temporarily. OpenAI has managed to partly conquer the attention economy with launches such as Studio Ghibli style images or more recently with Sora. This has allowed it to attract millions more free users, which the company then tries to convert into paying users. Not only that: its growth also helps investors want to participate in the company’s multimillion-dollar investment rounds. And the AGI, what? And while all these launches are taking place, we see how the holy grail of AI, getting a general artificial intelligence (AGI), seems to take a backseat. It is as if that speech had become an empty mantra or a long-term goal that is not credible in the middle of this chaos. Altman has achieved replace philosophical conversation —the one that caused the hypothetical arrival of the AGI— due to a consumer conversation. The Fast Food of AI. The AI ​​ecosystem that OpenAI is creating has adopted a consumption pattern similar to that we experience on social networks: fast and ephemeral, based on the latest viral news. The Studio Ghibli-style visuals were exciting for a couple of weeks, and the same has happened with Sora 2, but that “wow” effect fades quickly. What is OpenAI doing to revive the hype again? Launch a new product. Atlas is the latest example. Seeking to be a de facto monopoly. With all these movements, OpenAI continues to attract more and more users and dominate the conversation and gain attention. That may not get you what you really need (income) at the moment, but it solidifies your absolute benchmark position and helps make it what you’re really looking for: the de facto monopoly of AI. Image | Mariia Shalabaieva In Xataka | ChatGPT will let you have erotic conversations. Welcome to emotional intimacy with an AI

There are people buying land, farms and pig farms in Spain. And those people are investment funds

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If this were not an article by Xataka, if it were a novel by Michael Ende: the story would begin with a top-down shot of the Segrià fields. We would see farms and more farms, cereal fields, irrigated orchards, roads, the Segre winding through the plain. And, as we got closer to the ground, we would see a flood of little gray men with briefcases full of money. The argument would be obvious: the field is for sale and the funds have gone out to buy. 34 million pig heads. That is Spain: the undisputed leader of European pork, the third producer worldwide. A giant, no matter how hackneyed the metaphor may be, with feet of clay. And the Spanish countryside has many problems, but the most worrying (because it has no solution — neither easy nor difficult) is its exasperating lack of generational change. Thousands of farms are on the brink of disappearance simply because no one wants to take charge of them once the owner retires. And that “nobody” doesn’t include the funds? Not until very recently. Agriculture was an unsexy sector for financial capital, but now the situation has changed. We have seen it with agriculture: aggressive field management can generate a lot of income (even if it is at the cost of large negative externalities). Now, in addition, today two great factors have joined the celebration of capital: the first is that the mass of exploitations without relief is enormous. The second is that the processes of integration of farms with the meat industry have reached a point of no return — “the field” and “the industry” are now almost synonymous. A sea full of sharks. But, if that were not enough, the pressure on aquifers and international volatility are turning the agricultural world into a difficult place for small farms. Only large corporations have the lungs to dive into such tough markets. Is this bad news? If we look at the Spanish movements from a more international perspective, I’m afraid so. The Californian case is a warning for sailors: large funds are buying properties solely and exclusively for your water rights. And so, as seen in the last droughtit’s a huge problem. A problem that adds to environmental conflictsto rent captureto agricultural changesto the industrial dismantling of emptied Spain. A strange future. As I said before, Spain is the great agricultural power of the continent. In fact, little by little, it has become one of the great world powers in the marketing of agricultural products. But it will not be easy to stay there, the financial funds They are the best example and the problem is that everything seems to indicate that, along the way, the Spain we know will not be recognized by “not even the mother who gave birth to it.” Image | Annie Spratt | Markus Winkler In Xataka | The great paradox of Spanish olive oil: although it grows 15% a year, more than 500 olive oil mills will close in the next decade

How to use Ruta-E, the government app to find cheap gas stations and charging points in your city or your route

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We are going to tell you how to use Route-Ethe new application of the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, creators of My Citizen Folder among many other apps. It is an application that seeks to help you find the cheapest gas stations and electric charging points. It is a simple but versatile application. You can choose between gasoline or electric chargers, and then you have the options of exploring on the map or trace a route and see all the gas stations or charging points along with the price of fuel, so you know which one allows you to save a little money on your trips. Look at the price of gasoline with Ruta-E The first thing you have to do is download the Ruta-E application, available on Google Play for Android and in the App Store of iPhones. Once inside you will have a map, and at the top right you will have a filter in which you can choose fuel type for which you want to find a gas station or charging station. When you choose the type of fuel, you will see information about all the pumps in your city. But you can navigate the map to explore the entire country in case you want to look at those of some place you are going to visit. In the gasoline pump preview you will see the price of the fuel you have chosen. The app also has an option to trace the route of a trip what you want to do, with origin and destination point. When you do, you will see all the gas stations you have along the route along with the prices of the type of fuel you have chosen, and also the charging points. When you press at a gas stationyou will be able to see their hours and prices, and thus compare the cheapest ones or those that are open. And if you click on a charging point you will not see the price, but you will see the types of plugs available. In Xataka Basics | Gasoline price on Google Maps: how to see nearby gas stations and their prices on Android or iOS

that they do not pay tolls. And (almost) all countries don’t care

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The European Union is determined that transport drastically reduces its emissions. In Xataka We have discussed at length the plan to jump to the electric car, with new emissions limits from 2030 that will force the pure gasoline car to be almost testimonial and the intention to ban combustion engines by 2035. And, hand in hand, we also want to drastically reduce emissions from heavy road transport. Here, the electric truck should be key. To promote it, the European Union wants them not to pay tolls. No tolls. It’s what has approved the European Union. Right now, countries that want to apply it can free electric trucks from tolls on their roads. Applying this possibility, which is decided by each Member State, expired on December 31, 2025 but has been extended until December 31, 2030. The European Commission’s proposal arrived in summer and a few days ago, with 458 votes in favor, 182 against and 11 abstentions, the European Parliament confirmed its expansion. Electric trucks will not have to pay tolls on European roads… if a Member State decides so. almost no one. The problem is that almost no one fully applies this rule. Right now, only Germany and Austria offer their roads completely free of charge to purely electric trucks. These vehicles do not have to pay to use their toll roads. In addition to Germany and Austria, 10 countries offer discounts for electric trucks when using their highways. And another 15 countries do not apply any type of discount. Among them, indeed, is Spain, which charges the same for a polluting truck as for a zero-emission truck. The plans. Although the countries that apply these exemptions completely are testimonial and more than half do not apply any type of discount, European enlargement reopens this possibility so that more States join in to favor the arrival of electric trucks on their roads. Europe’s ultimate intention is to drastically reduce its emissions from heavy transport. The objectives vary depending on the size of the vehicle but, for trucks, the intention is to reduce emissions by 45% by 2035 and that in 2040 the presence of combustion engines in the trucks sold will be almost negligible, with a 90% reduction in emissions. The comparison is made with data from 1990. These plans also include passenger transport buses, which will also not have to pay tolls as long as each State allows it. Viable? Given this measure, manufacturer associations such as ACEA have shown their enthusiasm for the decision but… to what extent is it viable to electrify heavy transport? Its impact is important (barely 2% of the vehicles that move but produce more than 25% of road transport emissions) so jumping to electric trucks is a priority for Europe. The problem is that the electric truck continues to require a really expensive purchase although, over time, the savings promises are consistent. According to the consulting firm Commercial Vehicle World, the savings when operating with this type of vehicle is between 10 and 20% compared to a diesel truck. One of the problems, of course, continues to be autonomy. For now, the most ambitious electric trucks They move in runs of between 500 and 600 kilometers but the key is in the recharging times, which with a 150 kW pole can take up to two hours to fill their batteries. Beyond the tolls. In. its objective to promote the jump to the electric truck, the European Union is forcing countries to Fill your roads with charging points. Of these, large charging islands are planned that should serve these enormous vehicles. The intention is to have very powerful plugs but, until now, they have focused on plugs of, at most, 350 kW, which is clearly insufficient. It must be taken into account that BYD has already given approval for the installation in Europe of its 1MW chargerswhich is clearly focused on this type of transportation. But electric trucks are also beginning to gain ground. While in Europe they are negligible, with less than 1% of sales, in China they already exceed 20%. Many of them have gained traction due to the possibility of changing batteries at appropriate stations, which guarantees that, in just a few minutes, the vehicle can continue its journey. Photo | In Xataka | BYD has shown us that charging 400 kilometers in five minutes is very real. And they have managed to change my mind

tired of living in theme parks

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the word “tourismphobia”once seen as media exaggeration, began to describe for some time now a real climate: first were the massive marches and denunciations of unaffordable rents, then the jump to another guy of pressure (water guns, symbolic seals, terrace intervention) and then the extension of the unrest to iconic territories such as the Balearic Islands, where the protests in the middle of the high season sought precisely to hurt tourist visibility to signal that quantitative success had become a “non-living situation.” Latest case in Valencia reveals that the situation is far from over. Valencia as a symptom. At this time the video It has gone viral. The altercation between Dutch tourists on bicycles and young people in the historic center of Valencia (insults crossed, bikes on the ground, “tourists go home” versus “fuck you”) illustrates that the conflict has decreased, if possible, a step: It is no longer just political representation or organized protest, but direct friction in the saturated public space. They remembered in Levante newspaper that the video alone does not explain the background. The neighborhood platform contextualized the incident within an act for the eviction of a social space, denouncing that “real violence” is not the shout but the eviction, the noise, the daily saturation and the conversion of basements into tourist monoculture. The reactions in networks (some demonizing the neighbors as barbarians who tarnish the image of reception, others asking that “if they don’t respect, don’t come”) confirm that the phenomenon has entered a more polarizing phase, where each episode serves to reinforce side narratives. When it stopped being local. The demonstrations that occurred throughout Europe This summer they had a new nuance: they were no longer isolated cities in intermittent outbreaks but a coordinated mass that protests on the same day, against the same externalities and with recognizable symbols in circulation. Suitcases dragged to make noise, cardboard boats as an allegory of cruises or posters in English directed at the royal emissary of unrest made visible that for many, tourism stopped being just money and became a structural conflict over the use of land, air, water, sleep and disposable income. Housing as a trigger. The emotional thread that connects Barcelona, ​​Palma, Lisbon, Genoa, Venice or Marseille is not ideological but material: the hard core is the house price and social displacement linked to the monetization of the square meter in terms of tourism. When an apartment converted into a vacation rental doubles the potential income of renting it to a resident, the incentive structure expel population without individual bad intention. This displacement becomes more hurtful in island contexts or of historic centerwhere the supply cannot grow without damaging heritage or landscape, so the pressure It’s arithmetic: each hosted tourist competes with an expelled resident. that the conflict emerge in summer nor does it seem coincidental: the clash between external leisure and internal life It is maximum when the visitor demands speed, noise, density and carelessness, while the neighbor asks for sleep, shade, peace and access to basic goods. Globalization of fed up. What happened this summer of 2025 (the simultaneous protests in Mediterranean cities) proves that the unrest stopped being isolated to become a pattern of functional region in which the South has been reconfigured as North recreational playground. The demands shared in all the demonstrations reveal a common goal: decrease in tourism, limits on cruises, quotas on flights, moratoriums on tourist apartments, taxation of foreign capital and veto of land uses that externalize costs. If you also want, the political force of the phenomenon lies not so much in its radicality but in that is no longer marginal: social sectors that are not anti-system militants assume that tourism is a monoculture erodes civic resilience basics (residential market, mobility, access to services, quality employment) and that the gross profit of GDP does not compensate for erosion of the living conditions in the neighborhoods where the phenomenon is physically established. No cheap solution. And in all cities the underlying equation is similar: tourism is tax revenue, export income and low-entry employment in a country that has not generated equivalent industrial substitutes, but its territorial concentration produces social losses not internalized. The irony is that limiting it implies cut visible GDPbut not modifying it means gradually destroying the raw material of the habitable city. More simply put, success kills its own foundation. The Mediterranean arc went from competing to attract visitors in the 90s and 2000s to coordinating to contain them because the context of reference changed: when the limiting factor was employment, tourism was a solution, but when the limiting factor was land and housingtourism comes to form part of the problem. Uncertain future. Thus, without intervention, the outcome could be the silent consolidation of two parallel cities coexisting in the same place: one for tourists (abundant, prohibitiveephemeral, instagramer) and another for expelled residents to cheaper and worse served peripheral crowns. That pattern, in fact, already exists (Capo in Palermo converted in gastronomic park for visitors, Ciutat Vella in Valencia commercializedconverted Palma neighborhoods in decoration) and its deepening tends to become irreversible: when a street loses its base trade and their rents influence tourism, and as long as a solution is not found in the neighborhoods that absorb said impact, the videos like the one in Valencia They will not be an anomaly, they will be the symptom. Image | Zoetnet (Flickr) In Xataka | Decades ago, the cities of Europe came together to attract tourists. Today they join forces for the opposite: kick them out In Xataka | Spanish tourism faces the real risk of dying of success. There are already guides that advise against three of its great destinations

vote in the Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025

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Another round of voting begins Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025 with computers, components and accessories. From laptops to convertibles, including desktops (a category that this time includes gaming and conventional towers) and components of all kinds, it’s time to choose your favorites. As always, your votes will decide which products make it to the grand finale. Afterwards, they will be mixed with those of the jury (with a weight of one third) to determine the winners. We will discover these during the November 20 gala,tickets now available! With that clear, here are the candidates. Best desktop computer Note: If you are browsing from a mobile phone and the form does not look good, you can vote from here. best laptop Note: If you are browsing from a mobile phone and the form does not look good, you can vote from here. Best convertible laptop Note: If you are browsing from a mobile phone and the form does not look good, you can vote from here. Best gaming laptop Note: If you are browsing from a mobile phone and the form does not look good, you can vote from here. Best computer component or peripheral Note: If you are browsing from a mobile phone and the form does not look good, you can vote from here. For the voting system we use Google Forms, so in order to send your vote you need to be logged into your Gmail (or Google) account in the browser, whether desktop or mobile, so that each reader can cast their vote. Thank you. NordVPN offers you a fast and stable connection thanks to your more than 6,300 servers in more than 110 countries. Enjoy advanced cybersecurity tools with Threat Protection Pro™, securely access your streaming platforms favorites wherever you are and enjoy the best offers on flights and hotels. Advice offered by the brand How voting works The mechanics of the Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025 are the same as in previous editions. It is divided into three phases: Public vote: Over the next few days we will be publishing articles with our categories and the candidates selected by the Xataka team so that you, our xatakeros, can vote for your favorites. Jury vote: With the finalists that the public has chosen, the Xataka jury and other technology experts will vote for those who are, in their view, the best devices. Choice of winners: The jury’s votes will be combined with those of the public to choose the winners, who will be announced on November 20. The selected candidates are devices that They have gone on sale in 2025 or will do so with a confirmed date before the end of the year. We also include those that were left out last year when they were announced after the Awards. We believe it is the best solution: Unfortunately we cannot celebrate the gala on December 31 and our idea is that the Awards can serve as support in the purchasing decision for this last part of the year. Vote in other categories: These are all the categories of the Xataka NordVPN Awards 2025 in which you can now vote: Thank you very much for participating! Image | Xataka In Xataka | Xataka NordVPN 2025 Awards: reserve November 20 for the great annual technology festival

When is it and what day do we go to winter time?

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Let’s tell you when is the next time change with which we are going to switch to winter time in 2025. Like every year, with the arrival of autumn it is time to change the time again in a large part of Europe. And as always on these dates, we will tell you the exact day on which you have to set the clock forward or back. In this article we are going to tell you the date of the time change and what the change is exactly like. We will also tell you What you need to know about changing the time on your deviceswhich fortunately is little because almost everyone is going to do it alone. When do we go to winter time? The time change with which we are going to switch to winter time in 2025 will be in the early hours of Saturday, October 25 to Sunday, October 26. As always, the change is made on a weekend so that it is as least disruptive as possible to our work day. As happens when we jump to winter time, on Saturday we will have one more hour at night. When it is 3 in the morning we will go again at 2 in peninsular time. Come on, we’ll save an hour, to sleep, to party, or whatever we want. Another consequence of this change is that It will dawn and dusk one hour earlier. This will take us fully into the winter atmosphere, since the afternoons will be darker as dusk falls earlier. Time change and your devices If your device is connected to the Internet, it will only change the timesince it will detect the change automatically and apply it at the operating system level. Come on, you don’t have to do anything on your phone, your car, your tablet or your smart speaker or TV, they will all change the time on their own. However, some unconnected devices may need manual switching of hour. Not all, because many will have the change configured in their operating system, but those with greater simplicity such as ovens, microwaves, air conditioners and others, these will not change the time and you will have to do it. In short, if you are a person who has an alarm clock programmed on your mobile, you will not have to worry about anything. But if you have the typical luminous clock without an internet connection on the nightstand in your room, then don’t forget to change the time when you wake up on Sunday. In Xataka Basics | Hidden Apple Watch gestures: How to choose what it does when you clench your fists or pinch the watch

ChatGPT Atlas is here. It’s the biggest nightmare in the history of Google

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OpenAI has launched Atlas, your first browserand Alphabet has seen $150 billion in market capitalization evaporate in a matter of hours. Shares fell 4.8% shortly after the announcement, recovering slightly to close down 2.4%. The market reaction was no coincidence: Atlas is not (just) Chrome with a chatbot stuck on top, it is a browser designed from scratch around ChatGPT. Why is it important. For two decades, Google has controlled how we access the Internet through a lethal combination: Chrome as a gateway and Google Search as a mandatory destination. Atlas breaks that logic. If your browser has an AI assistant with memory that remembers your preferences, performs complex tasks for you, and directly answers your questions, the traditional search bar no longer makes sense. It is therefore not an incremental improvement, but rather a paradigm shift in the way we navigate. In detail. Atlas eliminates the address bar as the nerve center of the browser and replaces it with ChatGPT. Users can open a side panel in any window to summarize content, compare products, or analyze data without switching tabs. But the star functionality is the “agent mode“, currently reserved for paying subscribers: ChatGPT literally takes control of the mouse and keyboard, surf the web on your behalf, fill out forms, research travel options, add ingredients to the shopping cart. In yesterday’s demo, an OpenAI developer showed how the agent found a recipe and automatically purchased all the ingredients, a process that took several minutes but required no human intervention. “Browser memory” is another key piece. Atlas can remember what you’ve searched for before, what sites you’ve visited, and what projects you have in hand, using that data to suggest actions or automate routines it detects in your behavior. Everything is optional, but the message is clear: OpenAI wants Atlas to know you better than you know yourself. Nothing new with AI. The figures. OpenAI has 800 million weekly active ChatGPT users, double the number in February. Chrome has 3 billion and 71.9% global share. Google controls 90% of the search advertising market. Atlas sounds like a prelude to advertising coming to ChatGPT. Somehow they have to monetize the free users, who not only don’t pay OpenAI, but cost them money. And if OpenAI enters advertising, Google has the most to lose: it could be revenue that stops coming to them. Yes, but. Initial tests of ChatGPT agents have shown slow and imprecise results, where it is very effective to see the browser do tasks for us, but also much slower than if we take care of a few clicks. Plus, the hallucinations are still there. Google has a structural problem– Your business depends on people clicking on ads. If Atlas delivers direct answers without visiting web pages, Google loses. It has integrated Gemini into Chrome and added AI summaries to the results, but the basis of its model remains the same. Internet Explorer seemed invincible in 2007. Within five years, Chrome had surpassed it by offering something substantially better. The 150 billion drop in Alphabet’s capitalization is a sign that investors believe there is a chance that history could repeat itself. In Xataka | Privacy is dying since ChatGPT arrived. Now our obsession is for AI to know us as best as possible Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio

There is literally nowhere to put more soldiers.

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He housing problem It is an endemic disease that reproduces in practically the whole planet. What was more difficult to imagine is how far the tentacles of the crisis. Germany thought several decades ago that wars were a thing of the past. And now you have encountered a problem rearmament announced of his army: literally, he lacks houses to accommodate so many recruits. Rearmament and housing. The German offensive to rebuild a military capacity that it dismantled for decades has come up against an immediate internal cost: there is no space to house the soldiers that Berlin wants to reincorporate. The Heidelberg case is already a symbol. There, a former US base (abandoned after the end of mandatory military service and Washington’s partial withdrawal) was being converted into a new neighborhood. for 10,000 residentsin a country besieged by a structural shortage of housing. The Government’s idea of reactivate that same base shows the shift in priorities from civil urbanism to defense, pushed by two simultaneous actors: an openly Russia revisionist in the East and an American ally politically volatile. Strain. It we have counted before. The rearmament, furthermore, it is not doctrine on paper: Germany wants add 80,000 soldiers In five years, he considers reintroducing some conscription form and has decided to freeze the civilian conversion of bases, reexamine barracks under state control and reactivate military soil wherever it is useful, even at the cost of tension with local governments and voters. A reduced army. For years, Germany delegated its security to NATO and practiced “checkbook diplomacy”. Namely: commerce, rules and checkbook, but without hard muscle. Bloomberg recalled that the abandonment of recruiting in 2011 left behind an inventory of surplus facilities: 31 bases were closed and some land was sold to cities with housing shortages. Plus: the partial American withdrawal multiplied those gaps. This territorial liquidity made it possible to alleviate a strangled real estate market in medium-sized cities. like Heidelbergsandwiched between hills and with limited supply. The war in Ukraine has reversed the equation: Berlin assumes that the external umbrella is no longer enough and that military shortages It is structuralnot circumstantial. The arithmetic of space. Furthermore, and as analysts point outthe collision is physical and political: each re-militarized base is one less neighborhood in a country with skyrocketing rents and exhausted voters. In fact, researchers warn of an inevitable internal conflict because two legitimate goods (credible defense and affordable housing) compete for a non-expandable resource: land. The Government has already suspended the civil conversion of military properties, accelerated military work (+20% in 2024) and plans 270 new barracks for 40,000 troops from 2027. The modernization of military infrastructure exceeds 67,000 million until the 2040s, and the Bundestag processes a fast-track package with flexibility of procedures and exemptions low threshold of 1 million to gain speed. Negotiation window. Heidelberg still hopes to save its macro-project if the Defense considers the base inadequate for military use or if a kind of hybrid (barracks + neighborhood) is agreed upon that makes it possible to make security and urban fabric compatible. The municipal team admits who miss the economic footprint of US bases, but emphasize that civilian urbanization alleviates the housing bottleneck. There is no doubt, the current clash distills the German transition from the era of peaceful dividends towards a defense economy that requires redo what was dismantled: money, people, land and social consensus to rebuild against the clock. Fracture of the social contract. If you want, the impasse The current situation also reveals a temporal crack: Germany urbanized and planned as if geopolitics had been abolished after 1991 (end of the USSR and end of the Cold War), reallocating military land to housing under the premise of an environment without major wars in Europe. That assumption (which also ordered budgets, mentalities and territorial planning for three decades) collapsed the February 24, 2022. Today the country operates with institutions, urban planning laws and citizen expectations designed for a post-war era that no longer exists, while it is seen forced to reinsert in a scenario with infrastructure, densities and land uses inherited from prolonged peace. The clash between barracks and floors is not only physical: it is the clash between two historical calendars that coexist in the same territory, that of civil normality and that of abrupt return. of strategic risk. Image | Markus Rauchenberger In Xataka | The US no longer has to worry about Spain or the rearmament bill in Europe. Germany had a plan B In Xataka | The most pacifist city in Germany lived off its legendary train factory. Now they will make it from a gigantic tank factory

The border between Morocco and Algeria was closed in 1994. 30 years later, the fight threatens to claim its most unexpected piece: the date

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A strong, dry, accurate blow is enough. Only one, in the center of the chest. When this happens, the diaphragm contracts violently and the body exhales all the air it has inside: the person is temporarily unable to inhale. That is exactly what happened to the international date market on October 10, 2025: it was left breathless. And the reason was a misunderstanding. That and a very long diplomatic conflict that always ends up affecting Spain. What has happened? October 10. The advice of GIDattes (the Tunisian interprofessional date group) published a statement in which the start of exports was announced of dates. Business as usual, really. But they added a clarification that set off all the alarms: “to all markets except the Moroccan one.” In a matter of hours, everyone interpreted that Tunisia was vetoing the export of these fruits to the west. October 13 and 14. Given the widespread noise and uncertainty in the sector, the GIDattes He clarified that there was no type of exclusion. Simply put, as it is the main export market, These required a special calendar that would be approved on October 20. October 19, 20 and 21. But it was too late, the Moroccan employers’ associations and producer groups had smelled blood. For the first time in years, there was a 20% chance (19.7% in 2024) of the dates consumed by the country would disappear from the equation: the profits for local producers would be enormous. October 21. After the meeting on the 20th, the Tunisian press reported that there would indeed be exports to Morocco at the end of October: “like every year“. What does Algeria have to do with all this? Moroccan farmers have gone directly to where it hurts most: they have accused Tunisian dates of be Algerian. It is, moreover, a classic accusation of the Moroccan countryside. Something that no one can completely rule out (due to the traditional traceability deficits of the Maghreb), but that no one really takes seriously. Although it is not going through its best moment, Tunisia is a giant in the world of dates. He doesn’t need Algeria at all. But Algeria is a sensitive issue in the western end of North Africa. A little context. The historical enmity between Morocco and Algeria can be traced back to the very independence of these territories: border disputes ended up leading to the War of the Sands of 1963 and, above all, in the Algerian support for the Polisario Front in Western Sahara. In 94, an attack in Marrakech (in which two Spaniards died) caused a diplomatic conflict that closed the enormous land border between both countries. They have not been reopened and, in fact, in 2021, diplomatic and commercial relations they are broken. Suffice it to say that, if the accusations of the Moroccan producers are confirmed, the Tunisian date would disappear from the markets of the Alawite state. Why is all this so important? This has had an impact on the international date market because, although Tunisia is in the doldrums (and Saudi Arabia has overtaken it in recent years) it is still the second country in date exports. A decision such as that of vetoing the largest importer of dates in the world, Morocco, would have caused a violent restructuring of commercial networks around the globe. To all this we must add a key fact: the third country in date exports, Israel. Today (with or without a peace agreement) no one knows exactly what will happen to the tens of thousands of tons that the Hebrew country puts on the market each year. And that, logically, generates even more uncertainty. The important thing is in the details. In dates, for example. In recent days Steve Witkof and Jared Kushner (Trump’s special envoys) revealed that they were working to reach an agreement between Morocco and Algeria that would solve the Sahara issue. It is quite possible: the US president’s obsession with ‘ending all the world’s wars’ may have put a conflict like this in the spotlight. One, furthermore, that involves a traditional ally of Washington. However, dates show us that everything is more complicated than it seems. Is the delicate balance of the Mediterranean about to be blown up? We will see it in the coming months. Image | In Xataka | Morocco holds a new record: being the African country with the highest growth of millionaires in the last decade

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