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Spain’s main problem is not weapons, fighters or drones. It is the number of hands you need to use them.

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In recent years, the defense debate in Europe has revolved almost exclusively around money and technology. It talks about percentages of GDPmodernization and new systems capable of changing the battlefield. However, there is a much less visible factor that ends up being decisive when it comes time to turn plans into reality. A decade of losing muscle. The news Europa Press gave it. Since 2010, the Spanish Armed Forces They have lost 13,300 troops and they carry a structural deficit that the Military Life Observatory describes as chronic. As of January 1, 2025 there were 116,739 soldiers in active service, very far from the legal minimum of 130,000 established by the Military Career Law. The gap ranges between 13,000 and 23,000 uniformed personnel, a figure that is practically equivalent to an entire army within the system itself. Objectives that are not met. Several weeks ago another news item put the target on an enlightening fact: the regulatory framework establishes a maximum of 50,000 officers and non-commissioned officers, but there are only 40,656 dashboardsincluding 227 generals, leaving a wide margin unfilled. In the troops and Navy, the budget ceiling has limited staff numbers to 79,000 for years, although it is barely exceed 76,000 troops. The distance between what is provided for in the law and what is available in the barracks is not temporary, but sustained over time. More budget on weapons, fewer hands to operate them. The strategic debate in Europe has turned towards the modernization of systems and increased spending up to 2.1% of GDPbut the emphasis has not been transferred with the same intensity to the staff. Weapons programs and technological capabilities are expanding, but the number of military personnel is barely growing or even go back. Hence all this leads us to another reality very different from what we usually think: Spain’s main problem is not fighters, drones or new systems, but rather the great number of staff missing to use them and keep them operational. A 2025 that closed in negative. Despite the government’s commitment to increase staff by 7,500 personnel in four years, 2025 ended with 832 fewer soldiers than the previous year. The drop was especially pronounced at the officer level, where a thousand professionals they abandoned or passed to the reserve without sufficient replacement. Although non-commissioned officers and troops registered slight increases, the global balance was once again negative at a time when the international environment demands just the opposite. Lack of interest. The interpretation of these data leaves little room for doubt. The number of places offered has increased, but the proportion of applicants per vacancy has decreased worryingly. In the troop area the ratio has fallen to 4.2 applicants per placefar from the levels of a decade ago. In officers and non-commissioned officers, the descent is even more pronouncedwith fewer candidates and a worse selection margin, which limits the quality of replacement and anticipates problems of generational change. Salaries, mobility and little incentive for promotion. There is much more, as the report points to lower salaries to other bodies of the State and to an accumulated loss of purchasing power that discourages a military career. Constant mobility can imply a higher cost of living and low salary compensationleading many to give up promotions. The result is that “little interest” in progressing within the institution and a structure that ages without sufficient renewal. Stressed and aged. The other elephant in the room: more than a third of the dashboards exceeds 50 years and the troops also show progressive aging, while the reservists have decreased steadily since 2014. For its part, female participation grows slightly up to 13.1%above the NATO average, but it does not compensate for the overall loss of troops. I remembered the newspaper El Mundo that the system is also facing an increase in harassment complaints that adds reputational pressure at a time of low recruitment. Material capacity without critical mass. All this leaves a more or less illuminating map. Spain is investing in capabilities and is committed to increasingly demanding international missions, but it does so with less staff that fifteen years ago. The organizational structures and operational commitments have not diminished, rather the oppositewhile the human base it doesn’t stop shrinking. From that perspective, everything indicates that, if the trend is not reversed, the country may find itself with a future where the Armed Forces are modernized in equipment, but without the critical mass necessary to sustain them over time and respond reliably to an increasingly demanding strategic environment. Image | Air and Space Army Ministry of Defense Spain, Spanish Army In Xataka | Spain has a dilemma that is difficult to solve: call the US or be the last with a fighter jet in danger of extinction In Xataka | Spain has built a laser that shields the backbone of its Navy: the A400M is now ready for combat

The countries with the highest number of billionaires among their population, brought together in a very revealing graph

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The great fortunes they are not distributed uniformly across the planet. A few countries concentrate the majority of the world’s billionaires, while others barely contribute names to that exclusive club. The geographical distribution of extreme wealth leaves us with a snapshot that gives clues about which countries or tax policies encourage capital accumulation and they are the perfect breeding ground for generating wealth. In 2025, the wealth gap between the average population and the great fortunes has skyrocketed, but it has also left evidence of this difference between countries. The comparative graph prepared by Visual Capitalist allows you to compare this distribution in a very visual and direct way. The graph is powered by data provided by the study’Billionaire Ambitions Report 2025‘ prepared by UBS and the consulting firm PwC, in which an annual record of the number of billionaires is maintained. That is, people with assets exceeding one billion dollars at the beginning of the year. A billionaire factory To no one’s surprise, the US dominates by a wide margin the world ranking of countries according to the number of billionaires. The country hosts 924 people with a net worth of over a billion dollars, a figure that practically doubles that of the second-ranked player. This concentration also translates into a increase in joint wealthsince the sum of the US fortunes reaches a total of about 6.9 trillion dollars. China is in second place with 470 billionaires among its population. However, despite accounting for almost 50% of the billionaires in the US, their combined wealth is much lower, being close to 1.8 trillion dollars. That is to say, we only have half as many millionaires as the US, their combined assets are almost four times less. Third place on the list of countries with the most billionaires is occupied by India with 188 people with assets exceeding one billion dollars. Again, the comparison between India and China reveals a asynchronous growth between the number of millionaires and their total assets, with a combined capital of 888,000 million dollars. That is, with one third of China’s millionaires, the sum of the assets of the Indian magnates It is half of its Chinese counterparts. This reveals that a good number of Chinese millionaires have managed to overcome the billion-dollar barrier, but the accumulation of wealth from these great fortunes is not as pronounced as in other countries such as the US or India. The European map of billionaires Europe presents a internal distribution marked by notable differences between countries. According to data from the UBS report, Germany tops the European list with 156 billionairesbeing the main country on the continent in this aspect. Their combined fortune amounts to 692 billion dollars, which places them in a position alienated from the proportions of the United States or India. Common names also appear in the list in the lists of countries with millionaire populations, What are the United Kingdom like?which occupies fifth place with 91 billionairesor Switzerland with 84 great fortunes. In the following ranks are countries like Italy, which with 61 billionaires occupies the eighth position in number of great fortunes. France is also among the countries with outstanding figures, although well below these three leaders as it occupies thirteenth position in the ranking. In these cases, the harsh sales crisis in the Chinese and Asian markets for luxury products have seriously affected the balance sheets of exclusive brands like LVMH or Ferrariwhose owners are located as standard bearers of those great fortunes. The distribution of fortunes makes it clear that, even within Europethe concentration of billionaires tends to cluster in industrialized economies or with fiscal policies very oriented to capital returns. Spain takes positions Spain is not among the European countries with more billionairesalthough it has experienced recent growth in that select group. According to UBS data for 2025, the total number of Spanish billionaires who exceed the billion-dollar threshold It is 32 people. This figure places Spain as the seventeenth country with the most billionaires behind countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom or Italy in the continental ranking. The total combined wealth of the Spanish billionaires reaches $213.1 billion (about 182,602 million euros) in 2025, with an increase of 21.5% compared to previous years. However, in the Spanish case, the concentration of assets is not uniform, there is one figure that monopolizes a good part of that total assets: Amancio Ortega. In Xataka | Seven of the ten largest fortunes in the world in 2026 are due to AI: this illustrative graph makes it very clear Image | Visual Capitalist

The number of new apps coming to the App Store has skyrocketed. We have a culprit: “vibe coding”

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The arrival of tools based on generative artificial intelligence has caused a real explosion in mobile application stores, especially since we have development environments with AI that allow us to create and deploy applications without needing to know programming. According to data from venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), new apps launched in the iOS App Store in the United States increased 60% year-on-year in December, after remaining practically stagnant for the previous three years. The accumulated year-on-year growth in the last twelve months reaches 24%. The person responsible has a name: the “vibe coding“, that way of programming in which AI does much of the work. What is happening. 2025 has been the year in which “sensation programming” has exploded. And it is that in environments of ‘agentic programming‘ or vibe coding, just explain to an AI tool what application you need and the machine takes care of writing the code. Platforms like CursorBolt, Google AI StudioClaude Code or V0 have democratized app creation to the point that anyone with an idea can turn it into a working prototype without writing a single line of code. This opens many doors, as thousands of new developers without technical training are publishing applications in stores. That’s also a problem. Going back to 2008. As points out a16z, the situation evokes the early days of the iPhonewhen Apple launched its SDK and in a matter of months went from 500 applications to downloads that exceeded 1,000 million. That ecosystem ended up generating hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue. Here the phenomenon is even more overwhelming, since the creation of applications is no longer ‘limited’ to experienced developers, which means that in an afternoon we can create any simple app, as long as we know what to ask of the AI. Image: a16z The problem. Things are clear: you will not be able to create a complex application in one sentence. And now he told us Miguel Ángel Durán, a software engineer known as midudev, in March of last year: “don’t think that just saying something without knowing anything about programming is going to give you the next Airbnb.” As my colleague Javier Pastor mentioned some time ago, the case of Leoa user who created an entire SaaS platform with vibe coding and even got paying customers, perfectly illustrates the risks, since two days after bragging about his achievement, he had to ask for help because his app displayed public API keys, had an easy-to-jump paywall, and crashed his database due to basic programming errors. Quality matters. “You can do very basic things. We have tried Cursor, Bolt, etc., and you reach a level that one may think is advanced, but in reality what usually happens is that they are cloning a Github repository and changing its colors,” we say. counted Some time ago Daniel Ávila, co-founder of CodeGPT. There is a flood of low-quality apps, much more than before, since now many more inexperienced people can easily publish them in any app store. And the problem is that many of these applications do not even reach the prototype level, being unfinished products that work superficially and then end up accumulating all kinds of technical errors. Even worse if the app has a paywall. Between optimism and caution. “Vibe coding is super interesting to extend the prototyping of ideas and empower people,” we say. explained last year Nerea Luis, doctor in computer science. But he also recognizes that “it has risks” because completing these projects requires knowledge that neither the user nor the AI ​​possess. On the other hand, Omar Pera, Chief Product Officer of Freepik, was more optimistic: “vibe coding turns top engineers into 2x or 3x engineers.” Does it democratize access to application development? Yes, of course. The problem comes when the AI-generated application of someone without experience goes from a project to learn, as a hobby, or as an app development for one’s own use, to a project that encompasses more ambition and seeks to attract many clients. Cover image | James Yarema In Xataka | We believed that the AI ​​talent war is about engineers and developers. Actually, it’s about plumbers and electricians.

How does this number of questions about housing work and what is it for?

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Let’s tell you What is telephone 047 and how does it work?. This is a toll-free government telephone number to make inquiries related to housing, and it comes into force from February 2026. With this number, the Government tries to offer citizens a reliable and truthful way to resolve any doubts they may have about housing, but also advice regarding possible conflicts. Let’s explain everything to you. How telephone 047 works The telephone number 047 is intended to access accurate information related to housing. Come on, if you have any questions related to legal or technical aspects of the home, you can call and ask about your rights and obligations. In this number you can make inquiries about topics such as rentals, sales or problems of coexistence with neighbors. You may also ask about urban leases, horizontal property, eviction procedures, prevention mechanisms, social housing and situations of vulnerability or legal protection of tenants. This phone also offers legal advice and support against market abuses. If you believe that your rights are being violated, you can call for help. For this legal part, the Ministry has the collaboration of the General Council of Lawyers of Spain (CGAE), which brings together 83 professional associations promoting arbitration and mediation methods. The idea is that mediation can be done to avoid going to court unnecessarily when there are conflicts. There are three levels when answering calls. The first level of attention is for basic consultations on the first call, those that are about general issues regarding rights and obligations regarding rental, property and cohabitation. It is expected that the first level can resolve between 90 and 95% of calls. There will also be a level for more specific and less general questions, such as those about specific cases or specialized areas. And there will also be a level to help with legal support or legal advice related to conflicts regarding housing. This advice and advice will be extrajudicial, meaning it will not be helped if the conflict is already judicialized. This number will be available to all Spanish users, regardless of the telecommunications company we have contracted. We will simply have to dial 047 without any type of prefix or anything else, and you will be put in contact with the helpline. Initially this service will have 25 people of different profiles and levelswho are the ones who will answer the calls. Among them there will be lawyers and personnel with specific training in housing matters.

Mexico wanted to know who is behind each phone number. And Telcel has spread panic along the way

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Since January 9, 2026, the Mexican Telecommunications Regulatory Commission requires that all mobile lines in the country are associated with a verified identity. Until now, SIM cards could be contracted completely anonymously, something that changes with the mandatory registration. A logical measure to avoid the telephone SCAM that, in recent hours, has sparked controversy. The alleged gap. Less than 24 hours after the entry into force of the mandatory registration of mobile lines in Mexico, Telcel, one of the largest operators in the country, suffered an alleged security breach which would have exposed personal information of millions of customers. “The official portal of @Telcel presents a critical security vulnerability that exposes the identity, CURP, RFC and email of millions of users. This occurs only 24 hours after the regulations that require all mobile lines in the country to be registered came into force. When entering any Telcel telephone number in the form, the internal system returns – without the need for passwords or verification codes – a complete information package of the line owner. This is extremely dangerous. Any cybercriminal could use one of Telcel’s number bases and automate the massive extraction of information.” Ignacio Gómez Villaseñor, journalist. The reports They pointed to a massive leak of each and every one of their clients, the sources ensuring that for a few hours it was possible to access the data through the official Telcel portal. Telcel’s response. The spread of the alleged breach was such that Telcel did not take long to call for calm. Of course, he did it with a somewhat ambiguous statement in which it neither affirms nor denies that the security failure occurred. “Your data is secure. Each user receives a unique code by SMS to only access their own information and link their line. We have implemented additional security measures to the registration process. The process is secure and your data is protected.” Telcel. Although Telcel assured that, at the time of its publication, the data was safe, the company acknowledges having implemented additional security measures during the registration process. hours later. Renato Flores, deputy director of communications at Telcel, acknowledged hours later on one of the national radio stations that there was a technical vulnerability. “Telcel acted quickly, responsibly and transparently. We detected a vulnerability, we corrected it immediately, we reinforced security and at all times we protected our customers’ data.” Despite admitting the gap, the company’s position remained firm: it ensured that only one’s own information could be accessed as a user, not that of the rest of the company’s clients. It is something that Gómez Villaseñor was quick to deny. through a video published on Xin which he showed how he was able to access user data. The risks. According to the source, the following data was exposed for hours: Owner identity CURP (Unique Population Registry Key) RFC (Federal Taxpayer Registry) Email A relatively similar case to the recent hack of Endesa suffered in Spain, through which the alleged attackers claim to have obtained more than 1TB of information related to account numbers, identities, addresses, telephone numbers and emails. A bumpy process. In the middle of the debate, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (CRT) clarified that, during the first phase of this national registry, there were certain “intermittencies on various platforms” due to the high volume of users, without giving too many details in this regard. The Commission avoided referring to the specific case, and limited itself to pointing out that it remains in contact with the operators to normalize the service. And now what. At the moment, there is no news about possible exploitation of the supposed vulnerability. If this had occurred, the attackers would have access to customers’ personal information, as happens in any other case of mass hacking. In the face of these leaks, the user’s only response may be to be alert: not to respond to or provide sensitive data through SMS, calls, WhatsApp messages or email communications (or any of our means of contact that may have been leaked) without being very clear about who we are referring to. Image | Xataka In Xataka | A single person in Barcelona and 2.5 million SMS per day: the “mobile farms” that operate in Spain to scam you

In a chaotic 2025 of cancellations and delays, Renfe does have good news: record number of travelers

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Renfe has had one of its most chaotic years in 2025. The company has had to face more competition than ever, it has suffered delays due to its own trains and infrastructure, it has seen Talgo trains crack or how fires blocked its most profitable line. And, despite everything, he has achieved a new record. 37.3 million. They are the people who have traveled on AVE and long-distance Renfe trains. And in 2025 the company has managed to move more people than ever on these trains. The figure is 6% higher than that achieved a year ago when it added 35.2 million trips. According to data provided by the Ministry of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, the bulk of these trips are made up of the AVE, which has set a new record with 21.5 million trips. That’s a million more travelers than last year. Although AVLO is the company that has had the best performance, growing from 4.55 million in 2024 to 6.2 million travelers in 2025. Where? According to Transport, the corridor that continues to receive the most passengers is the Madrid-Barcelona route ending in Figueres. In total, Renfe has attracted 8.1 million passengers to this corridor. The figure is almost identical to last year’s. The Levante and Mediterranean corridor (which connects Madrid with the Valencian Community and Murcia) is where the impact on passenger growth has been felt most. Here, trips have increased from 5.5 million to 7.7 million. Andalusia has also experienced growth from 6.9 million travelers to 7.2 million. Although the corridor that has added the most passengers is the Madrid-Castilla y León-Galicia one. Adding its routes and the connection with Asturias has gone from 2.5 million travelers in 2024 to 4.6 million. Doubts. What Renfe leaves up in the air is how much passenger volume has been lost on other lines. In his statement It is not explained, for example, how many passengers there are in the Extremadura corridor. And if the data is well transmitted, there are lines that have had to lose the number of passengers. The text mentions, as we said, an increase of 2.1 million passengers in the sum of high-speed and long-distance lines. However, there is talk of increases of 2.2 million passengers in the Mediterranean corridor, 2.1 million in the northwest area and 300,000 more passengers in Andalusia, without mentioning the inevitable drops in passengers on other lines. A chaotic year. Although it is the year in which it has moved the most passengers, 2025 has been a chaotic year for Renfe, marked by the following milestones: And some good things. In addition to increasing the number of travelers, 2025 has also had some good things for Renfe. To begin with, it has been confirmation that the train can fight the plane as long as high-speed trains work with guarantee. And the fact is that Madrid-Galicia has made the airlines retreat. The company, Renfe points out, continues to be the most used in all corridors (although it is not specified that it is the one that works the most frequencies) and its travelers will be able to benefit from the new flat rate ticket of 60 euros to take all medium and long distance trains and that is pending the addition, potentially, of municipal or regional public transport. Furthermore, and although this is not so good for Renfe but for the user, travelers we should be able to receive refunds partial or total delays of more than 15 minutes this year. Photo | Xataka In Xataka | Renfe is obliged to compensate for delays of more than 15 minutes starting January 1. The Government wants to prevent it

we have the highest unemployment in the EU and also the lowest number of job vacancies

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Spain presents a phenomenon that at first glance seems contradictory: although it maintains one of the highest unemployment rates among advanced countries, it also registers one of the lowest proportions of vacancies in the EU. Understand this paradox It requires looking beyond the numbers and analyzing how employment supply and demand really work in the Spanish labor market. According to According to the INE, the unemployment rate in Spain is 10.5%, being the highest in the OECD compared to other developed countries, where the average is around 4.5%. At the same time, according to data According to Eurostat, the vacancy rate in Spain is only 0.9%, well below the European average of 2.1%. What is a vacancy? To understand why this combination occurs, it is helpful to define what a vacancy is. In the Eurostat definition This does not equate to “positions that the country would generally need to fill”, but to “newly created, vacant or about to become vacant paid position for which the employer is taking active steps and is willing to take additional steps to find a suitable candidate outside the company, and which the employer intends to fill immediately or within a specified period for which there is an active search and with an intention to fill soon.” So it is not “everything that would need to be hired in general”, but rather what is open at that moment. It’s like a photo of that exact moment, but it doesn’t show its reality. The “logic” behind the paradox. When a labor market grows, many vacancies can be expected to arise because there is more demand for workers. If, in addition, there is little unemployment, that demand tends to translate quickly into contracts. However, in Spain the reality is different. Although employment has grown in recent years, and there are busier people than ever (with membership records to Social Security), unemployment remains high compared to the EU, and vacancies do not increase at the expected rate. Mismatches between labor supply and demand. A key factor noted in the official reports is the mismatch between the skills that companies demand and those offered by unemployed people. That is, it can there are positions availablebut not that they correspond to the skills of those seeking employment. This type of mismatch is reflected in specific sectors (technology, engineering, health care) where companies claim to have difficulties find suitable profileswhile at the same time there are workers who cannot find a job. Some economists also highlight that the available offers tend to concentrate in sectors with high seasonality and little stability, such as services or tourism, where many vacancies are seasonal or short-term, which does not encourage all the unemployed to join immediately. Poorly distributed employment. Another element to consider is labor mobility. In Spain, there is a great imbalance between the territories with the greatest job offer and those with the greatest demand for employment. That is to say, employment is concentrated in large cities and industrial areas, while unemployment figures skyrocket in rural areas and in emptied Spain, contributing to maintaining this mismatch between the location of supply and demand. On the other hand, the stagnation of vacancies can also be explained by the high labor market rotation. Many times the position remains current and what happens is that it is the employees who rotate through that position. The job is still there, but it does not always appear as a “new vacancy” in the statistics, so the vacancy rate may be low, although real employment grows due to the high turnover of that position.​ For example, a waiter position is not listed as vacant, but the restaurant hires a new employee for that position every few months. The position is not vacant for statistical purposes, but the labor market does not stop registering new hires. What does this paradox tell us? That Spain has a lot of unemployment and few vacancies compared to the EU does not mean that there are no jobs available. What it indicates is that the labor market is functioning with difficulties: positions offered do not always fit the profile of unemployed people, there are great differences between sectors and an important part of the employment is temporarywhen many workers seek stability. Therefore, even when there are vacancies, they do not always end up being consolidated in the form of contracts. This situation does not depend only on a specific economic moment of prosperity or crisis, but also on underlying problems in the Spanish labor market. That this paradox continues over time points to the need to improve training, facilitate mobility between sectors and territories, raise the quality of employment and have statistics more adjusted to the reality of the labor market in Spain. In Xataka | In Belgium you could collect unemployment indefinitely. Your government has a new idea: put everyone to work Image | Unsplash (Mika Baumeister)

For decades, the “00000” has fascinated Christmas Lottery players. The reason: the King’s Number

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All the Lottery numbers They have the same chance of winning the Christmas prize, but not all of them generate the same interest or are surrounded by the same halo of fascination. Perhaps one of the most enigmatic is the “00000”. And it is because the doubts it raisesquestions that resurface every December just like the nougats in the supermarkets, the perfume ads on TV or the LED lights in Vigo. Does it really exist? Can it be purchased? And above all… Is it true that it is the number that gives Lotteries and Betting from the State to the Royal House? There are those who are so sure of the latter that they even refer to “00000” as “The King’s Number”although (spoiler) it is not actually founded. Is 00000 played? Yeah. In the Christmas raffle they play 100,000 numbers different. From 00000 to 99,999. Both included. In fact, a quick search arrives to confirm that the first issue on the list has been sold this year in half a dozen of branches in Cádiz, Las Palmas, La Rioja, Valencia and Murcia. After all, there is nothing written about tastes (and superstitions): there are those who see 00000 as an ‘ugly’ number, a combination to avoid with little chance of receiving the jackpot, and those who bet their 20 euros on it as the winning horse. Have you ever played? No. Not at least if we’re talking about El Gordo or millionaire prizes, although that doesn’t make 00000 a special number either. Although the National Lottery traces its origins to 1812 (when the biggest prize amounted to 8,000 pesos) and the Christmas draw began to become popular 133 years agoin reality there are not so many numbers graced with El Gordo. That doesn’t mean that 00000 hasn’t made more than one person’s day (or Christmas). In 2014 he achieved a stones of 120 euros. It may not seem like a big deal, but that year the same administration in Logroño had sold 160 lucky tickets, leaving money in the pockets of its clients. 19,200 euros. In 1828 luck also happened to him. That year the lucky number was 00523. To many the figure may not be attractive because it is too ‘low’, but the truth is that the drums do not understand low or high numbers. Lotteries remember that Gordo touched figures between 0 and 10,000 61 times, 70 times to bills from 10,001 to 30,000 and 64 times to combinations ranging from 30,001 to 66,000. The King’s Number? One of the most famous myths about 00000 is that, precisely because it is the first in the numerical sequence, State Lotteries and Betting reserves a special destiny for it: a gift for the Royal House. You don’t have to look hard to find articles that remember a story that in reality is nothing more than that: a story, pure urban legend. “No. It is a baseless rumor. Institutionally, no tenth is given away,” they clarified already in 2011 from Lotteries to the newspaper ABC. It is not the only occasion in which he has had to deny the hoax. “No tenth with the number 00000 is given to the king for the Christmas draw,” insist to RTVE. The best proof is that the tenths of 00000 can be found in various administrations in the country and in 2014 the media even they interviewed to one of the winners with the 120 euro stone. Curiously, she decided to play that number and not another because she was convinced that it was the one they used in Zarzuela. Curious, commented… Feared? 00000 not only generates expectation for its history and myths. There is another detail that arouses the curiosity of Christmas Lottery lovers. In case he wins the first prize, if chance showers him with millions of euros… How the hell would it be sung? Would we hear the children of San Ildefonso hum “zero thousand zero hundred zero zero”? Would you opt for a simpler formula? theEconomist assures that 00000 would simply be sung as “zero”, without further flourishes. Although another thing (of course) is that their nerves play tricks on them on the 22nd. Images | SELAE 1 and 2 and Royal House In Xataka | ChatGPT You have the same chance of hitting the Lottery Jackpot as a witch reading the guts of a crow

The main problem of Europe’s rearmament is a number. If Russia attacks its borders, it has 45 days to roam freely

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The scene took place a decade ago at a Polish station, when several American Bradleys lost their turrets when passing under a platform that was too low, symbolizing a problem that Europe never solved: the structural vulnerability of your military logistics network. on a continent that is rearmed at a vunknown speed since the Cold War, the shortcomings are not only found in the absence of more tanks, ammunition or entire brigades, but in the physical inability to move them in time. The hidden fragility. In the month of July already we count the first indication. Then Europe realized that rearmament I had to start on the roads under a very simple premise: a Russian invasion would unleash fatal congestion. In fact, the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is already exposed that reality. France could not transfer his Leclercs to Romania via the shortest land route through Germany and was forced to send them by sea, a deviation that evidenced what military planners have been pointing out with frustration for years: Europe is not prepared to move a modern army from its western ports to the eastern border in a credible time frame for deterrence. Now, in addition, he is certain of a number: deterrence takes about 45 daysand in a real scenario it would be equivalent to losing a war before appearing on the front, so it is imperative to reduce. How much? The plan is to reduce it five or even three daysaccording to the objectives that Brussels is finalizing. That is the heart of problem that obsesses to German General Alexander Sollfrank: that everything, from documentation to the resistance of a tunnel and the availability of a train driver, will work “like a Swiss clock” when Moscow tests NATO’s reaction capacity. The political challenge. They remembered in the Financial Times that even before the first armored train crosses Europe, the critical obstacle is political. The experience of 2022 showed that, although US intelligence accurately warned of the imminent Russian attack, some European leaders did not believe that Putin would give the order. Military mobilization can only begin once governments accept that the threat is real, and that delay (hours or days) is gold for the aggressor. General Ben Hodges, former commander of US forces in Europe, formulated it to put it bluntly: the key is not just how to move troops, but how to speed up decision-making, open ammunition depots, activate convoys and do it before Russia launch your offensive. And more. Added to this is the strategic unknown of Donald Trump, whose record of oscillations against Russia keeps Europe in constant tension: even if Washington claims to remain committed with Article 5clarity, synchronicity and speed could be conditioned by your posture. Only when that political decision is made will the massive movement to the east begin, a flow whose magnitude (200,000 soldiers and thousands of armored vehicles from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom) demands a continental precision no priors. Geography as an enemy. That said, almost all analysts agree: the real bottleneck of European defense is on your physical map. Europe, despite being a densely developed continent, is not designed to move heavy divisions from one end to the other. The tunnels are too low, the clearances too narrow, the Baltic roads incompatible with those of the rest of the continent, the bridges (such as the collapsed Carola in Dresden in 2024) too old to support the weight of a modern tank. Even the inclination of the railway track can become at a risk When a train transports armored vehicles: the cargo could overturn. The realization of this reality led Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to launch the Rail Baltica projecta €24 billion investment explicitly designed to support oversized military trains and eliminate the dangerous process of transferring vehicles between networks with different gauges. And on the Peninsula. In Spain and Portugal, the situation is similarmaking any urgent transfer from the peninsula difficult. Germany, which should act as Europe’s great military highway, is perhaps the most worrying example: exhausted roads, bridges in critical condition and a railway network that years ago was no longer suitable for high-intensity operations. The logistical dimension. Moving an army in Europe is not just a matter of infrastructure: it is also a administrative nightmare. Since most of the countries crossed would not be formally at war, their labor and customs laws would remain in force even in full military mobilization. A convoy crossing three borders could clash to three different regulations on mandatory breaks for truck drivers, incompatible customs procedures or transit permits that must be issued on paper, since NATO avoids digital documents for fear of cyberattacks. Germany, Poland and the Netherlands have tried to break this labyrinth by creating a “military Schengen” embryonic, but regulation remains fragmented, slow and vulnerable. Brussels has identified 2,800 critical points of infrastructure that need urgent modernization, although only 500 have been prioritized, and the fulfillment of the plans depends on governments whose political priorities change every year. Added to this complexity is the vehicle multiplication and calibers in service, which makes it almost impossible to standardize the logistics chain. As Sollfrank warnsyou cannot plan every “screw”, but you can plan the scenarios, and today Europe is just beginning to understand the real scale of the problem. The industry as a decisive link. Plus: the modernization of military mobility requires not only adapting bridges and roads, but also rebuilding industrial capacity to transport a contemporary army. A light division may require up to 200 trains, each with more than 40 cars, which represents more than 8,000 logistics platforms for a single operational movement. European railway companies, from Deutsche Bahn to Baltic operators, are signing agreements to reserve military capabilities, while Rheinmetall begins to offer complete services for convoys crossing Germany, from mobile dormitories to emergency workshops. But Europe does not produce enough high-capacity railcars or specialized vehicles, and the industry requires joint tenders and unified specifications to be able to produce … Read more

This song is number one on the Billboard chart in the US. And it has been generated by AI

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The new artist that is triumphing on the charts in the United States is called Breaking Rust, but it is not a person, but an AI. Your song’Walk My Walk‘ has become number one on the Billboard list of song sales of the genre countryand we are not surprised because it is wonderful. And that raises again an increasingly loud debate. Why is it important. Music generated with artificial intelligence platforms has already sowed other controversies in the past, such as the one we experience with famous fake Drake song. Models and services like Suno AI They have evolved so much in recent months that today the results that can be obtained are as good as those of songs played and sung by human artists. And if not, tell this song by Breaking Rust, which has managed to convince people enough to make it number one in the prestigious Billboard magazine of hits in the US. Who is Breaking Rust?. In Newsweek they claim to have contacted the person behind the virtual artist Breaking Rust, but he has not made any statements. The artist has a profile in Linktree and on Instagramwhere 39,000 people are currently following him. In that account, videos made with AI appear in which the image of a cowboy is presented in different situations and with his songs in the background. Meanwhile, on Spotify has Right now more than two million monthly listeners. It is not clear who is behind said virtual artist, although some analyzes have tried to reveal that mystery. It is not the first and it certainly will not be the last hit of AI. What ‘Walk My Walk’ has achieved is striking, but in recent months we had already seen some virtual artists with songs generated by AI They end up being a hit on Spotifyalthough there are suspicions in this success (and probably, many bots). Replicating any style has long seemed like a piece of cake for AI models… even before ChatGPT appeared and it will change everything. We can no longer distinguish if a song was made by AI. It is already difficult to detect whether a text or an image has been created by an AI. The video seemed to be somewhat easier to identify, but the latest versions of Veo or Sora make it really complicated. With music we have reached a point where human music is indistinguishable from that generated by AI. This is what it indicates a recent study linked in Scientific American. It became clear that the majority of participants in this study could not distinguish creations made with Suno AI from human compositions. Rejection and worry. Music generated by AI, as in other types of content, is generating rejection in certain sectors. Josh Antonuccio, from Ohio University, explained that AI-generated content “creates more noise (…) The only thing that will continue to distinguish human artists is those who have remarkable music, a captivating perspective and a story that attracts fans.” Meanwhile, the truth is that this makes it more difficult for artists, especially independent ones who are trying to be successful in this segment. They also wonder if AI will ultimately I shouldn’t pay them a commission considering that he has (probably) trained with his works. In Xataka | The war over AI-generated music continues to escalate: Major labels sue Suno AI and Udio

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