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In 2019 no one gave a damn for it, and today it is one of the best adaptations of a video game

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Nobody was betting much on an adaptation of the mythical blue hedgehog from Segha’s games in 2019 when Paramount published the first trailer for its film and unleashed a storm of memes. Five years and three deliveries later, ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 3’which reaches Netflix on June 10, can boast $492 million at the box office and two stars like Jim Carrey and Keanu Reeves on board the franchise. And the cherry on top: critics, for the first time in the saga, have sided with the hedgehog. We all remember how a avalanche of memes It ended up giving rise to a film that not only succeeded in fleshing out the schematic plot of the original games, but along the way grossed $319 million at the global box office. Three films later, the series has grossed more than $1.2 billion worldwide. ‘Sonic 3’, produced with a budget of $122 million, became the highest grossing of the franchise and closed its career as the tenth most watched in 2024. It is the second most lucrative video game adaptation in history, behind only ‘Super Mario Bros. The Movie’. In this new installment we move to 1974: a meteorite with an alien hedgehog on board, Shadow, falls on Earth. Professor Gerald Robotnik, grandfather of the villain of the series, subjects him to experiments in a secret facility, where the hedgehog befriends the scientist’s granddaughter. When an accident kills the girl, Shadow is left in suspended animation for fifty years. In 2024 someone frees Shadow, who wakes up furious and attacks Tokyo uncontrollably. Sonic, Tails and Knuckles try to stop him without success, forcing them to turn to Doctor Robotnik himself to stop him. On Rotten Tomatoes, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 accumulates 86% (and 95% of the public). Jim Carrey’s double role and the fast-paced pace of the film are responsible for these ratings, well above the scores of the previous installments, which do not reach 70%. The presence of Keanu Reeves has also been highly praised, as he provides an astonishing gravity and dramatic component to Shadow, a secondary character in the video games who here takes a particularly threatening form. A fun and fast-paced puzzle in which, for once, all the pieces seem to fit together. In Xataka | Scorsese signed one of his masterpieces with this film whose new version in series format arrives on streaming today

Tomorrow the new version of a classic sordid thriller that gave Scorsese one of his masterpieces comes to streaming

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John D. MacDonald published his novel ‘The Executioners’ in 1957. Since then, the same character (Max Cady, the ex-convict who returns to civilian life determined to destroy the life of the lawyer who locked him up) has survived two films, a television series, 69 years of life and three generations of leading actors (Mitchum, De Niro, Bardem) giving him life. Now, ‘Cape Fear‘ comes to Apple TV+ with Javier Bardem in the role of Cady and a premise that, this time, puts a woman in the eye of the hurricane. This is the most visible modification compared to the movies: a former lawyer (Amy Adams) who works in an NGO dedicated to exonerating unjustly convicted prisoners, is married to a lawyer for wealthy clients (Patrick Wilson). This time there is an intimate and forbidden relationship at Cady’s (Javier Bardem) trial, which accentuates the idea of ​​a family with a dysfunctional point that the villain wants to blow up. The series format also helps to expand the children’s characters: one goes through depression and is a victim of social isolation, another carries the label of “perfect daughter” while her parents overprotect her problematic brother. The person responsible for the series is not a newcomer to the genre. Nick Antosca is the creator of the magnificent anthology horror series inspired by creepypasta ‘Channel Zero’, and showrunner of the award-winning ‘The Act’, which turned an apparent story of true crime in a tortuous descent into the abysses of the mind. Some perfect precedents for a story that wins the murkier it appears. The main comments of the series, as it could not be otherwise, will be brought together by Javier Bardem in his new incarnation of Max Cady, especially because the comparison with his two predecessors is inevitable: Robert Mitchum captured a subtle evil, De Niro opted for biblical and explosive madness, and Bardem brings us sexual charisma and contained violence. Without a doubt, it will be a good way to see if this old story continues to stand the test of time. In Xataka | Today on HBO Max: the latest film directed by one of the greatest masters in the history of cinema

China just gave them a much more ambitious mission

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Every time we ask something of an AI, the scene seems almost invisible: we type a sentence, receive a response, and move on. But behind that apparent lightness there are buildings full of servers, cooling systems running tirelessly, and an electricity demand that does not stop growing. The cloud, no matter how much we call it a cloud, has ground, cables, heat and consumption. And precisely for this reason an idea that not so long ago sounded like a strange experiment is beginning to make sense: removing part of that infrastructure from land and taking it to the sea. China is already taking it to the commercial field. MERICS notes that the country has presented the first commercial underwater data center in Hainan and a module powered by offshore wind energy in Shanghai, two movements that point in the same direction: to see if this architecture can stop being a technical oddity and become a usable piece within its digital deployment. The novelty is not only in submerging servers, but in presenting them as a possible response to three tensions that already weigh on the AI ​​infrastructure: energy, cooling and land. Hainan is the first piece of that leap. Pilot testing of the Hainan underwater data center began in 2023, first with storage services for the island’s free trade port and telecom operators, before expanding to cloud and AI companies. The project does not play in the league of large terrestrial data centers, but it does have sufficient scale to stop being a simple model: each cabin is located 35 meters under water, has 24 racks and can house up to 500 servers. Its value is precisely there: demonstrating that China is trying to turn an experimental idea into real commercial infrastructure. Shanghai as an energy showcase. If Hainan represents the commercial leap, Shanghai adds the piece that makes the story more ambitious: direct integration with offshore wind energy. This project is facing Lingang, where CGTN places an underwater platform already operational and directly connected to a nearby offshore wind farm. The total planned investment is 1.6 billion yuan, about 235 million dollars according to that source, and the installation is based on a pilot phase of 2.3 MW, while the complete project is planned to reach 24 MW. Refrigerate without fighting against the environment. That is the technical promise that explains much of the interest in these underwater data centers. The Chinese state media recalls that terrestrial facilities can dedicate up to 40% of their electricity to cooling, a problem that is especially visible when we talk about increasingly dense racks. Under the sea, the idea changes: take advantage of water as a natural heat sink. In Shanghai, for example, the average sea temperature is around 15 degrees Celsius. The other half of the equation is energy. The Shanghai center is connected by a photoelectric composite cable to a 200 MW offshore wind farm, with more than 50 turbines, and more than 95% of its electricity comes from renewable energy. If the project reaches full scale, it is estimated that it could save 61 million kWh per year and significantly reduce its carbon emissions. There are challenges too. MERICS warns that these data centers pose significant challenges: sealing modules, dealing with seawater corrosion, operating in a high-pressure environment, and assuming that maintenance may require bringing entire modules to the surface. This is no secret. Accessing submerged hardware in the event of a failure is one of the most sensitive points. Microsoft had already tried the path. The best known antecedent is Project Natickan initiative with which Microsoft submerged a data center off the Orkney Islands, in Scotland, and recovered it in 2020 after two years of operation underwater. The test served to demonstrate that the idea could work technically.but it did not end up becoming a commercial line. Reading is not a magic solution. As we can see, China is trying another way of dividing up the pieces of the problem. Hainan shows attempt to bring underwater data centers into commercial arena; Shanghai adds a broader ambition, connecting them with offshore wind energy and directing them towards increasingly demanding loads. Undersea data centers seemed like a technological oddity. Now, at least in China, they are beginning to look like an industrial bet with a much more ambitious mission. Images | Shanghai Hailanyun Technology In Xataka | There is a battle to have the AI ​​model that programs best. And a good, pretty and very cheap rival has appeared in it: Cursor

Marvel just gave 48 minutes of unfiltered violence to its most extreme character and you can watch it today on Disney+

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Frank Castle, better known as the Punisher (or The Punisher if you’re an old-school comic reader), hasn’t had his own series for seven years. Since Netflix canceled ‘The Punisher’ in 2019, the character has survived on the margins of the MCU until ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ rescued him in 2025. Now Marvel has opted for a different format with him in ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’. It is not a series or a movie, but 48 minutes of a borderline antihero, co-directed by Jon Bernthal himself and with a level of violence that Disney+ never allowed before. ‘The Punisher: One Last Kill’ comes with the “Marvel Television Special Presentation” label, a format that the studio premiered in October 2022 with ‘The curse of the werewolf‘. The format is a kind of laboratory: projects of between 45 and 60 minutes that function as self-contained stories without the pressure of sustaining a series for several weeks. Both ‘The Curse of the Werewolf’ and the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas special worked as cult pieces, and with Punisher, Marvel has taken the experiment to the extreme, because its adult rating is the first on the platform for a Marvel Studios project. Here we will see how an unexpected force drags Frank Castle back into battle. The Punisher believes he has eliminated the Gnucci crime family, the last link to his family’s murderers, and the surviving matriarch, Ma Gnucci, comes to him not to negotiate but to settle scores. The first half of the episode focuses on visions that haunt Castle; the second is a real-time action sequence inside an apartment building reminiscent of ‘The Raid’. The idea for the series arose during the filming of the first season of ‘Daredevil: Born Again’. Bernthal asked the director for permission to develop something centered on Frank Castle. The two had previously collaborated, and that gave Disney confidence to have Bernthal co-write the script and serve as executive producer. Shot on real locations in Queens and Brooklyn, the photography is by Robert Elswit (Oscar winner for ‘Wells of Ambition’), a firm that visually elevates this bet far above a typical television film. In Xataka | 12 premieres this week on Netflix, including the return of one of the platform’s most successful franchises

Disney scraps Marvel creative team and loses many of the artists who gave visual shape to the MCU

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The character and setting designers who built the visual identity of the Marvel Universefrom the first Iron Man suit to the looks of recent villains like Killmonger, have in some cases been in the studio for more than ten years. On April 14, many of them received their dismissal letters: these tasks will be outsourced. What has happened? This April 14, in the middle of CinemaCon (a paradoxical moment, with the industry in full swing to announce films for the next two years), The Walt Disney Company executed the first big snip of the Josh D’Amaro era, your new CEO: about a thousand layoffs throughout the company. Marvel has been one of the company’s worst-hit factions: around 8% of the combined workforce of Marvel Entertainment in New York and Marvel Studios in Burbank. have suffered cuts in almost every department: film and TV production, comics, franchises, finance, legal and visual development. What the CEO says. D’Amaro, in an internal communication to those affectedacknowledges that the decision is “harsh” but clarifies that it does not reflect “his contributions or the overall strength of the company.” That is, he suggests that it is a restructuring designed before he stepped foot in the CEO’s office, inherited from the roadmap that Bob Iger left ready before leaving. It makes sense: a layoff of a thousand people is not decided overnight. Goodbye Marvel. The most symbolic blow has been suffered by the Visual Development department of Marvel Studios. Virtually all equipment has been dismantled: Only a small group of permanent employees remain to coordinate the hiring of external artists per project. This team was responsible for aspects as essential to the MCU as the costume and character design of the franchise’s films, since one of the most significant features of the MCU is the visual coherence they have maintained in thirty productions. Radical change. Now all that work is outsourced. From now on, Marvel Studios will retain a minimal team that will be responsible for hiring external artists based on each project. It is a common practice in the video game industry and in the production of visual effects (in the latter field, in fact, it had been done this way at Marvel, not without its corresponding controversies), but it represents a substantial change in model for a department that had always been integrated into the foundations of the studio. Is Marvel going bad? Not quite. It is a logical step after the latest movements that the company has made. After recognizing that under the command of Bob Chapek quantity had prevailed over qualitywhich had given rise to a certain exhaustion, after Iger’s return as CEO in 2022 there was a turnaround in the opposite direction. In 2025 there was only one MCU premiere, in 2026 we will only have ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ and ‘Avengers: Doomsday‘ in theaters and ‘Daredevil: Born Again’ and ‘VisionQuest’ on Disney+. This reduction in scale is what has made it evident that the staff was oversized. Layoffs in film and television production are the direct consequence of the reduction of the calendar. The numbers, in proportion. Between 2023 and 2025, the Iger era has already eliminated around 8,000 positions at Disney and generated a savings of 7.5 billion dollars. The current 1,000 layoffs represent less than 1% of the company’s 231,000 global employees, a number that in absolute terms may not seem very large. But the truth is that in the specific case of the Marvel Visual Development team it amounts to a certain erasure of the department at a critical moment: when we have to start preparing the continuation of ‘Doomsday’: ‘Secret Wars’, scheduled for release in December 2027. Other changes. Many of the layoffs affect the marketing department, unified under the sole command of the newly appointed head of that area of ​​the business, Asad Ayaz. As has been knownthe cuts reach marketing, advertising, production and corporate functions teams at ESPN, the studios and the product and technology area, in addition to the aforementioned cuts at Marvel. The decision fits the profile of D’Amaro, who has spent almost three decades at Disney, but his career is unrelated to the audiovisual content business. He was the architect of the largest theme park expansion in the company’s history, and the Experiences division he led generated, in the first quarter of 2026, about 75% of Disney’s total operating profit. In Xataka | ‘Avengers: Doomsday’, everything we know about Marvel’s next big event

the one that Russia gave him

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In modern warfare, see before the enemy can be more decisive than shooting first, hence some military systems current ones are capable of monitoring areas the size of an entire country from the air. We are talking about devices whose cost can exceed 500 million dollars per unit. The problem is that even these key pieces depend on something much more fragile than it seems: information. Without “eyes” in the war. In the last 48 hours, Iran has achieved something much more relevant than destroying a plane: has rendered useless one of the few key systems that allow the United States to see the battlefield from hundreds of kilometers, the E-3 Sentrya true aerial nerve center that coordinates fighters, detects threats and maintains superiority in the air. Its destruction is not symbolic (it barely keeps a fraction of the 16 it had operational), It is functionalbecause it eliminates real capacity surveillance and command at a critical moment, forcing the few remaining aircraft to take on more load and increasing blind spots in the theater of operations. In a conflict where every second of detection makes a difference, losing one of these assets is equivalent to fighting with your eyes partially bandaged. 500 million. They counted in the Telegraph that satellite images showed a few hours ago the destroyed fuselage of the four-engine United States Air Force plane on the runway of the air base in Saudi Arabia. Among the twisted metal remains, what looked like a large flying saucer lay face down. It is, or was, the crotating radar dome which typically sits atop E-3, the $500 million air operations nerve center that allows commanders to track everything in the air over hundreds of miles. Images of the destroyed E-3 Invisible help. The attack, furthermore, not only reveals precision, but also high-level prior intelligence, and that is where a decisive factor comes in: Russia. According to various sources, including his own president of UkraineMoscow provided images satellites from the base days before the attack, allowing Iran to know the exact location of the planes and choose the most vulnerable point, right where the E-3 radar is located. This support transformed a conventional attack into a surgical operation, demonstrating that war is no longer decided only by who shoots, but by who sees first and best. The Russian-Iranian collaboration turns each strike into more than just a tactical impact: it is a demonstration of network warfare against the American military architecture. Aging fleet. The severity of the blow is multiplied because the United States barely has these systems and its fleet is aging. As we said, only It had 16 units in total and many of them not operational at all times. Therefore, although the loss of one may be replaceable, since there is no immediate active production and replacement programs accumulate delays and political doubts. This leaves Washington in an awkward position, where each casualty is not just a material cost, but a structural reduction of capabilities in the middle of war, just when it is most necessary to maintain constant coverage over the airspace. The bombed base Bases exposed to missiles and drones. The attack also exposes an increasingly obvious weakness: America’s most valuable assets remain parked. in poorly protected bases against long range weapons. Although an attempt was made to disperse the planes to make them difficult to locate, the combination of satellite intelligence, drones and missiles has shown that this strategy is insufficient. Without hardened shelters and adequate protection, even key systems can be destroyed on the ground without the need for direct confrontationconfirming that technological superiority is of little use if critical assets are vulnerable before takeoff. War of attrition. Meanwhile, Iran has adapted its strategy toward a sustained pace of attacks. smaller but constantseeking not so much to saturate the defenses as to wear them down over time. With a still significant arsenal and the ability to coordinate still complex strikes, Tehran maintains continuous pressure while forcing the United States and its allies to expend interceptors and critical resources. This attrition logic, combined with selective attacks on key nodes such as radars or aircraft of command, multiplies the impact of each action and reinforces the central idea: it is not about launching more missiles, but about hitting where it hurts most. Silent shifting. Be that as it may, the episode points to a deeper transformation: modern war no longer revolves only around destroying forces, but to blind systems. Iran has not only attacked infrastructure or troops, but the information layer that supports the entire US military operation, and it has done so relying in external intelligence. The result is a clear signal, another onefor future conflicts: that whoever manages to disable the adversary’s sensors and command networks will have a decisive advantageeven against technologically superior powers. Image | USF In Xataka | Iran has achieved something unprecedented in the Middle East: that the US has to abandon its military bases In Xataka | While the US bombs Iran, something unusual has happened: drones attacking the nuclear bases in North Dakota

Beijing just gave the best news to NVIDIA

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NVIDIA has been caught in the crossfire of the trade war between the United States and China for more than a year. Its most powerful chips could not be sold to the Asian giant because Washington required export licenses and later Beijing did not give the green light to imports. This week the two fronts have been unlocked simultaneously and Jensen Huang has taken advantage of his annual developers conference to announce it out loud. Your factories they are starting enginesand the future is brighter than ever for her. H200 chips, unlocked. The H200 chip, NVIDIA’s second most powerful chip today, had become the center of trade and technological tensions between China and the United States. The Trump administration had already granted export licenses but of course, as long as she got her cut. Which was missing it was him approval from Beijingthat according to Reuters It has arrived this week for many of the customers who were demanding access to these chips. Among them are ByteDance, Tencent, Alibaba and DeepSeek. China is a gold mine. Before the restrictions imposed For the US, China represented 13% of NVIDIA’s total turnover. The export veto was highly criticized by Jensen Huang, who did not stop criticize the measureof try to avoid it and to explain that what the US had done was not protect its technology, but rather shoot itself in the foot. During this blockade, Chinese companies have been advancing both in the development of AI models and in the development of their own chips. They still have room for improvement, but this effort to “become independent” from US technology is already bearing fruit and perhaps would not have occurred if it were not for the US veto. There will also be Groq chips. NVIDIA will not only export its H200 chips, but is preparing a version of its AI inference accelerators for the Chinese market. Specifically, we are talking about Groq chips, a company in which NVIDIA invested $20 billion to “license” its technology, although In practical terms I have acquired it. These chips are especially interesting because they are not used to train AI models, but to execute and “serve” them. This is the market that is growing the fastest right now, and where competition is toughest. But China already has inference chips. Companies like Baidu they are already producing its own inference chips, which means that NVIDIA will not enter the Chinese market from a monopoly position, but as another competitor. What is striking here is the fact that Groq chips are not refined versions nor are they adapted to this market according to the cited sources. in Reuters: They will be the same ones that companies in the US or other parts of the world use. China will continue without access to Vera Rubin. This week NVIDIA presented a new line of products built around its next AI chips, the Vera Rubin. These chips cannot be sold to China due to current restrictions, so at NVIDIA they have found a hybrid architecture: Vera Rubin for markets where it can operate freely, and Groq as an inference component for China. NVIDIA is brimming with optimism, and with good reason. Jensen Huang spoke precisely in his inaugural conference about how promising the company’s future looks. Previous projections spoke of medium-term revenues of $500 billion for its Blackwell and Rubin chips. Inference solutions and this “opening” to China now mean that this forecast is doubled: Huang hopes to achieve at least $1 trillion in cumulative orders by 2027a simply dizzying figure that makes it clear that NVIDIA’s business seems to be in an enviable state of health. Image | NVIDIA In Xataka | DLSS 5: Millions invested in AI graphics improvements so people say it looks like an Instagram beauty filter

Peru gave the keys to a giant door to China that the US now wants to blow up

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For years, Chancay was a secondary port on the central coast of Peru, one linked to regional exports and with a limited weight in international trade. Everything changed when, at the beginning of the 2010s, the project began to transform into a megaconstruction designed to receive the largest ships in the world, a leap that culminated with the entry of Chinese capital and the inauguration of a work called to redefine the country’s role in Pacific trade. A giant door to the Pacific. Peru has now become the central stage of the rivalry between China and the United States for a very specific reason: the Chancay megaport, a deep-water infrastructure north of Lima that acts as a direct gateway between South America and Asia and that has elevated the Andean country from a trading partner to a strategic piece. As we said, with the capacity to receive the largest cargo ships in the world and accelerate the flow of raw materials to China, the port symbolizes how a logistics project can alter regional balances and place a country in the middle of a dispute between powers. The direct notice. From the Washington Department of State, the Donald Trump administration rated case as an example of how “cheap Chinese money” can erode national control over critical infrastructure, an unusually harsh warning in pointing out that Peru could be losing sovereignty over one of its critical infrastructures, after a court ruling which limits the ability of the national regulator to supervise Chancay. For the United States, the message is clear: Chinese money, presented as cheap and fast, has a long-term political cost. A case that has become an example of the US strategy to stop the expansion of Chinese influence in the Western Hemisphere and regain ground in a region that it considers vital for its security and global leadership. China and the Silk Road in Latin America. It we count some time ago. For Beijing, Chancay is a key piece of its Belt and Road Initiativethe great project with which it has financed ports, roads and airports around the world through credits and state guarantees. China has been for more than a decade the main partner Peru’s commercial sector and has invested massively in strategic sectors such as mining, electricity and transportation, consolidating a deep economic relationship that goes far beyond a single port and that reinforces its presence in the Latin American Pacific. The court ruling. The spark of the conflict has been court ruling Peruvian law that orders the authorities to refrain from regulating, supervising or sanctioning the activity of the port of Chancay, considering it a private facility. The regulator Ositran, which controls the rest of the country’s large ports, has denounced that this exception leaves users unprotected and creates a dangerous precedent, by making the operating company the only one that provides a public service without direct supervision of the State. The organization has already announced that it will appeal the decision. Cosco, sovereignty and red lines. The Chinese company Cosco Shipping, majority shareholder and operator of the port, has rejected any insinuation of loss of sovereignty and maintains that Chancay remains fully under Peruvian jurisdiction and subject to its laws, with the presence of police, customs and environmental authorities. For China, the US accusations are a political maneuver and a discredit campaign, while for Washington the problem is not only legal, but strategic: who controls, de facto, South America’s great gateway to transpacific trade. Peru trapped between two powers. The country is thus in an uncomfortable positionwith China as its main trading partner and the United States as a strategic ally and military partner, even designated as a main non-NATO ally. While Washington negotiates the construction of a naval base a few kilometers from Chancay, Beijing consolidates its influence economy around the same enclave. The result is a nation located in the middle of a major geopolitical battle, one where a port infrastructure has become the symbol of a difficult choice: take advantage of an economic opportunity without this giant door to the Pacific ending up conditioning its sovereignty and its international room for maneuver. Image | cosco In Xataka | China has been building a megaport in Peru for eight years. It has just been released to revolutionize South America In Xataka | €10 order, €30 tariffs: the EU has just approved the mother of tariffs for Aliexpress, Shein and Temu

Europe had been asking for a big hit on the table for some time. Revolut just gave it a huge valuation

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Revolut was born in London as a fintech focused on digital payments and today it has become one of the most watched companies on the European financial landscape. It has already exceeded 65 million customers worldwide and its ambition is to reach 100 million, with its sights set on becoming the first global bank born from technology. Not only does it add users, it also builds physical structures: Spain was the country chosen to install its first ATMs with own brand. Now, he has added one more element to his story: a valuation of $75 billion. The operation validated by some of the largest funds in the world. The sale of Revolut shares was not carried out by traditional banks, but by some of the most influential investment funds in the technology sector, such as Coatue, Greenoaks, Dragoneer and Fidelity Management & Research Company. They were joined by names linked to large companies such as NVentures, NVIDIA’s investment fund, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Franklin Templeton and T. Rowe Price. According to Bloombergthis operation has placed Revolut as the most valuable startup in Europe. It also allowed employees to sell shares, something Revolut has already offered on five occasions. A valuation that does not leave the stock market. Revolut remains a private company, so its shares are not available on public markets and its valuation is not set on the stock market. It is estimated from the price that investors accept when they buy a package of shares in operations like this: that price is taken as a reference to calculate how much 100% of the company would be worth. On this occasion, Revolut has made it easier for employees and existing shareholders to sell part of their stakes, while incorporating new investors into the capital. The result is a valuation that, as we say, sets the bar at 75 billion dollars. Revolut remains a private company, so its shares are not available on public markets and its valuation is not set on the stock market. Although it is still private, Revolut does publish figures that explain part of the investment enthusiasm. In 2024 it recorded $4 billion in revenue, with a growth of 72%, and $1.4 billion in profit before taxes, an increase of 149%. In 2025, the pace continues thanks to the performance of its business division, which already moves 1 billion annually. In addition, the company has made relevant regulatory progress: it has the final banking authorization for its next launch in Mexico, it has a banking incorporation license in Colombia and is preparing its arrival in India. Spain as a pilot bank. The Spanish market has become one of Revolut’s strategic laboratories. Here it inaugurated its first ATM network in Europe, with 50 machines installed and plans to expand to 200 next year. At the same time, it is exploring its entry into private banking by hiring specialized profiles. According to Expansionthe project is in the initial phase, but marks a symbolic step: it no longer competes only in mobile, but also in segments reserved for traditional banking. Europe gains visibility, but the United States sets the pace. That Revolut is the most valuable startup in Europe, as Bloomberg points out, demonstrates the moment that the technology sector is experiencing on the continent. Even so, the comparison with the United States remains significant: Reuters puts OpenAI at $500 billionabout 6.67 times above Revolut. There, the most notable startups come not only from fintech, but also from aerospace, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, design or productivity. Europe, on the other hand, has concentrated its progress mainly on fintech, quantum computing and corporate software. The $75 billion valuation does not automatically make Revolut a global bank, but it does send a clear message: large international funds are willing to back a model that mixes technology, financial services and international ambition. The next step will be to sustain that growth while obtaining key licenses, such as the one it is seeking in the United Kingdom. What is happening with Revolut shows that Europe can generate relevant players, although it remains to be seen how far they can go in a field historically dominated by American banking and technology. Images | Revolut In Xataka | A few weeks ago Amancio Ortega collected 1,552 million from Inditex: he just invested them in the second largest purchase in its history

Three judges gave three different opinions.

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In March 2022, a carpentry worker in Girona suffered a heart attack, and was admitted in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Despite his serious medical situation, the company decided to fire him just two days later, while he was still in the ICU. The dismissal had been carried out alleging disciplinary reasons. The most curious thing about the story is that, being the same case, it went through three legal classifications until it was resolved: disciplinary dismissalinadmissible and, finally, void. A complete circle. A fatal heart attack and an admission to the ICU. As detailed in the sentence From the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia, which has ultimately decided the case, the employee had started working as a laborer in a carpentry shop full-time in August 2021 and his gross monthly salary was 1,730.53 euros. After suffering the heart attack on March 23, 2022, the company notified him of the disciplinary dismissal on March 25, 2022, without assessing his medical condition or hospitalization in the ICU. The company claimed disciplinary dismissal arguing that the employee had not gone to work in the last two days. Obviously, the reason was more than justified given that the employee was still admitted to intensive care when he received the dismissal letter. Can you be fired during a hospital stay? Not currently, but before the 2022 labor reform that materialized with Law 15/2022, a disciplinary dismissal could be argued if it was not directly linked to the fact of hospitalization. In this case, the company did not fire him for being sickbut for not showing up at work. That nuance left the loophole that the company took advantage of to fire him when he had not yet recovered from his pathology or know if it would affect his work performance. The initial judicial process: unfair dismissal. The worker took the case to the Social Court number 1 of Girona. In the first instance, the judge analyzed the situation and decided that the dismissal was not disciplinary, but rather unfair. This means that the dismissal did not meet the legal requirements to be considered justified, and implied compensation. However, the court did not declare it void because, according to the previous legislation, the worker was not permanently disabled and had already been discharged when the sentence was issued, so the link with the heart attack could not be proven. Therefore, at that time, the court did not consider that there was discrimination on the basis of illness. It should be noted that, in July 2022, the latest labor reform came into force, which just changes this assessment regarding dismissals of people with illnesses or health conditions that can be considered disabilities, opening the door to new legal interpretations. A new twist: null dismissal. The worker appealed the first sentence and the case was raised to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC). In October 2023, with the new labor law already fully established, the TSJC ruled that the dismissal should be considered void. The court indicated that the speed with which the company decided to fire the worker, even while he was in the ICU, showed that the company was aware of his irregular action in dismissal. This means that the dismissal was illegal and should be reversed in its entirety. The court insisted that the true cause of the dismissal was not absence from work (clearly justified), but rather the worker’s serious illness, which is why it was interpreted that direct discrimination on the grounds of health had been committed. The TSJC ordered the reinstatement of the worker in his position and that he be paid all back wages since the first lawsuit was filed. In addition, he ordered the company to pay compensation of 15,000 euros for moral damages to the worker. In Xataka | Fraud in medical leave: the “discharges” are increasing as companies try to combat absenteeism Image | Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons

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