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An Air Canada pilot has been flying for 16 years without making a single mistake. And they have arrested him for one detail: he did not have a license

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Almost 20 years goes a long way, whether you are an airplane pilot or not. But if you are also one, you will have had time to accumulate almost a thousand international flights, take the controls of different types of aircraft and accumulate good money. It is the summary that Geoffrey Wall could make of his life when, once retired, he told this to his grandchildren or, who knows, told it to all of us in a book. One more story. Tasteless, without substance. But Geoffrey Wall may say otherwise. Yes, you can tell that He flew airplanes for decadeswho took the controls of the best-known commercial airplanes on more than 900 occasions and who accumulated millions of euros taking hundreds of lives from one place to another through the clouds. But he will also be able to tell how he managed to trick his airline into flying planes for 16 years without the relevant license to do so. Everything good, except for one small detail Because the future doesn’t look good for Geoffrey Wall. They count in cnn that the police knocked on his door and he was arrested. The reason: Air Canada notified authorities that one of its pilots was flying with a false license. Not only that, he had been doing it from 2009 until last year. The deception was discovered during a routine check. Nobody had reported irregularities in the controls, no aircraft had been put at risk. But in 2025, during a review of its documentation, it was found that there were some anomalies. By then, the pilot had been flying airplanes within the company for 27 years. However, the company points out that Wall began flying fraudulently starting in 2009. Then, the pilot was promoted to captain and was able to take command of the aircraft and direct operations. The small detail is that he falsified the ATPL-A, the highest level pilot’s license. At a press conference to explain what happened, Deputy Chief Nick Milinovich, of the Peel Regional Police (southern Ontario, Canada), pointed out that “It’s very similar to a doctor who is licensed to practice family medicine but is performing brain surgery in his office.” And he once again emphasized the importance of having the appropriate licenses to perform a job. Especially if in that job you have taken thousands of people through the air. The authorities have explained that the pilot left his job in 2025, just before “Project Icarus”, as the police work has been called internally, started rolling last January. months later They have managed to prove the falsification of the documents and on June 1 they arrested the pilot. However, Air Canada emphasizes that its pilots pass tests regularly and that at no time were passengers put in danger. They emphasize that Geoffrey Wall amply demonstrated his abilities to pilot the Boeing 767, 777 and 787 to which he had access during the last 16 years. During that time it is estimated that Wall earned more than two million dollars with his salary but will now have to face seven criminal charges, including fraud for money earned without a license and falsification of documents. In addition, it has already been fined by Transport Canada, the Canadian Government department in charge of ensuring compliance with all mobility regulations in the country. Photo | David Shypers In Xataka | Without a pilot or help from the ground: this is how the University of Munich has achieved the completely autonomous landing of a plane

The highway with the most lanes in the world is in China and has 50 lanes, except for one small detail: it is a lie

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Demographic growth, urban development and the great automobile boom crossed paths in the 20th century to give rise to some of the most spectacular roads today: from the Panamericana that has never closed to the road with the longest straight line in the world. Logic leads us to think: if there are more cars, then more lanes are needed to avoid traffic jams (spoiler: from one point on, not working). And if we talk about roads with more lanes, there is one place that takes the cake: the Interstate 10 in the United States. The point that interests us in question is in Houston, Texas: there an ordinary six-lane highway from the 60s became thanks to an astronomical widening of the widest road on the planet. It is this American highway that holds the record with 26 lanes and not a chinese highwaydespite the fame of the 50 lanes of the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao. The highway with the most lanes is in Texas. Within that highway that crosses the United States from Santa Monica in California to Jacksonville in Florida with a route of 2,460 kilometers in total length there is a specific section known colloquially as the Katy Freeway: a segment about 37 kilometers west of Houston. At its widest point, at Gessner Road, the road has 26 lanes in total: 12 main lanes (six in each direction), 8 service lanes (four in each direction) and 6 central dynamic toll lanes. This corridor is the backbone of mobility for the entire west of Houston, one of the largest cities in the United States and extremely dependent on the automobile (even for the United States): it has hardly any public transportation, little urban planning and decades of peripheral expansion. In this scenario, the I-10 is more than a highway: it is the artery of mobility and business parks, logistics centers, hospitals and universities that depend on private vehicles are concentrated around it. An unofficial record, not official. The Katy Freeway holds this record in practice, but it is not official (there is no Guinness for this) because no one has agreed on how to count the lanes. Do you only count those on the main road? There are 14. Do you add the side service lanes and the center toll lanes? You reach 26. Without a single, agreed upon criterion, Guinness cannot set a number and certify it. Brief history of its construction and expansion. The Katy Freeway was built in the 1960s and had six to eight lanes, sufficient for the mobility needs of the time. But between the 80s and 90s, Houston suffered spectacular urban growth: in 2000, traffic surpassed the 200,000 vehicles when had been designed for 120,000. In 2004, the American Highway Users Alliance (AHUA) classified it as the second most serious bottleneck in the country: they estimated that drivers lost 25 million hours a year. So the Administration planned a huge road expansion: an investment of 2.8 billion dollars and a four-year project between 2004 and 2008 to incorporate dynamic toll lanes inside an interstate highway for the first time. To make room they demolished an old railway corridor. As a curiosity, in 2014 there was another small expansion to add an auxiliary lane in each direction. Travel time from Pin Oak to downtown. Source: City Observatory / data: Houston Transtar More lanes and more traffic jams. Since a picture says a thousand words, above these lines is a graph from the non-profit organization City Observatory with data from Houston’s official traffic agency. City Observatory collects Although the AHUA described in a report that this expansion was one of the great success stories of traffic engineering to alleviate traffic jams and traffic jams, this was not the case: the congestion got worse. Just two years later, they recorded that travel times on that 47-kilometer route from the outskirts to downtown Houston increased by 13 minutes in the morning rush hour and 19 minutes in the afternoon. This phenomenon has a name: induced demand. Thoroughly developed by Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner in “The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion: Evidence from US Cities“, offers a clear conclusion: vehicle kilometers traveled increase proportionally to the available lanes and the new roads attract more drivers and more trips until the added capacity is saturated. The G4 toll, seen in Street View What happens with the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macao. It is common to find references to the G4 as “the 50-lane highway” thus overtaking the Katy Freeway on the right. The reality is another story: as verified by Africa Check with Google Mapsthe G4 is in practice a four-lane highway along almost its entire length of more than 2,000 kilometers. The expansion to dozens of lanes that usually appears corresponds exclusively to the Zhuozhou toll area (can be verified with Street View), near Beijing, where the number of lanes is expanded punctually to distribute the flow to the toll booths. Just half a kilometer later, it is reduced to four again. In 2015 there was a terrible traffic jam during the week of China’s National Day at that point that caused kilometer-long queues and the spread of that supposed “50-lane highway” when in reality it is the toll infrastructure of an ordinary four-lane road. In Xataka | The longest straight road in the world is a mental challenge: 240 km without curves, in the middle of the desert and with truck traffic In Xataka | The longest road in the world has been incomplete for 50 years: the 106 kilometers of jungle that no country has been able to pave

When they told us all the advantages of intermittent fasting, they forgot one small detail: that it could make us bald.

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For years we have been sold that intermittent fasting It was the strategy of the future to lose weight and improve our metabolic health. It is logical: it was something easy to implement, reasonable and very striking. Had everything necessary to become a fashion. And so it was. It is now, as the first long-term studies come to an end, that we begin to really understand its pros and cons. The most striking, of course, is the one that has to do with hair. What exactly is intermittent fasting? In general terms, we call ‘intermittent fasting’ a diet that alternates periods without food restrictions with brief periods of fasting. ‘Fasting’, here, is a deliberately elastic term: it can mean eating absolutely nothing or significantly reducing the number of calories consumed. The idea behind it sounds good.. When we undergo prolonged calorie restriction, the body goes into “savings mode” and that causes weight loss to slow down (or, at least, slow down). Intermittent fasting would attempt to trick the body into not adapting to the new calorie restriction and therefore continuing to “spend” at a normal rate. And does it work? That’s the bad news. “Research does not consistently show that intermittent fasting is superior to continuous low-calorie diets” when it comes to weight loss, the study tells us. more complete analysis on the subject after reviewing almost fifty studies. The clinical trials that have been carried out Subsequently, they only insist on the same thing: in general terms, the results are identical to those with the rest of the normal diets. Both in the dropout rate and in the amount of weight achieved or the improvement in health markers. The choice of another method, ultimately, has more to do with individual philias and phobias than with any type of extra scientific evidence. After all, everyone has a peculiar relationship with food and, consequently, there are some strategies that ‘fit’ us better than others. In other words, there are people who use it. Yes and the truth is that nothing happens. Little by little, researchers are discovering good things (can help intestinal cells regenerate) and bad things (could promote the formation of precancerous polyps). So, little by little, we are better understanding what it does, what it stops doing and what mechanisms are behind intermittent fasting. That’s when the surprises begin. Because, for example, a clinical trial carried out with mice has discovered that intermittent fasting slows hair growth. Researchers at Westlake University (in Zhejiang, China) took about 50 mice, shaved them and divided them into three groups with dietary restrictions (fed every 8, 16 or 48 hours) and one without restrictions which is the control group. After a month, the mice that could eat without problem had recovered their hair. Those who fasted, on the other hand, only partially recovered after 96 days. As? Because? What is happening here? The first thing is to make it clear that the researchers “They don’t want to scare people away from intermittent fasting.“; but rather highlight “the importance of taking into account that it could have some unwanted effects.” Taking this into account (and that the study is in mice), the answer is both simple and full of uncertainties: to begin with, hair growth is a process that requires constant and balanced nutrition. But researchers believe the problem could go further: It is possible that “the body uses fat reserves instead of glucose and this could trigger the release of chemicals that damage hair cells.” However (and this is important) the research is in a very seminal state and there is still much to investigate. After all, there is no better occasion than this: the occasion they paint her bald. Image | Seika In Xataka | The great promise of science to end baldness is not a transplant or a medicine: it is a vaccine A version of this topic was originally published in February 2025

DeepSeek promised them happiness as the great Chinese AI. I didn’t count on a small detail: Kimi

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Just a year ago, DeepSeek was one of the biggest scares that Silicon Valley had received dwarves. A Chinese model trained with a fraction of OpenAI’s budget equal to GPT-4 in benchmarks. Upon its arrival the message seemed clear: Western dominance of AI had its days numbered. Today, the story stands, but not thanks to DeepSeek. The DeepSeek case. DeepSeek carries months late for its V4 and, to date, has already lost three of the authors of R1, the model that catapulted them to success. The monthly downloads fell 72% in the second quarter of the year, seeing how Doubao (ByteDanec) snatched the lead. With missed dates, usage errors due to cyber attacksand the difficulty of split from NVIDIA To bet almost entirely on Huawei’s Ascend chips, Chinese alternatives like Kimi have been gaining ground. Meanwhile, on the other side of China. Moonshot AI was not born surrounded by noise like DeepSeek. It was founded in March 2023 by three former colleagues from Tsinghua University: Yang Zhilin—PhD from Carnegie Mellon, former Google Brain and Meta AI—, along with Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. There were no visible or media faces behind it, only product. That product is Kimi, and in early January 2026 the company launched it in its K2.5 version. In code and video benchmarks managed to surpass GPT-5 and Gemini Pro 3with the key to Chinese AI: its API costs between 4 and 17 times less than OpenAI’s. Those responsible for Moonshot explained how Kimi was almost at Claude’s level in software development testing, encouraging the race for open models. The money arrived. The commercial results are what really attract attention. In less than 20 days Following the launch of K2.5, Kimi’s cumulative revenue exceeded everything billed during 2025. API’s international revenue increased fourfold since November of the previous year. The consequence in valuation has been dizzying: 4.3 billion dollars in December 2025, 10 billion in February 2026, 18 billion in March. Three months, valuation multiplied by four. Kimi has thus become the fastest decacorn in Chinese business history. The Chinese maelstrom. DeepSeek was born a year ago as the great revolution that questioned the closed model of Silicon Valley. It only took a few months for Moonshot to steal the limelight and manage to be on par with – or even above – giants like Google and OpenAI in the most used models in the world. In favor of DeepSeek, it should be noted that its objective is different: it does not follow the typical startup pattern with pressure for immediate monetization and it is a gigantic AI laboratory that can afford not to win in the short term. In Xataka | DeepSeek API: what it is, what it is for, prices and how you can get one to use in your projects

Xiaomi smart glasses arrive in Spain at a very low price. They are just missing a small detail

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Xiaomi, for a long time, has not been a smartphone brand. It is an ecosystem brand. And to close the product circle it presented its Xiaomi AI Glasses. While these end up landing (or not) in Spain, the company has just quietly brought its Mijia Smart Audio Glasses. A quite different alternative in design to the formats we are used to for a simple reason: they are glasses purely focused on audio. You see it, you hear it. This is the slogan of Mijia, Xiaomi’s ecosystem sub-brand, for its Smart Audio Glasses. These are not the smart glasses we are used to. They are a device designed for audio functions. They have compatibility with both Siri as with him Google Voice Assistant. They have a voice recorder, included for calls. Real-time noise cancellation. Real-time notifications A design of… glasses. One of the main problems with alternatives with double chambers is the thickness of the temple. Being simpler glasses, these Audio Glasses have an appearance that could easily pass them off as normal glasses. In fact, the thickness of the rods is only 5mm. The chassis weighs only 27.6 grams. The hinge promises more than 15,000 bends and is detachable in case we need to replace it. They have polarized lenses that not only filter 99.9% of ultraviolet light, they also filter reflections and 25% of blue light. The design is finished in titanium. The controls. To interact with these Xiaomi glasses we will have two solutions. The first is to use its temples, with touch controls. These allow you to enable calls, alerts, start recordings… Of course, while we are recording a small indicator light will turn on, so that there is evidence that we are recording. The second method is to use its app, through which we can manage recordings, connected devices, gesture control and even find the glasses by emitting a sound if we can’t find them. The autonomy. If you are wondering how long the battery of a product like this lasts, the answer is: little if you use them a lot, enough with logical use. They promise up to 13 hours of continuous playback, 9 hours in calls and an average of a day and a half of use. Why is it important. The Mijia Smart Audio Glasses are not just glasses focused on audio, they are proof that Xiaomi wants to bring to Spain a product ecosystem that, sooner or later, will end up competing with giants like Go with your RayBans. The integration of the Xiaomi ecosystem as a Trojan horse in Spain It is something we have been talking about for a long time, bringing its ‘Human x Car x Home’ philosophy to all aspects: smartphones, appliances, smart accessories, cars… and even robots. Styles and price. The Mijia Smart Audio Glasses are now on sale in the Xiaomi Spain website in three different mounts: Pilot Style: 179.99 euros Browline: 179.99 euros Titanium: 199.99 euros Image | Xiaomi In Xataka | Meta is so serious about smart glasses that its catalog is already a mess: this is how the new models differentiate themselves

Europe believes it has won the gas war against Russia, but it has forgotten one small detail: infrastructure

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Europe has made a historic decision: 2027 will be the year in which the last trace of Russian gas disappear from the energy system of the continent. However, between the offices in Brussels and the reality of homes there is a chasm that is not measured in cubic meters, but in months of construction. The continent’s security no longer depends on diplomacy with the Kremlin, but on the speed at which terminals can be erected, tubes connected and ships deployed. The new European sovereignty is in the hands of the engineers. A system to build. As analyst Giacomo Prandelli explainsthe focus of the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) market has been on the price, but the real crisis is infrastructure. Europe is in a frantic race to replace Russian gas, but much of the necessary capacity is still under construction or in the planning phase. This has created a golden opportunity for a very select group of companies that own the physical assets. According to Prandelli, there are vital European companies that still go unnoticed. He gives as an example a firm valued at 662 million euros that operates “at a bargain price”: Their profits are very high compared to their stock market value and, most importantly, they already have government contracts secured until 2030. They are, basically, the owners of the “plugs” that Europe is forced to go through. The reasons for structural change. The reason for this urgency is an irreversible “divorce”. According to data collected by OilPriceRussian exports by gas pipeline to Europe have fallen by 44% in 2025, reaching lows in the 1970s. The definitive closure of the Ukrainian route this December leaves the continent without its historic arteries. The reasons for this new reality are three: US dependence: US gas It already represents 56% of LNG imports in Europe. The July 2025 agreementby which the EU will buy 750 billion dollars in energy from the US, has reconfigured the global board. The physical rigidity of the system: Although there is plenty of gas in the global market, European regasification plants (especially in the Netherlands) have operated at the limit of their technical capacity. Spain has the gas, but cannot send it to the rest of Europe: its pipelines with France they only allow export 8,500 million m³ per year. The problem is not the lack of fuel, it is the “funnel” of the pipes. Gas as an eternal backup: A report from McKinsey & Company issues an uncomfortable warning: Gas demand will grow by 26% until 2050. Europe needs gas to stabilize its electricity grid when renewables fail. The energy transition, far from eliminating gas, has turned it into a “permanent strategic pillar.” The Black Sea axis and the ghost fleet. However, the European wall has cracks. Hungary and Slovakia they keep injecting money to the Kremlin via the Druzhba pipeline and the TurkStream route. While Brussels asks for disconnection, Budapest and Bratislava build new connections towards the Black Sea, claiming that the cut would be “economic suicide.” Added to this is the fear of the “ghost fleet.” Brussels fears that Russian gas will repeat the oil scriptan opaque market of ships that change flag and documentation to hide the origin of the gas. To avoid this, the EU has imposed fines of up to 3.5% of global turnover and certificate of origin systems, but the crude oil precedent shows that, when Europe closes a door, the market usually opens a clandestine window. Europe’s floating lifebuoy. Given the slowness of concrete, a technical solution arises. According to Professor Alexandre Munspoints towards FSRUs (Floating Storage and Regasification Units). These ships are mobile regasification plants that use the heat of the sea to process the gas. According to Muns, their advantages are the speed of deployment and the cost since they can be rented for about $155,000 per day. Giants such as Excelerate Energy or Höegh LNG are those that today allow the EU to keep the pulse. Without these ships, the gas crossing the Atlantic simply would have nowhere to enter the continent. The tyranny of the calendar. Europe closes 2025 with deceptive calm. As reported by El Economistaprices have fallen to four-year lows (€27/MWh) thanks to a mild winter and the constant flow of ships. But, as the president of Sedigas, Joan Batalla, warns, this stability is “conditional.” Any extreme cold snap or technical failure in a saturated terminal could skyrocket prices again, because the network operates without margin for error. Europe’s autonomy is no longer negotiated in Moscow; It is built in the ports of Germany, in the interconnections of the Pyrenees and in the FSRU shipyards. The success of the 2027 plan will not depend on politicians’ promises, but on cranes and welders finishing their work before the climate changes the rules of the game. Image | freepik Xataka | The European Union has finally made the decision that has terrified it for so many years: stop importing Russian gas

Wall Street has turned on the spigot of infinite money for AI. They have forgotten a small detail: the electrical network

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In that equation that the world is trying to solve with AI, there is a half that not many people have noticed: debt. Behind every AI-generated chat and video is a gigantic network of data centers, and those data centers are being financed with a mountain of borrowed money. And therein lies the problem. In what is borrowed. Debt and more debt. According to recent datathe issuance of secured debt linked to data centers in the United States is estimated to be $25.4 billion by 2025. It is 112% more than the previous year. If we add up all the complex financial instruments (known as asset-backed securities (ABS) and commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBSS)), the snowball is already huge: there are almost $49 billion tied to these securities. Bonuses for everyone. Here there are not only startups asking for loans, no. The technology giants that are setting up these infrastructures – the so-called hyperscalers – are also taking advantage of this mechanism. Companies such as Microsoft, Google, Oracle or Meta have rediscovered the bond market as a source of financing. Better to spend what is not mine. They all have huge amounts of money, but instead of spending their own cash, They have raised 100,000 million dollars in debt issues so far this year. The goal: buy thousands of GPUs and build data centers before the competition. What are you doing, Oracle? If there is a company that embodies the vertigo of this excessive bet, it is Oracle. The company created by Larry Ellison has committed to meeting a Pharaonic $300 billion deal with OpenAI. That has forced it to become the largest issuer of corporate debt (outside the financial sector). The numbers are scary: your total debt has grown to 111.6 billion dollarswhile its cash has dropped by 10,000 million. Citi estimates they’ll need to borrow another $20 billion to $30 billion every year (every year!) for the next three years just to keep building. excessive ambition. There are also examples of startups that are exploiting this facet. One of the clearest is the one from CoreWeavea company famous for renting computing capacity for AI. The company has secured credit lines of $2.5 billion backed by leading investment banks such as JPMorgan. The market message seems clear: “if you’re going to build for AI, here’s the money.” How to get a 30-year mortgage. Analysts of all kinds have been keeping the fly behind their ears for some time, and one of the latest Moody’s reports is a good example. Concrete buildings are usually financed with terms of 20 or 30 years, but the technology inside (such as AI chips) changes radically every 3 or 4 years. Does it make sense to go into debt three decades from now for a technology that evolves so quickly? cheap money. Investors are also agreeing to charge minimal interest, just 1% above what the safe US public debt pays, when they assume that risk. It’s a worrying classic sign of euphoria. There is so much money wanting to enter the sector that those who lend it have lowered their guard and demand very little return for their risk. They firmly believe in the promises of AI while increasingly more analysts warnhorrified, that we are facing an “irrational exuberance.” Having money is no longer enough. All this is already scary, but the real bottleneck for expansion is not even capital or chips, but the electrical grid. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, pointed out, there is no power for so many chips. The situation is so worrying that a Deloitte study indicated in a study that there are a seven-year waiting line to connect some data center projects to the electrical grid. And if companies want to obtain financing, they need have guaranteed electricity supply for your data centers. If there is no plug, there is no loan. Big Tech looks for electrons. At OpenAI they already warned of the problem months ago when talking about the “electron gap” describing electrons (energy) as the new oil. Almost all the major companies in the industry are making a move. Google has signed an agreement with TotalEnergies to be delivered 1.5 TWh of electricity over the next 15 years, and Meta did something similar with Treaty Oak Clean Energy to get 385 MW of its solar plants in Louisiana. The bubble before the big question. All of this further increases the fear that the AI ​​bubble will end up bursting in a big way. Meanwhile, the big unknown is whether the demand for artificial intelligence will be capable of paying the immense electrical and financial bill that it is signing today in 5 or 10 years. The credit party continues. In Xataka | While Silicon Valley seeks electricity, China subsidizes it: this is how it wants to win the AI ​​war

When Meta forced us to use its AI chatbot on WhatsApp, it did not have a detail: the European Commission

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The European Commission has been fiercely fighting against monopolies in the technology sector for years. The persecution of Microsoft in the early 2000s it was just the beginning. In 2018 the EU imposed a historic fine on Google for abuse of dominant position with Android and last year they fined Facebook for the same reason. According to Financial TimesMeta is going to sit again in the dock accused of monopoly, this time for the Forced integration of Meta AI in WhatsApp. In the spotlight. The European Commission has not commented on the matter, but according to sources consulted by the Financial Times, Brussels is already investigating Meta for the integration of Meta AI into WhatsApp and the announcement will take place imminently. The case will be conducted under traditional monopoly laws and not under the Digital Markets Act or DMA. The accusation. The investigation has not yet been confirmed by the European Commission, but internal sources have revealed that the main reason is the deployment of Meta AI within WhatsApp, its AI chatbot. As we saw in its day, there is no way to avoid being activated and there is no option to hide it either. Let us remember that WhatsApp is the most used messaging app in the world, with 3 billion active users. Meta is already being investigated for this reason the competition authority in Italywhich considers that the integration of Meta AI “could limit production, market access or technical development” in the AI ​​chatbot sector. Goal returns to the bench. Just a year ago, Meta entered the select club of companies fined by the European Commission for violating the antitrust rules of the European Union. On that occasion, the product that was the object of the accusation was Facebook, more specifically for forcing the use of Facebook Marketplace, which, like Meta AI in WhatsApp, was activated without users’ permission. After several years of research, The Commission concluded that the company had violated the law and made them pay a fine of 800 million euros. Also in April of this year They had to pay 200 million for the case that required consent to the transfer of data. Historical fines. Facebook has come out cheap if we compare it with other sanctions, such as more than 4.3 billion that Google had to pay for abuse of dominant position with Android, and it has not been the only one that Mountain View has had to pay. In September of this year The EU fined Google 2.95 billion euros for abusing its position in the digital advertising market and currently Brussels is preparing another case by how they rank media results in their search results. USA against. The Trump administration has charged against the DMA and EU fineswhich he described as unfair and discriminatory, threatening to start a tariff war. Europe’s response was forceful: technological regulation “is a sovereign right of the EU.” Obviously the heads of the technology companies have also positioned themselves against it and earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg called on the US government to that would protect technology companies from “European censorship”so we can assume that this new research will not have been very amusing. Judges in the US also see monopolies. At the same time as the criticism is occurring, in the United States there are also antitrust cases against big technology companies, such as the one that Google lost in 2024 and that threatened to force them to sell Chrome, although in the end they dodged the bullet. Goal too carried out a similar case recently in which accused them of monopoly over WhatsApp and Instagrambut in this case they won. We will see what happens if Europe makes its case against WhatsApp official. Images | European Commission, Xataka Android In Xataka | The United States seems determined to break its monopolies. And it has an obvious victim between its eyebrows: Google

In the midst of rearmament, Europe has realized an unimportant detail: it does not have enough bullets

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The European defense industry is experiencing a decisive moment after decades of demilitarization, outsourcing of key processes and a growing dependence on suppliers that seemed assumed to be structural until the Russian invasion of Ukraine revealed its weaknesses. In that context, that of rearmamenta chemical compound with more than a century of military history has reappeared as a critical link: there is no TNT. The strategic resurgence. Yes, the shortage threatens the continent’s ability to sustain its ammunition production. The panorama is as simple as it is disturbing: Europe, with giants such as Rheinmetall, BAE or KNDS, only has a TNT plant operational (Nitro-Chemin Poland), while Russia manufactures millions of projectiles annually and receives direct support from North Korea. This combination has created a strategic asymmetry that the EU is trying to correct with massive investments and new industrial playersamong them a Swedish start-up that aims to break a historical blockade with a modern and fully European factory. At the center of this story appears Joakim Sjöbloman entrepreneur who abandoned fintech to build the first Swedish TNT plant in 30 years and contribute, as explainedfor her daughter to grow up in a continent capable of defending itself. The geopolitical urgency. Although its origin was almost anecdotal (a yellow dye produced in Germany at the end of the 19th century), the TNT It became a fundamental piece of modern warfare since its explosive properties were discovered. Today it is essential for almost any ammunition that exceeds the size of a bullet: artillery projectiles, grenades, aerial bombs and countless military loads require this compound which, paradoxically, is almost no longer manufactured in the West. The gap between capabilities is evident: while Russia produces between 4.5 and 5 million of projectiles per year, Europe barely reached 600,000 in 2024a figure that rose to 1.2 million adding US production, but still far from what is necessary for a balanced deterrence. Each projectile requires about 10 kg of TNTso matching the Russian pace would require about 50,000 tons of explosive per year. The great dependence. Nitro-Chem It manufactures a significant part of that volume, but exports much of it. outside the EUand the rest of the European market depends on India and China, suppliers that would automatically be left out of the equation in a conflict between blocs. For Sjöblomthis dependence is an intolerable risk: any diplomatic or military crisis could immediately cut off the supply, just as happened with vaccines during the pandemic. The Swedish bet. It counted on Insider that Swebalthe company founded by Sjöblom after selling Minna Technologies to Mastercardaims to produce 4,500 tons of TNT per year in a facility located a few kilometers from Alfred Nobel’s historic dynamite factory. The project (which plans to start in 2028) aims to only use Swedish and Baltic raw materialscreating a completely European supply chain and drastically reducing delivery times that today depend on ships diverted around the Horn of Africa. Although its capacity does not even remotely cover the continental gap, Sjöblom himself maintains that it will be a significant contribution for at least a decade, because even adding all the projects planned in Finland, Greece, the Czech Republic and the United States, Europe would still be far from balancing the industrial pulse with Russia. The rebirth of TNT is not a historical eccentricity, but the reconstruction of a capacity that Sweden had until 1998 and that it dismantled because demilitarization made it unnecessary to maintain a dangerous, expensive chemical industry for which there were no commercial incentives. A dangerous process. The construction of a TNT plant It requires overcoming a regulatory labyrinth that Sweden applies rigorously even in the era of rearmament. To obtain the environmental permit, Swebal has had to carry out 14 studies on protected faunaarchaeological remains, acoustic impact and risk analysis, in addition to guaranteeing a perimeter isolated by forests that would act as a natural barrier in the event of an explosion. The plant’s own architecture reflects the delicate nature of the process: acid tanks connected to a concentration tower, chemical reactors enclosed in an enclosure of six-meter earth walls, video control, electrified fencing and permanent security equipment. Automation. The goal is that 90% of the process be automatedso that workers only enter in a final laboratory testing and in a shielded control room. Mixing toluene with sulfuric and nitric acid involves managing extreme temperatures and toxic gases, and any mistake can lead to lethal fumes or spontaneous detonation. Additionally, producing TNT generates “redwater”a carcinogenic waste that Swebal will send to an external plant for incineration, avoiding repeating polluting practices of the past. All this requires between 80 and 90 million of euros of investment, well above the initial financing of 3.5 million that the company has already closed. The European dilemma. Behind this industrial commitment there is an economic argument that transcends TNT. Europe spends 200,000 million euros annually on defense, but more than 60% of that money is allocated to US suppliers. For Sjöblom, relocating supply chains would generate millions of jobs and reinforce strategic autonomy, two objectives aligned with the plan ReArm Europe 2030which could mobilize up to 800 billion in investments and loans for the defense industry. However, the sector continues to face a structural obstacle: Orders do not arrive as quickly as companies need to take risks. This inertia (coupled with the lack of interoperability between European weapons, which forces the maintenance of multiple calibers and standards) is, according to Sjöblomone of the greatest dangers to the defense of the continent. If Europe does not unify criteria and build a robust industrial base, it will end up depending on others to support its own security doctrine, a reminder that is summarized in a phrase which he considers essential: “either you have an army, or you have someone else’s army in your country.” Local tensions. There is no doubt, the factory, located near a group of summer huts next to a lake, has awakened reluctance among the residents of Nora, who fear truck … Read more

The most unexpected object has become the last battlefield of Catalan independence for a detail: the letter e

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A letter. The E. thus, in capital letters. And a fine. Capital for some if we consider that it is about paying 200 euros for covering a letter. Because that is the sanction that those who cover in Catalonia are receiving the letter E of the registration of their cars. The same that identifies the plaque with Spain. A lyric. And what lyric is it? The E. of “Spain”, “State” and “confrontation”, to give only some examples. At least for those who consider that this letter in their enrollment is an act of submission to the Spanish State and, therefore, is a cause for political confrontation. That letter that some Catalan independence disappears from their tuition to replace it with the CAT letters, next to a SENYERAas a political claim or small subversive act before what they consider the submission of Spain in the region. It is not new. The confidential collects the return of this way of acting by some Catalan independence. But this act of protest is not much less new. At the end of 2024a Catalan was fined for this reason, when considering the Mossos d’Esquadra that had manipulated the registration, which is considered a serious infraction that entails a sanction of 200 euros. But these attempts to replace the license plates either since then. Already in the last decade You can find some publications that point out this way of acting by some drivers. In some yes the European Union flag was maintained. However, it has been in the last two and three years in which the most noise has been generated. The Galician case. But it has been in the last three years when the phenomenon has taken special relevance. In 2024 a driver complained in social networks of having received the aforementioned fine. In the answers there were those who assured that carrying the CAT on the registration was not illegal. The origin must be found in Galicia. There, Bieito Lobeira, Secretary of Organization of the Galician Independence Party BNG, was fined for covering the E of Spain by a GZ in reference to “Galiza”. After various resources, Lobeira won the procedure because it was pointed out that the small modification did not prevent the correct reading of the registration. To this are grabbed those who act in this way, such as David Miñana (ANC leader) either Jordi Cabré (writer). The matter is slippery because in article 49.4 of the General Vehicle Regulations the following is specified: “It is prohibited that the registration plates be placed, registered or painted ornaments, signs or other characters other than those indicated in Annex XVIII, including advertising inside them (…) It is prohibited that in the anterior and posterior parts of the vehicles they will be placed unauthorized complementary plates or fix or paint marks or distinctive marks or distinctive Difficult readability or may induce confusion with the regulatory characters of the registration plates “ However, in the Traffic Law, where the serious sanctions (200 euros) are reflected, it is specified that the following compliance is sanctioned: “Failure to comply with the obligation of any driver to verify that vehicle registration plates do not present obstacles that prevent or hinder their reading and identification” Lobeira won when the judge understood that he took part in his appeal that the GZ letters did not prevent or hindered the reading and identification of the registration. 25 years. In the newspaper AraThey point out that this fight for the letters of the registration has been living for a quarter of a century. In 2000, the Spanish registration plates changed. They adapted to the obligation to carry the letter E and the flag of the European Union for the identification of a vehicle outside the country of origin. However, the government of José María Aznar also eliminated the references that existed to the regions. Before the year 2000, Spanish registrations were made up of one or two letters that referred to the province, four numbers and two additional letters. Already then The nationalist parties and the United Left complained about the absence of the autonomic badges. Already at that time some media and independence groups they encouraged this little protest actiondistributing stickers to incorporate into registrations. And in Europe? The truth is that in Europe there is a good handful of countries that have maintained regional badges despite having to change the registration plates to adapt to European regulations. In France, in Germany or in Italy Shields, letters or any other badge that specifies the region of origin of a vehicle are maintained. Photo | Wikinight2 Logan Armstrong and Oriol20 In Xataka | How to know the last registration that has been issued in Spain

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