Germany

Germany is considering breaking a rule in force since 1919 as a desperate measure to boost its economy: working on Sundays

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Bedran Günes was working on the cash register at his store in Berlin when two agents entered. They looked through their soup cans, their spices, and their bread. He was then fined 2,500 euros. Their crime: selling non-perishable food, but above all, doing so on Sunday, violating the 1919 rule contained in the German Constitution that prohibits opening on Sunday. “Sonntagsruhe”, they call it. Günes recognized to the Wall Street Journal that continues to do so. “Otherwise, my business would go bankrupt,” said the grocery store owner. He estimates that up to 40% of his sales are made just that day. A break that comes from 1919. The rule that fined Günes for working on Sunday is more than a century old. He was born in the Weimar Constitution proclaimed in 1919, which is still valid today in the article 140 of the German Basic Law. The text indicates the protection of Sunday “as days of rest and spiritual reflection.” Since then, on Sundays in Germany only bars, restaurants and gas stations open with a strict government permit. Supermarkets can only sell bread, drinks, tobacco or takeaway food that can be eaten on the street or standing (street food, etc.). Any other commercial activity is prohibited until Monday. Merz’s plan. Germany’s government is dealing with a stagnant economy since 2019 that does not give signs recovery and its main industry making water. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is not willing to throw in the towel, so he is implementing a intensive reform plan to revive the German economy. The German government has already touched medical leave, pensionsthe work dayand now proposes that retail businesses can also open on Sundays to extend opening hours to save their economy. Found positions. The change is scheduled for January 2027, and the measure has already found supporters and opponents. Unions see it as an attack on labor rights. They have been joined by some merchants who claim that “we have a hard time finding employees who are willing to work every Saturday, so how are we going to find employees to work on Sundays?” declared Catrin Schulz, an optician in Berlin. to the british The Telegraph. Furthermore, merchants point out that their customers already buy online on Sundays anyway, so the productivity of commerce (beyond restaurants) does not decline during Sunday. The numbers that move the debate. The German retail sector is feeling the crisis. has lost 60,000 jobs since 2022 and more than 50,000 stores have closed in the last five years, according to its own employers. Meanwhile, the country’s unemployment exceeds three million of people, something that has not happened for more than a decade. A survey of YouGov recently published reveals that 43% of Germans would support opening more on Sundays. Just a year ago, that support was around 34%. Half of the country is still against it, but resistance is cracking little by little, especially among the youngest. In Xataka | Germany believes it has found the most German possible solution to its productivity problems: work more Image | Unsplash (Gonzalo Leon Jasin, Tim Mossholder)

2,000 years ago someone screwed up in a foundry. Thanks to her we have discovered a Roman workshop hidden in Germany

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When a piece of metal goes wrong, the normal thing in an artisan workshop is that it ends up being discarded. Well, something like this must have happened 2,000 years ago and that chance discovery of a lead ingot at an excavation in Rothaargebirgein the German region of Sauerland, has helped discover, understand and reconstruct how this metal was produced in the Roman Empire. The discovery. It all started with a large cast lead ingot, with a characteristic workmanship from the Roman imperial period, which found Brilon resident and metal prospector Peter Hoffman. Then he notified the authorities: the ingot was not a unit lost in transit, but a casting failure that was probably left there with the idea of ​​remelting it to use it, something that fortunately (for archaeology) never happened. With that clue, the archeology team of the Westphalia-Lippe Regional Association (LWL) The excavation campaign began in June on an elevation of the Rothaargebirge massif, near Brilon. What they found there confirmed his suspicions: There was a lead processing area from Roman times, something unique until now in southwest Westphalia. Why is it important. It may not be as spectacular as tombs or treasures, but this defective lead ingot serves to fill a gap in history: it is the first solid archaeological evidence that a metallurgical production chain existed in Sauerland, something that until now was not known. This is how he fills in a piece to better explain how the Roman economy worked. Furthermore, since ingots are direct products of mining and are marked with seals or engravings, they allow their distribution chain to be traced: the place of origin (the manufacturing workshop is close to the mine), their trade and distribution networks. In fact, there is a corpus which brings together some 2,250 Roman ingots documented from Scotland to Morocco and from Portugal to Israel. Context. As explains the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochumlead was a metal widely used in Roman times for all kinds of things: pipes, weights, sling projectiles or sarcophagus linings… and sometimes it was linked to the extraction of silver, so it is common to find the production of both together. Precisely this relationship between lead and silver is essential to explain Brilon. According to the doctor in archeology of the LWL Manuel Zeilerrelatively small amounts of lead were found at the site, which suggests that the objective was to produce lead efficiently and not generate waste derived from silver exploitation, an important detail because in many ancient sites both activities go hand in hand. Previous works by LWL already indicated that in the area around Brilon there were deposits rich in mineral and that Roman metallurgists had visited the area with the interest of obtaining lead, but it was not clear how. In detail. The team, led by Sebastian Magnus Sonntag, documented that there were ceramic fragments of pre-Roman tradition and numerous small fragments of lead related to the process of obtaining the metal, in addition to a base built with carefully arranged stone slabs. Both these slabs and the clay soil beneath showed signs of fire and heat and in the gaps between stones there were remains of charcoal, still to be analyzed, but the team’s hypothesis points because that place was a roasting point: there the galena (the most common lead sulfide in the region) was heated along with charcoal to reduce its sulfur content and then melt the resulting metal and pour it into molds and obtain ingots like the one found. Yes, but. The excavation only lasted a couple of weeks and the conclusions are still preliminary, but there are some things that still do not add up: the ceramic fragments probably point to the beginning of the Roman imperial era, but it is a relative and not an absolute dating. The key will be in the dating of the vegetal carbon remains. But the big underlying question was who worked the metal there: whether they were Romans, Germans or local artisans in contact with Roman technology. In Xataka | “For 2,000 years they have been inaccessible. Finally we can read them”: archaeologists now know how to decipher the Herculaneum papyri In Xataka | The “Mud Rome” of Hispania loved board games and wine. We know it thanks to a mysterious site in Aragon Cover | LWL and Jebulon

the richest man in Germany and owner of Lidl

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The name “Dieter Schwarz” may not sound familiar to you right away, but if we talk about Lidl, things change. Well, Dieter Schwarz is the head of the family emporium of Lidl and Kaufland. And it is normal that neither the name nor the face is familiar to you, because the “German Juan Roig” He is extremely jealous of his privacy in a globalized and permanently connected world like the one we live in thanks to big tech like Google, Meta or Amazon. Precisely at that table is where the group wants to sit. Schwarz Digitsits technological side responsible until now for the IT of the almost 15,000 supermarkets that the chain has around the world. As synthesize Bernd Wagner, their sales manager: “If you don’t sit at the table, you end up being part of the menu.” From the supermarket to the cloud. It seems like a huge leap because in fact it is, but the Schwarz have been making their first steps for years. In 2018 they began developing their own internal cloud (called Stackit) to manage the critical infrastructure of its supermarkets independently. In 2021 they acquired the Israeli cybersecurity company XM Cyber ​​for about $700 million. In 2023 the group announced the creation of Schwarz Digits combining the cloud, cybersecurity and e-commerce and at that time they already had 7,500 people on staff. Originally this infrastructure was designed for internal use, but the next step has been to open it to external clients. A specific type of client: who seeks digital sovereignty. Companies and public institutions that want to process their data exclusively in Europe, with high standards of data protection and legal control. And now has important clientssuch as the government of the Netherlands, some German ministries, the KPN telecom or the Dutch Central Bank. Why is it important. This step forward comes at a time when Europe is missing the boat on artificial intelligence and the United States, the official supplier of the old continent, is converting its most valuable asset (the most advanced AI models) into export technology subject to controls, such as we have already seen with Claude Mythos. In fact, the CEO of Mistral has already warned that Europe only has two years to catch up if it does not want to be a vassal. In short, Europe has to put the turbo in models, but also chips and infrastructure such as data centers. And it’s in it. The institutional plan is ambitious and considers private collaboration as essential, but the fact that it is one of the largest retailers in Europe and not a newly arrived startup provides a plus: own capital on a large scale and without depending on external investors, as Stackit herself emphasizes by presenting itself as a company “without external shareholder interests, without changes in ownership.” Context. Currently, three American companies hold 70% of the European cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy datacompared to a paltry 15% from European suppliers. In short: the market that Stackit is targeting is succulent and its room for growth is enormous. And your work in the old continent and the country that has historically been the engine of Europe, more than welcome: in the words of the German Minister of DigitalizationKarsten Wildberger: “Germany needs processing capacity if it wants to compete in the first division in artificial intelligence.” In detail. Today Stackit manages several data centers in Germany and Austria and has relevant alliances: it hosts models from the German AI firm Aleph Alpha (where the Schwarz group has invested) and has a system called AuditGPT that uses Deutsche Bahn. Additionally, Google Workspace has been hosted since 2024 in data centers operated by Schwarz. Its most visible upcoming project is the Lübbenau data center, built on a former lignite thermal power plant. With 11 billion euros of investment and a first phase planned for the end of 2027, it is designed to work with renewable energy and will have the capacity to house 100,000 GPUs. Yes, but. Although the vision and business and industrial capacity of the Schwarz Group is beyond doubt, the big bet of the richest man in Germany is a complicated adventure because it has hyperscalers such as Google, Amazon or Microsoft in front of it, which implies economic muscle at another level, decades of advantage in software and technological experience that the German company does not yet have. Furthermore, American big tech companies are not willing to give up ground on the old continent: in November 2025 Google announced a €5.5 billion investment in Germany, including a new data center in Dietzenbach. And although digital sovereignty is a very strong claim, Stackit still depends on open source technologies and partners like CrowdStrike or Aleph Alpha for its catalog of services, so it is more aspirational than a reality. In Xataka | Who can do more, Google or seven small Dutch companies together? Europe is on the verge of discovering it In Xataka | To become technologically “independent” from the US, the European Union already has a plan: four desperate measures Cover | Xataka with Magnific

There are people who think that Europe should recover the military. What happened in Germany offers them an unpleasant surprise

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It is still early to know whether or not Germany will be successful with its new volunteer ‘military’but one thing is clear: the German authorities have revived a figure that was in the doldrums for years, the conscientious objector. Although Berlin does not apply a mandatory recruitment system, thousands of young people in the country have wanted to improve their health by starting the procedures to benefit from their constitutional right to not have to hold a weapon. More requests have been registered during the first six months of the year alone than in all of 2025. It has even surpassed 2011, the year in which the mandatory military service ended. What has happened? That the Bundesrat has achieved something unexpected (or not) with your new law of voluntary military service. Its purpose was to give a boost to recruitment so that the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr) would go from its current around 184,000 troops to between 255,000 and 270,000 in 2035, but everything indicates that they have activated a mechanism that pushes in the opposite direction: more and more young people declare themselves conscientious objectors, that is, they appeal to their constitutional right not to be forced by anyone to use weapons or be a soldier. That does not mean that the new German ‘military’ is not working (to affirm such a thing it would be necessary to handle updated recruitment data), but it does mean that its future will not be as peaceful as the Government of Friedrich Merz would like. Are there so many objectors? Yes. The data has advanced them Redaktions Netzwerk Deutschland (RND) and show that the figure of the objector is experiencing a real boom in Germany. During the first half of 2026 alone, the Federal Office for Family and Civil Society Affairs received 5,862 applications from citizens who wanted to declare themselves conscientious objectors. There are almost a thousand each month, but the data stands out above all when put into context. Throughout 2025 the Government noted 3,867 requests and in 2024 they were only 2,249. In 2011, the year in which the mandatory military service was suspended, 4,348 were registered. The balance of the first half of the year not only shows a clear rebound, it also suggests that young Germans are increasingly concerned about the issue: 60% of these applications were submitted between April and June, when the country was shaken by several controversies related to the new military law, as if men need authorization to leave the country for more than three months. But is there or isn’t there ‘mili’? Yes. And no. There is no mandatory service like the one that existed in Spain until 2001 or that applied in Germany until 2011, but there is a new legal framework with which Berlin aspires to gain voluntary recruits. To understand it you have to go back to December 2025when the Upper House of the German Parliament approved a military service bill that began to be applied on January 1, 2026. Its objective is very simple: add thousands of new soldiers to the country’s Armed Forces (Bundeswehr), although with a lot of pedagogy and initially appealing to voluntariness. In practice, this means that right now Germans who come of age are only required to go through two relatively harmless and simple procedures. “Men born in 2008 or later must participate in the military registration process. This includes filling out a questionnaire and passing a medical examination by medical personnel,” explains the Bundeswehr. Do we know anything else? Yes. The military explains in detail how it will implement the system. The idea is that all young Germans who come of age (some 650,000 each year) will receive an online questionnaire asking whether or not you are interested in military life. The men are obligated to respond. For women it is optional. If the answer is yes, the Armed Forces invite volunteers to a recruitment center to continue the process. The system is still being implemented, but at the end of last year the German press was talking aboutIn a second phase, late in 2027, 18-year-old men must also undergo a medical examination that will be mandatory whether they opt for voluntary military service or not. “No one forces you to do anything, except to fill out a questionnaire that reflects the recorded data and pass a medical examination that does no harm to anyone,” claims the German Defense Minister, the social democrat Boris Pistorius. “The State does not protect itself. That has to be done by people who are willing to defend it and not sit idly waiting for others to do so.” What is the objective? We pointed it out before: turning the German army into a European reference. And that happens by arriving in the mid-2030s with 460,000 troopsbetween active personnel (260,000) and reservists (200,000). Not bad if you take into account that in 2025 184,000 soldiers were serving. In Germany already throw out the idea that, if this objective is not achieved through voluntary recruitment, the Government could go further and opt for a mandatory model. In any case, that would require a new parliamentary procedure. For now, in view of the changes being promoted by the Merz Executive, the threat from Russia and the rearmament discourse fueled by Donald Trump, more and more young people are choosing to declare themselves objectors. Curiously, there are also people who take the opposite path, although less: the daily Neue Osnabrucker assures that during the first quarter 233 people waived their right to refuse military service. They join the 781 that did so in 2025. Images | Simon Infanger (Unsplash) and Filip Andrejevic (Unsplash) In Xataka | In Spain, 1,149 young people lost their lives in the same place between 1983 and 1989. All of these “accidents” could have been avoided.

Video game preservation has already been mortally wounded with Sony. The next blow comes from an entire country: Germany

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Many times we have treated video games as if their availability was guaranteed, even when they depended on discs, digital stores and servers that could disappear. What we have seen this week reminds us that preserving them requires more than will: we need supports that survive and organizations capable of cataloging them, maintaining them and opening them to researchers and the public. Sony has decided to close one of those avenues for future releases. Almost at the same time, Germany has dropped one of the most ambitious public projects that existed to prevent that memory from being lost. The closure is already underway. The Internationale Computerspielesammlung, known as ICS, is in the process of dissolution after the public funding that supported it expired at the end of April 2026. GamesWirtschaft points out that The federal government refused to renew its share of support and the partners voted unanimously to dissolve the company. The decision does not erase the existing collections at once, but it does leave the shared database and the infrastructure that allowed it to be consulted without defined continuity, the future of which remains under legal and technical review. An archive of more than 60,000 games. The ICS gathered records and funds provided by institutions such as the Computerspielemuseum of Berlin, the USK, the game association and the DIGAREC research center. The collection encompassed cartridges, floppy disks, CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray, as well as boxes, manuals, associated materials and hardware. Of course, what could be publicly consulted since April 2019 was the digital database, not the games themselves. The physical pieces remain in the hands of the proprietary entities. The ambition went much further. The ICS aspired to gather in one place the funds that were still distributed among its partners and turn the whole into a stable tool for researchers, media and specialists. The plan included facilitating access through automated emulation and creating a permanent public headquarters in the German capital region. The complete leap was never consolidated: a repository already existed, but permanent institutionalization, public headquarters and the access provided through emulation were missing. That second phase remained uncompleted. The money did not find a stable outlet. The aid came from the Berlin Senate and the Federal Commissioner for Culture, but was linked to a temporary phase of the initiative. When the video game policy passed to the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space in 2025, it studied whether it could turn the ICS into a permanent institution. He ultimately concluded that the model was not economically viable due to the scale of the work required. Preserving also means guaranteeing access. The scenario left by these two movements does not only imply that there are fewer objects to save or fewer projects capable of organizing them. It also weakens the ability to consult, study and understand these games decades from now, when they will depend on hardware, documentation and systems that may no longer exist. The coincidence between Sony’s announcement and the fall of the ICS points in that direction: the video game memory does not disappear all at once, but when the structures that keep it available are removed, one by one. Images | Sei In Xataka | ‘Minecraft’ has achieved something revolutionary in the dynamics of the game: allowing its users to sit

Germany toughens its labor reforms by requiring a sick leave certificate from day one: “It is a competitive disadvantage”

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In Germany, take a sick leave After the pandemic it was as easy as picking up the phone, describing what hurts you and hanging up with the leave already processed. That procedure his days are numbered. Chancellor Friedrich Merz wants Germans to go to a doctor’s office again from the first day they feel unwell, and for him to be the one to prescribe sick leave with proof from the first day. The measure has opened a debate that, although it may not seem like it, we also have in Spain. What exactly changes in Germany. Since Germany implemented distancing measures during the Covid-19 pandemic, a worker could call his or her doctor, tell him or her the symptoms, and receive treatment. lower part without leaving home. Merz’s plan erases them with a stroke of the pen. From now on, proof must be requested in person from the first day of sick leave. Previously, it was only necessary after the third day of illness. As and how I collected the BBCChancellor Merz argued that “we cannot afford this competitive disadvantage caused by long periods of absence from work.” The reform, agreed between his party and the SPD, has clashed with unions, who speak of a “culture of mistrust” towards employees, and with family doctors, who fear seeing their offices overflowing with workers with a simple cold. Spain, an uncomfortable mirror. The German debate sounds distant until you look at the data here. Work absenteeism in Spain reached 7.2% of the agreed hours in the first quarter of 2026, its highest level in five years, according to the Randstad report Research. That is equivalent to more than 1.6 million of people who are absent from their jobs every day. In Germany the data follow a similar pattern and, according to the IGES report For the DAK-Gesundheit mutual insurance company, the average sick leave time is 19.5 days per year per worker, with mental health as the fastest growing cause. Justified and unjustified, two very different things. However, the term absenteeism is misleading and lumps together those who do not go to work due to a diagnosed illness and those who do not report to work by their own decision. He justified absenteeism It includes medical leave, legal permits or a justified appointment with the specialist, and the company cannot sanction you in any case. Unjustified absenteeism is a very different thing and includes absences without warning or giving any explanation, something that can end in a sanction and even dismissal. In Spain, almost eight out of every ten absences come from a temporary disability recognized by a doctor. It should be noted that temporary sick leave is not assigned by the worker himself, but is prescribed by a doctor. Only two out of ten workers miss work without justifying it. The real bottleneck: saturated healthcare. Many sick leave are not prolonged because the patient decides to extend their convalescence. They lengthen because the medical system takes time to treat you. According to data from the Ministry of Health, in 2025 there were more than 853,000 people in waiting list surgery in Spain, with an average delay of 121 days to undergo surgery. Added to this are more than four million people waiting for an appointment with a specialist. The result is easy to imagine: someone on sick leave due to a hernia or a knee can spend months on sick leave waiting for the test or operation that would return them to work sooner. While Germany tightens downward access, in Spain the bottleneck of absenteeism is a few steps further: in a waiting room. In Xataka | Germany has recovered a measure from 1889 to avoid the collapse of its pensions: work until age 70 Image | Unsplash (Maheshkumar Painam, Vitaly Gariev)

Germany and France need to imitate Spain to survive the heat

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Melting roads, bursting train tracks and firefighters watering bridges. While in Spain we deal with the heat by lowering the blinds, in Europe we are looking for solutions to try to survive a heat wave that has blown up the most basic mobility infrastructures. “You should look at Japan”. “You should look at how rail transport works in Japan. There it also reaches 40 degrees in summer and the trains are not constantly cancelled” or “it happened 20 years ago, the air conditioning has failed. (…) the problem has existed for a long time and nothing is done.” There are two comments that reported in one of the local media in Bavaria (Germany). In the text, one of the reporters explains that “the passengers were completely sweaty and accepted the situation with resignation” when it was reported that the regional train in which they were traveling had broken down its air conditioning. With 35 degrees outside and more than 40 degrees inside, the problem was obvious. So evident that Marco Kragulji, spokesman for the German passenger association “Pro Bahn”pointed out that, quite simply, “Germany has problems with its trains when the heat comes.” Click on the image to go to the original tweet Germany, Belgium… German trains with broken air conditioning have been just one of the problems encountered by rail traffic in a burning central Europe. And in the country too Tram tracks have been broken in the city of Essen because of the heat. It is by no means the only case. In Brussels the tram tracks have also jumpedtearing up the asphalt and completely stopping traffic. The causes are simple: train tracks are designed to withstand temperatures typical of countries that used to be colder. Heat expands the materials and ends up splitting them.destroying the infrastructure. Click on the image to go to the original tweet “We recommend that you do not take the train”. In addition to broken tracks, SNCF (the French Renfe) has recommended that “vulnerable users” don’t take the train. And the problems with the air conditioning are constant and have even been the main reason why Dozens of trains were suspended last week. The problem is that the heat is being so extreme that it is putting the trains that have been in operation for more than 20 years to the test. Those trains were designed in a context that, except for the heat wave of 2003, does not exist today. And now the Spanish trains are given as an example, much better armed to withstand extreme temperatures. looking south. In the German media they use the Spanish and Italian infrastructure as an example. They claim that Deutsche Bahn (in this case, the German Renfe) designed the rails for the train to withstand temperatures that are now considered too low. And the problem, they point out in this medium specialized in engineeringit is not the ambient temperature, it is that the tracks, due to the concentrated heat and the passage of the trains, reach much higher temperatures that, now, break the tracks. Generalists focus on the fact that Spanish and Italian roads use colors that reflect the sun to reduce the temperature. But also They praise the air conditioning systems of Spanish trains that are more powerful and with more recurring departures within the cars. Both France and Germany point out, however, that the latest generation trains that are arriving on their tracks already use powerful air conditioning systems to face these new situations. And they are even adding batteries to ensure that the air conditioning remains active in case of a breakdown. Photo | Linus Follert and windy In Xataka | Some roads are literally melting. It is a gigantic problem that is going to get worse.

After Germany did not rate Uwe Boll’s new film by age, Elon Musk decided to premiere it himself on X

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The German FSK, the German age ratings body (private, self-regulated by the film industry, not related to the government) has been denying age ratings to films of extreme violence for decades. This time a controversial decision with the latest film by one of the most disastrous directors of all time has ended up resulting in the richest man in the world publishing it on his social network as an act of resistance against state censorship. Let’s see who is right in all this hubbub. But who…? Uwe Boll is a German director and producer known primarily for his film adaptations of video games. Terrible adaptations: ‘BloodRayne’, ‘Alone in the Dark’, ‘In the name of the king’ (based on ‘Dungeon Siege’) or ‘Postal’ are some of them. Despite some occasional successes (‘House of the Dead’ has a very nice trotting edge), Boll has deservedly earned the fame of being one of the worst directors in history, a fame only surpassed by his ingenuity when it comes to organizing publicity stunts, such as sketching evenings against his critics. What is it about? A former American military man based in Europe inherits his father’s real estate business. After witnessing the murder of a mother at the hands of migrant criminals, he decides to take justice into his own hands and begins a violent campaign against criminals and corrupt judges that turns him into a viral phenomenon: celebrated by many, and also persecuted by law enforcement and powerful enemies. Citizen Vigilante. His new film, written, produced and directed by Boll himself, was released on June 19 in a few theaters in the United States and on digital through Quiver Distribution. The protagonist is Armie Hammer, a detail of the casting that adds murky layers to the film: it is Hammer’s most relevant role since his career sank following allegations of sexual assault and emotional abuse in 2021 (with unspeakable overtones of cannibalism), although the investigation concluded without charges. Hammer recognized that ‘Citizen Vigilante’ was his first job offer in five years, and that when Boll called him, he burst into tears. Boll, very cunning, chose Hammer deliberately. As explained“I hired him because he is a great actor and also because he had been canceled and wanted to work. They didn’t accuse him of anything, there was no lawsuit. He was just a famous guy who had behaved badly.” It is an important detail: the casting is already a political statement, as it could not be otherwise, anti-woke. The role of the FSK. The FSK denied the film an age rating in two successive rounds. And although Boll calls it state censorship, it is not. The FSK is an entity serving the film industry itself, not a government body. The State only intervenes when a work violates current criminal laws, so Boll could have released his film without going through the FSK. Of course, there are commercial consequences: without the rating, the film cannot be shown in multiplexes or sold on DVD in large stores, and platforms such as Netflix in Germany do not include it in their catalog. But of course: Boll himself welcomes this decision by the FSK: without this extra publicity, ‘Citizen Vigilante’ would have gone unnoticed. The scandal is part of the film’s dissemination campaign. Enter Musk. Since December 2025, X has been in open conflict with the European institutions. That month the European Commission imposed a fine of 140 million dollars to X for failure to comply with the Digital Services Act, the law that forces platforms to combat misinformation and illegal content. In February 2026, X filed an appeal with the General Court of the European Union, alleging serious procedural errors and bias in the investigation. The publication of ‘Citizen Vigilante’ in Musk’s TL It fits perfectly with that narrative: Europe censors, X is a territory of freedom. Of coursethe reactions of those close to Musk (Libs of TikTok, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos) were immediate. But we have already seen the reality of the matter: no one has censored ‘Citizen Vigilante’, which has simply been rejected at a private ratings board. To watch. As is usual in cases of films used as throwing weapons between political factions, opinions are dispersed: audience score of the 93% on Rotten Tomatoesbut only three critic reviews, all negative. Variety He said the film is “so astonishingly bad that it almost seems like Boll is deliberately sabotaging his protagonist, whose return can only be harmed by this project.” But thanks to Musk’s push, he is in the 31st place on IMDB. For now, until tomorrow the film will be able to be seen on X, on Musk’s own account. The movie is possibly horrible. But not everyone can boast of having Elon Musk as an enthusiastic distribution partner. In Xataka | Elon Musk is going to turn 4,000 workers into millionaires and himself into a billionaire thanks to one thing: SpaceX

Spain had a master plan for the European fighter. The problem is that Germany just got a girlfriend with a lot of “money”

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In 1986, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom decided to join forces to build the Eurofighter Typhoon. It took almost two decades to turn it into realitybut that project left a key lesson: in Europe, fighters are not built with engineering alone, but with industrial and political balances that sometimes last longer than the technology itself. The collapse and plan B. It we count last week. He collapse of the Future Combat Air System has not only been the failure of a large European military program of 100,000 million euros, it has also been the moment in which Spain understood that he could not wait for France and Germany to resolve their industrial wars. For years, the FCAS It was sold as the large sixth-generation European fighter, but tensions between Airbus and Dassault Aviation they ended up blocking the distribution of work, leadership and technological architecture. When Berlin withdrew, Madrid lost more than just a partner: it lost the pillar that supported its own bet. FCAS concept The Spanish exit. Spain had been moving in silence for some time. With Indra gaining weight in defense and with growing conversations with Saab, the idea was clear: if FCAS sank, there was room to build an alternative axle with Germany and Sweden around satellite technologies such as sensors, combat cloud, accompanying drones and command systems. It was not yet a “new fighter” as such, but it was a survival platform industrial so as not to be tied to Paris. It was a lateral route to keep the Spanish option alive within the sixth European generation. Italy changes the board. And then Italy has appeared. Leonardo’s new management has made it clear that it would be delighted to open the door of the Global Combat Air Program to Germany. On paper, that is a logical invitation: Berlin brings money, industry and experience accumulated with the Eurofighter Typhoon. But strategically it is a bomb for Spain. Because the centerpiece of your plan B (Germany) could stop looking towards the Swedish axis and turn towards Rome, London and Tokyo. In a matter of weeks, the Spanish escape route could become a dead end. Germany is looking for a leading role. The German movement also has internal logic. Berlin does not want to be a secondary partner. He made it clear within the FCAS and he is repeating it now: if he enters another program, he wants a role proportional to your investment and its industrial weight. That sits poorly with France, where Dassault Aviation never wanted to let go control, but it fits much better with Italian flexibility. Furthermore, BAE Systems and the German branch of Airbus already they cooperated successfully on the Eurofighter. For Berlin, GCAP is starting to look less like an alternative and more like a logical continuation. The Spanish dilemma. And here is the big crack for Spain. If Germany joins GCAP, Madrid stays trapped between two worlds: a mortally wounded FCAS and an alternative plan that loses its most important partner before consolidating. Spain can try to continue punch to France, but that would mean accepting a (much) more subordinate role. You could also look for a direct approach to Italy or even Japan and the United Kingdom, but arriving late to an already structured program reduces a lot the negotiation margin. The risk is brutal: being left out of the table where the next great European air combat ecosystem is decided. Europe repeats its old problem. All this once again reveals the great industrial drama European: too many projects, too many egos and, above all, too much overlap. While the United States and China move forward with centralized programs, Europe continues to fragment its resources between rival blocs. In that sense, Spain believed it had found a safety net after the FCAS. The problem is that this network depended on Germany… and now Germany has a new dance couple. Image | Picryl In Xataka | Spain, France and Germany had joined together to illuminate the “European fighter” of the future: now that path is dead In Xataka | The European fighter has died, but Europe still has one last bullet to avoid the F-35: the alliance of Spain and Sweden

The European fighter may have died, but there is a plan B to avoid the F-35. One with Spain, Germany and an unexpected guest

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While Europe was still trying to convince itself that another great war was impossible, Germany blew up for the first time the Messerschmitt Bf 109 in 1935: the fighter that would become the backbone of the Luftwaffe. Ninety years later, the continent is once again debating the same underlying question: who will build its next air superiority. The death of the great European fighter. The great European dream of building a common sixth generation fighter has crashed. The manned core of the FCAS program, the so-called NGF, had been blocked for years by the industrial war between Airbus and Dassault Aviation, but now it’s official now: the Franco-German formula has collapsed. What was supposed to be the joint heir to the Eurofighter Typhoon and the Rafale has been broken by something very European: distribution of power, money and technological sovereignty. France wanted to lead it, and Germany did not agree to be a secondary partner. The danger of emptiness. When a program like this dies, the risk is not only industrial. It is also strategic. Europe need a substitute for its current fighters between 2040 and 2045, and the clock is ticking. The quickest way out would be to buy more Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning IIs, something that is already on the table in Berlin. But that would mean assuming that European air sovereignty has failed and that dependence on Washington is irreversible. At a time when America looks increasingly towards Asia and less towards Europe, that has much deeper implications than simply buying airplanes. Plan B exists. Here comes the real twist, because the great European fighter has died, but not the idea of ​​building one. Germany and Spain they have made a move with the so-called “Team Gen 6”a new industrial alliance led by Airbus that tries to rescue what is useful from FCAS and turn it into something else: a more agile, less political and more realistic project. It is not a restart from scratch, since the engines, combat networks, guided weapons and accompanying drones are still alive, and what has died is the original political architecture. Spain is no longer secondary. On this new board, there is no doubt, Spain I would gain weight. Until now it was the junior partner in a project dominated by Paris and Berlin, but the collapse has changed circumstances. Companies such as Indra Sistemas, GMV, ITP Aero or Sener become part of the hard core of the new design. For Spain, this is not just a matter of defense, It is also industrytechnology and presence in the value chain of future European air combat. In other words, if the plan succeeds, the Spanish nation will cease to be a companion and become a central actor. Sweden as an unexpected piece. The big problem by Team Gen 6 is the size. Germany and Spain together hardly economically justify a program worth hundreds of billions. That’s why the name that begins to sound strongly It’s Saab AB. Sweden fits better than the United Kingdom or Japan because its needs they are more similar: a more contained, cheaper and less gigantic plane than the Anglo-Japanese GCAP. If Berlin, Madrid and Stockholm converge, there could be a third way European very different from the French and the British. One bullet remains before the F-35. If you want too, that’s what’s really important. He collapse of the NGF It does not mean that Europe has lost its last chance. It means that the old formula has died and another is trying to be born from the rubble. In that sense, Germany, Spain and Airbus know it. That is why the real plan B is not to buy the American F-35, that is el emergency plan. The real plan B is to try to save a European industrial autonomy with another coalition, another logic and another calendar. And although it may seem like a desperate maneuver, it is actually the last attempt to prevent the future of European air combat from being designed (again) in Washington. Image | Robert Sullivan In Xataka | Spain refuses to buy the F-35 from the US, so it has gotten something in exchange: Harrier pieces as LEGO In Xataka | The US opted for the quality of the F-35 rather than quantity. China opted for the opposite and it is already a problem

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