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An Aragonese company used the brand ‘La Mafia’ for its restaurants. Italy has managed to have it annulled in Spain

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The restaurant chain ‘The Mafia sits at the table’ it’s news. And not because of the new features of its Italian-inspired menu or because of the opening of new stores. What has made it hit the headlines (much to its chagrin) is its brand, a business card that the Republic of Italy considers offensive and takes years starring in a complicated judicial soap opera. Now Roma has achieved a key victory that puts the brand in serious danger in Spain. The key: Can the word ‘mafia’ be used happily? What has happened? The news has advanced it the diary Expansion. The Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM) has resolved that the name of ‘The Mafia sits at the table’a popular restaurant chain founded more than 20 years ago in Zaragozais “contrary to public order and good customs”, which is why it has endorsed the request for annulment made by the Government of Italy. The OEPM resolution is recent (February 26) and leaves little room for interpretation. In the opinion of its techniciansthe brand alludes to a real organization with activities “contrary to the ethical and moral principles” of the EU. Hence, I agree with Italy that it is questionable whether it can be registered and exploited on a commercial level. “It would offend the victims and their families,” he warns. Is it something new? Yes. And no. Italy has been maneuvering for years to force the Aragonese restaurant chain to abandon a name that it considers offensive. And nothing has gone wrong in his efforts. In 2015, he filed a complaint that led to the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) refusing to register the trademark at the community level. Years later (2018) it was marked equally important when the General Court of the EU (TGUE) endorsed the decision of the EUIPO and prevented the company from shielding its commercial name. What does that mean? That was more than a simple judicial victory. The decision The TGEU prevented the company from registering its trademark at the community level, which in practice left it unprotected. However, the TGUE’s decision had its limitations. For example, it did not prevent the Zaragoza chain from continuing to use its name in the dozens of restaurants it has throughout Spain. What changes now? The OEPM opinion goes one step (and several) further. The brand is no longer only annulled at the community level, but it is also doing so in Spain, a fundamental decision since ‘La Mafia sits at the table’ (remember) is a chain born 26 years ago right here, in Zaragoza. The Spanish organization has aligned itself with European justice and has come to the conclusion that the name is “contrary to public order” and “good customs”, which is why it has endorsed the request for annulment presented by Italy. Not only that. The transalpine country has already gone to the commercial courts of Barcelona to prevent the Aragonese company from continuing to use its name. What will happen now? “The resolution could be issued in less than a year and, if favorable, would force them to cease using the trademark,” explains to Expansion Josep Carbonell, partner of Fieldfisherthe office that has advised Italy in the procedure. Of course, the company also has margin (one month) to appeal the OEPM’s decision. In any case, its resolution of February 26 represents a setback for the future of the brand in its large market. What is the problem? The underlying question is very simple: can the word ‘mafia’ be used happily or not? Should its commercial use be banned? The company claims that it was inspired by a recipe book and appeals to the right to freedom of expression, remembering in passing that it is not unusual to find books, movies and series focused on the same topic. years ago in fact already clarified that its objective is not to offend anyone, but to generate an atmosphere similar to that of the ‘Godfather’ saga. For the authorities, however, the reading is somewhat different. In its resolution, the TGUE recalled that (at least in this case) using the term “banalizes organized crime” and even warned of the risk of “romanticizing” it. In a similar vein, the OEPM recalls that Spain is no stranger to this criminal organization and its activities, “contrary to the ethical principles” and “fundamental moral values ​​of the EU.” In the background there is a more complex issue, such as remember Carbonell: Is using the word ‘mafia’ in an artistic work the same as elevating it to the category of a business’ trademark? Is it an isolated case? Not at all. The Italian authorities have not only focused on the Zaragoza company. In 2024, fed up with his town being associated with organized crime, the mayor of Agrigento (Sicily) issued a municipal order to prohibit the sale of tourist souvenirs related to the mafia. The underlying reason was similar: to prevent people from doing business with (and romanticizing) an organization that, beyond the veneer that Hollywood has given it, has been causing headaches for the Italian authorities for years. Images | The Mafia 1 and 2 Via | Expansion In Xataka | Sushi was a sleeping giant of the fast food industry: in the US it has already begun to eat hamburgers

South Korea has had the most catastrophic birth rate in the world for years. And now it has finally managed to grow

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For a few years now, talking about demographics in South Korea has made it necessary to first take out a clinex package. Despite all his attempts (and there have been not a few) the country seemed condemned to suffer an uncontrollable ‘bleed’ of birth rates and see the seams of its economy tighten. It may sound exaggerated, but it is good to remember that he said goodbye to 2024 by declaring “super aged” and that there are academics who warn that the nation is emptying (literally). With that backdrop, Seoul has started 2026 with a positive fact: wins babies. And it also does so for the second consecutive year. The big question that arises now is… Are we facing a change in trend or just a mirage? The figure: 254,457. It is provisional data (the definitio will not arrive until the summer), but even so it has arrived like manna in a country accustomed to every piece of news about demographics involving a national drama. Last year South Korea registered 254,457 birthsa good balance no matter where you look at it. To begin with because it means 6.8% more that in 2024 and leaves the largest percentage increase since 2007; but those are only two of the possible readings. More babies per woman. Another interesting reading is the one that tells us about the “fertility rate”, the average number of babies that (at a statistical level) a woman is expected to have throughout her reproductive life. A few years ago that indicator plummeted to 0.72very far from the “replacement rate” (2.1 children per woman) that allows societies to remain stable. The data is still below that red line, but at least it has grown: in 2025 it passed from 0.75 to 0.8. Not only that. Reuters remember that the South Korean Government had optimistic estimates that suggested that this rate would grow to 0.75 in 2025 and 0.8 in 2026, which appears to be recovering positions faster than expected. In Seoul the trend is even more pronounced. There the indicator rose 8.9%, going from 0.53 to 0.63. The data is still very poor and they are far away to solve the problem that Korea has, but they suggest a change of cycle. Breaking the bad streak. That the birth rate is increasing in South Korea is news, but it is even more so if (as is the case) that growth is maintained for two years. In 2024 the country has already registered a positive fact (breaking up with eight exercises of consecutive falls) that now invites us to think about whether it has really found the right way to encourage its young people to have more offspring. Of course, the country has invested time, efforts and especially economic resources in that objective, in which it is played from the social sustainability and the march of his industry to issues as relevant as national defense. More weddings, more babies. 2025 has not only been a good year in maternity hospitals. It has also been for the wedding planners. Marriages increased by 8.1% in 2025, reinforcing the 14.8% rebound already recorded in 2024. This is good news because, in a conservative society like South Korea (the percentage of births outside of marriage It’s surprisingly low.), weddings are often considered an early indicator of a rebound in birth rates. Trend or mirage? That’s the million dollar question. That South Korea has been trying to activate its birth rate for years is undeniable, as is the fact that it has invested large resources in this effort and that they have been involved in the effort since the public institutions to the business world. However, there are other factors at play that suggest that the recent growth in the South Korean birth rate could be more circumstantial than structural. That is to say, in reality we would be facing a kind of demographic ‘mirage’. The hangover of the pandemic. When explaining the phenomenon, there are those who point to the influence of the pandemic. Not so much in the birth rate itself as in marriages. It is true that more South Koreans are getting tired and that this indicator will probably influence the birth rate in the coming years, but it is also true that many couples had to postpone their plans during the pandemic. “The number of marriages has increased for 21 consecutive months, from April 2024 to December last year, as couples who had delayed their marriages due to COVID-19 have tied the knot,” recognize Park Hyun-jung, director of the government office that analyzes population trends. He himself admits that today it is very difficult to establish a clear “correlation” between government policies and improved birth rates. A demographic with ‘echo’. There are those who point out, however, another factor that would be directly influencing South Korean demographics: history. The explanation I broke it down Rapahel Rashid recently in Guardian and provides an alternative theory. More babies have been born in the South Korea of ​​2024 or 2025 simply because the same thing already happened in the Korea of ​​30 years ago. To be more precise, more or less during the first half of the 1990s (1991-1995) there was a peak of around 3.6 million of babies who today enter their thirties and begin to become parents themselves. Reviewing history. We explain ourselves. Paradoxical as it may be, in the 1950s and 1960s Korea had a very different problem than today: a very high fertility rate which led authorities to launch family planning programs. The objective: guarantee the country’s recovery after the war. The message that was launched was very simple: have fewer children (two, one) and guarantee them a better life. It worked so well that by the early 1980s the fertility rate had fallen below the replacement margin and Seoul decided change course. By doing so, it favored the rebound that would now be heating up the birth rate. According to that theory, what we see today is actually a … Read more

Tokyo is one of the few cities in the world that has managed to maintain housing prices. His secret: build

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“If you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger.” This oft-repeated maxim (and mistakenly coined for Dwight D. Eisenhower) can be good advice when it comes to housing: Expanding the scope of a problem can make new solutions possible. Japan is the world’s best example of an advanced industrial democracy with abundance of affordable housing with low carbon emissions. To build. The key to Japan’s success is its unusual degree of national control over zoning and building rules. Centralized authority trumps local housing obstructionism. Tokyo builds more housing in a year than all of California or all of England, which have 3 or 4 times its population. In the largest megalopolis in the world, the way Rents stay low in the long term is to build. National decisions. The political scientist Grant McConnell wrote on the classic articulation of the view that the national government is more likely to solve difficult problems than state or local governments. Small can be beautiful, the reasoning goes, but it can also be provincial, backward and oligarchic. This logic fits well with the housing issue: Putting much more at stake, all at once, in one big fight, rather than piece by piece in hundreds of separate local fights, could disrupt the housing war. More homes around the world. The world has provided some examples of this. Japan has had extraordinary success in housing construction. He has long been a leader and expanded his leadership even further in recent years. Germany, Austria and Switzerland have always had good records, behind Japan but still performing well. France has stepped up, at least in Paris. These countries generally employ rule-based (or “by right”) building permit systems: if your plans check the stipulated boxes, building authorities have no choice but to sign. The Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand, are lagging behind. Their permit systems are often more discretionarygiving local officials the power to approve or reject buildings at will. In many parts of these countries, especially their large cities, housing is expensive because it is scarce. For now, the Anglosphere suffers the worst housing shortages and prices. The Japanese case. The Asian country is the best example of the maxim of “magnifying” problems. Japan’s national government controls the use of land and buildings to a greater extent than national authorities in other countries. This control has grown in recent decades, even as other nations have gone into lockdown. The number of homes built per year in industrial democracies has fallen by more than 60% since 1970, according to The Economist. Meanwhile, housing construction in Japan has remained solid at all timesbroad public interest in abundant housing has triumphed over obstructionism. What did they do? To boost construction and lower prices, Japan redoubled efforts to allow more housing construction. He resorted, in particular, to administrative changes in building codes. “To help the economy recover from the bubble, the country eased the regulation of urban development,” explained Hiro Ichikawa, a construction development advisor. in the Financial Times. “If it hadn’t been for the bubble, Tokyo would be in the same situation as London or San Francisco.” Build, build and build. The results, in abundant housing, low prices and low carbon urban formswalkable and transit-focused, are notable. The city of Tokyo had 13.5 million residents in 2018. But the city built 145,000 new residences that year. Tokyo’s achievement was particularly surprising considering that the prefecture has very little vacant land, so almost all of those 145,000 homes were located in an existing neighborhood. The astonishing pace of housing construction in the capital has continued for years. Tokyo routinely builds more new homes than all of California (which has three times its population) or, in some years, all of England (which has four times its population). It has increased housing construction by 30% since the turn of the century, even as its population peaked and began to decline in 2007. disposable houses. It is true that Japan demolishes houses much earlier than other industrialized countriesso a large portion of their housing starts are replacement housing. But the much criticized Japanese culture of “disposable houses” It is actually one of the secrets of its success. Japan’s rigorous and up-to-date earthquake safety laws, plus a cultural attachment to new homes, mean that tiny houses in Japan often depreciate completely in just 30 years and are replaced soon after. Because housing is renovated quickly, the country has a much better chance of installing larger buildings. In parts of the US, where buildings typically have an economic life of 100 years, you only have one chance per century to replace a house with an apartment building. In Japan, you get three. More housing. The prefecture has tripled its stocks of housing in the last 50 years and has expanded the number of residences in the city by about 2% annually since 2000. In fact, its overall housing unit growth rate was three times faster than London or New York in the 2010s. Among the 14 megacities around the world, only Singapore and Seoul surpassed Tokyo in the pace of overall housing growth. Thanks to the Japanese program to govern housing, Tokyo Prefecture and the world’s largest metropolis have completely avoided residential closures. Japan seems to have learned the maxim attributed to Eisenhower: if you can’t solve a problem, make it bigger. In Xataka | In its crazy rise in housing prices, Madrid has just broken a barrier: that of the most expensive apartment in its history In Xataka | Tenants and owners are not the same type of Spaniards: some pay €400 more than others for the same home Image | Yu Kato

After 16 years, Mexico has managed to get a millionaire to pay his taxes. And they are going to use them to help young people

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One of the richest men in Mexico has been litigating for two decades to avoid paying what he owes to the treasury. In an unexpected turn of events, that money that was owed has ended up financing scholarships, soccer fields and cultural centers for young people at risk of falling into drug trafficking violenceat least that is what the Mexican Government has assured. President Claudia Sheinbaum has presented the social program “Young People Transforming Mexico” aimed at distancing young people from the influence of drug trafficking networks. During the explanation of the measures that includes the program, the president was very direct about the origin of the project’s financing: “Where does this resource come from? All this resource for young people, well, from the payment of a person who finally paid his taxes.” Sheinbaum was not referring to just any citizen, it was a direct reference to businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego, owner of TV Azteca, Elektra and Banco Azteca, who at the end of January settled the largest individual tax debt in the history of Mexico. The largest payment in Mexican tax history The conflict between Salinas Pliego and the Tax Administration Service (SAT) dates back to 2009, when the Treasury concluded that the Elektra Group, owned by Mexican millionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego, with a estimated fortune at $5.8 billion, it had declared non-existent tax losses to artificially reduce its bill between 2008 and 2013. As explained in the specialized medium LexLatinFor 16 years, the businessman used a strategy of systematic delay, filing appeals in multiple judicial instances and requesting recusals of judges in order to prolong the lawsuits that demanded payment of his tax debt. In the Supreme Court alone, the seven main trials generated 100 secondary processes, the majority at the initiative of the Salinas Group. The turning point came in October 2025, when Congress approved a reform of the Amparo Lawwhich limited the possibility of challenging already final tax rulings. In November, the Supreme Court used this new law to resolve the seven trials, confirming sanctions of more than 48,000 million pesos (about 2,367 million euros), including one of more than 33,000 million pesos (about 1,627 million euros) from the 2013 fiscal year. What began in 2009 as the claim of a tax debt of about 38,000 million pesos (around 1,874 million euros) had already exceeded 74,000 million pesos (about 3,649 million euros) due to accumulated interests, surcharges and penalties. On January 29, 2026, Salinas Pliego made a first disbursement of its tax debt with a payment of 10,400 million pesos (about 513 million euros), which were deposited that same day into the Treasury. The total debt finally recognized has amounted to 32,132 million pesos (the equivalent of 1,584 million euros), with the remaining balance to be settled in 18 monthly payments. This final amount represents a discount with respect to the 51,000 million pesos (about 2,515 million euros) that the Mexican treasury had initially set, since Salinas Pliego took advantage of the benefits of the Tax Code, which in this case represented a 37% reduction of the debt through voluntary payment. As and how I collected The CountrySheinbaum He did not hide his satisfaction after knowing the sentence. “It is the largest payment that has ever been made for a case of this type. And it is really good that he decided to pay it!” The president recalled that “for many years, based on negotiations and agreements, taxes were not paid. When President Andrés Manuel López Obrador arrived, the remission of taxes was prohibited in the Constitution.” A plan against youth violence As Sheinbaum pointed out at the presentation event, the money collected from taxes owed for years by one of the largest fortunes in Mexico was going to be used to finance the program “Young People Transforming Mexico“. This project includes the construction of new educational facilities, more places in secondary and higher education, as well as the expansion of the Gertrudis Bocanegra Scholarship for one million students. In the sports field, 4,208 football fields will be rehabilitated, 100 community centers will be created in high violence areas with capacity for 1,000 young people each, offering sports, cultural workshops, mental health and addiction prevention. The objective of all these measures is to offer educational opportunities, social support and leisure to prevent young people at risk of social exclusion and without professional opportunities from falling into the networks of the Mexican drug cartels. “That young people stop any activity that has to do with criminal groups,” the president stated Mexican. In Xataka | The chances of two superyachts colliding are few, but never zero: “You won’t believe it, but our yacht was hit” Image | Wikimedia Commons (JGTorresH), Unsplash (Jesus Herrera)

This is how SETI managed to isolate 100 possible alien technosignatures

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For more than two decades, millions of desktop computers around the world shared their computing power while they were ‘at rest’ with a common goal. This was nothing more than searching for extraterrestrial technological signatures in the noise of the cosmos. Now, the team behind SETI@home has published the final analysis of its dataclosing a fundamental chapter in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. A cosmic funnel. The data analyzed by SETI@home come from observations made over 14 years using the iconic Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. During this time, the project operated by collecting data while the telescope was targeted by other astrophysical research. The immense amount of data recorded by this telescope was divided into small packages that were distributed over the Internet using the platform BOINC. In this case, more than five million volunteers lent the computing power of their PC processors to analyze these frequencies in the background with the legendary screensaver in the form of graphics with a latent pulse that crowned some PCs from the 2000s. All this thanks to a collaborative work that I started by installing a small application and giving up part of the processing power. What was seen. The result of all this information was nothing other than statistical outrage. Specifically, more than 12 billion initial detections were identified, and volunteers from there looked for energy spikes, narrowband pulses and signals with repetitive structures over time. The analysis focused on a 2.5 MHz band around the 1.42 GHz frequency, known as the hydrogen transition line, considered the logical “radio channel” for an interstellar civilization. The sieve end. Finding an alien signal in that mountain of data requires, first, discarding our own technological screams that we have in space. The second phase of the project consisted of cleaning those 12 billion detections from radio frequency interference. Aviation radars, television stations or even mobile phones constantly pollute the radio spectrum, not allowing us to see what is in the background. How it was done. The truly interesting thing about this project was how they managed to Separate the wheat from the chaff in a sea of ​​millions of datasince the researchers designed complex algorithms with a very ingenious technique called ‘birdies’. The ‘birdies’ are nothing more than software-simulated alien technosignatures that the team artificially injected into the database. Its importance lies in that they simply serve to test the sensitivity of the system, since if the anti-noise filters erased the ‘birdies’ or failed to group them, it meant that the algorithm was failing, since it would also be eliminating possible data that pointed to extraterrestrial life. The result. In this way, the researchers were able to go from having 12,107,039,965 in their database to selecting 100 specific signals, which is where some type of communication with an extraterrestrial could be found. A titanic cleaning task, and it is where one of the most important points of all this research lies. The role of China. The problem with all this is that the Arecibo radio telescope in December 2020 prevented the original source of the data from being able to verify these findings. Fortunately, the gigantic rFAST adiotelescope in Chinacurrently the largest and most sensitive of its kind in the world, has taken over for the final stage. In this way, with a database of 100 signals and with 23 hours of observation time dedicated to the FAST, the different locations began to be re-observed. And it is not a quick process, since each re-observation at the Chinese telescope lasts about 15 minutes and includes a slow scan with the 19 beams of the FAST receiver. This is fundamental, because the sensitivity obtained in these new measurements is substantially better, reaching between 2.0 and 2.5 times the capacity of the original Arecibo data. The outcome. After all this, the question seems obvious: Does this mean that we have finally contacted an extraterrestrial intelligence? We must be honest and emphatic: no. To date, none of the signals analyzed or reobserved have been shown to be a repeatable or conclusive alien technosignature. However, from a technological and astronomical point of view, SETI@home has been a historic triumph, as it not only democratized computer science and pioneered the immense power of distributed computing for the masses, but it has established an open source framework and new documented sensitivity limits for the future. The use of high-computational birdie injection for end-to-end testing of analysis software is, in fact, a pioneering advance in radio astronomy. Images | SETI@Home Leo_Visions In Xataka | TRAPPIST-1 was the most promising solar system to search for life. Now our joy is in a well

China has managed to create an AI that has made Hollywood tremble. Disney has not been amused at all

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The phenomenon of the month in AI is Seedance 2.0. To date, the most amazing text-to-video creation model and theard a dart at the same industry from Hollywood. So much so that Disney itself has legally warned Bytedance, the Chinese giant behind this model. The notice. Sources of Reuters They claim that Disney has sent a cease and desist letter to Bytedance, accusing the Chinese company of having used company characters to train its Seedance 2.0 model. According to statements, Bytedance would have created a package of copyrighted characters to feed this artificial intelligence, the main reason why it is so accurate at recreating them. Bytedance’s response. The Chinese company has not acknowledged having used copyrighted characters to train its model, but it has reacted to Disney’s notice. “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users.” Beyond the statement, the company has not detailed what measures it is taking to prevent users from distributing copyrighted content, such as the one we have been seeing flooding the network for two weeks. They are not the first. Disney has already taken similar measures against Character.AIan AI specialized in creating animated characters capable of perfectly emulating Disney characters. The company It only has an alliance with OpenAIwith whom he signed an agreement so that Sora could generate more than 200 characters thanks to a three-year license. The operation included a $1 billion investment by Disney in OpenAI. Doors to the countryside. “Creative prompt engineering” and code modifications to make AI bypass the very limitations for which it is programmed are inevitable, in addition to all the derived Open-Source models that can be trained outside the jurisdiction. The key here is not in the dispute between Disney and Bytedance, it is that China has created the first model that directly threatens the creation of cinematographic content. Join the enemy. For some time now, the film industry has been clear that the coming years they will be cuts and embrace of AI. CEOs like Sony have already spoken out and positioned themselves as “very focused on AI”, making it clear that the current problem for movies is expense. Models like Seedance now allow us to generate in minutes what previously required entire teams and million-dollar budgets. In the coming years, video generation models will force the industry to rethink its cost structure. In Xataka | We are entering a new era of robotics driven by AI and Disney is its perfect showcase

Jensen Huang managed to convince Trump to sell his H200 chips in China. Now China doesn’t want to buy them

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When something gets into Jensen Huang’s head, he goes after it and often succeeds. This is what happened in July of this year when managed to convince Trump to let him sell his H20 chip in China. History has just repeated itself and has managed to the president lifts the veto on H200 chips (although keeping a part). The problem is China, which does not see it very clearly. what has happened. China is preparing restrictions aimed at limiting access to NVIDIA’s H200 chips, according to Financial Times. If these restrictions end up being implemented, it will mean that the chips will not be available to any company that wants to buy them; They will first go through a pre-approval process, which includes explaining why chips from domestic companies do not meet their needs. In addition, there is another fact that adds up: for the first time, China has put national chips from companies like Huawei and Cambricon in its official procurement list. This list is a kind of purchasing guide for public institutions and large state groups that move billions a year in contracts. Why is it important. It is further proof that the Chinese government’s priority is not to depend on American technology for the development of its AI. Their bet is to favor the use of national chips even though they are not technologically at the level of NVIDIA chips. It’s not the same. China has already responded with distrust when NVIDIA obtained permission to sell H20 chips months ago and it seems that now they want to follow the same path, but there is a big difference: the H20 chips were the most basic, the H200 GPUs are much more advanced and represent a greater technological advantage, especially in more demanding tasks such as training large language models. What Chinese companies say. According to South China Morning PostAI companies in China such as ByteDance, Alibaba or Tencent continue to prefer to use H200s because they are much more powerful than the national alternatives offered by Huawei or Cambricon. Additionally, much of these companies’ code is based on NVIDIA’s Hopper microarchitecture, allowing them to use the chips without having to rewrite the code. On the other hand, developers who do not need maximum performance are wary of using American chips given the instability of the situation. The energy. NVIDIA’s CEO has been around for a while pressing for the US to lift these restrictions. Their pitch is that if China does not have access to NVIDIA chips, then they will improve their domestic chips and win the AI ​​race, but there is more. He has also warned that China has a huge energy advantagelargely thanks to government subsidies. He has already managed to convince Trump to sell chips and now the most difficult thing remains. Image | Wikipedia In Xataka | China is very clear about what it must do to win the chip war against the US: resort to its technological geniuses

The elite of the open models spoke in Chinese. Mistral has just placed Europe at a level that not even the US managed to reach

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Over the last year, the elite of open models for assisted programming, at least in benchmarks as SWE-Bench Verifiedhas spoken with a Chinese accent. Names like DeepSeek, Kimi either qwen They had settled into the top positions in testing and were setting the pace in complex software engineering tasks, while Europe was still searching for its position. The arrival of Devstral 2 alters that distribution. It does not displace those who were already at the top, but it places Mistral at the same level of demand and turns a European company into a real contender in a field that until now seemed reserved for others. League change: the technical leap that had been brewing for some time. During recent months, the open models developed in Europe and the United States had shown constant evolution, although still without the performance necessary to compete in the most demanding tests. The progress was evident, but there was a lack of a project capable of consolidating it at a higher level and demonstrating that this path could give results comparable to those of the sector. Devstral 2 in data: performance, size and licenses. The new Mistral model reaches 123B parameters in a dense architecture and offers an expanded context of 256K tokens, accompanied by a modified MIT license that facilitates its adoption in open environments. Its compact version, Devstral Small 2, reduces the model to 24B licensed parameters Apache 2.0. In the SWE-Bench Verified figures published by the companyDevstral 2 obtains 72.2%, a mark that places it in the most competitive section of the open models evaluated and that confirms its presence among the most advanced alternatives in the segment. It is reflected by a panorama concentrated in the upper part of the benchmark. Among the open models, DeepSeek V3.2 leads the group with 73.1%, followed by Kimi K2 Thinking with 71.3% and for proposals such as Qwen 3 Coder Plus and Minimax M2, which are around 69 points. At lower levels GLM 4.6, GPT-OSS-120B, CWM and DeepSWE appear, with more moderate results. In the closed commercial environment (proprietary models), the graph incorporates higher scores: Gemini 3 Pro reaches 76.2%, GPT 5.1 Codex Max rises to 77.9% and Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores 77.2%, all of them above the best brands registered for open models. What SWE-Bench Verified Really Measures and Why It Matters. SWE-Bench Verified is a test designed to evaluate whether a model can solve real programming tasks, not synthetic exercises. Each case presents a bug in an open source repository and requires a patch to pass the previously failed tests. The evaluation seeks to measure whether the system understands the structure of the project, identifies the cause of the problem and proposes a coherent solution. It is a useful and demanding metric, although limited to Python repositories and a specific set of situations that do not cover the full breadth of software work. From co-pilots to agents who act on the project. The arrival of Devstral 2 coincides with a broader change in the way of working with programming tools. It is no longer just about receiving suggestions in the editor, but about having agents capable of exploring an entire repository, interpreting its structure and proposing changes consistent with its real state. In this context, Vibe CLI appears, a tool that allows Devstral to analyze files, modify parts of the code and execute actions directly from the terminal, bringing these capabilities closer to the daily workflow of developers. Cost and deployment: what each type of user can do with Devstral. The model will be available for free for an initial period and will then cost $0.40 per million tokens for input and $2.00 per million for output, while the Small 2 version will be priced lower. Its deployment also makes a difference: Devstral 2 requires at least four H100-class GPUs, aimed at data centers, while Devstral Small 2 is intended to run on a single GPU and, according to Mistral documentation, the Devstral Small family can also run in CPU-only configurations, without a dedicated GPU. This variety allows both companies and individual developers to find a suitable entry point. The appearance of Devstral 2 introduces an unexpected element in a space where Chinese companies set the pace and where not even the United States, despite its leadership in artificial intelligence, had an open model in this high performance range in SWE-Bench Verified. Mistral does not displace those who were already at the top, but it does broaden the conversation and shows that Europe can compete in a field where it did not appear until now. It is a movement that does not alter the general hierarchy, although it does open a new margin for the evolution of assisted programming tools. Images | Xataka with Gemini 3 In Xataka | OpenAI and Google deny that they are going to put ads in ChatGPT and Gemini. The reality is that accounts do not come only with subscriptions

2026 has not yet started but it has already managed to produce the first bad news: the light goes up

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There is one month left until 2026 begins and the January slope already has a clear protagonist: light. The electricity bill will start the year with the largest simultaneous review of regulated costs since 2020. The proposals of the Government and the energy regulator point to an increase that will affect all homes, regardless of what they consume. Without anesthesia. The National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) has put into public hearing its toll proposal for 2026 – the part of the bill that finances the electrical networks – and proposes a global increase of close to 4%. This update has two pillars: Transportation, which are the large electric highways, will increase by 12.1%. Distribution, which are the networks that reach homes and businesses, will increase by 2.5%. With these changes, the total money allocated to maintaining and expanding electrical networks will reach 6,608 million in 2026. In addition, to this increase we must add that of the chargesset by the Government. According to Five Daysthe Ministry for the Ecological Transition proposes increasing them by 10.5% to cover, above all, the cost of regulated renewable energies (Recore), which will grow by 37%. The fixed part is in charge again. The electricity bill is divided into two large blocks: The cost of energy, which depends on what each user consumes. Regulated costs (tolls and charges), which are always paid. This new year, the regulated part once again gains prominence. According to the specialized portal Tarifaluzhorathe combination of tolls and charges will increase between 2.8% and 4.8% for households. It may seem like a moderate increase, but it affects the amount paid even if consumption drops. Furthermore, the CNMC report estimates that domestic customers with PVPC 2.0 TD rate will see a final increase of approximately 0.6% on their bill, thanks in part to the slight expected growth in demand and the greater number of consumers among whom to spread the costs. A small print that worries the sector. As Cinco Días detailsthe Government has prepared its proposal for charges under the hypothesis that consumption will grow by 4.5% in 2026. This figure is not minor: the greater the demand, the more the regulated costs are diluted among users and the lower the impact per receipt. However, the problem is that the CNMC – which sets tolls – does not share that optimism. The regulator foresees an increase of only 2.3%. And here a delicate scenario opens up: if demand does not grow as much as the Government expects, the system will not collect what was expected. The tolls and charges are calculated on the basis that there will be more kilowatts consumed in 2026. If they are not ultimately consumed, there will be a lack of money to cover the regulated costs, which are already on the rise due to the Recore renewables, the expansion of networks and the adjustments from previous years. If we get ashy. The return of the tariff deficit is at stake. In other words, putting ourselves in the worst possible scenario, if revenues prove insufficient, Spain could return to a known scenario: tariff deficit. In other words, when the bill does not cover the costs of the electrical system, a hole is created that is financed as debt and drags on for years. It took Spain more than a decade to absorb the deficit accumulated between 2000 and 2013—more than 28 billion euros—and the sector fears a partial repeat of that cycle. A gap of just two percentage points between the demand forecast by the Government and the realistic estimate of the CNMC can make the difference between a balanced system or a stressed one. And all in a year in which tolls and charges will rise at the same time for the first time since 2020. And why will everything go up at once? Because in 2026 several impact factors coincide: More investment in networks to integrate renewables and electrification. Higher cost of Recore renewables, which must be compensated according to their contracts. The cumulative impact of the electricity blackout of 360 million, that the marketers still carry. Pending adjustments from previous exercises. 2026: a year that starts uphill. The electricity bill will be the first notice of a year marked by the structural increase in the cost of the electrical system and the need to accelerate investments that sustain the energy transition. More robust networks, more renewables and a more complex system imply higher operating costs. And, once again, it will be consumers who notice in January. Image | freepik Xataka | Spain needs to modernize its electrical grid, so the remuneration rate has increased. The effect will be noticeable in the next five years

Russia had managed to manufacture drones and missiles despite the sanctions. So selling Zara clothes was a matter of time

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In recent months, a strange wave of western products has begun to reappear in places where, on paper, it is already they shouldn’t exist. Between geopolitical changes, forced business exits and an increasingly opaque market, certain brands have unexpectedly become visible again, fueling rumors, theories about how they are getting there and who is really pulling the strings of their distribution towards Moscow. Now a giant from Spain has (re)appeared: Inditex. A market that does not close completely. After announcing the end of operations in Russia a few days after the invasion of Ukraine, Inditex left behind its second largest market and sold its business in the country. However, more than two years latergarments with official labels from brands such as Zara, Bershka, Oysho, Stradivarius or Massimo Dutti have once again appeared on the shelves of the Russian channel Tvoenow renamed Tvoe n Ko, which boasts a “constantly updated” selection on social networks and presents the collections as almost clandestine finds. The pieces, which match models from previous seasons and carry prices in euros, are now sold in at least 19 stores Russian companies without there being (according to the official version offered) any contractual relationship between the Spanish company and the local distributor. In fact, they occur two months after the executive director of Inditex, Óscar García Maceiras, will declare to the Financial Times that the conditions “were not met” for his return to Russia. The engineering of the Russian gray market. I was counting a few hours ago the FT that the mechanism that allows the reappearance of these garments is based on the system of “parallel imports” established by Moscow to circumvent the massive departures of Western brands. In this scheme operates Disco Club LLCa Russian company that has recorded 18 statements in accordance, citing Inditex as supplier and presenting itself as its “authorized representative”, despite the fact that Inditex flatly denies having granted such permission. The garments come partly from inventories originally destined for various EU countries and partly from Chinese factories, according to labels and documents customs, in a circuit that takes advantage of legal loopholes and the Kremlin’s lack of inhibition to give formal coverage to a trade that would previously have been considered smuggling. The denial. For its part, Tvoe assures that it does not have direct agreements with Inditex and hides behind confidentiality agreements so as not to detail its suppliers, while Disco Club insist in which he only performed a “punctual technical service.” Burkhard Binder, the businessman linked to the founding of the company and based in Dubai, is disassociating himself from current operations. Inditex, known for its tight control of inventory, distribution and franchises, completely reject any link: he claims not to have authorized Disco Club or any Russian entity to act on his behalf and avoids commenting on how his products arrive in the country since he withdrew. Matter of time. we have been counting: the ability of the Russian economy to adapt in the midst of war has shown that international restrictions, no matter how strict, always find cracks. A country that has rebuilt chains complex supply chains to produce drones, precision ammunition or long-range missiles, despite technological embargoes and industrial vetoes, would not have difficulties reopening the door to much more “simpler” products, such as Western fashion clothing. In that context, the reappearance of garments of Zara in Russian stores is not so much surprising as confirming a trend: Moscow has perfected an ecosystem of parallel imports capable of circumventing almost any blockade, from military components even t-shirts and dresses from past seasons, turning the impossible into routine and the forbidden into a merely logistical problem. Russia, a laboratory of consumption in times of sanctions. The appearance of Zara products in Russia despite the exit from the company illustrates the magnitude of the gray market that Moscow has made official since 2022: an ecosystem that allows consumers to access Western brands through private intermediaries and indirect routes, without participation of the original companies. In this context, the reappearance of the Spanish firm in the Russian commercial landscape is not due to a business return, but rather to a state-run mechanism. commercial evasion that turns its garments into parallel import merchandise. If you like, the phenomenon also reveals the extent to which Russia has rebuilt its global consumption through third countries and front companies, and how even the strictest groups in controlling its supply chain cannot prevent its products from reappearing in a market from which they tried to leave definitely. Image | Pexels In Xataka | Ukraine has opened the Russian ballistic missile that has devastated its cities. Your surprise is a condemnation: your main supplier is untouchable In Xataka | Zara has been selling clothes for years. Now he aspires to sell something more difficult: prestige

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