France

France has been determined to rob Spain of its position as a data center power in Europe

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The French country has hit the table in its ambition to become a technological benchmark in Europe. He agreement reached between Emmanuel Macron and Masayoshi Son (CEO of SoftBank) aims to deploy up to 5 GW of computing capacity for AI data centers in northern France. This movement competes with all the projects that are underway in Spain, one of the countries that until now had attracted the greatest interest from hyperscalers. The problem is that neither France nor Spain will gain much from these initiatives. Nuclear counterattack. France has taken advantage your energy network —with a clear prominence of its nuclear power plants— to attract AI supercomputing projects. The SoftBank project will start in the Hauts-de-France region with an initial phase of 45 billion euros to build data centers in regions such as Dunkirk. In this first phase we want to achieve that the total capacity rise to 3.1 GW in 2031followed by a second phase that could reach 5 GW. Spain, data center paradise. Faced with this French movement, Spain has been closing agreements in that same area for months. It totals more than 22,000 million euros in recently announced projects. Giants like AWS (15.7 billion in Aragon), Microsoft (more than 7,000 million) and Blackstone have chosen our country to create these data centers. The Spanish advantage is its renewable energy productionwhich has attracted that type of investment. The harsh reality: Europe (probably) loses. Although both this announcement and those made in Spain are very striking, the reality for the Old Continent is quite stark. The data centers in Spain are not Spanish, and those in France are not French either. Europe is becoming the powerhouse for foreign multinationals that invest here because it suits them strategically. Energy resources are great for Microsoft, Amazon, Meta or Softbank, but the real benefit of this computing does not remain in Europe. The accounts. There is a clear difference between the strategies of Spain and France. Spanish soil is filled with hyperscalers like AWS or Microsoft that build, operate their own clouds and then control the flow completely. In the case of France, the initiative depends on a Japanese conglomerate allied with sovereign funds from the Middle East. SoftBank operates here more like a real estate developer– Create the data center and then rent it to third parties. Source: FT. Sovereignty, little. Emmanuel Macron and Pedro Sánchez can sell the message that these projects promote this ambition to have sovereign AI. The problem is that these data centers are simply delegations of big technology companies taking advantage of the advantages offered by their European partners. There may be options in the French project for the country to boost its AI companies —Mistral is the clear example—, but the truth is that these movements do little to help this objective of avoiding the independence of foreign technology companies. Rather they make the situation worse. The other European rivals. Europe’s traditional technology markets, grouped under the acronym FLAP-D (Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Dublin) are giving way to projects in other countries like France or Spain. There are also other protagonists in this new map of decentralized infrastructures: the Nordic countries are also interesting for their cold climates, ideal for helping to cool these centers. The real bottleneck. Beyond the billions of euros that are on the table, the big battle in the coming years will be access to hardware components, especially now that the memory crisis has made everything significantly more expensive. Demand far exceeds supply and it does not seem that this imbalance will be resolved soon, so all of these initiatives could suffer delays and changes in their final costs. In Xataka | Mistral does not generate hype, it is a discreet AI, it does not boost the shares of any company, but it already makes more money than Grok

In the battle for high speed in Italy, someone has passed Renfe on the right. Someone called France

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SNCF will compete for the Italian high speed network from September 2027. For a few weeks now, the French company has had the go-ahead to operate on the Italian network and stand up to the state company Trenitalia and the private company Italo. With this movement, France once again gets ahead of Renfe. Although it’s not all bad news. What do we know? The SCNF company, the public railway entity in France, will compete for high speed on Italian soil from September 2027. At least, those are the deadlines according to their latest announcement which specifies that the corridors they can use have already been assigned. In his statementSCNF explains that its trains will offer up to 13 round-trip services on the Turin – Naples and Turin – Venice corridors. The company boasts that this new activity on the lines will result in the creation of 4,000 jobs with the addition of direct and indirect workers. What does it offer? With its proposal, the French company ensures that the Italian railways 15 TGV M trains will be available. They are Alstom trains that the company has not yet been able to test because deliveries have been delayed in recent months. They hope to have them in operation first in France starting next July on the Paris-Lyon-Marseille line. The trains have had to be modified slightly since much of the Italian high speed It does not allow driving at more than 200 km/h. The company will offer four round trips on the Turin-Venice and nine on the Turin-Naples. This last corridor is key because it passes through cities like Milan, Florence and Rome, which is undoubtedly a very juicy cake for a company that intends to gain volume in the coming years. A tough battle. SCNF’s landing comes after a battle in the courts. They explain in the French media that Italy has tried to torpedo the company’s attempts to compete with Trenitalia and Italo. According to these media, the Italian subsidiary of the company has been in an open battle since 2021 with Italian Railway Rete (RFI) that manages the Italian roads, would be the Italian Adif. After numerous disagreements, the Italian subsidiary of the French company ended up denouncing RFI to AGCM, the body in charge of ensuring free competition in the transalpine country. Finally, this body has given the approval so that SCNF can compete with local companies on its roads. To compete, the French company will once again bet on offering lower prices and they assure that the medium-term objective is to gain 15% market share. In the French mediain fact, Spain is pointed out as the example model that SCNF wants to implement in the Italian country, trying to maximize trips on already consolidated routes. And Renfe? Renfe also has its own plans in Italy and although it has not been officially confirmed that it wants to make the leap to high speed, the truth is that the Spanish company has been taking positions that give us an idea of ​​the extent to which it wants to offer this service. And it is that Renfe bought 33% of Arenaways in 2024an Italian company that provides railway services. Of the rest of the shareholders, the Spanish Serena Industrial Partners It also has 33% so most of it is Spanish. This purchase has allowed Renfe to operate the Cuneo-Saluzzo-Savigliano regional line from 2025 and will do the same with the Ceva-Ormea line when the works are completed. But, furthermore, in Expansion They already pointed out then that the company has certifications to operate throughout the Italian network, which should facilitate the arrival of Renfe to the high-speed corridors. Spain-France-Italy. The triangle formed by Spain, Italy and France is leaving us with an intense battle for European high-speed services. In our country, the roads have been opened to Ouigo (SCNF) and Iryo (Trenitalia) and the battle has even reached the use of workshops. In Italy there has been an attempt to torpedo the entry of SCNF but after four years of fighting, the French company has ended up receiving the go-ahead to take its trains to compete on the Italian expressways. Renfe, at the moment, has not confirmed plans to take this step and only operates on regional trains. In France, Renfe has complained that the neighboring country is creating innumerable obstacles to reaching Paris, a key objective when it comes to offering a profitable high-speed service to the north of the Pyrenees. Trenitalia, however, Yes, it has managed to operate in France connecting Paris with its large local cities. Leisurely. All in all, it must be taken into account that Renfe’s forays abroad are not reaping bad results as far as its accounts are concerned. Last year he managed to invoice 20 million euros with the AVE of Meccawhere it moved 10 million passengers, like main promoter of Renfe International Projects. There, Renfe has high-speed services running but its projects outside our borders They are varied. It operates, for example, on the regional train network of the Czech Republic and on Rail Baltica (Latvia and Estonia) and It is also part of what is known as the Mayan Train. Photo | Fernando Meloni and Phil Richards In Xataka | There is a fight between the railway operators to get the best drivers and Renfe is winning it

In 1802 someone proposed to Napoleon to unite France with England. Today the Eurotunnel invoices more than 1,000 million a year

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“Bonjour mon ami,” said Graham Fagg. “Welcome to France”, replies Philippe Cozette. With these words an Englishman and a Frenchman greet each other. Both are operators of one of the most ambitious and spectacular infrastructures in the world. France and the United Kingdom have just been united by land. Specifically, the land lies 50 meters below the seabed. It is December 1, 1990 and the workers have found themselves in their excavation operations. Since work began in December 1987, it is the most exciting moment in the history of the Channel Tunnel. finally united The Eurotunnel is a 50.5 km excavation that since 1994 has connected buses and trains between the United Kingdom and France. The work runs for 38 kilometers under the sea and remains, to this day, the only land connection between the United Kingdom and Europe. More than 30 years after it was launched, the Channel Tunnel has a turnover of more than 1 billion euros a year. It is the magic figure that confirms why the investment has not only been profitable, but also why it is a project that has been talked about for hundreds of years. They explain in Reuters That the first time someone imagined a tunnel similar to the current one was 1751. The Frenchman Nicolas Desmarets, a French geologist, was the first to imagine the construction of a tunnel but no one bought the idea. Yes it would, they explain in MotorpassionNapoleon Bonaparte in 1802 when he gave his support to a project to dig a tunnel to the United Kingdom and launch a passage for horse-drawn carriages by the light of oil lamps. Evidently the project never went beyond paper because, in fact, throughout the 19th century projections were being made of what this step would be like to the point that, in 1866, the British engineer Henry Marc Brunel showed that the soil under water was composed of chalk (a type of limestone rock) that allowed drilling into the soil. In fact, these studies led him to create the gravity coring system, a working method that is still used today. However, it would not be until 1880 when the first steps on the ground would be taken. Progress that was initially successful but was completely suspended in 1883 when the works had already begun to enter the underwater zone. The reason given by the United Kingdom is that a tunnel could facilitate a potential invasion of the country from the continent. The argument carried so much weight that the project was frozen for almost a century. Winston Churchill advocated for it before the Second World War but no serious work was ever carried out to bring it forward. In fact, a system of hatches was proposed that, in the event of an emergency situation, would allow the tunnel to be flooded in case of fear of an invasion. This did not convince the military officials and the project remained suspended. It was not until the 1970s that the project was discussed again in much more serious terms. Along the way, all kinds of solutions had been proposed, including the possibility of creating an isthmus and that, through canals, allow ships to pass at the same time. In the end, the most logical solution was chosen: a railway tunnel between the United Kingdom and France. The agreement began to take shape in 1964 when technical studies began to make it viable. However, it would not be until 10 years later when work began. Some works that, in fact, barely lasted because the United Kingdom soon abandoned them due to the enormous cost of the project. Yet, The Eurotunnel had already started. And on January 20, 1986, François Mitterrand, on the French side, and Margaret Thatcher, for the British, announced the definitive construction of the tunnel. The decision maintained the idea of ​​previous decades of linking both countries with trains. Trains that, at the same time, allowed the transport of vehicles such as private cars. Thus, the tunnel now allows the transit of people with the one known as Eurostar, whose passengers travel by train, and a second train that allows the transfer of vehicles. It works through a system of three tunnels. Two of them perform round trip functions and the third is designed for their maintenance. The work, which began operating in 1994, now allows the passage of people and vehicles (including trucks) and is managed by Getlink (which was previously called Group Eurotunnel), a company that has the concession of exploitation by both countries as stated in the Treaty of Canterbury. This company benefits from the concession thanks to the passage of people and vehicles but also due to the interconnection of electrical energy on both sides of it. In fact, in 2025 turnover was close to 1.6 billion euros but almost 400 million euros came from Eleclink (the electrical interconnection between both countries) and Europorte (freight transport), the other two businesses that the company has associated with the exploitation of infrastructure. Photo | opihuck and Tambo on Wikimedia In Xataka | 125 kilometers of water separate 140 million inhabitants. China is going to solve it with a mega railway tunnel

France wants to replace Windows with Linux. Extremadura and Munich tried it before, and both failed

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On April 8, 20226, the French Digital Interministerial Directorate (DINUM) advertisement that will migrate your jobs from Windows to Linux. He ordered all ministries to present a plan by the fall with the aim of eliminating dependencies on non-European software. The announcement in fact goes beyond changing Windows for Linux: it also affects collaborative tools, antivirus, AI, databases, virtualization or telecommunications. It is, on paper, the largest operation to replace proprietary software with free software that a Western State has ever attempted. And if the history of this type of projects teaches us anything, it is that many have ended in failure. French sovereignty. It is not that France is a lover of free software; What has happened is that the relationship with the United States has changed. Trump’s tariffs accelerated a debate that had been postponed for years: To what extent is it sustainable to depend on the US digital infrastructure? French companies like OVHCloud and Scaleway did not stop growing in 2025, but France has already taken some previous steps recently. In January 2026, announced the plan to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own video conferencing platform, called Visiowith the aim that its 2.5 million employees would use it. At the moment 40,000 of them are using it, and it remains to be seen if the deployment ends up being total. This was LinEx, the Linux distribution derived from Debian that was used in public organizations in Extremadura. Spain tried it in 2002. The Junta de Extremadura is one of the most famous cases of attempted replace Windows with Linux in public administration. In 2001 it launched LinEx, a Linux distribution based on Debian, and tried to implement it massively in the educational environment and in the health system of the autonomous community. That was imitated in other Spanish regions: Andalusia had Guadalinex, Valencia had LliureX, Madrid had MAX, Galicia had Galinux, Catalonia had Linkat and Castilla La Mancha had Molinux. All of these projects proposed an alternative to the absolute dominance of Windows on the desktops of public officials, and they all failed, but the biggest failure was the one that promised the most: that of LinEx. LinEx myths and realities. Although this distribution worked reasonably in the aforementioned education and health environments, it never fully penetrated the general public administration of the Autonomous Community. In 2011 the project was transferred to a state foundation due to budget cuts and by then only 1% of positions of the Extremaduran autonomous administration used free software. The final blow came when SAP, which managed the community’s medical records system, decided to stop supporting Linux. That made this body return to Windows, and in fact in 2024 the Board formally eliminated the obligation to use gnuLinEx. Rise and fall of Linux in Munich. another case even more famous At the European level it was Munich. In 2003, the city council of this German city announced that it would migrate 14,000 Windows computers to LiMux, its Debian-based Linux distribution. In 2013 the project seemed a success: there were 12,000 migrated computers and theoretically more than 11 million euros had been saved in licenses and other costs. However, in 2014, complaints about loss of productivity and debate began. ended sharply: At the end of 2017, the leaders of Munich decided to migrate 29,000 PCs of their employees to Windows 10 from LiMux. The initial migration was never complete, and in many cases there was a mix of Windows and Linux systems to complete the processes, something that seemed inefficient and never managed to eliminate the dependency on Windows and especially on legacy applications. But there are silent successes. LinEx and LiMux failed in Spain and Germany, but there is precedent to show that abandoning Windows in favor of Linux can work. It proves it GendBuntua version of Ubuntu that was implemented in the French National Gendarmerie. This organization was already a pioneer in the adoption of the OpenOffice.org office suite in 2005, and since 2008 the plan was to abandon Windows in favor of its own Linux distribution. In June 2024, GendBuntu runs on 103,164 jobswhich represents 97% of the IT park of this organization. This has also saved around two million euros per year on licenses, and has reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 40%. Another promising example: Schleswig-Holstein. This German state began its migration from Windows and Office to Linux and LibreOffice in 2021. In early 2026 had already completed almost 80% of the transition in its 30,000 jobs and according to its data that allowed savings about 15 million euros in licenses only in 2026. A one-time investment of 9 million euros is planned to complete 20% of the process, which is still tied to certain specialized applications and will therefore take a little more time. This is the model that is closest to the French initiative: gradual migration and above all a political will that is maintained among the legislatures that are in power. What distinguishes success from failure. Cases that work share three characteristics. The first, gradual and phased migration, not sudden and massive. The second, real internal technical support that goes beyond political declarations. And the third (and probably the most important), a sustained will beyond an electroral cycle. Those who fail share three others: trying to migrate everything at once, underestimating the cost of legacy applications and depending on the project not changing government, which certainly contributed, for example, to the failure of LinEx. A colossal challenge. Installing Linux on a computer is trivial today and it is true that today the learning curve has been significantly reduced and its use is very similar to that of Windows or macOS. The real problem is in the applications that run on top of it. In public administration there is often critical software tailored for Windows, forms that only work in certain browsers (including the old Internet Explorer), management systems that do not have equivalents in Linux or vendors that simply do … Read more

France has begun to retire Windows from its administration. It is the beginning of his divorce from Microsoft, Google and Amazon

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Digital sovereignty in Europe has gone from being a theoretical concept to something increasingly tangible and desirable with respect to the technology we consume. It is no longer just a trend that is increasingly more individual people are tryingbut has also become an object of desire for administrations and companies. The path to becoming independent from big tech in the United States is not easy and while there are startups like Mistral who gets rich in the processthere is a state that has decided to take a brave step forward: France. In a global environment where data and infrastructure are geopolitical weapons, the French Government, through the Interministerial Directorate for Digital (DINUM), has launched an aggressive roadmap to regain control over their information systems, thus reducing the hegemony of non-EU technological solutions. And it has started with Windows. The decision. In a high-level inter-ministerial seminar, DINUM together with ANSSI, the State Purchasing Directorate and the DGE formalized the most ambitious commitment to digital sovereignty adopted to date by a Western European power. Or what is the same: France wants to exit the American technological ecosystem in a systematic, planned way and with specific deadlines. It is not an experiment, it is state policy. The guideline is clear: map and reduce dependence on technology suppliers from outside the EU. The measure is not a veto but rather a mandatory transition towards a model where public administration must prioritize local or open source solutions, especially in critical services and sensitive data processing. As has declared the Minister of Action and Public Accounts David Amiel: “ We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, prices, evolution and risks we do not control.” Why is it important. From a systems engineering and cybersecurity point of view, the measure is vital for issues such as protecting against Cloud Act of the United States, the law that allows its authorities to access data stored in American companies regardless of where the servers are located. On the other hand, it guarantees that the state maintains its necessary technical capabilities to operate its own infrastructure without depending on proprietary “black boxes” and to heal itself in the event of a change in conditions or other external problems. But this phased migration is much more than an OS change: it involves dismantling the entire associated ecosystem, certificates and applications designed for Windows. It means rebuilding the digital foundations of the state from the roots so that they function with total autonomy and without foreign parts, without citizens noticing the change on the surface. Context. Our daily personal, professional and bureaucratic lives live in an ecosystem governed by hyperscalersthose technology companies like Microsoft, Google or Amazon that dominate storage and cloud computing. This mention is not random: they alone eat more than 60% of the cloud cake, as Statista collects. The increase in cyber threats and the US technological monopoly in the West and its increasingly invasive turn to the privacy of others have done the rest. France has been maturing the doctrine for years “Cloud au Center“. While the ANSSI audited the dependencies on critical infrastructures, its sovereign cloud was being forged as a real alternative. In addition, the European regulatory framework, with the NIS2 directive wave cyber resilience lawhas created the ideal breeding ground. With tools like TchapVisio, FranceTransfert and Socle Numérique (alternatives to WhatsApp, Teams, WeTransfer or Microsoft 365, respectively) France no longer only has a plan, but a real operational base on which to scale. The plan towards sovereignty. It is neither a toast to the sun nor does it have vague and diffuse measurements or distant dates, but concrete, tangible movements and which is either already being implemented or is scheduled to be completed before the end of the year: DINUM abandons Windows and migrates its jobs to Linux. It is the first central State agency to do so. Already underway. Migration of 80,000 agents from the Caisse Nationale d’Assurance Maladie (equivalent to Social Security) to sovereign tools: Tchap, Visio and FranceTransfert. Already underway. Migration of the health data platform to a reliable European solution. Scheduled for the end of 2026. Duties for each ministry: present a dependency reduction plan, which includes databases, antivirus, AI or collaborative tools. For this fall. Yes, but. France has a basic skeleton and a legal framework, as well as public-private coalitions to accelerate the transition through concrete and measurable public commitments. But it won’t be easy. Exiting Windows involves disassembling Active Directory and what is behind it, something that costs a lot of time and money. And migrating 80,000 agents to new tools is not so much a technology problem but rather a problem of implementing new management. Also, go out where. Many European solutions still do not reach the integration, ease of use and capacity (especially in AI) of American big tech, which implies a step backwards in terms of quality. But even if it were possible, moving from a proprietary infrastructure to a sovereign one implies an enormous investment in time, personnel training and data migration. Finally, maintaining and evolving our own infrastructure requires specialized and experienced personnel in a market where talent is scarce and expensive. In Xataka | The CEO of Mistral sends a message to Europe: the end of being the technological vassal of the United States In Xataka | Europe seeks to become independent from Microsoft Office. Your alternative is already here, but not without controversy Cover | Clint Patterson and Arno Senoner

France has taken all its gold from the US: it has gained from the transfer

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The Bank of France confirmed yesterday something that had been brewing in silence for a long time: he has withdrawn every last gold bar he had stored in the vaults of the New York Federal Reserve. An operation that normally could have lasted two decades but has suddenly accelerated. The trigger has its own name: Donald Trump. What initially began as a technical operation to update its gold reserves, with the latest movements of the US against its European allies, including France, has become the first major geopolitical movement that has left half of Europe looking at each other. Furthermore, the play has left them with more money than they had. The key is to sell at the right time and place. The first thing to understand is that France did not charter any plane loaded with gold to bring it back to Europe. Instead of physically moving the bullion, the Bank of France made a smarter decision. As the bank explained in a statementbetween July 2025 and January 2026, they have been selling the 129 tons of old gold that was stored in the New York Federal Reserve in the North American gold market. In Xataka The gold of discord: why 14 municipalities of Guadalajara have rebelled against the plan "mineral sovereignty" from Europe In this way, the French have taken advantage of higher gold prices at historic highs. With these income, France has been purchasing gold bars that met the new higher quality standard in the European market, which registered more contained prices, to store those bars directly in its vaults in Paris. The operation was completed in 26 different transactions and generated extraordinary income of 11 billion euros for the French central bank. A result that transformed the 7.7 billion euros in losses that it registered in 2024, into a net profit of 8.1 billion of euros in 2025. Why was there European gold in the US? The history of this gold in New York goes back at the end of World War II. After the conflict, the dollar became the axis of international trade and having reserves in New York allowed countries to sell them quickly and obtain currency to facilitate payments in global trade. Furthermore, with the Cold War raging and the USSR looming, many European governments preferred their gold reserves to be kept in distant New York rather than in Paris or London, protecting their treasury from hypothetical invasions Russian. A first major reduction of that gold reserve came in the sixties, when De Gaulle made the decision to repatriate part of the reserves French and other countries imitated it. But they didn’t take everything. France still maintained 5% of its total reserves on the other side of the Atlantic, a figure that may seem small but is equivalent to a mountain of ingots. With the latest move, France now concentrates all of its 2,437 tons in Paris, becoming the world’s fourth largest holder of gold. In Xataka The safest and most profitable investment you can make today is the same as 3,000 years ago: buy gold The spark that has ignited Europe. This same year It has been known that India has already repatriated 274 tons of gold since 2023, and currently around two-thirds of its total 880.8 tons are in national territory, driven by geopolitical risks and the need for greater control and liquidity. From OMFIF they point out that the location of gold storage has once again become a priority for central banks, especially since Russian assets deposited in third countries were seized following the invasion of Ukraine. However, the spark that has ignited the machinery of repatriation of European gold has been the erratic attitude of Donald Trump. His attacks public to Jerome Powell and its repeated attempts to interfere in monetary policy have generated a growing concern between European central banks over who really controls the institutions that custody their gold. {“videoId”:”x90yx2y”,”autoplay”:false,”title”:”THE LARGEST GOLD MINE IN EUROPE IS IN SPAIN AND NO ONE DARES TOUCH IT”, “tag”:”WEBEDIA-PROD”, “duration”:”483″} Germany and Italy: the next ones in the spotlight. Following France’s move, attention has turned to the central banks of Germany and Italy, the two countries with larger gold reserves on American soil. Germany preserves 1,236 tons in the vaults of New York, 37% of its total reserves, while Italy has 1,053 tons there, 43% of the total. Together, both countries accumulate the equivalent of $245 billion in bullion in New York. Michael Jäger, Vice President of the German Taxpayers’ Federation (Bund der Steuerzahler) and President of the European Taxpayers Association (TAE) declared that “Trump’s unpredictability and his relentless pursuit of revenue means our gold is no longer safe in the Federal Reserve vaults. What happens if the provocation over Greenland continues? The risk that the Bundesbank will not be able to access its gold is increasing. That is why it should repatriate its reserves.” For now, neither country has announced an official decision on the future of its gold in the US. In Xataka | They don’t call him the “gold tycoon” for nothing: he is 82 years old and has won 746% betting on a mine that doesn’t even work Image | Unsplash (Samuel Regan-Asante, Scottsdale Mint) (function() { window._JS_MODULES = window._JS_MODULES || {}; var headElement = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)(0); if (_JS_MODULES.instagram) { var instagramScript = document.createElement(‘script’); instagramScript.src=”https://platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js”; instagramScript.async = true; instagramScript.defer = true; headElement.appendChild(instagramScript); – The news France has taken all its gold from the US: it has gained from the transfer was originally published in Xataka by Ruben Andres .

This is how the device that has triggered fines in France works

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If at any time we come across a metallic, angular and almost futuristic-looking trailer on the road, it is easy for us to think of anything but a speed camera. However, that design that vaguely resembles a vehicle like the Tesla Cybertruck It has a much more specific function: controlling speed and automatically penalizing those who exceed it. What we have seen in other countries already has a presence in Spain, and everything indicates that its impact is not going unnoticed. the real name. Although the name “Cybertruck radar” It has become popular for its appearancewhat we have before us is a system with first and last name: Poliscan Enforcement Trailermanufactured by the German company Vitronic. Its approach is different from other radars that we already know. Here we are talking about a speedometer installed on a trailer that can be easily moved and that is designed to operate autonomously, without the constant presence of operators. How it works. We have already seen that it does not need constant supervision, but its operation goes one step further. This towed radar can operate for long periods thanks to high-performance batteries, which allows it to be deployed in points where there is no electrical connection or fixed infrastructure. Once installed, it controls speed precisely in several lanes and can manage violations without the need for police presence at the time. In addition, it incorporates protection measures against sabotage, from sensors that detect movements to elements designed to make any tampering attempt difficult, and can be connected to process disciplinary proceedings. Where is it in Spain. If we now look at the Spanish case, the starting point is clear: Catalonia was the first community to incorporate this type of towed radars. Here, yes, the sources do not completely agree on the figures and dates.Infotrànsit, in a post dated March 2, 2026states that the Servei Català de Trànsit incorporated them into the road network in 2023 and raises the number to ten operational tow radars. The direction seems clear: expand the fleet during 2026 and concentrate it on sections with higher accident rates, with the AP-7 as one of the corridors where this type of control fits most clearly. The French mirror. A precedent that explains its impact. To understand why this type of radar is gaining prominence, it is worth looking at France, where they have been deployed for years and with measurable results. According to data collected by Motorpasiónin 2022 there were about 340 devices of this type, which represented approximately 7.5% of the country’s total radars. However, their weight in the sanctions was much greater: they accounted for more than a quarter of the 25.5 million fines registered. That is to say, its presence was relatively limited, but the data points to a capacity to detect infractions much greater than its weight within the system. Beyond its design or its impact on the figures, what is drawn with this type of device is a change in the way of controlling speed on the road. Both the Servei Català de Trànsit and the DGT have focused on sections where the risk is greater, from roads with high accident rates to construction areas where signage changes and drivers do not always adjust their gear. In this context, towed radars fit as a flexible tool, capable of adapting to different situations. Images | Vitronic | Catalan Transit Service In Xataka | Denza Z9GT and D9: BYD’s luxury brand lands in Europe with a coupé with more than 1,000 HP and a seven-seater minivan

Renfe is already maneuvering to get a new contract in France. And the 1,000 million euros at stake is the least of it

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Arrive in Paris. Three words to summarize Renfe’s great objective in the neighboring country. After living with competition on our roads for more than five years, the Spanish company seeks to achieve one of its great challenges in its international expansion. A new route originating or ending in Paris is underway. But, so far, France has not made it easy. Target: Paris. Be that as it may. And Renfe is already preparing an offer to participate in the tender for the Paris-Dijon-Lyon line. That is what media outlets like Expansion either Forbeswho state that the Spanish company will participate in the tender to operate a route that, ten years from now, would be valued at around 1,000 million euros. The striking thing is that this line is not high speed. The link between Paris and Lyon that Renfe will serve uses regional trains, contrary to what the Spanish company has always pursued in the neighboring country. It would be, for the moment, his only way to reach Paris, a city that continues to resist him. A complicated landing. And Renfe has tried to reach Paris by all the means at its disposal. These were, as could be expected, offering their services on a high-speed line as required by Europe and Spain is allowing Ouigo and Iryowith French and Italian origins respectively. However, France has tried to torpedo As far as possible, Renfe runs its lines. Right now, the Spanish have managed to launch a corridor between Madrid and Marseille and Barcelona and Lyon. However, the French have managed to protect the arrival of the Spanish company in Paris, where a very substantial part of the high-speed business is located. What has been argued from France is that Renfe trains do not meet the technical criteria to be able to operate on the lines that reach Paris. And in this way he has achieved that Renfe will not operate in the city while the Olympic Games were organized from Paris, which would have given a great boost to his project. Go for the regionals. Aware of the difficulties they are encountering to continue expanding their borders with high speed, Renfe has decided to take the leap with regional trains. In Forbes They explain that the process requires the final offer for the Paris-Dijon-Lyon line to be presented before the end of 2026. Next year the award of the line would be confirmed and between 2029 and 2030 the company that has received the approval must begin operating. Renfe’s great rival, everything indicates, will be the French SNCF. The Burgundy-Franche-Comté region, which is responsible for this line, has already put out a first batch of the tender that fell into the hands of the local company with hardly any opposition, they point out in Five Days. And in Spain? As we can see, Renfe has already shown interest in operating on regional trains in neighboring countries. However, in this case it is Spain that is putting all possible obstacles to delay competition on this type of lines in our country. According to the deadlines established since In 2016 the Fourth Railway Package will be approvedcompetition on these lines should have been a reality from December 25, 2023. In 2024, the contracts should have been awarded. However, Renfe is still the only company that currently offers this service and it does not seem that it will change. And it is that The Government has been working to delay the launch of new competitions in these ways. According to ABCthe current Renfe contract extended from 2018 to 2027. This year, 3% of the contract was to be put out to tender but the Government and Renfe have signed, without making it public, an addendum to it that extends said contract until 2028. Photo | Anthony Delanoix and Xataka In Xataka | Spain forced to open its lines to Ouigo. France is now doing everything possible to prevent the entry of Renfe

France was moving its aircraft carrier without revealing its location. Until a runner on board uploaded an activity to Strava

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Putting on some sneakers, stretching your legs and running for miles and miles outdoors is not (a priori) a reprehensible habit. Quite the opposite. Neither is recording race data with a smartwatch and then publish them on Stravaan app that is used to share routes, times and performance data. All this, we insist, is “a priori” because things change if the person running is a Navy officer and his publication on Strava ends up revealing the near real-time location of a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. That is what has happened in France. Trotting on the high seas. A few days ago the newspaper reporters Le Monde they found each other with something curious: a publication on Strava that showed someone running in circles in the middle of the Mediterranean, dozens of kilometers from the coasts of Turkey and Cyprus and hundreds from the Egyptian coast. The question was obvious… What the hell was a runner doing trotting like a top in the middle of the sea? A look at Copernicus. Over the last few years Le Monde has published various items in which he warns about how Strava can be used to reveal the position of ships and bodyguards, so the reporters had their suspicions about that publication in the Mediterranean. They didn’t last long. By using the Copernicus online viewer they checked that very close to the location registered by Strava the silhouette of one of the most important ships in France, the powerful aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, could be seen. Click on the image to go to the tweet. What had happened? That one of the officers mobilized alongside the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle was better served by his runner than by the caution expected of a member of the French Navy. As reveals Le Mondethe Strava publication belongs to a young officer who on the morning of March 13, around 10:35 a.m., decided to jog around the deck of his ship. While he covered 7.23 kilometers in 35 minutes, the watch on his wrist recorded all the training data and then shared it on Strava. Once there, since their profile is public, anyone could see them. From his friends and gym colleagues to journalists in Paris. The problem is that with that small gesture he revealed the location of the Charles de Gaulle and its naval escort, which was then making its way towards the northwest of Cyprus. Something more than an oversight. We cannot know if the indiscreet runner was aboard the Charles de Gaulle or one of the ships that escorted him, but one thing is clear: his Strava account gives clues to more than just his sporting achievements. On February 14, the same officer posted another graph with data from a race off the Cotentin peninsula, also in the middle of the sea. Days later he ran in Copenhagen (probably after landing) and on March 13 he can already be located in the Mediterranean, just 100 km from the Turkish coast. A worrying snitch. It is not that the deployment of the Charles de Gaulle and the rest of the French ships was a secret. On March 3, Emmanuel Macron himself ordered publicly that they moved from the Baltic to the Mediterranean after the attack by Israel and the US on Iran and it is known that days later The aircraft carrier crossed Gibraltar escorted by the frigate Christopher Columbus. The problem is that the young officer’s publication on Strava reveals the movements of the convoy in detail and almost in real time, also revealing a worrying security breach in the Navy. Especially if you take into account that in recent weeks Iran has attacked French forces in the Middle East, leaving several wounded and one dead. “The appropriate measures”. The incident may seem more or less serious, but one thing is incontestable: Strava data allowed reporters from Le Monde accurately identify the location of the aircraft carrier and its accompanying frigate. The question that remains is… What if, instead of a newspaper, this same exercise had been done by other people with other interests? The General Staff of the Armed Forces has recognized that Strava’s publication “does not comply with current regulations” or the precautions that its staff must take at the digital level. Hence, it is proposed to adopt “appropriate measures.” But is it so worrying? Once again the problem is not only the race recorded on March 13 in the middle of the Mediterranean, but its context. This is not the first time Le Monde warns that Strava can become a breach for national security, depending on who, when and where uses it. The French newspaper has even coined the term “StravaLeaks”. Maybe it sounds excessive, but in 2025 He already warned that there were publications by French sailors that revealed the activity of nuclear submarines and months before, in November 2024, he revealed that Strava allowed thousands of Israeli soldiers to be identified. They are not isolated cases. The most dangerous oversights They were probably committed by the bodyguards of the presidents of France, the United States and Russia. By sharing their training data publicly, they left a trail that helped to partially anticipate the movements of the leaders they protected. Images | Wikipedia In Xataka | Things have to be bad for the US to have made an unprecedented decision: extending the life of its dinosaur aircraft carrier

While Europe fears for its pocket after gas cuts in the Middle East, France has a plan: its nuclear power

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Europe holds its breath in the face of the threat of a new energy crisis. The escalation of war in the Middle East has caused a real earthquake in the markets. The de facto blockade in the vital Strait of Hormuz puts in check the arrival of liquefied natural gas (LNG) ships from Qatar, forcing cargo ships to deviate towards Asia. With European gas reserves below 30% after an unusually cold winter, panic relives the nightmare of 2022 it is palpable. However, in the midst of this continental chaos, France observes the situation with an apparent and calculated calm. The French country believes it has an ace up its sleeve to avoid blackouts and industrial ruin: its imposing, and recently resurrected, nuclear fleet. A historical export record. While northern Europe trembles over gas, the French electricity grid operator, RTE, has just put figures on the table that support the Elysée’s optimism. According to the Bilan electric 2025Last year, France broke its historical record by exporting 92.3 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity. To put it in perspective, RTE’s Director General of Economics, Thomas Veyrenc, explained to the Revue Générale Nucléaire that this volume exceeds the annual electricity consumption of an entire country like Belgium. This milestone has returned France to its traditional role as Europe’s “electric battery”, a status that it had resoundingly lost in 2022. The secret of this success lies in the recovery of its nuclear park, which produced 373 TWh in 2025 (3.1% more than the previous year) thanks to better availability of its reactors. As pointed out by Financial Timesthis French nuclear fleet is precisely the energy lever that Europe was missing after the invasion of Ukraine, and could be the key to not having to turn on polluting coal plants again in the face of the current gas cut in the Middle East. The paradox: they export because they do not consume. Economically, the move is round. According to Le Mondethese exports have earned France 5.4 billion euros. By having so much low-cost electricity production (nuclear and hydroelectric), the country manages to maintain very competitive wholesale prices, situated at an average of €61/MWh in 2025, well below the suffocating prices suffered by neighbors such as Germany or Italy. But this “miracle” has some worrying fine print. As the specialized media warns Le Monde de l’EnergieFrance exports so much electricity mainly because its domestic consumption is stagnant. The country’s electricity demand remained at 451 TWh in 2025, 6% below pre-crisis levels. The reality is that France is far behind in the electrification of its own economy. Paradoxically, 56% of the final energy consumed by the country continues to depend on fossil fuels, especially in sectors such as transportation and heating. The energy clamp to Spain. The French master plan to establish itself as the energy savior of Europe has a clear loser: the Iberian Peninsula. As we explained in Xatakawhile Germany pays more than 100 euros for electricity and France pays 13 euros, in Spain and Portugal renewable overproduction sinks prices until they reach zero or negative values. Why doesn’t that cheap and clean Iberian energy flow to a thirsty Europe? Because France acts as a protective wall. The country maintains Spain as an “energy island” with only 2.8% interconnection, deliberately blocking vital projects in Aragon and Navarra in its network plan for 2025-2035. ANDThe eternal France-Spain conflict. The motivation is not technical, but pure geostrategy and economic survival. Paris needs urgently make profitable a pharaonic investment of 300,000 million euros in its atomic sector. Allowing the massive entry of competitive Spanish solar and wind energy would sink the prices and profitability of its nuclear plants. In fact, President Emmanuel Macron has come to attack the Spanish energy model in the international press, calling it unstable, arguing that a network does not support a 100% renewable model, and describing the urgency of interconnections as a “false debate.” However, the data dismantles the Elysée story. On the one hand, there is the “Danish mirror”: Denmark operates with more than 80% wind generation and does not suffer blackouts because it is ultra-interconnected with its neighbors to balance the load. On the other hand, the flagrant French amnesia regarding 2022 stands out, the year in which the French reactors failed massively due to corrosion problems and it was Spain that had to export electricity to rescue France from the blackouts. Because of this current plug, Spain is forced to throw it away (what is known as technical discharges or curtailment) around 7% of its clean energy because it literally “does not fit” into the grid. All this is part of a strategy of total domination by the Elysée: Macron not only seeks civil energy hegemony, but, how to collect CNBChas put a doctrine of “advance deterrence” on the table, offering the protection of its nuclear weapons to Europe in the face of the withdrawal of the United States. The Achilles heel: the uranium crisis. However, Macron’s nuclear fortress could have feet of clay. The chain RFI (Radio France International) warns that this “nuclear renaissance” faces great uncertainty over uranium supply. Historically, France obtained 20% of its uranium from Niger. But following the recent military coup, the ruling junta revoked the permits of the French company Orano, nationalized the mines and blocked exports, leaving Paris with a gaping supply hole. Now, France is desperately trying to look for new sources in countries like Kazakhstan (the world’s largest producer) or Mongolia, but there it comes face to face with the overwhelming geopolitical, business and infrastructure influence of Russia and China. A castle with a drawbridge. France has managed to build an energy strength that, in the short term, allows it to weather the Middle East storm better than its European neighbors, selling its surpluses at a gold price. But it does so at the cost of isolating the Iberian Peninsula and betting everything on a mineral, uranium, whose control is increasingly slipping out of its hands on the global chessboard. Time will … Read more

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