dollars

Dubai was a mecca for expats. Now they are driving 10 hours and paying thousands of dollars for a flight to escape from there

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Iran has shown it needs very little to upend Middle East air traffic and hit the United Arab Emirates (UAE) where it hurts the most: the image of reliability that has been built for years at an international level, with great benefitsby the way. The wave of attacks launched by Tehran to neighboring countries that facilitate US military deployment in the region, such as Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or the UAE itself, has affected thousands of flights and left a curious image: expats desperate to leave Dubai. There are those who are shelling out large sums to fly on private jets and those who have even driven 10 hours to get to Riyadh and get on a plane there. What has happened? If Tehran wanted to damage the image of stability of neighbors like the UAE, it was completely right. Although the country managed to intercept most of the drones and missiles launched by Iran, the truth is that some of the projectiles reached Dubai, the tourist and financial heart of the region. In practice, this translated into fires in luxury hotels, towers with windows shattered by explosions, a knocked out airport and, above all, considerable reputational damage for a city that has spent years building the image of a safe and comfortable destination for expats. Sums it up beautifully Elizabeth Rayment, a consultant caught off guard by the Iranian attack in Palm Islands: “You never expect to hear missiles flying overhead in Dubai.” Have there been more consequences? Yes. The most serious are undoubtedly the victims. Arab News I was talking yesterday about three deceased and 58 injured in the United Arab Emirates. There are not many if you take into account that the country’s authorities claim to have detected a total of 156 ballistic missiles and several cruise missiles, in addition to more than half a thousand drones, most of them intercepted and destroyed. The other consequence is the chaos generated in air traffic in the Persian Gulf, where some airports and airlines have had to suspend their operations, affecting both customers in the region and others who had planned to pass through Dubai, Abu Dhabi or Qatar to take connecting flights between Europe and Asia. Have many been cancelled? FlightAware estimates that around 2,800 operations and on Sunday more than 3,1500. Added to these are the flights canceled and suspended today by Gulf airlines. For reference, Financial Times assured this morning that more than half of the services that had been booked for today in the region have been cancelled. The Iranian attacks have altered to a greater or lesser extent the programming of Emirates, Etihad Airways and Qatar Airways and the airports of Dubai, Doha and Abu Dhabi, as well as other terminals in Kuwait and Bahrain. The BBC has chatted with travelers who have found flights canceled upon arriving at the terminal. There are those who already talk about the biggest crisis aviation since the pandemic. How do I leave the country? That is the question that expats and tourists have been asking themselves since Saturday. The Iranian attacks have surprised them in the region and now they find that there are few (or no) regular flights that take them to other parts of the globe. Faced with such a scenario, there are those who have armed themselves with patience, those who have drawn on their checkbook and those who have resigned themselves to traveling kilometers and kilometers to reach airports with flights. So I told it a few hours ago FTwhich speaks of “tens of thousands of passengers” stranded in the region and assures that there are Dubai residents who have traveled to neighboring Oman to get a flight. What’s more, some have even driven 10 hours to get on a plane in Riyadh. They don’t have it easy. Most scheduled flights these days between Muscat (Oman) and Europe are reserved. And what do they do? The wealthiest, pull out their checkbook and try their luck with private jet companies. EnterJet, which is dedicated to intermediating between customers and available planes, says that reservations have skyrocketed 40% since the weekend. The problem is that the sector also has its limitations. Its founder explains to Financial Times that “the only viable option” to operate is the Muscat terminal, which makes it difficult to obtain landing slots. Added to this are the difficulties in finding ships. The businessman hopes that as traffic recovers in the Gulf, private flights will increase. Are they very expensive? The situation in the Gulf has caused a curious effect: while the price of airlines such as International Airlines Group or Air France-KLM they resent the price of private services skyrockets. The JetVip agency (Oman) explains to Guardian that a flight to Istanbul on a small Nextant jet costs around 85,000 euros, about three times the normal price. The same media reveals that seats on private charter flights to Moscow are paid for about 20,000 euros… per person. Rates vary depending on the company, but they usually always range in the five digits, or even more. It may sound strange, but we must keep in mind that Donald Trump has hinted that the offensive against Iran could continue even further. “four weeks” and the question remains as to how Tehran will respond. Added to this is that over the last few years the UAE has managed to position itself as a priority destination for thousands of expatsa position largely based on reliability and stability that Tehran has now managed to damage with missiles. Images | Michael Ranzau (Flickr) In Xataka | The arrival of the B-2s to Iran can only mean one thing: the search for the greatest threat to the United States has begun

The Winter Olympics leave Italy with a debt of 7.8 million dollars. Not to organize them, to win them

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Italy can be satisfied with the Winter Olympic Games, held in its own home. It has gone well. Very good, in fact. Thirty medals in total: 10 gold, six silver and 14 bronze. If we talk about metals in general only there are three nations with a better balance, the powerful Norway (41) and the United States (33). The most curious thing is that this balance is so damn good that now Italy will have to assume a debt of almost eight million of dollars. Success also pays. What has happened? That Italy will have to face a debt of 7.8 million dollars for the Winter Olympics that it just hosted. So far nothing extraordinary if we take into account the large investment carried out by the country to host the Olympics and that a large part of these funds were financed by the Executive itself. The curious thing is that those almost eight million have nothing to do with its status as host or the infrastructure necessary for the tests. The debt has another reason: the sporting successes achieved by Italy. Country Golds Silver Bronze Total Norway 18 12 11 41 USA 12 12 9 33 Italy 10 6 14 30 Germany 8 10 8 26 Japan 5 7 12 24 Debts to earn? Yes. The news (and the calculations that support it) has revealed them Forbeswhich on Sunday echoed the peculiar scenario that Italy faces. In his day the Italian National Olympic Committee He decided to encourage his athletes by promising them huge bonuses if they made it onto the podium. To be more precise, he offered 213,000 dollars in exchange for gold, 106,000 for silver and 71,000 for bronze. What has happened? That incentive seems to have worked and has now generated a million-dollar commitment. Its status as host nation opened the doors to automatic qualification for Italy, but its sports teams have demonstrated a more than notable performance: they achieved 30 medals (10 gold, six silver and 14 bronze), ten more than those achieved in 1994which had been his best winter Olympics until now. In fact, in the global ranking it is only surpassed by Norway, with 41 medals, and the USA, with 33. It is also one of the best positioned in gold medals. It occupies third place in the ranking, shared with the Netherlands. Does it only happen to Italy? No. Although it is true that your case is peculiar. For your report Forbes He contacted 37 delegations who confirm having offered incentives to those athletes who reached the podium. Among those groups, Italy was one of the most generous. Only Singapore, Hong Kong, Poland and Kazakhstan surpassed it, which motivated their sports teams with bigger prizes. For reference, Singapore ‘tempted’ its athletes with $787,000 in exchange for gold in individual sports. Hong Kong paid it at $768,000. What happened in Italy? That the claim worked as well for none of those delegations as it did for Italy. According to the calculations of Forbesthe host country is the one that will have to pay the most now: 7.8 million dollars, well above the second on the list, the United States, with just over three million. Third on the list is Switzerland (1.5 million) and fourth is Poland, whose incentives total 1.24 million. In general, the incentive system varies greatly from one country to another. Not only for its rewards. There may also be differences in how these bonuses are financed (with public funds or with sponsors), in the maximum number of bonuses or if the prizes extend beyond the podium, also rewarding athletes who return home with Olympic diplomas. Italy has also decided to offer bonuses to its para-athletes, so the amount it owes to its most successful athletes could increase not much. In this case, the bonus amounts to $118,000 for those who win the gold, 65,000 for those who win the silver and 41,000 for the bronze. Is it the only relevant figure? At all. The bonus debt is curious, but it is by no means the only relevant figure associated with the Winter Olympic Games that Italy has just organized, with distributed headquarters through Milan, Cortina d´Ampezzo, Verona, Valtellina and Val di Fiemme. Another key data is the investment mobilized by the competition. S&P estimates that the total cost of the Winter Games comfortably exceeded 5,000 million euros. A good part of this spending (about 63%) was public and was dedicated mainly to investments in infrastructure. The other fundamental data is the economic return for the country: some estimates speak of the generation of some 5.3 billion eurosa good part of them thanks to tourism boost. Images | Eric Salard (Flickr) and Simone Ferraro/CONI Via | Forbes In Xataka | The Winter Olympics are facing the most unexpected technological doping: penis punctures

Creating a C compiler cost 2 million dollars and took 2 years. Claude Opus 4.6 did it in two weeks for $20,000

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We are facing a technological inflection point. Uo in which software engineering, one of the most complex and demanding technical tasks in history, little by little It is becoming the “killer app” of AI. It is clear that generative AI models are not perfect, but we continue to see extraordinary evolution. The latest example? The C compiler that Claude Opus 4.6 programmed all by himself. what has happened. Nicholas Carlini, researcher at Anthropic, I counted yesterday how “I’ve been experimenting with a new way of monitoring language models that we’ve called “agent teams””. What it has done is ensure that several programming agents work in parallel using the recently released Claude Opus 4.6, and thanks to that it has developed something exceptional with 16 of these agents: a C code compiler. Hello CCC. At Anthropic they have called it Claude’s C Compiler (CCC), and they have published the code, completely generated by Opus 4.6, on GitHub. The project consists of 100,000 lines of Rust code that were generated in two weeks with an API cost of $20,000. And it works: with it they have compiled a functional Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V. Before it was (at least) two million dollars and two years. What this experiment has achieved is to demonstrate how software development can be much cheaper and faster thanks to the use of these agents. Although there is no readily available data on how much time and money compilers cost in the past, the size of these products was enormous, as is the case with Microsoft Visual C++For example. It is difficult to know how much it cost, but it is estimated that it involved 15-20 people working for five years. That’s a lot of man hours and a lot of money to develop and polish that compiler. The estimate of two years and two million dollars may in fact be overly optimistic. another example. Historically, building a C compiler from scratch was considered one of the pinnacles of systems engineering. Not only was in-depth knowledge of processor architecture required, but thousands of man-hours were required to manage optimization and machine code generation. In the 90s the company Cygnus Solutions (clue in compiler development gcc) came to invest more than 250 million in a decade to maintain and port build tools. The real cost was not just in the final lines of code, but in countless hours analyzing CPU and memory patterns to make the resulting binary efficient. Far from perfect, but… Carlini himself explained in the post that this compiler had serious limitations and for example “it does not have a 16-bit x86 compiler which is essential to start Linux outside of “real mode”, and it does not have its own assembler nor its linker“. It is probably far from mature compilers, but even so the achievement remains exceptional and points to that future in which even very complex developments can be supported with AI. They will be expensive, no doubt, but their total development will probably be a fraction of what they cost a few years ago. Cursor already demonstrated it. Before Anthropic launched its AI-programmed compiler, Cursor completed a similar project, combining GPT-5.2 agents into its development platform to create a working browser in a week. In total the AI ​​programmed three million (!) lines of code in Rust, and although it was again far from being perfect or competing with Chrome, it demonstrated the current capacity of these agentic programming systems. Turning point (especially for Anthropic). For the SemiAnalysis experts Claude Code, current leading exponent of this new era of AI-driven programming, is a paradigm shift: “We believe that Claude Code is the turning point for AI agents and is a glimpse into the future of how AI will work.” This prestigious newsletter predicts an exceptional 2026 for Anthropic, and so much so that they believe it will “dramatically surpass OpenAI.” You ask, the AI ​​programs. If you have tried the vibe codingI’m sure you agree with me: AI allows you to do things you would never have dreamed of. What I did a few weeks ago with Immich made it clear to me, and I continue experimenting with AI and programming “custom” things that solve real problems and needs for me. Yes, for now they are for me and therefore they are not large and complex systems that need to be put into production as happens in professional environments, but I am clear that this is being done little by little and more will be done. In fact, both OpenAI and Anthropic have stood out how in the development of their latest models part of the work has been done, paradoxically, by those same models, which have fed back to each other. And the result is in production and used by millions of people. Something is changing. And it’s something big. In Xataka | OpenAI has a problem: Anthropic is succeeding right where the most money is at stake

a stock of billions of dollars

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These are not easy times for the alcohol industry. And not only for the crossfire of the trade war, ups and downs of prices or the apparent loss of interest of Generation Z for drinking. As customers demand less whiskey, cognac and tequila, the giants of the sector have found themselves with a growing stock that some estimates already put at 22 billion dollars. Thousands and thousands of bottles that threaten to strain the finances of large manufacturers and (even worse) unleash a price war that clouds their future. “The accumulation of inventories is unprecedented,” warn. A huge “lake of liquor”. So recently described Financial Times the panorama that the large distillate manufacturers have encountered, giants of the sector that have their warehouses full of bottles that cannot be disposed of. To be exact, the newspaper claims that five of the titans of the industry that are listed (Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Campari, Brown Forman and Rémy Cointreau) have a stock of aged spirits valued at 22 billion. Click on the image to go to the tweet. Breaking schemes. If the figure seems high, it is because it is. Those $22 billion mark the highest level of stock in more than a decade and there are already those who warn that they paint a delicate picture. “The accumulation is unprecedented,” recognize FT Trevor Stirling, analyst at Bernstein. The most extreme case would be that of the French cognac manufacturer Rémy Cointreau, which according to the newspaper accumulates aged stocks worth 1.8 billion euros. Almost double its annual income and close to its global market capitalization. Is there more data? Yes. In recent years the percentage of mature stock over total net sales has increased clearly at Rémy, but also at Brown-Forman, Campari, Diageo and Pernord Ricard. For example, in the case of the British multinational Diageo, this ratio has clearly increased in just a few years: if in the fiscal year of 2022 it represented 34%, it is now 34%. 43%. The problem is not just the big manufacturers of Scotch whiskey, cognac and tequila. Data from the Tequila Regulatory Council show that at the end of 2023 the Mexican industry had a stock of 525 million liters of that popular distilled beverage. The figure (sum of the product in barrels or pending bottling) is almost equivalent to the country’s annual production. “Much more new liquor is distilled than is sold, and the stock begins to accumulate,” duck Bernstein. A ticking bomb. The accumulation of stock is not worrying only because of what it suggests to us about the past and current sales pace. It is especially so because of its implications for the future. With more barrels and bottles gathering dust in the warehouses of the big manufacturers there are those who already fear that a price war would break out, a pulse in the market that would aggravate the situation. For now, FT recalls that there are manufacturers who have chosen to hit the brakes in their factories. This is the case of Diageo, which has production suspended of whiskey in various factories, or from the bourbon producer Jim Bean (Suntory), which has done something similar with its main Kentucky distillery. The problem: often the aged drinks sector works for several years, so pausing its production today can compromise the supply in five years or a decade. What is the reason? To understand the current stock of the industry, it is necessary to understand several keys. For example, the fluctuations in demand in recent years and the forecasts with which manufacturers have worked. At the beginning of the pandemic, the sector registered an increase of distillate consumption in the US, which led to an increase in production. After the health crisis and with inflation as a backdrop, however, the market returned to normal. What’s more, the industry had to deal with new challenges that a priori have little to do with its business. The first is the trade war unleashed last year, a scenario in which the alcohol industry was not foreign. In fact, if Jim Bean considered suspending production at his main distillery it was precisely due to the increase in stock and the uncertainty generated by tariffs. Another key factor is that alcohol consumption (at least of certain types of alcohol) appears to be moderating as more people focus on their physical health and take weight loss medications, such as Wegovy or Ozempic. It is nothing exceptional if you take into account that in 2023 a study Walmart already warned that consumption of Ozempic was reducing food sales. The big question. Beyond these current factors, a key question for the industry hovers: Are we consuming less alcohol in general? Do we drink less than our parents and grandparents? And will the new generations on whom the sector will have to rely on in a couple of decades drink less? There is data that suggests this. The Our World in Data platform has developed a graph on per capita consumption that reflects that almost all the countries analyzed consume less alcohol than a few decades ago. It is not the only study that points in that direction. Another recent one from Gallup confirms that in the US consumption has fallen to its lowest level since at least 1930 and OECD tables They also show that many of their countries (not all) have seen how the intake of liters per person per year decreased between 2013 and 2023. There are those who already warns that the trend does not look like it will stop, fully affecting to the accounts of the distillate industry. Images | Paolo Bendandi (Unsplash), OECD and Our World in Data In Xataka | There is an age at which we should stop drinking alcohol forever. Neuroscience is clear why

Their fortunes set a new record, growing by 2.2 billion dollars

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While millions of workers suffered massive layoffs, budget cuts and uncertain tariffs of the Trump administration, the 500 largest fortunes on the planet added a new record, adding 2.2 trillion dollars to their combined wealth, which already rises to 11.9 trillion dollars. However, even in this bullish context, there are figures in which this growth has been especially striking. The most notable, of course, the growth of the fortune of the richest person in the world. His assets have increased by no less than $358 billion in just 12 months. Record growth. He Bloomberg Millionaires Index recorded the largest annual increase in wealth in history for the 500 largest fortunes in the world. No less than 2.2 trillion dollars in 2025. If we look for someone responsible for this meteoric growth, we find some important clues in the profitability of the S&P 500 index, which has reached 17% thanks to the behavior of the 7 Magnificentas well as in the gold revaluation and other raw materials. Precisely the good stock market performance of the Big Tech It is responsible for the fact that 23% of those profits were concentrated in only eight individuals who, (oh, coincidence) are its founders or main directors. As and how they point from Bloombergthe total assets of those 500 largest fortunes in the world reached $11.9 trillion in 2025, surpassing any previous record. Millionaires among millionaires. But when it comes to naming names, Elon Musk is one of the most notable. The CEO of Tesla far led the level of profits, surpassing for the first time the ceiling of 600 billion dollars thanks to SpaceX valuation before its IPO. His fortune went from 421.2 billion in January up to the 788.1 billion dollars that are currently attributed to it. That implies an increase of 87.1% in his assets in just one year. On the other hand, Larry Ellison added 57.7 billion to his fortune for the role of Oracle in the development of AI, leaving its founder with a fortune of $231 billion. For its part, the evolution of other regular millionaires in the Top 10 with the highest fortunes, such as Jeff Bezos, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg, linked their increase in wealth to the performance of their companies on the stock market. Larry Page and his founding partner of Google, Sergei Brin, they escalated quickly in the heat of the last Gemini trading moveswhile Amazon and Goal suffered to stay in the mix.​ Impact on billionaires. Beyond the increase in assets of the ultra-rich participants in the race for AI, the wealth boom among billionaires has been a global phenomenon, registering growth of more than 16% in 2025, three times the average of the last five years, as noted the report from Oxfam Intermón. This jump, quantified at about 2.5 trillion dollars, is equivalent to the assets of 4.1 billion people, the poorest half of the planet. On the other hand, the report focuses on the increase in the number of billionaires, that is, those people with assets greater than 1,000 million dollars. For the first time, there were more than 3,000 billionaires in the world, which is further proof of the trend towards the concentration of resources in a few hands. Wealth in Spain. 2025 was also a year of growth for millionaires in Spain. In fact, for the first time there is 32 billionaires in Spainmostly men and with an average of age over 80 years. In 2024, this select club only had 27 members. Their combined wealth is estimated at 197.5 billion euros, the maximum recorded. This record represents an increase of 28.3 billion compared to 2024, which implies a real growth of 13.6%, more than four times the forecast for the national economy of 2.9%.​ However, there is one figure that accounts for a good part of that total amount: Amancio Ortegawith a fortune estimated at more than $142.6 billion. “This means that Spanish billionaires earned on average more than 77 million euros a day,” indicate the authors of the report from Oxfam Intermón. In Xataka | The emir of Qatar travels in a private jet so big it helped upgrade Sardinia airport Image | Flickr (Oracle, Gage Skidmore), GTRES

25 million dollars and a commitment to Greenland

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Ironies of history, it is more likely that Donald Trump’s wish incorporating Greenland into the United States will be more surprising to us, the citizens of 2026, than to those of a century ago. The reason: by then Americans and Danes were more than used to reading news about the sale of overseas territory from the European kingdom to Washington. Of course, more than a century ago the focus was not on Greenland, but on much warmer waters and with a strategic value that the Arctic island completely lacked at that time. The land in dispute was Virgin Islands. Nothing new under the sun. The protagonists, the context, even the tone change, but not the background. Although the Europeans of 2026 will be shocked expansionist plans of Trump and his desire to seize Greenland from Denmark (well through a “purchase”pulling a checkbook, or asserting its military power) the truth is that it is not the first time that both countries have been involved in a dispute for Danish territory to remain under American control. It actually happened not so long agobetween the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, although the focus at that time was on the warm waters of the Caribbean. The Danish Western Islands. To understand it you have to travel to the other end of the Atlantic and go back to late 17th centurywhen Denmark took control of a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. Over time its domain extended to the insulas of Saint John, Saint Thomas, Saint Croix and dozens of islets and cays that formed what was called Danish Western Islands. Although the archipelago in question was thousands of kilometers from Copenhagen, for a time its domain represented a lucrative business based on two big legs: slaves and sugar plantations. From good business to heavy burden. That changed over time. In 1848 the territory lived a revolt which ended up leading to the abolition of slavery in the colony, which added to other economic factors (such as the fall in the price of sugar) made the archipelago less attractive. At least in the eyes of the metropolis, which continued to face the costs of its administration. That was the situation when in 1867 the US Secretary of State, William H. Sewardknocked on the door of Denmark interested in the ownership of the islands. A long tug of war. “After the Civil War it was time to consider strategic conditions in the Caribbean and Seward focused on both the annexation of Mexico and possible expansion into the Caribbean,” explains to BBC the historian Hans Christian Berg. In principle, the winds were favorable for Washington: Denmark’s power was declining and the US faced a new stage, convinced that it had to reaffirm its regional power and erase European influence. For a time the pact to acquire the Danish Western Islands seemed to go ahead, crystallizing in a treaty that contemplated the sale in exchange for 7.5 million of dollars in gold. However, both parties were left wanting. The agreement ended up foundering in the US Senate. The reason actually had little (or nothing) to do with the Virgin Islands. The controversy over the recent purchase of Alaska and Seward’s support for the president Andrew Johnson took their toll on the operation with Denmark, which did not achieve the necessary political support. It wouldn’t be the first time. In 1900 both countries signed a new treaty which also went to waste when it did not obtain the endorsement of the Danish Upper House. It took a global conflagration for that to change. The fateful RMS Lusitania. Things changed at the beginning of the 20th century, during the First World War. To be more precise (and as you recognize the US State Department itself) the turning point was the wreck of the RMS Lusitaniaa British ship that was torpedoed by a German U-Boat submarine while traveling from New York to Liverpool. That episode not only influenced American public opinion regarding the First World War, it also made it understand how much was at stake in controlling the Caribbean Sea. “The purchase of the Danish West Indies once again became an important issue in US foreign policy. The president W.Wilson and Secretary of State Lansing feared that the German Government might annex Denmark, in which case the Germans could secure the West Indies as a naval or submarine base from which to launch attacks against shipping in the Caribbean and Atlantic,” explains the US Department of State Archive. By hook or by crook. No sooner said than done. In 1915 Lansing sounded out Denmark to facilitate (once again) the purchase of the Caribbean archipelago. The new attempt did not go down well in the European metropolis, leading Washington to adopt a tone reminiscent of that assumed by Donald Trump today: “Concerned by recent events and Danish reluctance, Lansing suggested that if Denmark was not willing to sell, the US could occupy the islands to avoid their confiscation by Germany,” remember the file. It was enough for Copenhagen to agree to the sale, which crystallized in a treaty signed in New York in August 1916. The agreement received the blessing of the Lower Houses of both countries and months later it was submitted to a Danish plebiscite (note, not in the Danish Virgin Islands, affected by the decision). Once all the procedures were closed and with the approval of Cristian X, the archipelago was under the control of Washington in March 1917. To this day the renowned US Virgin Islands remain a “unincorporated territory” from the USA. 25 million dollars… and something more. In exchange, the US paid Denmark 25 million dollars in gold coins, which would be equivalent, according to Bloomberg estimatesto 630 million today. In the last days there are who has remembered However, another point of the pact signed by Copenhagen and Washington. As remember the BBCthe US promised not to interfere with Denmark extending “its political and economic interests” … Read more

eight trillion dollars in assets

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From politics to finance. If anything has become clear during Donald Trump’s first year in the White House, it is how blurred the separations (if there are any) between geopolitics, defense, economics and taxation are for him. He made it clear shortly after assuming his second term, with the round of tariffs which followed what he baptized as “Liberation Day.” And it has become clear again now with the threats of liens to European countries on account of the tensions created around Greenland, an island that the Republican wants to incorporate to the USA. Against this backdrop, Brussels is asking what response the EU should (can) offer. There is talk of activating tariffs worth 93 billion to punish American companies, to dust off the so-called “commercial bazooka”…and even a financial ‘nuclear bomb’ with which Brussels could pressure Trump, one that amounts to eight trillion of dollars. What has happened? That Trump is not willing to give in to Greenland. And he did not like it one bit that a delegation of eight European countries (and colleagues in NATO) sent a small group of soldiers to the Arctic island to guarantee its defense. The Republican weekend threatened to punish them to all (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom) true to its style: imposing tariffs on them. The new rates will focus on commercial exports to the US and would be activated on February 1 with a value of 10%, although the idea is to raise them to 25% in June if the outlook does not change in Greenland. The message is clear: the Republican wants the Stars and Stripes flag to fly in Greenland, regardless of who he is, be it Denmark, the greenlanders themselves or other European nations with which it shares an alliance in NATO. “We need Greenland for national security reasons,” ditch the republican. “He will not allow himself to be blackmailed”. Trump threatening tariffs is nothing new. In fact, one of his first star measures shortly after returning to the White House (just a year ago) was to announce a wide range of rates for an even broader list of nations, including the EU. What is more shocking is that it encounters the manifest anger that the EU has shown on this occasion. “Europe will not allow itself to be blackmailed,” he warned shortly after from Trump’s announcement Mette FrederiksenPrime Minister of Denmark. Similar messages (more or less emphatically) have been launched by Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer or even the leaders of Norway and Finland, Alexander Stubb, who on other occasions has praised the American for his international policy. Not only the leaders have spoken out. Community parties have also done it, which they seem willing to go beyond rhetoric. How to respond to Trump? That is the debate that has been flying over Europe since the weekend. Bloomberg assures that representatives of the 27 EU countries met yesterday precisely to discuss solutions. This week a new summit will be held with the same objective: to discuss retaliation. For now, the European People’s Party (among other formations) has shown in favor to leave in the air the trade pact reached in the summer with Washington. It talks about restrict access of North American companies to the EU market and imposing tariffs on the US worth 93 billion of euros. all this on the eve of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. The clearest and most resounding voice has probably been that of Macron, who has encouraged for the EU to activate its anti-coercive instrument, known as the community “trade bazooka”, which (if applied) could complicate US access to EU markets. Brussels itself clarify that this tool allows it to “launch countermeasures against a non-member country, including a wide range of restrictions related to trade, investment and financing.” These are big words if we take into account that in 2024 transatlantic trade in goods and services between the EU and the US exceeded 1.68 billion of euros. “The biggest lender”. In recent days, another course of action has circulated, much more complex (and emphatic) that focuses on another key link between both territories: the enormous amount of US assets in the hands of Europeans. In a report released yesterday, George Saravelos of Deutsche Bank AG, I remembered that Europe is the largest lender to the US. To be more precise, their countries hoard eight trillion dollars in bonds and stocks. For reference, it assumes almost double than the rest of the world as a whole. “Enjoys influence”. He is not the only one who has slipped that figure. In another report published today by ING Think, Carsten Brzeski and Bert Colijn recall that in recent days there has been talk of “the exposure” of the US to investors on the other side of the pond. “European countries own $8 trillion in US bonds and stocks, making Europe by far the largest US lender. Not only does this illustrate the interdependence between the regions, but Europe also enjoys influence over the US.” Why is it important? Financial Times even goes further and estimates, using data from the Federal Reserve, that the total value of US financial assets in the hands of NATO countries in Europe reaches 12.6 trillion dollars. Savarelos slips that this figure represents a “weakness” of the US that makes it “dependent on others to pay its bills through large external deficits,” and cast a reflection: “In a context where the geoeconomic stability of the Western alliance is seriously disturbed, it is not clear why the Europeans would be so willing to assume this role.” “Danish pension funds were among the first to repatriate money and reduce their exposure to the dollar a year ago. With dollar exposure still very high in Europe, the events of recent days could further drive dollar rebalancing,” duck the analyst. The question therefore is… Does the EU have a secret weapon, a pressure tool in its favor against Trump? Could Europe embark on “an … Read more

one where we pay 20 dollars a month (if we pay) and another where companies pay up to 200 per employee

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The AI ​​industry is forking into two paths. They are non-binary and actors can be in both at the same time, but it was expected that we would see this branching: Products aimed at the general consumer. ChatGPT wins there and Gemini is growing lately. Tools for companies. Gemini and Copilot from Microsoft stand out more there, but Anthropic is growing a lot thanks to Claude Code. This division also marks something else: who is going to capture the real economic value of AI. Why is it important. Companies pay up to $200 per month per employee for the best model. ChatGPT “domestic” users, one tenth. And in business environments, the difference between the best and the second best matters a lot. At least much more than in domestic environments. Yao Shunyu, who worked at OpenAI and is now at Tencent, sums it up: “If your salary is $200,000 and you have 10 tasks a day, an excellent model does eight or nine. A weaker model does five or six. And when you don’t know what those five or six are, you waste time monitoring it.” according to the newsletter ChinaTalk. The contrast. “If you compare the Today’s ChatGPT with the one from a year agothere’s really no perceptible difference,” Yao points out. “On the other hand, AI-assisted programming has already changed the entire coding industry. “People no longer write code, they talk to their computer in natural language.” Most ordinary people still use ChatGPT as a kind of enhanced search engine. In companies, more intelligence directly means more productivity with a clear economic value. Between the lines. Anthropic has bet everything on this. Claude Code has changed the way developers work. And now just launched Coworkwhich seeks to bring that same idea to office workers, outside of programming. They are not going after occasional users: they want entire teams that depend on AI to work. OpenAI dominates in adoption figures and brand recognition, but it has a problem: many users who pay little on average. Companies are increasingly looking for tools that truly improve productivity. The threat. In the business market, whoever has the best model wins. Companies will always pay for number one if its price is comparable to the rest of the proposals. In consumption, something decent is enough and the price sensitivity is greater. And OpenAI needs a lot of money. Training and operating these models costs a lot. The consumer market has a fairly low profitability ceiling, and that is why they seek to shore it up with advertising revenue and pointing towards those of affiliation. And now what. This year we will see it clearly: OpenAI needs to prove that its enterprise agents are worth the money. Anthropic will continue to refine its position in code and productivity. Google is a little late but has hit the nail on the head with Gemini 3. At the end of the year we will know if OpenAI’s generalist strategy works or if the AI ​​business ends up divided between those who dominate the office and those who dominate the couch. In Xataka | OpenAI fully enters health for a simple reason: ChatGPT is already our front-line doctor (although we don’t want to admit it) Featured image | Anthropic, OpenAI, Xataka

A Harry Potter fan fiction was so successful that it changed the names of its protagonists. And thanks to this he earned 3 million dollars

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A Harry Potter fanfic has just become one of the most successful publishing releases of the year. ‘Alchemised‘, SenLinYu’s debut novel, sold 300,000 copies during its first week in bookstores and reached number one on The New York Times bestseller list. But the real impact came days before its publication, when Legendary Entertainment paid more than $3 million for the film rights, setting a record for a debut novel. How it was done. The story behind the book is as notable as its figures: ‘Alchemised’ was originally titled ‘Manacled’, and was a fanfiction that mixed the universe of harry potter with ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ by Margaret Atwood, focusing on the relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy. Over 18 months, SenLinYu transformed his viral story (which racked up millions of reads on the fanfictions Archive of Our Own) in a completely original work, eliminating all traces of intellectual property of JK Rowling and Atwood of the text, but trying to preserve the core of the narrative. The result: Favorite Debut Novel of 2025 at the Goodreads Choice Awards. What is it about? Alchemised follows Helena Marino, an alchemist and healer who awakens after 14 months as a prisoner of war of the necromancers, the victorious side in a devastating civil war. Helena discovers that her mind has been magically altered, erasing crucial memories from a part of her life she doesn’t even remember owning. The book has a violent and dark approach, and that is why SenLinYu rejects the “romance” label despite the love component: “I didn’t write this book with the idea that it would be seen as aspirational.”he states. The author’s past. The appeal of the book lies precisely in that uncompromising darkness. SenLinYu, of Japanese descent, injects into her fantasy elements based on the real horrors of war (her maternal grandmother was in American concentration camps during World War II) and has sought to recover ignored historical perspectives, particularly the experiences of Soviet women on the Eastern Front. That combination of epic fantasy and anti-war criticism has connected with readers who seek more mature and disturbing narratives than those usual in the genre. The paradigmatic case. The path of fanfiction The publishing phenomenon has an inescapable antecedent: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’. In 2009, EL James began publishing chapters of ‘Master of the Universe’ on Fanfiction.netreimagining the relationship between Edward Cullen and Bella Swan from ‘Twilight’, without vampires but with a domineering billionaire. Reader reaction was so positive that James self-published the story in 2011 after removing explicit references to Stephenie Meyer’s saga and renaming the protagonists Christian Gray and Anastasia Steele. The leap came in March 2012, when Random House acquired the rights of the novel in a seven-figure contract. The result was more than 150 million copies sold globally and a film trilogy that grossed $1.3 billion at the global box office. Even then Jennifer Bergstrom, executive at Simon & Schuster, declared that “the fanfiction It has definitely become part of what we publish. This is changing the industry at a time when traditional publishing needs it most.” For the first time, major publishers were publicly acknowledging that online communities of amateur writers were a legitimate talent pool. Other successes. The success of ‘Fifty Shades’ was not an isolated case. Anna Todd wrote a story about One Direction’s Harry Styles on Wattpad in 2013, publishing it in serial format under the title ‘After’. The story accumulated more than 1,000 million readings on the platform before Simon & Schuster offered him a contract with which sold more than 10 million copies and generated five movies. More recently, Ali Hazelwood transformed her fanfiction of Star Wars centered on Rey and Kylo Ren in ‘The Love Hypothesis’, which It will soon be adapted to film. The journey here. This transformation of fanfiction into a bestseller would not have been possible without the digital ecosystem that supports it. Archive of Our Own It houses more than 13 million works and has become the most important archive of transformative writing. ‘Manacled’ by SenLinYu It was the second most read story in the entire history of the web when it was removed in January 2025, having accumulated more than 10 million views and 84,000 kudos (the equivalent of “likes”). This phenomenon has forced the traditional publishing industry to rethink its methods of attracting talent. Literary agents and editors now systematically scour Wattpad, Archive of Our Own, and Fanfiction.net, identifying high-impact stories before offering contracts. Removing references to other people’s intellectual property is now a standardized process, and thanks to this, trends such as videos on ‘Manacled’ accumulated millions of views years before ‘Alchemised’ hit bookstores. A whole tide of public before the official publication of the book. In Xataka | JK Rowling against fandom: How the Harry Potter universe lost its magic

A Bugatti Mistral costs five million dollars. Launching it includes convincing the police to organize a race

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It’s not every day that you can brand new a Bugatti Mistrala supercar valued at more than five million and that the CEO of Bugatti himself come deliver it to you in person. However, it is not so common that for this delivery, the CEO has to convince the police that it is a good idea to cut off one of Miami’s coastal roads to traffic to debut the supercar by racing between the Mistral and a custom-built sports yacht for the same owner. Although it may seem very bizarre, these things can happen when you are millionaire enough. A very particular premiere in Miami The delivery of a Bugatti Mistral is never a routine event. It’s a exclusive supercar of which only 99 units were manufactured that were they sold the same day that was put up for sale. However, when you pay five million euros for one of these exclusive jewels, the least you expect is that the CEO of Bugatti himself will come to deliver it to you in person. According to published Luxury Launchesthat’s what happened to Anthony Hsieh, a millionaire from Miami who received the exclusive unit of this supercar. The staging, far from being limited to a simple presentation in the dealer who had sold it to himincluded an unusual proposal: a race in front of the sea competing head to head with one of the exclusive yachts for sport fishing that Hsieh’s company builds. Bugatti’s CEO also joins in Mate Rimac, founder of the brand Rimac supercarscurrent CEO of Bugatti and a true speed enthusiast, did not want to miss the race and got so involved that he finally ended up offering to drive the Mistral in its race against the yacht. Obviously, the CEO wasn’t going to risk getting pulled over by the police or having the car’s owner fined, so he opted to convince Miami traffic authorities to close one of Miami’s busy coastal roads for the race, and This is how he told it on his networks social. A routine delivery for a Bugatti. Bugatti Mistral W16 engine The Bugatti Mistral uses the brand’s legendary W16 engine, an engineering gem what brand the end of an era for the brand since this is the last production model that will carry this 8-liter, 4-turbo block that delivers a power of 1,600 hp. Such a beast catapults the Mistral at a speed above 453 km/h. Her opponent was not exactly a cruising yacht. It is about the Badco 50 Gameboata boat designed for sport fishing of tuna and billfish (a large species similar to swordfish) and therefore must have agile and powerful engines that allow it to navigate at speeds of up to 44 knots. Like the Bugatti, the Badco 50 are customized to the owner’s taste with materials of the highest quality and resistance. Saying that the Badco 50 is a simple fishing boat is like saying that the Mistral is just a car. Furthermore, it so happens that the company that manufactures the Badco 50 is Bad Company Fishing Adventures, It is owned by the millionaire who bought the Mistral, so organizing this race, which as you can see in the video that was recordedis more symbolic than real, the brand sought to turn the delivery of the supercar into an unrepeatable experience for its customer. It’s not every day that the head of a supercar brand makes you luxury chauffeur in the car that has just been delivered to you and all followed by a police escort. If at this point you are still wondering who was the overall winner of the racethe answer is more than obvious: Mate Rimac, and not just by driving the car fasterbut because he took in his pocket the five million that the Bugatti Mistral costs and the absolute loyalty of a customer who will never again receive a car like Bugatti did with his Mistral. In Xataka | Bugatti has discovered that millionaires no longer want to buy luxury cars: they want to buy unique works of art Image | Bad Company Fishing Adventures

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