decided

Two tourists from the US decided to free the lobsters from a bar in Italy. Environmentalists think it was a bad decision.

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In theory it was going to be a nice gesture, a kind of performance improvised idea with which to give an emotional touch to a holiday in the Mediterranean, but it has ended up becoming a blunder. A few days ago, while eating at a restaurant in Campania (Italy), two American tourists decided to rescue the dozen lobsters that were swimming in the local aquarium. They paid for them. They put them in a basin. They got into a taxi. And they traveled to a Tyrrhenian beach, where they released the crustaceans. Everything was fantastic if it weren’t for one small detail: what they did could be an environmental crime. Now they risk paying a considerable fine. The saying goes that hell is paved with good intentions. In the waters of the Tyrrhenian, Italy, good intentions have caused something else: a illegal release of lobsters. The event occurred a few days ago, when two tourists from Texas (mother and daughter) decided to crown their vacation in Naples with something that at first seemed an altruistic gesture: Pay for a dozen crustaceans condemned to die in a kitchen and then release them into the sea. Altruistic gesture or environmental crime? To understand the story you have to travel to the Mercato Pompeiano restaurant, in Campania, where a few days ago two Americans decided to try the local cuisine. So far nothing strange. The surprise came when they asked the waiter to sell them the dozen lobsters that were swimming in the aquarium, the typical display where customers can choose the seafood they want to be cooked for them. Their intention was not to feast on crustaceans, but to put the animals in a basin to release them into the sea. It was the daughter herself who was in charge of ‘fishing’ them out of the pond with a small net. Then, to the astonishment of the restaurant owners, the two tourists got into a taxi and traveled to the nearby beach of Castellammare di Stabia. Once there, the daughter rolled up her sleeves, approached the coastline where the waves were breaking, and went releasing one by one the lobsters that until recently looked at the diners of the Mercato Pompeiano with tongs held with ribbons. You don’t have to imagine it. The scene can be seen because the tourists themselves were in charge of recording everything in a video that has ended up going viral. In it you can see the daughter with the water up to her ankles, releasing the lobsters, while the mother immortalizes the scene with her cell phone. Some Italian media they need who were accompanied by a guide. “We want to take this memory to the United States. It has been beautiful, we are happy,” explains the mother, proud. The couple even sent a message to the restaurant owner. “Even if they only live a few more days, it was worth it. My mother has always wanted to do this when we saw lobsters in restaurants, but until now it has never been possible.” The video of the release soon spread like wildfire on social networks, where it provoked opposing reactions. There are those who applaud the gesture for its altruism. And there are those who consider it a nonsense with serious environmental consequences. @la.repubblica Have bought all the things that were in the restaurant’s aquarium. Salvandololi from the death and from the destiny indicated by the end of the meals in the menu. Due to Texan tourists arriving at Pompei from Texas, they are very happy to join the spiaggia of Castellammare di Stabia and have not been liberated in the sea. Terminata la missione salvezza hanno sent a message in English to the owner of the ristorante: “Grazie per avercelo permesso, se anche vivranno qualche giorno in più ne è valsa la pena. Mia mamma avrebbe semper voluto farlo quando abbiamo viewed le aragoste nei ristoranti, ma non è stato mai possibile.” Il fuoriprogramma nato quasi percaso, quanto le due Americane touriste hanno gli glistici nuotare nell’acquario accanto al tavolo dove era sedute a mangiare. This is the time to turn on one at a time with the light used in the chambers of the premises, fishing from the aquarium with per insertion in safety. Tutto ripreso con il cellulare dalla mamma: “Vogliamo porre a casa negli Usa il ricordo di questo avvenimento. È stato bello, siamo felici. Abbiamo regalato loro una ultima possibilità.” by Mariella Parmendola ♬ original audio – la.repubblica The reason? To the untrained eye, perhaps all lobsters look the same, but that is not the case. In the recording it can be seen that the lobsters that the tourists released into the waters of the Tyrrhenian are of the species Homarus americanus (American or Canadian), native to the northwest Atlantic and characterized by the brown tones of its shell, very different from the bluish color that usually identifies the European lobster. It is no surprise because the American variety is usually the one used by restaurants in the region. That small detail is important because in practice the Homarus americanus is considered an invasive species in the Mediterranean. Not only that. Animal releases, even if only a dozen specimens, as occurred in Castellammare di Stabia, require studies and careful prior planning. First because introducing species can alter the balance of ecosystems. Second, because it is not unusual for loose specimens to carry parasites or diseases that are lethal to the native fauna. As if the above were not enough, there are experts who warn that the lobsters released by the American tourists probably did not live much longer than they would have lasted in the restaurant’s aquarium. The reason? The water in the pond was probably kept at a lower temperature than that found on the beach of Castellammare di Stabia, so it is not unreasonable that they suffered. a lethal thermal shock. The worst of all is not that both tourists have found themselves involved in a bitter … Read more

In 2004 Madrid decided to build its own Guggenheim. Now it has a monster that not even Richard Gere wants as a Buddhist center

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Many cities have pursued the idea that a single building could change everything, attract tourism and redefine their identity almost overnight. The obsession has a very specific origin: the impact it had the Guggenheim Museum in the economy and image of Bilbao, converted into a global case study. In 1997, its inauguration marked a before and after and fueled an urban fever that led to replicate that model in places where the context did not always accompany. A Guggenheim in the suburbs. At the beginning of the 2000s, in the midst of a real estate boom and with the Bilbao effect still resonating, Alcorcón decided to aspire to his own cultural icona complex that was to place the city on the international art map. The idea was ambitious to the point of excess: a macrocenter cwith nine interconnected buildings which included an auditorium, conservatory, conference center and even a permanent circus, all conceived as a kind of Madrid Guggenheim. The problem here was not a lack of imagination, of course, but the scale of a project designed for an economic reality that was about to disappear. A half giant. The works They started in 2007 with budgets that were already high, but soon they began to chain modifications, cost overruns and difficult decisions to justify, such as the demolition of a practically new library or the incorporation of such peculiar facilities as, attention, stables for animals. When the 2008 crisis hit squarely, the project was stopped with around 70% executed and more than 100 million of euros invested, leaving behind a huge structure, partially completed and without a clear function. What should have been a cultural emblem became an empty mass, one too big to abandon completely and too expensive to finish. The hidden cost of an impossible project. Beyond the initial investment, CREAA had profound economic consequences for the municipality. The reason? It had been financed through a public company that ended up accumulating a gigantic debt. The estimates spoke of tens of millions additional costs to complete it and several million annually just to keep it running, which turned it into a structural problem rather than an opportunity. In fact, even its design played against: a complex so integrated that turning on a single zone meant activating practically the entire system, skyrocketing costs and making any reasonable partial use unfeasible. Nobody wants the “Guggenheim” of Alcorcón. Over the years, the building became a kind of failed promise that was passed from hand to hand without finding real lace. Projects of all types and colors were considered, from an NBA campus to a sports university, passing through a large Buddhist center promoted by Richard Gerebut none came to fruition and most of those interested declined the opportunity. Even more recent initiatives, such as the creation of a great audiovisual hubhave ended up running aground when faced with the real costs of adapting facilities designed for a completely different context. The idea that that complex could become an international benchmark has been diluted with each failed attempt. From cultural icon to symbol of excess. Over time, CREAA has gone from being an emblematic project to becoming another example of that appellant excessive planning in Spain, a construction that aspired to change the identity of a city, but ended up conditioning its public narrative. The image of that large iron and concrete structure, partially finished and unused for years, has weighed more than any original intention, fueling the debate about the limits of public spending on large-scale cultural projects. A partial ending to an unfinished story. However, in recent years, some spaces have begun to find usefulnesssuch as the installation of a state victim care center or the partial reopening of certain areas, but the whole is still far from fulfilling the vision with which it was conceived. More than a decade later, the complex begins to reactivate in a fragmented way, adapting to much more pragmatic needs than those from which it was born. The result, as in other phantom “moles” of the Peninsula, is a persistent reminder of a time when it was thought that it was enough to build big to transform a city, without foreseeing that the real challenge would really come later. Image | Juan Lupión, Zarateman In Xataka | The biggest disaster in sports history dates back to the Roman Empire: the tragedy of the Fidenae “VIP boxes” In Xataka | In 1995, South Korea suffered one of the great architectural disasters of the century. The culprit: the air conditioning

Some Swedish scientists decided to drug salmon with cocaine and then release them. It happened just what was expected

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There is more than just fish and algae in the world’s rivers. More or less diluted amounts of chemicalsincluding pesticides, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs. He checked it a few years ago a team from King’s College that, after taking samples in various parts of the county of Suffolk, in England, found cocaine and ketamine residues. Researchers have long known that wildlife is exposed to these compounds, but one question remained: How do drugs affect them in their natural environment? To find out in Sweden have drugged to dozens of salmon. Drugging salmon? That’s how it is. It sounds strange, but it is exactly what a group of scientists from Griffith University, the Zoological Society of London and the Max Planck Institute, among other organizations, have done. They basically took 105 salmon (salmo salar) from a fish farm, they divided them into several groups and added implants that supplied them with drugs. Then they released them. More or less as in the famous case of Cocaine Bearbut in a planned way. How did they do it? 35 of those salmon were implanted with a special device that slowly released coca into their bodies. A similar system was incorporated into others, although modified to provide benzoylecgoninethe main metabolite of cocaine. The third group did not receive any substance to act as a control. Once prepared, the salmon, all young specimens, were released into Lake Vätternsouth of Sweden. For eight weeks the researchers dedicated themselves to finding out how each group behaved. The specimens in the experiment wore a special tracking device, so (with the help of sensors installed around the lake) scientists could follow their trail and calculate how far they swam. And what did they find out? That the drugged salmon behaved very differently from the ‘sober’ ones. Especially those who received benzoylecgonine. After releasing the fish on the southwest bank of the Vättern, the researchers found that the salmon exposed to coca swam on average five more kilometers than the ‘clean’ ones, a considerable difference that falls short, however, when the specimens to which the metabolite was supplied are analyzed. They swam almost 14 km more, which led them to enter the northern area of ​​the lake. “The team found that fish exposed to benzoylecgonine swam up to 1.9 times farther per week than those not exposed and dispersed up to 12.3 km farther,” duck Griffith University. The agency also clarifies that the changes “became more evident” as the days passed, which shows that exposure to coca alters the behavior of fauna. Why is it important? Let the drugged salmon swim more kilometers and cover more space than others without ‘doping’ is more important than it may seem. These behavioral changes influence aspects such as what places the fish occupy, where they feed or the risks they face. More kilometers also translates into greater physical effort, which forces the salmon to look for more sources of nutrition to recover energy. “Where fish go determines what they eat, what eats them, and how populations are structured,” comment Dr. Marcus Michelangeli. “If pollution is driving these patterns, it has the potential to affect ecosystems in ways we are only beginning to understand.” But that was already known, right? Yes. And no. We knew that aquatic fauna is exposed to the drugs that we consume. The 2019 study in Suffolk and others, such as the made in 2016 in Puget (Washington), during which researchers detected traces of Prozac, Lipitor and cocaine in the body of salomes. We also knew that these substances alter the behavior of wildlife. In fact, scientists they already checked how water fleas exposed to coca swim faster or crabs are more reckless. The really interesting thing about the study carried out in Sweden is that it has allowed us to go one step further: to leave the laboratories, which were the isolated space in which these types of experiments had been carried out until now, and carry out research in natural environments and the same conditions that fauna is found. It hasn’t been easy. Although the team guarantees that the entire experiment has been done in safe conditions for the ecosystem and humans. Obtain all necessary permits, they confess researchers, it was “a tedious process.” And what to do now? Dr. Jack Brand, from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, recognize that more studies are needed to fully understand the consequences of pollution in rivers, lakes and seas. It is an important issue, among other reasons because the substance that has most altered salmon is benzoylecgonine, which has a special impact. “It was the metabolite, which we know is found in higher concentrations in nature, that had a much more profound effect on the behavior and movement of the fish,” warns in statements to Guardian. “This suggests that if we perform evaluations without including compounds such as these metabolites and their derivatives, we could be overlooking an important part of the environmental risks to which we expose these animals.” Images | Colin Davis (Unsplash), Katmai National Park and Preserve (Flickr) and Scazon (Flickr) In Xataka | In 2001, a yacht took refuge on a remote island in the Atlantic. Days later its inhabitants breaded fish with coca

The Coca-Cola recipe seemed untouchable. Until Europe first and Mexico later have decided to touch it

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For decades, the Coca-Cola recipe has been treated almost like a state secret, guarded in a vault in Atlanta and protected by an aura of mystery. However, in the real world, governments have discovered that they do not need to infiltrate that vault to alter the world’s most famous drink, but can do so through legislative texts. Modifying, for example, the fiscal or regulatory framework can push any company to change its composition, its prices or its supply. The case of Mexico. Without a doubt, it is one of the most solid in the world to understand how large-scale industrial change can be forced. And it is no wonder, because the driving force behind this change was not a direct order to rewrite the formula, but rather the entry into force of a new tax on sugary drinks. in 2014. Here the effect it had was commented on by different studies which showed that, one year after the tax, purchases of sugary drinks fell by 6%, while purchases of water they rose 4%. He had an answer. The fiscal scenario and the drop in sales logically generated strong pressure for the company to change its ingredients, causing great pressure on the mix of the company’s sweeteners. This opened an intense debate about the use of cane sugar versus high fructose corn syrup, and now the national government has put on the table the possibility of forcing Coca-Cola to stop using imported corn syrup and transition towards national cane sugar by selling it much cheaper. In Europe. While Mexico uses fiscal pressure on consumption, the European Union is the perfect example of structural market regulation. And for those who have traveled to North America, you will have realized that the taste of Coca-Cola is different from what is drunk here in Europe. And a very important bureaucratic tangle is also to blame. The culprit was none other than the strong intervention that the sugar market had in the European Union for 50 years through a complex quota system that came to an end on September 30, 2017. Its consequences. Here European regulations historically limited the production of isoglucose, which is the European equivalent of American corn syrup, through strict quotas. This structural restriction forced its use in the soft drink industry to be much more contained than in the United States. Although the European Commission continued to manage certain quantitative limits in the final phase of this legal regime, the regulation acted as a containment dam. Furthermore, several Member States have implemented their own taxes on soft drinks, separating the strategy of “market regulation” from “public health” policies against sugar consumption. In India. To understand how far the fight between a State and the Atlanta giant can go, you have to travel to India in 1977. Here, unlike Mexico or Europe, the debate was not about cane sugar or sweeteners, but about sovereignty and corporate control due to the ‘fault’ of a currency control law that forced multinationals to dilute and reduce their foreign participation. Here Coca-Cola reacted quickly to prevent any government from controlling its operations and therefore sharing its secret formula, and that is why it decided to leave the country in 1977 before submitting and revealing the secrets it had. Images | Unsplash In Xataka | Researchers have analyzed the impact of sugary drinks on global health. They have put their hands on their heads

In 2013, Amazon created a Kindle so good it has proven to last forever. And now he has decided that it must end

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Amazon has announced that, starting May 20, 2026, Kindle devices released in 2012 will no longer have access to the Kindle Store. You will still be able to access the books downloaded on the devices, taking into account that we should not factory reset the Kindle. If we do, we will not be able to register it in our Amazon account. Goodbye to old Kindles. If you have an early Kindle, starting in May you won’t be able to download books from the official Amazon store or register them as new devices when you restore them. Specifically, these are the affected models. Kindle 1st Gen (2007) Kindle DX and DX Graphite (2009 and 2010) Kindle Keyboard (2010) Kindle 4 (2011) Kindle Touch (2011) Kindle 5 (2012) Kindle Paperwhite 1st Gen (2012) Kindle Fire 1st Gen (2011) Kindle Fire 2nd Gen (2012) Kindle Fire HD 7 (2012) Kindle Fire HD 8.9 (2012) Amazon is sending an email to affected users, offering a 20% discount on new Kindle devices and credit compensation for purchasing new books. Likewise, all the purchases we have made on the old device will be available if we log in to the new one with the same account. It’s not the first time. Amazon has long wanted to have tight control over the installation of books on its Kindles. One of its most recent updates ended with a star function: being able to send books to the device via USB. In the same way, Users were required to keep their Kindle updated to access the store. In practice, this meant limiting features—such as downloading books outside of the Kindle Store—to push users to install those more restrictive versions if they wanted to retain access. Almost a paperweight. A book reader to which we cannot download more books is not very useful. A questionable decision considering that this type of device is born to have a useful life only limited by its hardware – that the screen ends up saying enough, which is difficult with electronic ink or that we are left without a battery replacement. Amazon has decided to end the life cycle of a product that still had a war left to fight. Not because the hardware has stopped working, but because maintaining its compatibility no longer fits with your business model or your current ecosystem. In Xataka | We enter book month with sales on Kindle: you can now buy the eReader for less than 100 euros

Claude Mythos is an AI model so powerful it’s scary. So Anthropic has decided that you won’t be able to use it

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Claude Mythos Preview it’s already here and it’s so good it’s scary. Literally. Anthropic has just introduced it to the public, but it has been done so cautiously that we won’t even be able to test it and it will only be available for certain technology partners. That’s frustrating and disturbing at the same time, but also reasonable. So powerful that it scares. On February 24, 2026, Anthropic engineers were able to test their new artificial intelligence model for the first time, which they called Claude Mythos Preview. As soon as they did they realized one thing: “demonstrated a dramatic leap in its cyber capabilities over previous models, including the ability to autonomously discover and exploit vulnerabilities zero-day in the main operating systems and web browsers on the market. Threat to global cybersecurity. This finding made it clear to Anthropic officials that although this capability makes it very valuable for defensive purposes, it also poses clear risks if the model were offered globally. Thus, a cybercriminal could take advantage of it to find vulnerabilities in all types of systems and exploit them. A few hours ago the company developed this analysis of Mythos as a threat to cybersecurity in a post on his blogand for example highlighted how Mythos found a vulnerability (now corrected) that had been present in OpenBSD for 27 years, an operating system precisely recognized for its very strong security. There were more examples, and all of them made the conclusion clear: Mythos is too powerful for ordinary mortals to use. Superior in all benchmarks, and in some cases such as USAMO (mathematics), the jump is simply incredible. Source: Anthropic. The best in history according to benchmarks. Anthropic has published a very in-depth report about this model with its “system card”. Among the data present is, for example, its performance in benchmarks, where it has swept GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 Pro and also Claude Ous 4.6, which until now was the best model in the world in almost all performance tests. Although in some cases the jump is not spectacular, in others such as USAMO —mathematical problem solving—Mythos practically achieves perfection. He barely hallucinates… That system card also talks in detail about how Claude Mythos Preview has a drastically lower hallucination rate than Claude Opus 4.6 and earlier models. He is also capable of saying “I don’t know” if he does not have enough information to answer, something that reduces hallucinations due to overconfidence. …but when it does, be careful. The paper warns of a new phenomenon: when the model fails in some complex tasks, the “hallucinations” are not obvious errors, but rather extremely subtle and well-argued technical failures. This is dangerous because the answer seems totally correct to experts, requiring very deep verification. Glasswing Project. That power and capacity has meant that the model will only be available through a “defensive” program that they have called Glasswing Project and which will be exclusive to some Anthropic technology partners. Specifically AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Palo Alto Networks. All of them will have the privilege (and responsibility) of having access to Claude Mythos Preview to identify vulnerabilities and exploits and correct them before bad actors can do so. Mythos Preview “it’s just the beginning”. Although this model is the most capable that has been seen so far, at least according to the benchmarks and data presented by Anthropic, the company assures that “we see no reason to think that Mythos Preview is the point at which the cybersecurity capabilities of language models reach their peak.” They assure that they expect the models to continue improving in the coming months and years, although this new model is certainly on another level. In Xataka | OpenAI and Anthropic have proposed the impossible: lose $85 billion in one year and survive

twelve countries have just decided that much better with Bizum

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Bizum has not only conquered the Spanish: now it is who leads the construction of the pan-European payment system that aspires to stand up to VISA and Mastercard. That is, who aspires to be the face of European sovereignty in payments against the great American solutions. The new company that will coordinate this alliance of national solutions will have its headquarters in Madrid. Why is it important. Europe moves trillions of euros in daily digital payments and almost all of that infrastructure passes through American hands. That twelve EU countries plus Norway have decided to join, and that they have chosen Spain as their headquarters, is a declaration of geopolitical intentions. “We want to not depend so much on American solutions,” said Fernando Rodríguez, deputy general director of International Expansion at Bizum. Difficult to explain it more clearly. The context. The project starts from a previous alliance between Bizum, the Italian Bancomat Pay and the Portuguese SIBS, which was later joined by Blik (Poland and Slovakia) and Vipps MobilePay (Nordic countries). In parallel, the scheme werodriven by the European Payments Initiativealready operates in Germany, France and Belgium. All of them now converge under a common architecture: a central infrastructure that acts as a “bridge” and guarantees that a user in Oslo can pay a user in Lisbon without any American intervening. Between the lines. The choice of Madrid has not been automatic. It has been, according to the protagonists themselves, “the first compromise solution” reached between the partners, which says a lot about the difficulty of what is to come. Choosing a venue is the easy part. The shareholder agreement that will determine the governance and distribution of power, the selection of the CEO and the negotiation of a legal process that the parties describe as “long and complex.” There is an obvious risk: that national interests will strain the alliance. Coordinating 13 countries with different banking cultures and different market sizes is something we have not yet seen in Europe. Main winner? Bizum. With difference. Their 31 million users They are almost 20% of the total clients of all the allied systems, and that weight has been enough to convert Madrid into its headquarters and place Spain at the center of an initiative that no one would have imagined led from here ten years ago. We did not see the leap from national payment application to European sovereignty lever. The big question. Whether this consortium will be able to challenge Visa and Mastercard for real ground depends on whether it manages to go beyond payments between individuals. Electronic commerce and point-of-sale payments, planned for 2027-2028 and what has been achieved so far we have only seen the tip of the icebergoften with walk-around approaches; They are the litmus test of truth: that is where the American networks have their most profitable business and where Europe has been down for decades. Go deeper. The president of the Spanish Banking Association, Alejandra Kindelán, also has been clear about this: Europe needs to gain autonomy at a time of rising geopolitical upheaval. Payments, in this context, have ceased to be the usual infrastructure and have become a matter of sovereignty. And dependence on American networks is increasingly seen in Europe as a problem to be solved. Featured image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio In Xataka | Europe seeks its sovereignty in rare earths and knows how to achieve it the fast way: with a supermine in Sweden

Saudi Arabia had billions to build the future in the desert. He has decided to sacrifice them to destroy Iran

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The cranes have stopped roaring in the Tabuk desert. There where it should rise a colossal artificial lake at 2,600 meters high and a science fiction metropolis valued in billionsToday the priority is to look at the sky looking for the trail of ballistic missiles and kamikaze drones. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) had promised the world a glass and petrodollar utopia called NEOM, a monument to his own ego designed to whitewash the regime’s image. However, the harsh reality of the Middle East has ended up imposing itself on the renders in 3D. A crossroads in the gulf. We are looking at what is now, for all intents and purposes, a Third Gulf War, and Saudi Arabia has reached a historic crossroads. Caught in the war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, the Saudi monarchy faces an existential dilemma: save its economy and its megalomaniac pharaonic project, or take advantage of the chaos to dismantle, once and for all, the regime in Tehran. And judging by the shadow movements of its leaders, Riyadh seems willing to let its economic utopia bleed if it means it can win this war. Facing the gallery. Behind closed doors, Saudi Arabia’s message is one of absolute containment. In recent communicationsthe Saudi government has insisted that it has “always supported a peaceful resolution” and that its only priority is defending its population and infrastructure from daily attacks. This is what an analysis by Dr. Turki Faisal Al-Rasheed has defined as “strategic patience”: a tactic in which Riyadh avoids direct confrontation to protect its investments, while subtly encouraging the weakening of its regional rival. The reality is more complex. However, the leaks tell a very different story. As revealed The New York TimesBased on sources informed by US officials, MBS has been privately pressuring US President Donald Trump not to stop the war. The crown prince sees the current US-Israeli military campaign as a “historic opportunity” to destroy Iran’s hardline government. The talks have reached the point where MBS would have advocated for ground operations and even the military takeover of Kharg Island, the Iranian oil heart. The diplomatic board is abuzz. Mohamed bin Salmán’s phone does not stop ringing, as he urgently needs to shield his vital infrastructure from attacks and, to do so, he relies on the Western umbrella. As detailed ReutersBritish Prime Minister Keir Starmer personally telephoned MBS to condemn the Iranian offensive and confirm the deployment of more British defensive military equipment. London’s goal is to protect the kingdom and try to ensure that the sea trade route does not completely collapse. But while MBS is piling up shields and secretly pressuring Trump not to relax the blow against Iran, other regional allies are desperately trying to put out the fire before it devastates the entire Gulf. As revealed by the agency AnadoluPakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif contacted the crown prince to underline the “urgent need” for a de-escalation. Islamabad’s move is not a toast to the sun: Pakistan has emerged as the great shadow mediator, to the point of offering to host direct talks between the United States and Iran based on a 15-point American peace plan. The sacrifice of Vision 2030. “It’s the last thing he wanted. He wants stability and order, he doesn’t want missiles or drones flying.” This is how forceful an expert seemed consulted by him Financial Times. The diplomatic “detente” that Saudi Arabia had signed with Iran in 2023 has been shattered. Iranian retaliatory attacks have hit the giant Ras Tanura refinery, the Shaybah field and the Prince Sultan air base. The cost of this war for MBS’s dreams is already incalculable. Formula 1 had to cancel its April races. In the entertainment sector, the CEO of Savvy Games Group recognized that the war escalation It will “cool the perception” of Saudi Arabia as a safe destination for investment of 38 billion in eSports. The biggest collateral victim: NEOM. The artificial lake project Trojenaawarded for $4.7 billion to an Italian construction company, is already facing leaks about delays of between three and four years. The 2029 Winter Games have been postponed indefinitely and the extra costs suffocate an already deficient budget. The war and instability in the Red Sea discourage foreign investment, vital for these science fiction cities to go from render to reality. The reality of the Saudi coffers is critical. As revealed The New York TimesEven before the conflict broke out, the crown prince was already facing serious financial challenges. The 2030 deadline is approaching and the government assumes budget deficit forecasts for the coming years, suffocated by excessive spending on megaprojects and vast investments in artificial intelligence that are straining the country’s resources to the limit. And a prolonged war threatens to blow everything up, since MBS’s success depends on a single factor that is currently non-existent: a safe environment for investors and tourists. Holding the pulse. To withstand the challenge, Saudi Arabia has had to resort to an engineering work born of fear in the 80s. With the Strait of Hormuz strangled by the Iranian threat, Riyadh has activated its logistical “antidote.” State oil company Aramco is pumping against the clock through the East-West Pipeline, a 1,200 kilometer pipeline that crosses the desert to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The objective is to move up to 7 million barrels a day by land, avoiding Tehran’s missiles. The landscape in Yanbu is like something out of a movie: an “army” of at least 25 supertankers (VLCC) crowds on the coast to evacuate some 50 million barrels. However, there are no magic solutions. The port has a physical funnel (it can only load between 4 and 4.5 million barrels per day) and, in addition, ships must cross the Bab al-Mandab Strait, exposing themselves to the Houthi rebels. Added to this is that the pipeline only moves crude oil, leaving markets such as Europe without their vital supplies of refined products such as diesel, exacerbating the global energy … Read more

OpenAI seemed unstoppable. Now he has decided to leave Sora behind and change course

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There was a time when OpenAI seemed to move forward without looking back, adding release after release while the rest of the industry tried to keep up. On that stage it appeared sorapresented in February 2024 as a model capable of generating video from text and, shortly after, as an application with broader aspirations. The idea was not only to create clips, but also to give them a place to circulate, share them and turn them into a more social experience. It was, in a way, the natural extension of a company that never stopped exploring new formats. The closure. What fit as one more step within that expansion has ended in a twist that is difficult to ignore. OpenAI has confirmed the end of the Sora app, a decision that the team itself has communicated with a direct message to those who used it: “We say goodbye to the Sora app.” According to The Wall Street Journalthe withdrawal would not be limited to the app: it would also affect the API and video support within ChatGPT. For now there are no specific dates or complete technical details, although the company has announced that it will offer more information shortly. What was Sora and why did it matter?. To understand what this closure means, it is worth clarifying what Sora was. It was a system capable of generating videos from text and expanding existing clips. Over time, that capability became a broader product, with functions for sharing content generated within the platform itself. It was not just another tool, but one of the proposals with which OpenAI sought to bring AI to the field of audiovisual creation. The change of prioritys. Less video, more code and agents. The closure of Sora is not an isolated move, but part of a broader change within OpenAI. According to the aforementioned newspaper, the company is reorienting computing capacity and part of its equipment towards productivity tools, programming and systems capable of acting autonomously on the user’s computer. In that same line, The company recently announced the integration of its ChatGPT app, its Codex code tool and its browser into a kind of “super app.”. The idea, as conveyed by management to employees, is to concentrate efforts on a clearer product vision. During his journey, Sora symbolized a stage in which OpenAI was exploring how far it could take its models beyond text. Its closure, however, points to a different reading of the current moment. The company seems to be leaving this stage of expansion behind to focus on products with more immediate applications in the professional field. It is not so much a resignation as a rearrangement of priorities. In that setting, video loses weight compared to tools that fit better into your current strategy. Images | OpenAI In Xataka | Terence Tao is the best mathematician in the world: he has recognized that he is using AI to solve one of the Millennium Problems

The world is desperately asking Ukraine for its antidote to the Shahed. And Ukraine has decided to keep them for its war

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In September 2023, a swarm of cheap drones managed to get through some of the most advanced air defenses in the world and paralyzing strategic infrastructure in the Middle East for hours. That left a conclusion for many armies: the air war of the 21st century no longer depends only on fighters or missiles that cost real fortunes, but also on small machines that can be manufactured in workshops and change the balance of the battlefield. The “antidote” that everyone is looking for. After four years of war against Russia and thousands of Shahed drone attacks, Ukraine has ended up becoming the most advanced laboratory of the world to combat this type of weapons. What began as a desperate need to defend their cities has ended up generating a complete ecosystem defense: detection networks with radars and acoustic sensors, command software that coordinates cheap interceptors and specialized pilots who have learned to confront swarms of drones in real combat conditions. That experience has awakened a enormous international interest because it solves the big problem of modern defenses: destroying cheap drones with missiles that cost millions is an unsustainable equation. Changes the economics of air defense. It we have counted other times. The Ukrainian success is explained above all by cost. While a Patriot missile can exceed four million dollars and a THAAD interceptor is around twelve million, many kamikaze drones cost between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars. Ukraine has broken that logic using tiny interceptors that can cost between $1,000 and $2,500 and that, guided by human operators and thermal sensors or radar, pursue the enemy drone until it is destroyed. Systems like the Sting interceptor (small 3D printed devices capable of reaching speeds close to 280 kilometers per hour) have demonstrated surprising effectiveness in real combat, taking down a large part of the Shahed that attack cities like kyiv. From battlefield to global product. That performance has made Ukraine the center of a new technological career. Gulf countries, European countries and allies of the United States have started calling kyiv in search of solutions to confront the same Iranian drones that Russia has been using for years on the Ukrainian front. Middle Eastern governments, concerned about attacks on oil facilities or military bases, negotiate agreements to acquire interceptors, detection systems and operational training. They not only want to buy the drones, but learn the method Ukrainian: a distributed defense model based on thousands of cheap sensors and small weapons capable of quickly responding to massive attacks. A system to copy. The demand, furthermore, is not limited to hardware. Ukraine too export knowledge. Teams of Ukrainian specialists have already been sent to several countries to explain how to detect, track and shoot down drones in large numbers. In total, at least eleven governments have requested direct assistance to replicate this low-cost air defense model. For many Western militaries, the war in Ukraine has shown that defense against drone swarms is not won with large strategic systems, but with distributed networks of sensors, software and small weapons that operate in a coordinated manner. The great paradox. However, there is a fundamental problem. Despite international interest, Ukrainian companies can’t export their interceptors. The reason? The government has prohibited the sale of defense drones because it considers that all available systems should remain in the country. Manufacturers like Wild Hornets o SkyFall constantly receive purchase requests from the Middle East and Europe, but the official response is always the same: The absolute priority is to defend Ukrainian territory itself. Like the United States. The position reflects a very clear strategic logic. Ukraine faces massive drone attacks every night and needs every interceptor it produces. Selling them in the middle of the war would mean weakening their own defense. The decision, in fact, is reminiscent of what the United States has been doing repeatedly with key weaponry during intense conflicts (the latest: in South Korea): reserve or directly move the most necessary technologies for your own operations before exporting them. In this case, kyiv is applying exactly the same logic. War laboratory. Meanwhile, the war continues to turn Ukraine into the biggest testing ground of the new era of drone combat. The country has even created a specific branch of its armed forces dedicated to unmanned systems and is developing everything from robotic submarines to long-range attack drones. In cities like kyiv, national interceptors are already they demolish more than 70% of the Shahed that fly over the region. That experience, accumulated under constant attacks, is generating innovations that many Western armies have not yet managed to replicate. Pressure of a new war. The reason international interest is growing so quickly is easy to understand: the problem that Ukraine has been facing for years starts to spread to other regions. Iranian drones are now appearing in conflicts and attacks in the Middle Eastwhere the United States and its allies have discovered that their traditional air defense systems are too expensive to confront swarms of cheap drones. Each attack forces interceptors that cost millions to be fired against devices that are worth only a few thousand. Therefore, from US military bases to oil facilities in the Gulf, half the world andis looking towards Ukraine in search of answers. Its engineers, pilots and programmers have accumulated experience that no other army has. They have learned to fight swarms of drones with limited resources and to design cheap weapons that They break economic logic of modern air warfare. An antidote that stays at home. As they counted on TWZthe scenario is summarized in governments around the world calling to kyiv and asking for the “antidote” against the Shahed, while Ukraine has made a pragmatic decision: to keep it to itself. The companies receive offersallies ask questions and specialists travel to share experience. But the weapons that really make a difference right now, those cheap interceptors that have changed air defense, continue to stay at home, because for Ukraine the war is still it’s very far determine. Image … Read more

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