problem

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

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

In China, ‘bookfluencers’ are the sales engine of the publishing industry. The problem is that no one can read 700 books.

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In China, publishers have discovered a rich vein thanks to bookfluencers. Reviews on social networks such as Douyin (the Chinese TikTok) or RedNote have become the sales engine for many books in recent years. However, the volume of books and the intense competition between these influencers has led to the credibility of the model beginning to be questioned. what has happened. They tell it in world of chinese. A book content creator posted a 25-minute video exposing another professional colleague who has more than half a million followers. In the video, he shows a paper almost 5 meters long with a list of 700 books that this bookfluencer had supposedly recommended on his social networks. There wouldn’t be any problem if it weren’t for the fact that they were the readings of a single year. It comes out almost two books a day. Authenticity not found. There is even more and, when reviewing the reviews, he found something curious. They were full of repeated and very exaggerated phrases. For example, this influencer felt “transformed” by 17 different books and “healed” by 33 more. We don’t know if he used AI to summarize the books and do the reviews, but clearly they weren’t real reviews. The online community of readers had been criticizing the lack of authenticity for some time and this video was the last straw. Read for the algorithm. Reading fans criticize the model that has been created with online recommendations. For several years now, the publishing industry has made these influencers a key resource to promote their launches, but with the passage of time, the volume of readings and the need to keep up to date with all the trendsis transforming reading from a leisurely and private activity to something manufactured for the “by weight” algorithm. The business works. Video reviews are giving publishers very good results, as in the case of the novel ‘The Last Quarter of the Moon’, which went from 600,000 copies to more than 6 million after a famous influencer recommended it. Large publishers allocate a specific budget and pay commissions of between 15 and 30% of the sales generated through their channels. The dependence on this promotional model is such that, according to editor Bai Bai, “In many cases, if no influencer is willing to take charge of a book or promote it, the book is practically doomed to failure at the moment of its publication.” A precarious job. Although publishers turn to these creators and give them good commissions, it does not mean that it is exactly a grateful job. There is enormous competition between creators, who have to constantly be up to date with trends in order to satisfy the algorithm and have their content go viral. Still, income is very unstable, pushing creators to post more reviews and exaggerate the impact the books have had on them. Anqian Reads, one of these bookfluencers, says “The ironic thing is that since I’ve been a book influencer, I have less time to read.” Image | 愚木混株 Yumu in Unsplash In Xataka | Universities are discovering something: fewer and fewer students are reading long essays without losing concentration

The biggest problem for Spanish olive trees is neither costs nor climate change: it is ‘ghost oil’

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Something smells bad in the olive oil market. We knew it for a long timebut it is now with the collapse of prices at source (almost 46%) that everyone has become nervous. The figures do not add up and the bill will not be paid by the large olive oil groups, but by the small producers. For this reason, on June 15, a COAG representative stood in front of the microphones and reported that 81% of olive oil Tunisian was entering Spain undercover. But how do you put 65,500 tons of oil under the radar? It has not been easy to determine, the truth is. But if the organization is right, the oil ship has more than one leak compromising its future. But it doesn’t have it. Always according to the COAGa good part of that oil comes from Portugal. But the ‘Portuguese way’ does not add up: with the data from the 2024-2025 campaign, Portugal produces between 160,000 and 195,000 tons of its own and imported only 3,406 of Tunisian oil. Those 3,406 tons cannot explain the 131,877 that it re-exports to Spain. Some part yes, but not all of it. And then? The problem seems different. It looks like ours, in fact. Because what COAG does seem to be right about is that a good part of the oil that entered the country did so under a special regime: that of active development. It is a formula of the Customs Code of the European Union that allows the importation of non-EU merchandise without tariffs or VAT as long as it is transformed and exported again. What the producers point out is that a good part of the oil that arrives in Spain to be “perfected” ends up being sold in the country without appearing in the statistics (marked, in fact, as community). The consumer does not notice it substantially in the price, but it is noticeable at the source. And a lot. But there is more. A few years ago, honey became a problem. Nobody really knew what they were eating in Europe. The key to this was to mix it up. Above all, because with completely insufficient regulation, it was enough to put “mix” so that there was nothing more to ask. This was attempted to be resolved with Directive (EU) 2024/1438 (the “Breakfast Guidelines“) which has not come into force in Spain until June 14, 2026. Among many other things, Brussels demands that the package states where what is inside comes from. Easy, clean, effective and… …non-existent for oil. The big problem, as almost always, is traceability. Not that we have problems, but that there is almost no real interest in doing it. As we have said many times, the Spanish agricultural market is a giant with feet of clay and now is the time to think if we want it to be something else. In Xataka | Something strange is happening with the price of olive oil and farmers have just denounced it: there are up to 2.8 billion at stake

We don’t know if AI is going to take our jobs. The problem is that whoever is developing the AI ​​doesn’t know it either.

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The arrival of AI has sown the seed of uncertainty in many sectors putting on the table a question for which, today, no one has a clear answer: Is AI going to take our jobs or not? The most curious thing is that not even those who are developing those models that would replace millions of employees they have a clear answer. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, have been offering two completely opposite visions for the same issue. After predicting a almost apocalyptic scenarioAltman now says everything will be fine. Amodei, for his part, warns of a very hard blow to employment. The data also does not shed light on the future employment of those who now must choose a career professional. Altman says he was wrong (for the better). Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, has greatly softened the defeatist speech he had been holding. A while ago I talked about entire job categories that were going to disappear. Now he says something else, although perhaps he does so more conditioned by the IPO of your company than for the certainty of a future with more jobs. According to collected ReutersAltman is “I’m glad I was wrong about this; I thought the elimination of entry-level administrative jobs would have already had a bigger impact than it actually has.” This is a pretty big script twist coming from someone who has been setting the pace for the sector for years. Amodei and Anthropic do not let up. At the other end of the narrative is Anthropic. Its co-founder, Chris Olah, repeated at a conference on ethics and AI in the vatican the same idea as his boss, Dario Amodei, has been defending for a long time. There is a real possibility that AI will replace human work on a large scale. It does not speak of a smooth change or an easy transition. Talk about a serious, and sudden, impact. However, although both talk about the same type of technology and with similar data on the table, their interpretations of what is to come are clearly opposite. Employees were an expense, but AI doesn’t come free. As leaders at major AI companies debate the future of the millions of employees they will replace with AI, companies are beginning to realize that AI It’s not going to be much cheaper either. than an employee. The companies that have opted the most for workforce cuts and increased use of AI are receiving your first billsand they scare. So they have put a stop to the so-called “tokenmaxxing“: pay without limit to use models without measuring the return well. According to collected Business InsiderUber’s chief operating officer said AI costs are increasingly difficult to justify, just after its chief technology officer burned the annual AI budget early. According what was published by The VergeMicrosoft, also began reducing Claude Code licenses among its employees, a cut that Fortune linked to the high cost of massive use of these models. More jobs for programmers and security teams. However, the implementation of AI in companies, far from eliminating jobs, is increasing the demand for certain profiles. According to data from the hiring platform Indeed collected by Axiosvacancies for software engineering positions have grown by 18% in the last year, while total employment falls by 4.3% in the same period. Why is this happening? More code written with AI means more code that someone has to check. Companies continue hiring security analystsauditors and people who validate what the models generate. Automation detects failures at high speed, but prioritizing and fixing them still depends on human judgment. For now, that criterion remains scarceand expensive. Generation Z is not trusting. Without a doubt, those most affected by all this uncertainty are the generation that has just entered the labor market. Without enough experience enough to face the new demands, but too advanced in their professional career to choose another career path. Given all this uncertainty and closed doorsGeneration Z no longer sees AI as an opportunity. He increasingly sees her as a direct threat to his first job, so he has chosen to fight it. A survey According to Gallup, enthusiasm for AI among young people fell 14 points in just one year, and anger towards the technology rose to 31%. And they don’t stop complaining. a survey of Writer together with Workplace Intelligence, pointed out that 44% of Generation Z employees admit to actively sabotaging their company’s AI implementation plans, compared to 29% of the entire workforce. With all this on the table, the only thing clear is that no one has the complete picture about the future of AI in the labor market. Neither those who sell the technology, nor those who use it, nor those who are about to look for their first job. Probably the answer is neither disaster nor total calm, but a little of each, distributed very unevenly depending on the sector and the country. In Xataka | Technology workers have better salaries and an important “but”: more than half fear being replaced by AI Image | Flickr (World Economic Forum/Pascal Bitz, Sandra Blaser), Unsplash (syful islam)

The world’s leading expert in identifying deepfakes has a big problem. No longer able to identify them

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Is called Hany Farid and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on deepfake videos. This digital forensics expert was capable of uncovering videos manipulated by governments, for example, but now he has decided to leave Silicon Valley for one simple reason: It is no longer able to differentiate the real ones from those that are being generated with AI tools. And we are not surprised. Deepfakes indistinguishable from reality. In the last two decades Farid, 60, has specialized in identifying fake videos. This professor at the University of California at Berkeley has confessed that advances in generative AI have made traditional detection methods are no longer of any use. Their conclusions confirm the feeling that we have had for a long time with this type of content: AI has advanced so much that the problem is no longer just deepfakes: it is that we distrust even real photos. Farid’s reputation precedes him. His father worked for 50 years as a chemist at Eastman Kodak, and Farid grew up visiting the dark room often, watching photos become photos as they passed through the different liquids. He ended up designing a “digital fingerprint” system that made it possible to detect cases of child pornography hidden on the Internet. In fact, its technology has led to 30 million cases of potential abuse being reported each year, as well as leading to hundreds of arrests and several rescues. I surrender. Faced with the avalanche of perfect deepfakes generated with AI, Farid has decided to leave his job to take refuge on a farm in Vermont. His surrender is the latest demonstration of a harsh reality: We can no longer trust what we see on networks. Now he is dedicated to working with wood, and has distanced himself from networks and technology. The missile that changed everything. The turning point that demonstrates this crisis of this digital forensic task occurred after the viral spread of a video showing the alleged impact of a US missile on a school in Iran. Farid spent an entire day breaking down the sequence frame by frame: analyzing the geometry of the shadows, the sound delay rate of the explosion according to the laws of physics, or the pixel length of the projectile. Impossible to decide if it is false or not. He found nothing that could prove that the video was fake, and the same thing happened to other specialists. None could issue a clear verdict of authenticity, and that made it clear that AI video generation is currently so advanced that real content is indistinguishable from a deepfake generated with these latest generation models. Verifying is too complicated. There is another problem here: generating a fake video, whether toxic or not, with cloned voices that are perfectly synchronized with the interlocutor is easy, fast and cheap. Carrying out a forensic investigation to try to detect whether the video is real or not takes hours of computational and direct analysis by specialists. Given that deepfakes manage to go viral in just 20 minutes if they are successful, the methods to contain this spread are useless for a simple reason: they arrive late. The biter bit. The researcher himself was a victim of this reality: cybercriminals cloned his phone number and used AI to generate his voice and thus impersonate his identity. With that clone, they called a close contact who was involved in a court case and managed to extract confidential information. Farid and his wife, a vision researcher at Berkeley, they had to create a secret safe word at the beginning of each family call to certify that each interlocutor was who they said they were. The situation generates a disturbing paranoia and mistrust. “I’m going blind”. In the report of The New York TimesFarid explained that his studies show that most people can no longer differentiate a real photo from a digitally created one. “I feel like I’m going blind,” he indicated, showing his concern about an AI that is managing to obscure the truth and distort reality. Watermarks as a solution. Faced with this avalanche of images and videos generated by AI that are indistinguishable from reality, one of the potential ways to mitigate the problem continues to gain strength. It is, of course, the watermarkstotally invisible and which are part of the metadata of those files. Two promising initiatives. There are several initiatives in this regard, although the most notable It is that of the C2PA coalition which includes, for example, Google and OpenAI. AI tools should add those watermarks identifying those contents (“This video has been generated with this AI application, this image has been generated or edited with this other one”), but at the moment that type of option is not applied by default. Another important project in this sense is SynthIDGoogle’s technology to “mark” these contents as created with AI. Image | Bild (CC0) In Xataka | What happened to Technicolor: evolution and death of the company that changed cinema and was overwhelmed by its ambition

the problem was never the nuclear bomb

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In October 1973, during the first great oil crisisgas stations in the United States posted signs “Sorry, last car in this line” to cut kilometer-long queues and ration fuel. That image became the symbol of an uncomfortable truth that remains valid half a century later: when energy is what gets stuck, even the great powers change their priorities. The end of a war with another truth. For more than a hundred days, Donald Trump sold the war against Iran as a crusade to prevent Tehran from crossing the nuclear line. The rhetoric was clear: unconditional surrender, dismantling of the atomic program and maximum military pressure. But the agreement that now it just closed with the Iranians reveals another, much more uncomfortable reality: the priority was never really the bomb. In fact, if it had been, Washington would not have accepted a pact that leaves the regime intact, postpones nuclear negotiations and turns the issue of enriched uranium into an issue. for later. What was urgent, what was truly unbearable for the White House and the markets, was something else: reopen Hormuz. The neck of the world. we have been counting these months. The Strait of Hormuz became in the royal center of war because about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes through there. When Iran closed it de facto, it not only paralyzed regional exports, but turned the conflict into a systemic threat for the global economy. Oil skyrocketed, gas followed suit, and markets began to discount something much more dangerous than a regional war: a global energy crisis. Trump could continue bombing and wasting ammunition (maybe too much), but each day that Hormuz remained blocked it more damage to Washington than to Tehran. The weapon that Iran did have. For years there was discussion about the hypothetical iranian bombbut in the end Tehran’s real pressure capacity was not underground in those missile cities in Fordow or Natanzbut floating over the Gulf. Tehran demonstrated that it could cut off the planet’s energy artery and keep it closed long enough to bend American strategic logic. Therein lies possibly the great lesson: because it did not need to manufacture a nuclear weapon to acquire deterrent power. It was enough for him control a chokepoint vital and show punitive capacity against US bases and regional allies. That changed the entire balance of the negotiation. The economy and its cracks. While the war continued, the world began to consume strategic reserves at a worrying speed. The United States drained its so-called Strategic Petroleum Reserve to levels not seen since 1983, Japan and South Korea saw reduce your inventories and Europe was beginning to strain its refined fuel supply chains. It is true that there was no collapse yet, but there were clear signs of fragility and that we were approaching red lines. In other words, the market continued to function thanks to these “shock absorbers”, but everyone knew that they were finite. Because the war could continue, but the energy cheap No. The agreement that reveals priority. And then it has arrived the unthinkable pact when the United States launched its bombing campaign. Sixty days of ceasefire, gradual reopening of Hormuz, withdrawal of the US naval blockade and temporary permission for Iran sell oil again. The sequence is revealing: before resolving the nuclear program, Washington has resolved first the flow energetic. Next will come talks on uranium, if there are any, oversight of the International Atomic Energy Agency and possible sanctions relief phases. That is to say: the nuclear issue is still important on paper, but it was no longer the strategic urgency dictated by the clock. An imperfect peace, but necessary. There is no doubt, the agreement It doesn’t close the wound. Benjamin Netanyahu keep hitting to Hezbollah day in and day out, and the Lebanese front can vturn everything back on. Iran maintains its regime, its regional influence and much of its negotiating capacity. But the war has made one conclusion brutally clear: When the stability of the global energy system began to falter, Washington downgraded its maximums to minimums. In the end, the “bomb” was the political argument, oil was the real problem. And when crude oil began to run out, peace stopped being an option and became an imperative necessity. Image | Google Earth, US Navy In Xataka | We have been fearing the Apocalypse for 100 days due to the closure of Hormuz. The blow is going to be given to us by a heat wave in China In Xataka | Ukraine turned drones into hunters. A helicopter shot down in Hormuz has transformed them into a Spielberg film

We thought the MacBook Neo was the perfect affordable computer. AMD claims it has a big problem: games

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He MacBook Neo has been everything a missile on the waterline of the “affordable” Windows laptop market. Our analysis confirmed our expectations and we were able to verify that we are facing a more than solvent team with a outstanding price/performance ratio. However, it is not perfect, and its Achilles heel is in a specific area: video games. AMD strikes back. The company has launched an aggressive advertising campaign with a strong message: “The competition makes sacrifices. You don’t have to make them”, and then focus on how the Apple team falters in a section that is important for a notable sector of users: “While 15 of the top 20 PC games don’t run natively on the MacBook Neo, AMD systems give you access to a massive library of games across Steam, Epic Games Store, and PC Game Pass.” The hateful comparisons. In that campaign AMD compares the HP Omnibook X Flip with an AMD Ryzen 5 220 with Apple’s MacBook Neo. It boasts of its 512 GB SSD (256 GB in the Apple model indicated, although there is a 512 GB version), its touch screen and its greater connectivity options. Beware of AMD’s message. As noted in Tom’s Hardware, this AMD chip is not new, but rather a version derived from the 8540U that is accompanied by an integrated Radeon 740M GPU. It’s a modest chip that can run titles like GTA V at 100 FPS in low quality, but Hellblade 2 runs at 8 FPS and Alan Wake 2 runs at 11 FPS. So it may indeed be able to run those video games, but it’s not clear that they are actually “playable.” One thing is certain: the MacBook Neo is not for gaming. In reality, Apple does not focus its MacBook Neo on gamers, because it knows that although the A18 Pro is a truly remarkable SoCis not designed for that sector. The company has its Metal API to be able to run games and it is even possible to enjoy some native ones with some joy, but if what you want is to play (especially with top PC titles), the MacBook Neo is not your device. The laptop war for students. This counterattack from AMD is to be expected: the company has undoubtedly been affected by the enormous success of the MacBook Neo, and is trying to demonstrate that its proposals are just as valid or even better. The juicy niche of student laptops is at play here: if you convince a young person to opt for a MacBook Neo, they will likely end up trapped in the Apple ecosystem (if they weren’t already). Intel also reacts. Intel’s response to the MacBook Neo has not been an advertising campaign, but something much more tangible. The company has announced its platform Wildcat Lakechips made with 18A photolithography that are a priori up to 21% more powerful than the A18 Pro. Equipment like the Chuwi Unibook (from $449) are better at least with the specifications sheet in hand, but its real performance is for now an unknown and we will have to wait for independent analyzes. More options are coming. The Computex fair that took place two weeks ago also made it clear that other manufacturers they are going to try to take advantage this moment of uncertainty to sneak in their proposals. Qualcomm launched its Snapdragon C and Nvidia made something similar with their RTX Spark (we will see the prices). What is clear is that the launch of the MacBook Neo has awakened a segment that had become comfortable, and that is good: there will be a lot of competition and, above all, many options. In Xataka | Apple is selling so many MacBook Neos that it runs the risk of not being able to make more

BYD wants to dethrone Toyota in five years. The problem is that first he has to fix what is happening in China

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Wang Chuanfu, president of BYD, has full confidence that the next few years are going to be big for the company. However, the price of its shares is not following to the company’s exploits, and for that reason it has sent a message that is intended, above all, for its investors: the promise of becoming the world’s leading manufacturer in terms of scale. Wang spoke about the issue at the Chinese company’s annual shareholders meeting, held in Shenzhen on June 9. His words come at a delicate moment, since BYD’s actions have fallen more than 45% from its highs in Hong Kong in the last year, and 33% on the Shenzhen stock market. In fact, his promise failed to convince, as the next day, shares fell another 4.3% in Hong Kong and 1.6% in Shenzhen. This is how things are at BYD. Target: Toyota. BYD is already the largest electric car manufacturer in the world by sales, having surpassed Tesla last year. But Wang’s objective goes further, as he wants BYD become number one global in total vehicle volume, ahead of Toyota. And precisely, to achieve this, it would have to sell more than double what it is selling now. In 2025, Toyota sold 11.3 million vehicles; BYD, 4.8 million. The distance is enormous. Technology. At the meeting, Wang assured that the second generation Blade battery was the main growth bottleneck this year and has pledged to accelerate its production. He also highlighted the advances in ultra-fast charging, since this week BYD announced an investment of about 2,000 million euros in Europe to develop its Flash Charge infrastructure, with 1,500 kW of power and that would allow its cars to be charged from 10% to 70% in just 5 minutes. The firm showed it to us last April, when we were able to attend the official presentation of the Denza Z9GT. Along with this, the president of the company claimed that BYD has 3.15 million vehicles with intelligent driving already in circulation, accumulating 200 million kilometers of data per day, and that L3 and L4 level autonomous driving will arrive “sooner than expected.” “As soon as the regulation is ready, BYD will take off quickly,” Wang said. A domestic problem. The great tension of the moment is precisely at home. And the Chinese market, where BYD does most of its business, has become fiercely competitive. The price war between local manufacturers has pressured margins and hampered sales. Between January and May of this year, total deliveries fell more than 20% compared to the same period of the previous year, according to account Reuters. This internal bleeding is what worries investors, and no promises about Toyota have covered it up for now. Your business away from home. Exports are the other side of the coin, and there the panorama is different. In the first five months of the year, international sales grew 65% year-on-yearwith Brazil, the United Kingdom and Australia as the main destinations. In May alone, BYD sold more than 160,000 vehicles outside China, 80% more than in the same month of 2025. The goal for 2026 is to exceed one and a half million units exported, which would represent an increase of more than 40% over the 1.05 million last year. According to share According to CarNewsChina, Wang admitted at the meeting that the current trend aims to exceed even the initial goal of 1.6 million. Europe, opportunity and problems. The firm knows that to achieve its objectives, Europe is key to its expansion. Stella Li, chief international officer of BYD, confirmed to Reuters that the hungary plant will begin assembling cars in the fourth quarter of this year. Manufacturing locally is essential if you want to avoid the tariffs that the European Union has imposed on Chinese electric companies. However, the Hungarian factory is attracting some controversy, since organizations such as China Labor Watch have reported alleged violations of European labor legislation, and local authorities have sanctioned three companies linked to its construction for dumping excavation soils on surrounding agricultural land. The matter remains open. The shadow of the Pentagon. As if the problems in the stock market and the pressure in its domestic market were not enough, this week the United States Department of Defense added BYD to its list of “Chinese military companies”considering it a risk to national security. Beijing responded by calling the decision without a factual basis. BYD does not operate in the US market due to existing tariffsbut the label complicates its image and its possible future movements in that market. In Xataka | A German driver set out to discover how much he could stretch the tank of his old diesel car. And he has done 2,400 kilometers

the traditional solution of a town in Navarra to the most dangerous problem of seeing an eclipse

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Who has not been guided by the rooms on New Year’s Eve so as not to screw up with the beginning of the 12 grapes? Without a doubt, those sounds that precede the chimes of 12 midnight are an ideal resource to fully enjoy the last night of the year. This summer, in the Navarrese town of Lerín they will have something similar to follow the solar eclipse of August 12. It is a ringing that has been designed for the occasion by the Navarra Bell Ringers Association and that, without a doubt, will make the observation of this phenomenon much more special. And also safe. A new touch for a unique phenomenon. The town of Lerín celebrates each year some days of astrotourism and scientific tourism, known as Lerín Earth Star. This year, as it could not be otherwise, they have been planned to coincide with the eclipse. For this reason, the astrophysicist and scientific disseminator Javier Armentia contacted the Association of Bell Ringers of Navarra to find out if they have a specific ringing to announce this type of events. The objective, according to explained At the press conference in which this curious invention was announced, it was “to unite tradition and astronomy in a way never seen before.” Since they did not have such a ring, they did not hesitate to look among their members for someone willing to design it. The person in charge, finally, was Rosarina Caballín. A simple touch with several interventions. The touch designed by Caballín is simple, with a ringing that becomes more intense as the climax approaches. It is designed to indicate the beginning and end of the partial and total phase of the eclipse. Bells for security. The decision to notify the start of the partial and total phase is not only symbolic, it also seeks the safety of those attending. While the eclipse is partial, if you look at the Sun it is absolutely essential to use approved protective glasses. Even if there is only 1% of light it can be enough to damage the eyes. On the other hand, during totality, when the Sun is completely covered, you can look at it without glasses. But the ending can be difficult to discern. As soon as the first rays appear again, the glasses should already be on. Therefore, warning through chimes is a genius. Ringing bells. This ringing will be carried out through two bells that have been acquired by the Association for this special moment. They do not belong to any building, but will be installed on a scaffolding approved for the occasion. The use of bells in history. We are used to associating bells with religious issues. In the Catholic religion, for example, it is quite common for them to be used to notify the start of masses, both those that take place regularly and those that are extraordinary for any reason. However, historically bells have been used for many other purposes. They have been used to warn of fires, neighborhood assemblies or even the passage of livestock. Some of these touches have their own tradition. It is the case of touch try cloudwhich was used to warn of the arrival of a storm and which in some places in Spain was even accompanied by a verse: “Hold on, hold on, God can do more than you.” It is not strange that Navarra has wanted to recover this type of traditions and unite them with the astronomical phenomenon of the year. An event that in the north of Spainperhaps it could also be considered the most important of the decade. Image | Unsplash/NASA In Xataka | The trio of eclipses that await Spain on the horizon: an unprecedented and historic chain between 2026 and 2028

The problem is that there are police officers using it to harass their exes.

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The US authorities have a powerful tool that reads license plates and allows them to reconstruct the movements of any vehicle. This technology, called Flock, has been key in solving hundreds of crimes, but it is also being used by some police officers to monitor and control their partners and ex-partners. what has happened. They count in 404media the case of an agent from Orange City, California, who during the summer of 2024 consulted his ex-partner’s license plate 69 times in the system. In addition, he searched for his mother’s 24 times and his father’s 15 times. Using this data, the agent showed up where she was, but he was also harassing her with constant calls and had even put an AirTag in her wallet. He was accused of harassment and computer crimes and was sentenced to one day in prison and five years of probation. It is not an isolated case. According to an Institute for Justice studyhas not been the only case in which an agent has used license plate readers to stalk their partners or ex-partners. They speak of at least 18 known cases in recent years, these are only those that have ended in a conviction, but it is believed that there will be many more that have not been detected. They cite several cases, from controlling their partners, their ex-partners, and their new partners, to the persecution of strangers, such as a police officer who tracked down and detained a woman he had met on a shoot because he liked her. What is Flock and how does it work?. It is a “public safety technology” company that has a huge network of automatic license plate reading cameras. These cameras record all the cars that pass and a cloud platform stores them, later allowing all the movements of any vehicle to be reconstructed over time. The system also detects matches for warrants, missing persons, and stolen vehicles and issues alerts if a match is found. Very effective, but. As we said, Flock has been key to solving many cases. According to the company itself, up to 700,000 crimes every year they are solved using their technology and defend that crimes that used to go unpunished, such as hit-and-runs, are now investigated and end in arrests. The problem is that A court order is not required to use the system.simply a username and password that any police officer has. Many agents document their searches with vague or false reasons to cover up improper use. What Flock says. In statements to 404media, the company defends itself against the accusations by saying that it is aware of these cases, that they are a minority and that they came to light “thanks to the built-in transparency and accountability functions.” It is true that the audit functions have been useful in detecting some cases, as it is also true that there have been situations of harassment that have continued for years until they have been detected. Furthermore, it is very difficult to audit because the volume of searches is gigantic, so much so that they do not even fit in a single Excel (more than 1 million). Have I been Flocked? That’s what it’s called independent website which was born as a response to this problem. Here citizens can enter their license plate and check if it has been searched on the platform by comparing it with leaked internal records. Flock has pushed for closure this platform, arguing that it allows doxxing to police and could put investigations at risk, but it has not succeeded. Image | Jonathan Lim in Unsplash In Xataka | The 2026 World Cup starts today and brings more than just football: the largest surveillance device at a sporting event

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