decided

has decided to ban its next-generation humanoid robots

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The US knows what it feels like when China controls a critical resource and decides to use it as leverage at the negotiating table. It has happened with rare earths and other strategic minerals, and he does not want it to be repeated either with robotics or with power electronics that sustains your data centers of artificial intelligence (AI). This is the scenario in which the Government led by Donald Trump has decided to act before this dependency becomes a vulnerability. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) yesterday announced new restrictions that prohibit the import of new-generation Chinese humanoid robots and quadruped robots, as well as connected power inverters. The latter are the equipment that links renewable energy sources and batteries with the electrical grid and data centers. This measure only affects new and not yet authorized models, but the FCC reserves the power to revoke authorizations that have already been granted. The underlying fear is not only economic. The US Administration wants to avoid a cyberespionage campaign linked to the Chinese Government similar to the operation Volt Typhoon 2023, after several agencies have concluded that connected robotics and inverters represent vulnerabilities capable of exposing critical infrastructure to espionage or a blackout. Manufacturers, however, will be able to request conditional approval through an FCC process overseen by the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, in a scheme modeled on that which already exists for drones. The US fears the mass adoption of Chinese robots John Moolenaar, a Republican congressman who chairs the House Select Committee on China, has celebrated this decision: “Protect our country and strengthen our nation’s robotics industry.” China is by far the world’s largest manufacturer of power inverters, with Sungrow Power Supply and Huawei leading the way (the latter already strongly sanctioned by the US), and has been gaining share in the Western market with a very aggressive strategy of lowering prices. Some analysts foresee mass adoption of humanoid robots equipped with AI-based “brains” On the other hand, some analysts foresee a mass adoption of humanoid robots equipped with AI-based “brains”, while the accelerated construction of data centers in the US will depend on a reliable supply of inverters. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent I had already warned separately that Chinese AI companies could face US sanctions for intellectual property theft. After yesterday’s measures, the FCC is expected to exempt numerous non-Chinese suppliers from these restrictions, as it already did with the recent bans on drones and routers foreigners. The logic is always the same: close the door to Beijing without also closing it to its own industrial allies. We will see what impact these measures have on the trade conflict between the US and China. Image | UBTech Robotics More information | Nikkei Asia In Xataka | US robot manufacturers have asked their government for help. If they don’t get it, China will win this race

Eight years ago Morocco embraced Central European Time. Now you’ve decided it’s time to change.

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September 20, 2026 will be an important day in Morocco. Or rather, an important early morning. With the last blows of summer, the Maghreb country wants to apply a major change in an aspect that affects its close ties. 37 million inhabitantsbeyond your age, gender, profession or wealth: the schedule. The nation will abandon the GMT+1 to return to GMT. It may seem like a minor issue, but it has been starring for years an intense debate. In practice it also means move away (at the time level) of Europe. What has happened? That Morocco has decided that next September will mean more than just the end of summer. It will also mean goodbye to GMT+1the time that is one hour ahead of the Greenwich meridian, the same one used by peninsular Spain during winter time. The executive headed by Aziz Achanuch has decided that at the end of summer it will return to GMT. The change will be made at 02.00 on Sunday the 20th of September. What hours do you have now? At the end of the 1960s Morocco established the legal time GMT, but in the last decade it progressively adopted the use of GTM+1. That change occurred an acceleration in 2018, when it was decided to establish it definitively, eliminating the return to the GMT. At that time, Moroccans stopped having to manipulate the hands of their clocks depending on the season they were in. There was only an exception: Ramadan. During those weeks (the dates depend on the lunar calendar) the population switched to GMT time to make life more bearable in a period marked by fasting and prayer. As explains Juan Carlos Sanz in The Countrythis year the hands were moved back one hour between February 15 and March 22, which in practice advanced he iftarthe food that breaks the daily fast, and prolong the rest. العودة إلى الساعة القانونية (توقيت غرينيتش) ابتداء من متم الصيف الحالي (السيد أخنوش) pic.twitter.com/TF14b57sTE — Agence MAP (@MAP_Information) June 25, 2026 And why do they go to GMT? In words of the Government, to meet “citizens’ expectations” and “solve the problems associated with the early schedule.” The return to GMt+1 after Ramadan is supported by several government decrees, but that does not mean that it convinces Moroccans. The reason: the mismatches between the official schedule, the bands in which there is daylight and the biorhythms of the population. For example, it is said that the GMT zone prevents it from being nighttime when children go to school in winter. Is it that important? Yes. In April Watchtower public a chronicle in which he talked about how a collection of signatures against the GMT+1 had achieved the support of 300,000 people, a considerable number in a country of 37 million of people. The same medium cited a survey, carried out in 2025, in which the majority desire to establish the GMT is expressed with percentages. According to the survey, 43% of Moroccans are against GMT+1, which only convinces 28%. 40% also affirm that it is negative for their daily life. Why did they adopt it then? Because GMT+1 also has its advantages, although they may not be as noticeable in the daily routine of Moroccans. His defenders they talk of energy efficiency and competitiveness and recall a 2019 study that estimated a saving of 37.6 GWh in electricity during the winter, which resulted in fewer CO2 emissions and fuel costs. Are there more reasons? Yes. Another key reason is that the GMT improves Morocco’s synchronization with its major European economic allies, France and Spain. That Rabat joining GMT+1 meant that for a good part of the year, from october to marchthe Moroccan capital shares the same time as Madrid, Paris and Berlin. The rest of the year the difference was only one hour, like Lisbon or London. The change will mean moving Morocco away from that harmony, leaving an hour of lag in winter and two during summer. Images | Raúl Mermans García (Unsplash) and Mari Helin (Unsplash) In Xataka | For decades we changed the time to spend less. Today we know that it was not of much use

The PSP is more than 20 years old and has no reason to move ‘Counter-Strike’. A developer has decided to try

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Those afternoons began with a simple gesture: turn on the computer and open ‘Counter Strike‘. Sometimes it happened at home and other times in an Internet cafe, still decisive in places where domestic connection was just beginning to spread. Then came the servers, network games and scenarios like de_dust2repeated until each hallway was familiar. For those of us who lived through that stage, “playing a Counter” did not just describe a video game, but a specific way to pass the time. In 2005, the PSP was beginning to make a place for itself among players when ‘Counter-Strike’ had been on the PC for years and its version 1.6 had already become a reference. Sony’s laptop belonged to that same technological culture, but never received an official delivery of the Valve title. They shared a time, an audience and many hours of playing, although their paths did not cross. More than two decades later, a developer has decided to bring them closer through a project that does not go unnoticed. The way chosen to bring Counter-Strike closer to the PSP is called OpenStrikea project that looks familiar on screen, although under that appearance something completely different works. We are not looking at Valve’s commercial game running on the laptop or a direct port of its engine, but rather a new implementation that recovers maps, rounds, shooting and combats against bots. Each user must provide the maps and textures from their own copy, while the movement, rules and rendering depend on a base created expressly for the project. Behind that base is Yifeng Wang, known as doodlewind on GitHub, a developer linked to open software, interfaces and web technologies. Its objective was to test PocketJS and Pocket3D and demonstrate that that architecture could go beyond interfaces to support a 3D game in real time. As he explained when presenting OpenStrike, he chose the PSP because its hardware does not allow it to disguise an inefficient architecture with more memory or power. If that worked there, the demonstration would be much more convincing. The first obstacle was elementary: the PSP cannot directly run a program created for the PC. Your processor uses a MIPS architecturedifferent from the one for which ‘Counter-Strike’ was compiled, and they also change the system, the libraries and the way of communicating with the graphics hardware. Copy the executable to a memory card would be like providing written instructions for another machine. You had to recompile and adapt the original code, emulate its environment or, as Wang did, build a new implementation that spoke the console language from the beginning. Once the barrier of architecture was overcome, an even tighter fight remained: making everything fit and respond in time. The PSP-1000 had 32 MB of memory, of which the programs could use 24 MB, and its processor reached 333 MHz. Everything necessary for the game to work had to coexist within that margin. Maintaining 60 images per second meant doing all that work in about 16.7 milliseconds per frame, with no room for unnecessary calculations. The solution was to prevent the PSP from calculating during the game everything that could be prepared in advance. OpenStrike incorporates the map lighting into the geometry itself, adapts the resources to the console format and takes advantage of the pre-calculated visibility information of the BSP maps to limit rendering to potentially visible areas. According to Wang’s measurements on a physical PSP, the test run on dust2 remains at 60 FPS, also during combat. It is still, however, a proof of concept without multiplayer, purchase phase or all the systems of the original game. As shown in the demo published by the projectthe crossover between ‘Counter-Strike’ and the PSP no longer belongs solely to the realm of the imaginable. OpenStrike is still far from reproducing the full game, but it delivers on the essential promise: recovering a recognizable part of that experience. That is the true scope of Wang’s work. Not to demonstrate that the laptop hid an unknown power, but rather that its limits could still become the starting point for building something new. Images | Yifeng Wang In Xataka | Microsoft wants to preserve Xbox games and has chosen an unexpected path: officially emulate them on Windows

An AI model did not have access to the internet. So he thought it was better to have it and decided to hack something along the way

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Last week, OpenAI I was evaluating the offensive capabilities of two of its most advanced models. On the one hand, GPT-5.6 Sol, publicly available. On the other, a second model not yet presented and which in fact is described as superior to the first. It was about measuring their capabilities in the field of cybersecurity, and although the testing environment was theoretically airtight and isolated, both models managed to connect to the internet and hack a very popular AI models and testing platform, Hugging Face. what has happened. Both models were being evaluated using ExploitGyma cybersecurity benchmark developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley. The goal is to try to find real vulnerabilities in real software. Instead of searching for them on their own, the models detected that the (unspecified) packet logging cache proxy, the only component with limited external access, had a flaw that they could exploit. A study by the AI ​​Security Institute reveals the advances of the latest OpenAI and Anthropic models in cybersecurity. Hello, internet connection. The models did not have internet access, but they exploited that vulnerability to achieve it. Once this was done, they assumed that Hugging Face, the reference platform for models and data sets (datasets) of AI, probably had data on ExploitGym that would allow them to overcome the requested challenge. Hack Hugging Face. So they searched, found and exploited several attack vectors at once, including both stolen credentials and zero-day vulnerabilities. With all this, they managed to access Hugging Face’s production database (that is, the one used publicly on their website), and from there they achieved the solutions to the benchmark. GLM-5.2 to the rescue. The OpenAI security team detected anomalous activity, but Hugging Face I had already detected it a few days ago without knowing what was happening. The curious thing is that to respond to that attack they first tried to use proprietary US AI models to contain them. Those models were blocked by automatic security filters, and Hugging Face turned to the GLM-5.2, the surprising open model from Z.ai that was launched a few weeks ago. The chat with all the details. Adrien Carreira, Infrastructure Manager at Hugging Face, I summed it up in X: “We fight with open models, in the open. AI security will not be solved by a single company acting in secret. Open source puts these tools in the hands of all defenders.” This expert also shared the conversations that they maintained with the AI ​​model to address the problem. Brute force works again. At OpenAI indicated that this was an unprecedented (involuntary) milestone, although some cybersecurity experts reduced the relevance of what happened. “This is not an AI problem. It is negligence on a forty-year-old standard,” explained David Ottenheimer. However, as with Mythos, what this event demonstrates is that AI can apply brute force and analyze possible vulnerabilities (and combine them) in a way that human researchers could not due to lack of time. A fundamental problem. OpenAI acknowledges that the deployment filters that would have blocked the model’s behavior were intentionally disabled because the assessment was intended to measure vulnerabilities. Dierdre Mulligan, professor at Berkeley, indicated that “it seems to me that OpenAI did not properly create the sandbox for the testing environment.” It was not clear to her that passing a test would outweigh the potential damage that an AI model could cause if it “escaped” and gained access to the internet. The end matters, not the means. The models did not have the objective of hacking Hugging Face: that was only a means to achieve their ultimate goal, which was to beat the ExploitGym benchmark. Everything they did along the way—finding the vulnerability that gave them access to the internet, hacking Hugging Face’s database—was simply part of their plan to pass the proposed test. What have each other learned?. Following the incident, OpenAI indicated that they are implementing stricter controls in the configuration of their infrastructure, in addition to collaborating with the developers of the affected component and with Hugging Face to improve their defenses. They have also promised improve “alignment” of their models and the monitoring tasks during this type of tests. In Xataka | Daniel Púa, head of security at Magnific: “Video calls are going to arrive with a video of a family member and things are going to get complicated”

A professor from Malaga decided to rewrite ‘Don Quixote’ in Gothic calligraphy. Now he says it’s worth a million euros

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Manuel Marín Navarro, artistic drawing teacher from Vélez-Málaga, had an idea. “A madness”, rather, as he himself says: rewriting the entire great work of Miguel de Cervantes using Gothic calligraphy. By hand, dedicating between 7 and 8 hours a day. It’s been six years, seven months and 26 days and he still hasn’t completed the 344,000 words that make up the, why not say it, best book in the history of universal literature. Anyone would say of ‘The Quixote’ rots sanity. Wait, I emphasize it well, then Jesús G. Maestro gets angry: ‘The ingenious gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha’. Miguel de Cervantes gave birth to a textually transmitted virus and, four centuries later, the pathogen is still free. Rewriting the 2.1 million characters in a Gothic font, letter by letter, ink on paper, is his great dream, the legacy of a life. A retiree doing lettering with the pulse of a teenager on TikTok? The difference here lies in the commitment. His company borders on the wild: the final book is on its way to weighing 20 kilos and, if it goes on sale, the author values ​​this monstrosity at one million euros. Shooting low. That million euros is a calculation that obeys pure labor arithmetic. Marín Navarro added hours, days and years, after such a monastic confinement in front of the folio, he estimates a salary equivalent to that of a medieval copyist in the current market. Not in vain has he drawn two million one hundred thousand characters with a pen. Pens that he has made himself. It has filled one thousand three hundred and five giant-sized (A3) pages. His cellulose monster is called ‘El Quixote Axárquico’, an orthographic nod to the princes edition of 1605. A geographical tribute to his native Andalusian region. The best book, the neatest edition. “I play music from the 17th century, I get into the character, I read the chapter first, I get the idea and then I start writing. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.” The devotion of this professor and writer for the work of Cervantes is indisputable. Of his personal library, which houses more than 4,000 volumes, three hundred of them are different editions of the hidalgo from La Mancha. At home he keeps eccentric jewelry and pays fortunes at closed auctions. Its most expensive copy cost 6,000 euros. It treasures absurd physical oddities, like a miniature tome printed on a single sheet. That is, the reader needs a powerful magnifying glass in front of that tiny paper. But his recent Gothic manuscript breaks any balance. The dimensions of the work require a brutal binding, so the professor is looking for a brave craftsman. It will take the entire skin of a cow to cover the caps. From prison to museum. And anyone who knows the biography of the writer from Alcalá de Henares well will know that he set foot on the cobbled streets of Vélez-Málaga. The roots go back a long way: he walked there in the hot summer of 1594, acting as a tax collector for King Philip II. He collected money and wheat for the coffers of an insolvent and corrupt empire. And the crown excommunicated the novelist twice for his zeal. What’s more, Cervantes collected debts from the all-powerful Church and it is said that the priests kicked him out of the atriums. A Sevillian bank went bankrupt with the royal collections deposited and that is how Cervantes ended up in a damp and gloomy cell in Seville. And there the figure of the crazy gentleman was born, influenced by Italian literature. Andalusian tradition venerates this prison origin of the work. And of course, Marín Navarro has decided to return the geographical favor to his land, giving his manuscript to the city Museum. The old San Juan de Dios Hospital will host this literary mammoth as long as no one sells the original volume to private funds, nor prints cheap copies for clueless tourists. He reserves a personal and final facsimile: the mother manuscript will sleep under institutional lock forever. Why gothic letters and not Comic Sans. It’s not because Marín Navarro is reviewing HIM or the work of Bauhaus and The Cure. On the contrary, the man from Malaga listens to lute and harpsichord madrigals locked in his study, assimilating tragedy and comedy in silence, using the best black Chinese ink, writing slowly. It takes a whole day to fill out a single page—the first page took a full week of trial and error. To avoid frustration with marks, ten handmade pens were made from reed and metal and it was imposed not to use modern white correctors, scraping the paper with a sharp blade if a mistake was made. As for the use of Textura font, which imposes straight lines and sharp angles, it is simple: history. Johannes Gutenberg applied it in his first printed Bible and German monks perfected it in monasteries. It is not the natural calligraphy of the Spanish Golden Age but it is the one associated with arcane knowledge. The Gothic line provides a brutal dramatic weight and requires much greater physical rigor in the wrist. Navarro does not give up: infected with COVID-19, during confinement the fever kept him in bed. Giving classes with a webcam, he pondered whether to give up or what, but in the end he pulled through and returned to writing the hard way. Between dirty cottons and blows, he already accumulates typos for the interior endpapers of the book. Illustrated by the best. Pictorial art always attacked the Cervantes novel with obsession. It was Gustave Doré who established the visual image in the 19th century—he traveled through Spain in 1861 and drew 370 detailed engravings. Many others wanted to repeat the play. Pablo Picasso sketched the starving silhouette in 1955, using the same black India ink. Salvador Dalí did the same with an American edition in 1946. And ignoring the works of Salvador Tusell, even the comedian Antonio Mingote contributed his … Read more

Airbus leaves its aircraft engines in the hands of others. With hydrogen he has decided to enter that business

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Airbus has built some of the world’s most important commercial aircraft for decades, but its engines have always come from outside. Rolls-Royce, GE Aerospace, Pratt & Whitney and CFM International have occupied that specialized space, while the European manufacturer concentrated on design, integrate and assemble the aircraft. That separation has been one of the unwritten rules of the industry. Now, the search for a hydrogen-powered plane has led the group to cross a border that until today it had preferred to keep intact. The movement will take shape, if it overcomes the pending steps, in a joint venture between Airbus and MTU Aero Engines. Its objective will be to bring together in a single organization the development, testing, certification and commercialization of a fully electric propulsion system powered by hydrogen fuel cells. For now, both companies have signed a non-binding agreement and the operation remains subject to regulatory authorizations and the corresponding labor consultation processes. The forecast is that the new company will begin operating in 2027. Airbus wants to manufacture the heart of its future hydrogen plane The operation represents Airbus’s first foray into the manufacture of complete aeronautical engines. The step breaks with a model in which manufacturers define and integrate the aircraft, but leave the propulsion in the hands of specialized companies. The European firm does not intend to compete with them in the conventional engines that its models currently use. Its entry will be limited, at least for now, to a technology still in development that Airbus and MTU want to transform into an industrialized and certifiable system. The two partners come to the project from complementary positions. Airbus brings its knowledge of commercial aviation programs and its experience in fuel cell and liquid hydrogen propulsion; MTU adds capabilities in engine design, integration, validation, certification and maintenance. The final terms of the future partnership are still being negotiated. The Financial Times maintainsbased on two sources close to the talks, that the European manufacturer would have close to 75%, that the valuation could exceed 1.2 billion euros and that both parties are inclined to install it in Germany. Recreation of the ZEROe turboprop concept presented by Airbus in 2020 The initiative also reflects how ZEROe has changed since its launch in 2020. Airbus initially aspired to introduce a hydrogen aircraft around 2035, but ended up recognizing that the technology and the necessary ecosystem would not advance in time to meet that horizon. The British newspaper now places the launch in the 2040s and claims that the readjustment included a budget reduction and the reassignment of staff. After reviewing the program, the group decided to prioritize an all-electric architecture based on fuel cells. The prioritized architecture would not burn hydrogen inside a turbine. The fuel, stored in a liquid state, would power fuel cell systems that would electrochemically combine it with oxygen to produce electricity; That energy would later reach the electric motors responsible for moving the propellers. It should not be confused with the direct combustion demonstrator that Airbus and CFM International had planned to test on an A380. That was a different technological path. The system would not produce direct CO₂ emissions during the flight and would have water as a byproduct of the reaction. The announcement does not immediately bring a hydrogen plane closer to airports. As we say, the future society must still be established, convert the research and results of the demonstrators into an industrialized and certifiable system, and face obstacles ranging from weight and cooling to fuel supply. There is also no assigned model nor a confirmed commercial calendar. Images | Airbus In Xataka | Spain promised them very happy with the European hunting megaproject. Until a rival appeared out of nowhere: Italy

Every time a rocket ship fails, an industry grows. And China has just decided that it wants to be the owner and mistress

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In 2016, a SpaceX’s Falcon 9 exploded at Cape Canaveral destroying Israel’s Amos-6 communications satellite. Luckily, like when you get hit by a car while parking, there was insurance behind it that paid for the mess because the incident cost almost 300 million dollars. Because imagine that your latest and most ambitious project explodes and that as a consequence you end up bankrupt. Insurance is that industry that when everything goes well seems like a superfluous expense and that saves you when there is an accident. Applied to space, they move more than 4 billion dollars a year. Well, space insurance is undergoing a historic transformation: China has decided who no longer wants to be a mere customer, she wants to be the owner of the business. China goes from client to insurer. China had been insuring its satellites for years through the state insurer PICC, but part of the real risk was absorbed by the international market via reinsurance. So when ChinaSat-18 failed in 2019, it was foreign insurers that absorbed part of the hit, according to SpaceNews. China paid the premiums and London and Paris, where space reinsurance business is concentratedthey stayed with the business. Everything changed in March 2025: a consortium from Beijing covered 25 private launches for $1.47 billion in its first year, bringing together domestic insurers so that everything, money and control, stays at home, according to Caixin Global. It is the first consortium dedicated exclusively to the Chinese commercial aerospace sector. Why is it important. Because if there is no insurance, there is no investment and without that financing there are no rockets either. A fact: a geostationary satellite costs between 150 and 400 million dollars to manufacture and launch, according to the Satellite Industry Association. If there is a failure, the economic impact is tremendous and could lead to the bankruptcy of the operator, so having an insurance policy is a condition for any investor to dare to put money into a space project. Controlling space insurance is controlling who can take certain risks and how. The Chinese government is clear: according to the IISSShanghai allocated 300 million yuan in subsidies to the commercial aerospace sector in April 2025, and Beijing has announced targeted insurance premium subsidies for space companies. China replicates the move it has already used in semiconductors or batteries: state push to achieve strategic independence. Context. The space insurance market is growing simply because the commercial space sector is also growing, and because insurance is an essential condition for operating in it: Space Liability Convention of 1972 establishes that states are responsible for damages caused by their space objects. Lloyd’s of London has been insuring satellites since 1965 and for decades, this was a closed market dominated in Europe by companies such as Munich Re, Swiss Re or AXA XL. According to Orbital Radarthis market generates between 500 and 600 million in annual premiums and remains concentrated in London, Paris and Bermuda. SpaceX changed everything: more launches, lower unit cost, new risk profiles… and now new Chinese private launchers such as LandSpace, CAS Space, Space Pioneer bring a new transformation: everything stays at home, China cooks it and China eats it. In detail. As with cars, insurance premiums depend on the history of the rocket and here China has a potential gap to slip through: for new rockets with no history, the premiums are very high. Orbital Radar Explained that launch premiums range between 5% and 15% of the insured value depending on the vehicle and orbit. Therein lies the great advantage of the Chinese consortium: it can take risks where other insurers put their “buts.” A revealing fact: of 10,000 active satellites in orbit, only 300 have insurance, according to Space Insider. In fact, SpaceX does not even externally secure its own Starlink. Yes, but. The market that China wants to enter with everything is in trouble: in 2024 it paid more in claims than it earned in premiums, according to Insurance Business Magazineamong other things due to the loss of Intelsat 33e. And it’s going to get worse: space debris is growing faster than the ability to calculate it and here China is largely to blame. Furthermore, in accordance with the regulations OFAC of the US Department of the Treasury.when a Chinese rocket fails, American and European insurers can’t always pay: Western sanctions legally prohibit them from dealing with certain Chinese assets, so the market is fragmented. In Xataka | SpaceX has always been 10 years ahead of the competition. The problem is that in China that law no longer applies. In Xataka | The race to become “China’s SpaceX”: who’s who in its private space launch sector Cover | Ivan Diaz and zhang kaiyv

After Germany did not rate Uwe Boll’s new film by age, Elon Musk decided to premiere it himself on X

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The German FSK, the German age ratings body (private, self-regulated by the film industry, not related to the government) has been denying age ratings to films of extreme violence for decades. This time a controversial decision with the latest film by one of the most disastrous directors of all time has ended up resulting in the richest man in the world publishing it on his social network as an act of resistance against state censorship. Let’s see who is right in all this hubbub. But who…? Uwe Boll is a German director and producer known primarily for his film adaptations of video games. Terrible adaptations: ‘BloodRayne’, ‘Alone in the Dark’, ‘In the name of the king’ (based on ‘Dungeon Siege’) or ‘Postal’ are some of them. Despite some occasional successes (‘House of the Dead’ has a very nice trotting edge), Boll has deservedly earned the fame of being one of the worst directors in history, a fame only surpassed by his ingenuity when it comes to organizing publicity stunts, such as sketching evenings against his critics. What is it about? A former American military man based in Europe inherits his father’s real estate business. After witnessing the murder of a mother at the hands of migrant criminals, he decides to take justice into his own hands and begins a violent campaign against criminals and corrupt judges that turns him into a viral phenomenon: celebrated by many, and also persecuted by law enforcement and powerful enemies. Citizen Vigilante. His new film, written, produced and directed by Boll himself, was released on June 19 in a few theaters in the United States and on digital through Quiver Distribution. The protagonist is Armie Hammer, a detail of the casting that adds murky layers to the film: it is Hammer’s most relevant role since his career sank following allegations of sexual assault and emotional abuse in 2021 (with unspeakable overtones of cannibalism), although the investigation concluded without charges. Hammer recognized that ‘Citizen Vigilante’ was his first job offer in five years, and that when Boll called him, he burst into tears. Boll, very cunning, chose Hammer deliberately. As explained“I hired him because he is a great actor and also because he had been canceled and wanted to work. They didn’t accuse him of anything, there was no lawsuit. He was just a famous guy who had behaved badly.” It is an important detail: the casting is already a political statement, as it could not be otherwise, anti-woke. The role of the FSK. The FSK denied the film an age rating in two successive rounds. And although Boll calls it state censorship, it is not. The FSK is an entity serving the film industry itself, not a government body. The State only intervenes when a work violates current criminal laws, so Boll could have released his film without going through the FSK. Of course, there are commercial consequences: without the rating, the film cannot be shown in multiplexes or sold on DVD in large stores, and platforms such as Netflix in Germany do not include it in their catalog. But of course: Boll himself welcomes this decision by the FSK: without this extra publicity, ‘Citizen Vigilante’ would have gone unnoticed. The scandal is part of the film’s dissemination campaign. Enter Musk. Since December 2025, X has been in open conflict with the European institutions. That month the European Commission imposed a fine of 140 million dollars to X for failure to comply with the Digital Services Act, the law that forces platforms to combat misinformation and illegal content. In February 2026, X filed an appeal with the General Court of the European Union, alleging serious procedural errors and bias in the investigation. The publication of ‘Citizen Vigilante’ in Musk’s TL It fits perfectly with that narrative: Europe censors, X is a territory of freedom. Of coursethe reactions of those close to Musk (Libs of TikTok, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos) were immediate. But we have already seen the reality of the matter: no one has censored ‘Citizen Vigilante’, which has simply been rejected at a private ratings board. To watch. As is usual in cases of films used as throwing weapons between political factions, opinions are dispersed: audience score of the 93% on Rotten Tomatoesbut only three critic reviews, all negative. Variety He said the film is “so astonishingly bad that it almost seems like Boll is deliberately sabotaging his protagonist, whose return can only be harmed by this project.” But thanks to Musk’s push, he is in the 31st place on IMDB. For now, until tomorrow the film will be able to be seen on X, on Musk’s own account. The movie is possibly horrible. But not everyone can boast of having Elon Musk as an enthusiastic distribution partner. In Xataka | Elon Musk is going to turn 4,000 workers into millionaires and himself into a billionaire thanks to one thing: SpaceX

Centuries ago, the merchants of a town in Segovia decided that no one would understand them. They ended up creating a unique language

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It does not reach 3,700 inhabitants and it is almost an hour from Segovia capital and 90 minutes from the center of Madrid, but Cantalejo (Castilla y León) hides a fascinating treasure, one of those that cannot be valued in euros or any other currency. For centuries this small town in the Duratón region has been the epicenter of a unique dialect: the gallerya jargon once used by threshing floor merchants and which, according to some experts, draws on words taken from other languages, such as Basque, Galician, French or Arabic. Now he keeps a pulse so as not to disappear. What is the gagaría? The “jargon of the Cantalejo thrillers.” Or at least this is how he defines it the ‘Dictionary of Current Spanish’ of the BBVA Foundation. However, to fully understand the history and relevance of the gacería (or briquero) more nuances must be taken into account. Its richness of lexicon means that it is often presented more as a ‘dialect’a ‘linguistic variant’ or even a language. Its use has also transcended artisans and threshing floor merchants to extend to other areas. Nowadays there are websites where is documented the vocabulary and expressions of the slang and even published works in the slang, including a hobby book and a translation from ‘The Little Prince’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, whose briquero title would be ‘The cocky pitoche’. Its footprint also expands beyond the municipal area of ​​Cantalejo, with echoes in other neighboring towns in Castilla y León. More than 300 words. As Professor Sara Engra explains in an article On the subject, the gazería presents some interesting peculiarities. At a linguistic level, in terms of word structures and intonation, it conforms to Spanish norms. Also its syntax. What differentiates it is its lexicon. “It is limited to replacing Spanish words with (mostly) borrowings from other languages,” explains the linguist, who gives as an example ‘The gazebo is garnished by the briqueros of Vilorio Sierte’which would be translated as ‘The gacería is spoken by the inhabitants of Cantalejo’. The structure of the sentence, the use of verbs or plurals is similar to Spanish, the lexicon changes. What makes slang so amazing is your vocabulary and how you have formed it. The web Cantalejo.comwhich is dedicated to collecting words and disseminating the characteristics of speech, assures that the briquero is made up of 353 terms, almost all nouns, although there are also 40 verbs and a handful of adjectives, such as ‘serte’, ‘gazo’, ‘pitoche’ either ‘sievo’which in Spanish mean, ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘little’ and ‘old’. Other sources raise their lexicon to about 500 words. From Basque to Arabic. Beyond its greater or lesser richness of vocabulary, the most striking thing about the gacería is the origin of those more than 300 words that make up its slang. Engra remembers that there are terms from Basque, Galician and Catalan, but also others imported from Arabic or even Galicianisms. The linguist specifies that in some of the words of Cantalejo’s slang another phenomenon can be seen: metathesiswhich basically consists of changing the place of one or more sounds or syllables of a word, as may be the case of ‘miraglo’ instead of miraculo or ‘murciégalo’ for bat. If we review the lexicon of the gacería we can see that there are terms that derive from Spanish through this ‘deformation’. It is not his only strategy for creating words. Another, just as interesting, is to recover rarely used words and use them to indirectly refer to a new reality. Engra cites a specific case: significant (“carrying a sign”) is changed to ‘sinifaro’which means ‘civil guard’. Other peculiarities of speech are its intonation and gestures. The origins. The authors do not always agree on the details of the origin and antiquity of the gacería, although they do tend to agree on several details. The first, which dates back centuries. The second, the key role played by the inhabitants of Cantalejo who traveled through Spain to sell threshes and cattle. Engra, for example, slide which served as a code, a ‘secret’ speech shared by the Cantalejans that allowed them to “encrypt conversations and hide information” when negotiating with merchants from other regions. The gaceria would therefore be like a code created and nurtured by the residents of Cantalejo who traveled around Spain to trade their goods. When they wanted to exchange information with each other, safe from other people’s ears, they resorted to their own jargon that was indecipherable to merchants from other areas. Regarding its origins, it is usually pointed to 13th centuryalthough there are who points rather to the 16th, 18th or 19th century, with its peak well into the 20th century. a living speech. “When our ancestors toured Spain and went through Galicia, the Basque Country, Extremadura… they heard different dialects, words that they did not understand, so they brought many of them with them. In the workshops they were later unified, forming phrases. And thus the gacería was born,” explains to The Newspaper Ana Rosa Zamarro, mayor of Cantalejo and leading voice in the defense of slang. “They used it to warn each other during sales deals.” With the changes in agriculture and the depopulation of rural areas, the gacería has been losing ground, which does not mean that Cantalejo has forced its speech. A jargon for the 21st century. Zamarro assures that continues to be heard on the street and in recent years steps have been taken to guarantee its future, which includes since the publication of hobby books or to the translation of classic works. Even the local public school works to pass it on to the new generations. The objective: that Cantalejo (and the province of Segovia and Castilla y León) does not lose one of its great linguistic treasures. Images | Wikipedia1 and 2 and From Tuma In Xataka | In 1953, North Korea and South Korea spoke the same language. In 2026, they begin to be two different

in Cádiz they have decided that playing soccer on the beach is a prohibited activity

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It doesn’t matter the year, the city, or the beach. Every summer on the sandy beaches of Spain there are a series of images that are religiously repeated: the queues in the beach barsthe crowded parking lotsthe tourists who They approach at dawn to the beachfront to hang his umbrella and reserve the best spaces… and the groups of children playing with balls among bathers who just want to lie in the sun, which sometimes leads to the occasional fight. In Cádiz they have decided that they want to save that last one. What has happened? For a few days now, the beaches of Cádiz have been the protagonist of a curious controversy: Balls yes or balls no? Should ball games be prohibited on sandy beaches? Do a group of children who want to have a party in the sand have the same right to enjoy the coast as a retired couple who just want to sunbathe, or should the latter be prioritized? These are questions that tend to be repeated year after year, but a few days ago Canal Sur recovered them in a report in which he reveals that in Cádiz the Local Police have gotten to work to put an end to the little parties on the beach. @zona.cousins 🚨€750 FINE for playing ball on the beach? 😳🏝️ Is it fair or does it seem exaggerated? #zonacousins #fine #beach #cadiz #news ♬ original sound – Zona Primos Why’s that? By pure regulations. The ordinance of Cádiz is very clear and limits the spaces in which you can (and cannot) play with balls in the city’s sandy areas during the summer. The key is that the City Council has decided to move from theory to action and has mobilized local agents to enforce this rule. In a matter of two days they seized 18 balls. And that is the least of the problems for the ‘hunted’ players red-handed. Those who disturb other bathers by playing with a ball may commit a minor offense, for which they risk fines of up to 750 euros. If they are also repeat offenders and are caught twice, the punishment can increase to 1,500. He reportage of Canal Sur shows another reality, just as important: the norm is far from arousing consensus. Their reporter interviews bathers who call it “atrocious” or “exaggeration” that someone is fined 750 euros just for kicking a ball. Also to others who complain about “lack of control.” “The boy with the ball again, I’m going to have to get up because if he hits me with the ball…” complains one of the women interviewed. “What bothers me is that they get close, hit me with a ball and break my glasses.” What does the ordinance say? The most curious thing, as a local Cádiz police officer reminds Canal Sur, is that the restrictions that affect ball games on the town’s beaches are not new. The ordinance It was published in the Provincial Gazette in August 2023 and in its article 29, dedicated precisely to “games and recreational activities” in the city’s sandy areas, it is very clear about it: “The walk, the stay or the bath in the sea will have preference over any other use on the beaches of Cádiz (…). People who practice sports on beaches will make normal, rational and peaceful use of the beach space, without causing inconvenience or damage to the rest of the users or to the natural attributes of the beaches.“. And in case it is not clear, underline: “During bathing season, and in order to avoid possible inconvenience to other users, the activities and ball sports will take place in the areas marked and enabled for this purpose, included in the Operation Plan. When the sports activities in question may cause inconvenience to other users, the sports areas will be provided with protections and background nets, in order to prevent the projection of balls and balls towards the bathing area, walkways over the sand, shower areas, changing rooms, first aid kits or any other facility. Does it only happen in Cádiz? Not at all. Controversy has arisen in Cádiz due to the Local Police campaign and the removal of 18 balls in just 48 hours, but the Cádiz City Council is not the only one that prioritizes bathers over those who want to play with the ball on the beach. At least during the summer months. The municipal regulations de Vigo also clarifies that games with balls or paddles “both in sand and water” can only be played when “they do not pose a nuisance” to the rest of the users. A similar pattern is found in the ordinances of To Coruña, Alicante either Malagato cite a few examples. More or less clearly, permanently or depending on each context, all the rules agree on the same thing: the games cannot interfere with the rest of the people who enjoy the sand. “It is prohibited in bathing areas and waters and during the bathing season (…) to carry out activities, games or exercises that may disturb others,” he clarifies. the Malaga norm. Does it only affect the beaches? No. A quick Google search comes in to find articles and forums in which the loss of spaces is pointed out in which a few years ago one could play without a problem and now they veto the use of balls. “In this park where generations have grown up playing soccer and with a ball in their hands, they have put up this sign prohibiting it,” commented In February, a Reddit user next to a photo showed a sign banning balls. “I can’t help but wonder: where does the city council want to focus children’s leisure? There are fewer and fewer spaces for free play and more regulations.” What is the priority? “Then we worry that children will spend more time with screens, consoles and mobile phones, ‘like zombies’, but what real alternatives are we leaving them if even the most basic … Read more

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