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You can live without paying Google for more storage. The problem is not space, but Gmail

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I know firsthand that the offers that Google launches for your One plan cheaper are attractive. Paying a couple of euros a month so that the company does not bother you with warnings that you have little storage left is perfectly valid and you immediately get 100 GB so you can use it however you want. However, although it may not seem like a big deal, it ends up being a small “phantom expense” that we can easily avoid if we change our spending habits a little. cloud storage. In the vast majority of cases, the main culprit that causes us to have consumed almost all of the 15 GB that Google makes available to us for free is email. And the good thing is that they exist ways to almost immediately empty our inbox and have that free storage back. Below these lines we indicate some recommendations that will help you. 10 GOOGLE APPS THAT COULD HAVE SUCCESSFUL The problem is in your inbox If you check what takes up the most space in your Google account, it is quite likely that you will be surprised: Gmail is usually the biggest storage hog. Other times, it is also Google Photos that gives the most trouble with this, but in the case of Gmail, emails with attachments accumulate for years, and most of them are perfectly expendable: automatic notifications, old invoices, newsletters that you never read, etc. If your work depends to a certain extent on being very aware of the email, as happens to me, you find thousands of emails of press releases, presentations and, in short, material that arrives, takes up space and you don’t open it again. The good thing is that Google gives you very specific tools to locate those emails that we do not need and delete them in bulk. Between that and some tips to filter your inbox, you will be able to empty a very important part of the free storage that Google gives you in a simple way. The starting point: Google’s storage manager Before you get to work with Gmail, there’s one place worth going first: Google’s storage manager, accessible directly from this website. You can also get to it by clicking on the storage tab in Drive and clicking on “Free up space”, an option included in the Drive, Photos or Gmail app. This page shows how much space you have occupied and offers two key sections: one with personalized suggestions to free up space (such as deleting spam emails, large files or heavy attachments, indicating how much can be gained in each case) and another with shortcuts to the specific management of Drive, Gmail and Google Photos. It’s a good way to get a general idea of ​​the picture before acting: at a glance you can see which service is consuming the most and where to start cleaning. How to find and delete what matters most in Gmail If you’ve noticed that Gmail is taking up quite a bit of your cloud storage, the next step is to take action. After having deleted the emails that the Google One system itself suggested in the previous step, you can continue on your own using advanced filters that Gmail offers you, going for the heaviest emails first. To do this you can start by writing in the Gmail search engine ‘larger:15MB‘ (without the quotes) and so you will see all the emails that exceed that size. You can adjust the number depending on what you want to find: larger:5MB, larger:10MBor whatever value you prefer. It is a quick way to identify the messages that take up the most space with minimal effort. It is one thing to identify them, and quite another to know if they are really important to you or not. Going one by one is a bit of a hassle, but for example it helps me a lot to know if the email is from a long time ago or not. That’s why I also use date filters. This way, if what you want is to go also old, the command before:YYYY/MM/DD shows messages sent or received before a certain date. You can even combine both commands to locate old and heavy emails at the same time. Another very practical option is to search directly by attachments. Wearing has:attachment larger:10M All emails with attachments larger than 10 MB appear in the search bar. If you want to tune more, filename:.pdf larger:5M specifically locates emails with PDF attachments that weigh more than that amount, and older_than:2y has:attachment Filter out those that have attachments and have been in your tray for more than two years. Attached files (photos, PDFs, videos, documents) are usually responsible for the storage filling up much faster than expected. Search your keywords Beyond the commands that Gmail offers you, you can also use searches that serve you personally. In my case, for example, when I have a long list of press releases that I have already read, I simply type ‘ndp’ or ‘press release’ in the search engine and I will easily have a whole long list of press releases waiting to be deleted. Then you just need to pull the trigger. Once you have identified all the emails you want to delete, click on the selection square in the upper left corner to mark them all, click on ‘Select all conversations that match this search‘ so you can mark them all and not just the first 50, and then pull the trigger. If you know exactly what you DON’T want to delete, you can move it to its own label or mark it as featured before mass deleting the rest. That way you don’t risk losing anything important. Don’t forget to empty the trash When you have identified and deleted all the emails, you will have to pay a visit to the trash. And the emails that you have deleted do not disappear immediately: they are sent to the trash, where stay for 30 … Read more

China says it has built its largest data center. And confirms that your problem is precisely in the chips

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China has just turned on its new technological pride in Shenzhen: an AI cluster with 14,000 petaflops built entirely with Huawei Ascend 910C chips. the city has presented it as the first scale computing center with 10,000 cards with completely national technology. It is an undeniable milestone, but if we give it context, an alarm signal and a dose of reality. Why is it important. The Shenzhen cluster, with all its rhetoric of technological sovereignty, represents about 1% of the capacity of the largest US data center in operation today. In other words: China has built, with great institutional effort, what OpenAI already had available to train GPT-4 in 2022. The gap is not a question of ambition (China has it) or capital (it also has it) or energy (of course, he also has it). It’s a chip issue. What are they capable of manufacturing and in what volume today. Between the lines. The Shenzhen government statement highlights energy efficiency metrics and occupancy rates of 92%. It’s really good data. But the selection of indicators (the cherry picking) says a lot so it is omitted: there are no direct comparisons with the clusters of NVIDIA H100 that colonize the data centers of Microsoft, Google or Amazon. Posting only what you have is also a way of not publishing what you lack. The context. At this point no one doubts that China does not lack electricity, not even engineersnor money to build large-scale AI infrastructure. What is still missing, despite the advances, are the chips. Export restrictions imposed by Trump They have cut off access to advanced semiconductors from NVIDIA and TSMCand that has forced China to accelerate its own ecosystem. Huawei has responded with the Ascend 910Ca capable chip but that still has performance limitations and, above all, volume production. If wafers were not in short supply, this data center would be a hundred times larger. Yes, but. Can China close that four-year gap before it gets even bigger? The answer depends almost entirely on how much its domestic semiconductor industry manages to scale, and whether or not Western sanctions manage to stifle that process. At the moment, in Shenzhen they are celebrating an achievement as undeniable as it turns out that in the eyes of Silicon Valley they are still in 2022. Featured image | Huawei In Xataka | Memory prices have started to fall in some markets. There is still a long way to go to close the AI ​​crisis

Microsoft’s problem is not having lost a quarter of its value in three months. It’s just that he’s been wrong for a long time.

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It seems like not so long ago when many celebrated Microsoft’s commitment to Azure. The decision of Satya Nadella Focusing on cloud computing soon began to translate into good financial results, propelling the Redmond company to achieve record revenue figures. But there was something more relevant in that movement: the realization that it could generate enormous benefits beyond Windows. That strategy, started in 2014ended up marking a before and after that became especially visible in 2019, when the firm reached for the first time a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. However, not even the most long-term oriented strategists, like Nadella, are free from errors. Microsoft has been chaining questionable decisions for some time that have ended up having a direct impact on its quarterly results. Specifically, the company has lost almost a quarter of its value in just three months. To put it in context, we are talking about its largest quarterly drop since the 2008 financial crisis. A decline of this magnitude, logically, does not go unnoticed. From cloud leadership to a strategy under pressure If we want to understand why the story has gone wrong, we have to start with the most obvious: the market has reacted harshly and, above all, selectively. In the first quarter of 2026, Microsoft lost about 23% of its stock market value, according to CNBCwhile the Nasdaq lost around 7%. It is not a minor movement, among other things because we are talking about a drop of a magnitude that has not been seen in almost two decades. This gap compared to the rest of the sector begins to point out problems that go beyond the general context. For a time, the commitment to OpenAI was seen as one of Microsoft’s great strategic successes, and it is not difficult to understand why. The company has invested around 13 billion dollarss to integrate this technology into Azure and into products like Copilot, which allowed it to place itself in a very advantageous position in the race of the artificial intelligence. However, with the passage of time we have also begun to see the other side of that decision: a very high technological dependence and a growing pressure to justify that deployment. As the months have passed, that close relationship has also quietly begun to change. Although Azure remains a key partner for OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman has started to open your infrastructure to other actors to sustain the growth of its models, which increasingly require more computing capacity and energy. This does not break the alliance, but it does change its meaning, because Microsoft no longer concentrates with the same clarity all the strategic advantage that it had achieved in the first phases of the agreement. If we go down to the field of the product, where all these bets should materialize, the case of Copilot is especially illustrative. Microsoft has tried to make this assistant the axis of its new value propositionintegrating it into Microsoft 365 and a good part of its ecosystem, but the adoption It is not going at the expected pace. According to The Information, almost no one uses Copilot. What we have seen is that bringing artificial intelligence to the daily life of companies is more complex than it seemed on paper. Added to all this is a tension that is not always seen, but is very present in the backroom of this race: that of how to distribute resources in an environment of growing demand. Microsoft is investing massively in infrastructure to sustain the rise of AI, but at the same time it has to decide how it allocates that capacity between Azure and its own services. In January, CFO Amy Hood came to point out that Azure’s growth in the December quarter would have been even greater if the company had allocated more chips to the cloud instead of distributing some of that capacity among services like Copilot. Attrition is not limited to artificial intelligence, and that should also be taken into account. Also this year we have seen notable drops in income and in various areas of the Xbox ecosystemin a context also marked by previous price increases in Game Pass and on the consoles. It may seem like a minor front next to Azure or Microsoft 365, but it helps complete the picture of a company that has been opening too many flanks at the same time. What we have seen is that even in areas where it had a consolidated position, Microsoft is finding it more difficult to keep pace. Put all these pieces together, and what begins to emerge is an increasingly evident disconnect between Microsoft’s operational strength and the way the market is valuing its strategy. The company remains the fourth most valuable on the planetcontinues to grow, with revenue up close to 17% year-on-year in its last reported quarter and with Azure advancing 39% in the December quarter, but that strength is not translating to its price or valuation. Images | Xataka with Nano Banana 2 In Xataka | The ghost of IBM: Satya Nadella’s great challenge is to prevent Microsoft from becoming a technological fossil

CEO Toyota believes his extreme perfectionism is a problem

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Japan is an extremely peculiar country. It is for many reasons in the eyes of a European. One of them is the mixture of humility at work and absolute dedication to the company to achieve a common objective that materializes in designing and producing the best possible products. The contrast is more complicated to understand if possible in the automobile industry. Toyota is considered the mother of what we know today as “toyotism”. A formula to work in a chain with a very limited stock. That is, without a safety net that allows unforeseen events to be handled with a warehouse large enough to support production until the problem is solved. This is achieved, of course, by building a chain that is oiled with the precision of a Swiss watch. But also with the certainty that what goes on the market is the best version of what each worker has in hand. Toyota revolutionized automobile assembly line production by giving the workers themselves the power to stop production if any failure was detected. It is a way of working that can only be carried out when, when developing the parts and design of an entire car, you work with the firmness of philosophy Kaizen. This Japanese word defines the pursuit of perfection through continuous improvement. This allows each modified part in the process of producing a new car to have the support of years of experience behind it. This way of working has been a competitive advantage until now has made Toyota the largest car manufacturer of the world. The company was, in 2025, the world’s largest automobile producer, with more than 11 million units manufactured. Volkswagen is second and remained at 9 million units manufactured. It is the result of production measured to the millimeter and reliability earned by hard work. That philosophy kaizen which Mazda or Toyota boast has allowed the latter to always be at the top of the reliability rankings, a value when it comes to putting millions and millions of units on the market. But this way of working has its drawbacks when you have to make agile decisions. China is the train to follow “If things don’t change, we won’t survive.” The phrase is from Koij Sato, CEO of Toyota, and is especially relevant because, as we pointed out, it comes from the head of the world’s leading brand. The message was sent to 489 suppliers with the aim of making them understand the importance of improving competitiveness against Chinese companies, they state in Automotive News. According to AutoblogToyota’s quality standards have been so strict that parts have been returned with small resin wrinkles that had no impact on a vehicle’s dynamics or reliability. The same thing was happening with thousands of wire harnesses that would have been returned because they showed minor signs of discoloration. Small aesthetic defects that buyers did not even notice because they are hidden inside the vehicle itself. Now Sato has asked its suppliers to be more flexible to save money on production and be more agile. The message launched by the company’s CEO is not coincidental. Months ago, a consulting firm specialized in reverse engineering I already alerted Toyota that their electric cars were designed as combustion vehicles and that penalized them when producing them. The problem is that, according to this company, producing an electric car is so different from a combustion car that it is almost equivalent to two different products even though both have four wheels and a steering wheel. They pointed out, for example, that Toyota used steel bars and reinforcements in the steering column or to hold the dashboard, thinking about reducing vibrations. However, Chinese manufacturers and Tesla choose to increased use of plastics because those vibrations are almost non-existent in an electric car. This allows them to produce cheaper and faster. And get lighter cars. “The average customer doesn’t even see these parts,” explained Shoji Nishihara, purchasing manager for Toyota’s vehicle development department, in statements reported by forumelectriccars. The final goal is complicated. The company aims to improve competitiveness by reducing production times and making the final quality of its products more flexible. A complicated balance if we want to continue being the reference in terms of reliability. For now, Toyota believes that its perfectionism was already bordering on healthy. Photo | toyota In Xataka | The legend of the Toyota Supra, one of the legendary Japanese sports cars: the fusion of illegal racing and the Kaizen philosophy

The problem for the US is not that China is mass-producing a new hypersonic missile. It costs the same as a Tesla

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The most advanced military systems have had something in common: exorbitant prices and limited production, with weapons that can take years to manufacture and cost millions per unit. It happens that there is a less known fact that is beginning to change everything: today it is possible to build technology capable of traveling more than 1,000 kilometers in minutes using components derived from the civil industry. And China is in the lead. What a car costs. It we count in November of last year. China has introduced a quiet but profound change in modern warfare: a hypersonic missile, the YKJ-1000capable of reaching speeds of up to Mach 7 and traveling more than 1,000 kilometers for a price around at $99,000that is, equivalent to that of a high-end car like a Tesla Model It is not a trivial fact, although it may seem anecdotal, it is actually the core of the problem you have right now. United States in Iranbecause it completely breaks the traditional logic of military balance: for the first time, an extremely advanced weapon allows to be exclusive and expensive to become something potentially massive, accessible and replicable on a large scale. It’s not the technology, it’s the cost. Because the challenge for the United States is not that China has developed a new hypersonic missile, but that it has done so extremely cheap. While intercepting a threat can cost millions per attempt (with systems like Patriot, SM-6 or THAAD), destroying that missile costs dozens of times more to manufacture it. This creates a brutal asymmetry where the attacker always wins financially, forcing the defender to spend disproportionate amounts just to stay safe. In this scenario, defending yourself is no longer sustainable, especially in the face of massive attacks. Mass production. Unlike traditional programs, this missile is not a limited or experimental piece, but rather a product designed to be manufactured in large quantities. using civil materialscommercial supply chains and components already available on the market. China has not only reduced the cost, but has industrialized productionallowing us to imagine scenarios where hundreds or thousands of these systems can be rapidly deployed, saturating any existing defense without the need for absolute precision. Invisible launchers. The change is not limited to the missile itself, but how it unfolds– Can be launched from platforms hidden in shipping containers, trucks or common industrial facilities, integrating into global civil infrastructures. This virtually eliminates any predictability on the origin of the attack, expanding the scope of the threat to any point within its operational radius. In other words, war no longer has defined fronts and begins to depend more on a diffuse network where the attacker can appear anywhere without prior notice. The swarm effect. Added to this logic is the parallel development of advanced drones like the TM-300capable of flying at high speed, with stealth capacity and also designed for mass production. In that light, the combination of cheap missiles and swarming drones creates a scenario in which even sophisticated defenses can be overcome. simply by volumenot because of technological superiority. It is not necessary for all attacks to be successful: it is enough for some to do so to generate a disproportionate strategic impact. Change of era. If you like, all this points to a structural transformation: one where the advantage is no longer in having the most advanced weapons, but in being able to produce them faster and cheaper that the opponent can defend himself. The central idea, as we saw in Ukraine and now in Iranis clearly imposed: the problem for the United States is not that China is mass manufacturing a new hypersonic missile, but that it is doing so at a ridiculously low costaltering the balance between attack and defense and opening the door to a war where quantity and price can prevail over technology and sophistication. Image | x In Xataka | China is sending drones to an island 100 km from Taiwan. The problem is that Japan and the US are filling it with missiles In Xataka | China has drawn a very clear red line to Japan: being an ally of the United States is good, supporting Taiwan is bad.

AI chatbots are more flattering than humans giving personal advice. And that’s a problem

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Before, to create your echo chamber you could only follow like-minded people on networks, now you can create your own personalized echo chamber with an AI. A Stanford study has thoroughly analyzed the excessive adulation of LLMs and the result is clear: if you want to be told what you want to hear, it is better to talk to the AI ​​​​than with a person. The study. The Researchers analyzed eleven language models, among which were the most popular ones like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or DeepSeek, and they fed them with data sets about personal dilemmas. In addition, they included 2,000 prompts taken from the Reddit community. Approximately one-third of all scenarios included harmful or outright illegal behavior. Then, they compared the LLM responses with human responses to see who tends to agree with the user more. In a second part of the study, they recruited 2,400 participants and had them chat with flattering and non-flattering language models. We like to be proven right. Chatbots tend to be much more flattering than a human when giving personal advice, but not only that, people generally prefer these types of responses. The models endorsed the user’s position 49% more than humans in general dilemmas and endorsed harmful behavior 47% more. In the second experiment, people who chatted with different models considered the sycophantic model more trustworthy and preferable. Furthermore, she came away more convinced that she was right and less willing to apologize or repair the conflict. Why is it a problem. According to the authors, LLMs can reinforce egocentrism and make people more morally dogmatic. According to Myra Cheng, co-author of the study, “By default, AI advice does not tell people that they are wrong or give them a reality check (…) I worry that people will lose the ability to deal with difficult social situations.” In addition, there is another worrying fact and that is that users perceived the models as equally objective, which suggests a lack of critical vision to be able to distinguish a flattering AI from a non-flattering one. AI is not a person. It is obvious, but the reality is that every day we address AI chatbots as if they were one. Thank him and ask him for things please It is a harmless symptom of our mania for anthropoformize everything. However, when We use AI as a substitute for a psychologist or when we establish intimate relationships with a chatbotthat’s where we start to step in swampy terrain. The authors of the study consider it urgent that companies introduce safeguards to reduce the excessive complacency of LLMs and advise avoiding using them as a substitute for a person to deal with personal conflicts. The counterpoint. There are voices that argue that AI is not generating these echo chambers, at least not with as much intensity as we have seen with social networks. According to John Burn-Murdoch in Financial Timeslanguage models tend to raise consensus with experts and generate more moderate opinions than networks. Their argument is that the economic architecture of networks rewards inflammatory and polarizing content, while chatbots compete to offer reliable answers to users who use them to make important decisions. It is not just an opinion, it has also done an experiment in which it has simulated thousands of political conversations between users with extreme positions and several of the main chatbots on the market. Based on electoral surveys and data on the use of these tools, it measures how positions would move if a part of the citizenry used AI to inform themselves. The author concludes that, on average, the models tend to push the most radical ones towards more temperate positions closer to the expert consensus, also validating many fewer conspiracy theories than those that routinely circulate on social networks. In Xataka | AIs have become accompanying tools against loneliness. For some researchers it is “junk food” Image | Zulfugar Karimov in Unsplash

Iran has made energy a problem again. The United Kingdom believes it has found a solution in solar panels

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There are issues that we believe are resolved until reality reminds us that they are not. Energy is one of them. We have been talking about for years solar panelsof self-consumption and of alternatives to fossil fuelsbut in many cases they remained a rather gradual, almost optional decision. That has changed. The rise in energy prices linked to the conflict in Iran has brought the problem back to the forefront and forced several governments to react. The United Kingdom has decided to act. The specific measure. What the British Government has put on the table is not a generic promise, but a plan to try bring so-called plug-in solar panels to stores in “the coming months.” To make it possible, the Government is working with Amazon, Lidl and the manufacturer EcoFlow. There is also an interesting nuance here: we are talking about an American e-commerce giant and a very recognizable supermarket chain in Europe. What makes them different. At this point, it is worth stopping for a moment on what exactly we are talking about. These plug-in solar panels do not work like a traditional photovoltaic installation, which usually requires construction, permits, and the intervention of a professional. The idea here is much simpler: smaller devices that can be placed on balconies, walls or gardens and connected directly to the home electrical network. According to the British Government, this approach would allow them to be used without the need for an electrician, as long as technical and safety standards are adapted. The context. It is no longer a secret that the conflict in Iran has hit one of the most sensitive points of the global energy system, the Strait of Hormuzthrough which a relevant part of the world’s oil circulates. When that flow is threatened, prices react quickly, and that is just what has happened. In a few days, crude oil and gas have risen sharply and that impact ends up reaching Europe in the form of more expensive fuels and higher bills, which has forced several governments to act. The European mirror. If we leave the United Kingdom, what we see is a map of quite diverse responses to the same problem. Rising energy prices have forced action, but each country is doing it in its own way. Spain has opted for a broad package of aid and tax cuts, valued at around 5,000 million euroswhile Germany has focused on regulating the behavior of gas stations and Portugal has applied fiscal adjustments more specific about fuels. Faced with these measures, more focused on cushioning the immediate blow, the British movement introduces another approach, facilitating access to alternatives such as solar energy to reduce dependence in the medium term. Images | Caspar Rae In Xataka | Europe has a million reasons to fear an increase in the price of electricity. Spain has something else: renewables

The IOC has a new method to exclude trans athletes from the Olympic Games. The problem is that biology doesn’t work like that.

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At the end of March, the International Olympic Committee announced undoubtedly one of the most controversial decisions in its recent history: starting with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, no transgender athlete will be able to compete in the women’s category. But beyond the social and political debate that can be generated, we must also focus on the method chosen to determine this exclusion: a simple genetic analysis where a single gene is searched. And this is something highly discussed among science. His discoverer. The gene in question, which will be analyzed in athletes who want to participate in the female category, will be SRYwhich is nothing more than the “Sex Determining Region Y”. A gene that was discovered in 1990 by molecular biologist Andrew Sinclair and who pointed out that its presence is a determining factor in male sexual development. It is, literally, the scientific father of the test that the IOC has chosen to integrate into its Olympic requirements. But the thing is that he himself is against using it for this. Your disagreement. This decision is not a big news, since if we look back, the body that governs world athletics, World Athletics, adopted this same test in September 2025 to participate in their competitions. Here is Sinclair himself He did not hesitate to publish an opinion article where he made it clear that the result is not definitive, since the only thing the analysis can say is whether the gene is present or not. Because. In this way, it must be detailed that being positive in SRY does not give us information about whether it is working to form a testicle, if it stimulates the production of testosterone or even if it expresses the necessary receptors so that testosterone can be used. Put another way: knowing that an athlete has the SRY gene does not tell you anything conclusive about her physiology, her hormonal levels or, by extension, about her supposed competitive advantages from having testosterone. The biology of sexual development is infinitely more complex than the presence or absence of a genetic marker, which will now mark the ‘everything’ before the IOC. There is more evidence. This researcher is not the only one who opposes this decision, since at the beginning of March it was published an article signed by 34 academics to respond to the decision of World Athletics. Here they pointed to the same thing: we are facing a test that reduces everything to a single gene when biology is much more complex. And biological sex is the result of a very complex interaction of human genetics, hormones, receptors, tissues… Furthermore, the IOC’s argument suggests that this test protects against competitive equity, but for academics, they point out that there is no solid scientific evidence to demonstrate that the presence of the SRY gene is directly related to having a greater sporting advantage. It’s not something new. Although we now see a big scandal in the sports world over this decision, the reality is that if we look at the newspaper archive, something similar was already being done in the 90s. 30 years ago The IOC decided to require women to verify their sex through chromosomal testing and also by determining the SRY gene. But finally the tests were withdrawn due to technical limitations, the absence of medical evidence and also because of the legal problems it could have. A Spanish case. Due to these tests, the Spanish athlete María José Martínez Patiño was disqualified in 1985 after testing positive in the chromosome test despite not having any physiological advantage over her peers. In this way, her career was practically doomed, but she was able to recover it thanks to the help of a geneticist who was able to document her case with scientific evidence that showed that it was not giving her an advantage over the rest of her competitors. The debate. If the basis for requiring genetic testing is to protect competitive fairness, we must ask what science says about the real advantages of transgender athletes. And at this point much less is known than the general population believes. One of the most important studies It was made in 2015 by a transgender researcher who analyzed the running times of eight athletes before and after their transition. In this case, the brands slowed down and their relative performance compared to runners of the same sex remained quite stable. An IOC study. Published in 2024 and partially financed by the committee itself, produced results that do not fit with the discourse we keep hearing: transgender women showed worse results than cisgender women in lower body strength and lung function. But logically it does not mean that there cannot be residual advantages in certain sports, which is something that to this day remains a question that needs an answer. And now what? We are undoubtedly facing a dispute about which tools are valid to solve a genuinely complex problem. Right now, science suggests that the SRY gene test is not the best tool, but because it does not give us a complete answer, since the SRY gene may be present and the body may not respond to testosterone. But this is something that today must continue to be investigated to obtain evidence that can guarantee this equity, but always with a scientific basis behind it. Images | Umanoid Erik van Leeuwen In Xataka | We have accepted that sport is “medicine” for the body. Now science is discovering its side effects

The United Kingdom has just detained a Russian oil tanker in Gibraltar. The problem is the possibility that they are armed

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Spain controls one of the busiest maritime passages on the planet: for the Strait of Gibraltar More than 100,000 ships cross each year, including thousands of oil tankers. Just a few kilometers from its coasts, a good part of the crude oil that feeds Europe circulates, and any alteration in that flow has a direct impact on the Spanish economy, from the price of energy to maritime security. From sanctions to interceptions. What for months was a silent economic war you have just crossed a new visible line. The Royal Navy no longer limits itself to observing Russian maritime traffic, it now follows it, identifies it and makes it easier to approach. The case of the MV Deyna oil tanker in Gibraltar mark that change. It is not an isolated incident, it is the symptom of a strategy that is beginning to materialize at sea. And in this turn there is a key detail: for the first time, the pressure on the shadow fleet stops being just legal or financial and becomes operational. The fleet in the shadows. Russia has built a network of hundreds of opaque tankers to continue selling crude oil despite the sanctions. This includes everything from old ships to constant flag changes or business structures that are difficult to trace. All designed for keep the flow of income that fuels its war economy. This network has been for years difficult to attack because it operates on the margins of international law. But now that margin is narrowing, and every interception at key points like Gibraltar points directly to a critical vulnerability of the Russian system. HMS Cutlass stopped the tanker Gibraltar and the bottleneck. The strait, furthermore, is not just any place. As we said at the beginning, it is one of the most guarded maritime crossings on the planet. and convert it at pressure point against Russian oil has a clear logic: controlling traffic is controlling business. HMS Cutlass operations near France show that NATO is willing to use intelligencesurveillance and naval presence to stop this flow. If you will, each intervention sends a message that goes beyond the specific ship, one that announces that it is no longer safe to operate in the shadows near Europe. The problem. It turns out that this is where the story really changes. Because Russia not only wants to protect its fleet, it is considering doing so with military means. Armed patrols, fire equipment on board and even the possibility of militarizing the tankers themselves. What until now were civil ships with economic functions could be transformed into platforms with defensive capacity. And that turns any approach or follow-up into an operation with a real risk of escalation, where an inspection can turn into an armed incident. From drones to oil tankers. Ukrainian naval drone attacks against Russian ships have been the trigger of this change. They have shown that even large maritime assets are vulnerable, and Russia has responded hardening his stance and preparing an active defense. This connects directly with the current global scenario, where energy transportation has become in strategic objective. The sea, which for decades was a relatively stable highway, is beginning to look more and more like a diffuse war front. The domino effect. The paradox is quite evident. While the West try to cut Russia’s revenues, the war in the Middle East has put Moscow’s crude oil back to the center of the market global, with India and China absorbing shipments that previously found no buyer and prices rising higher and higher. And meanwhile the shadow fleet returns to be indispensable. That makes any try to stop it have global consequences, turning each interception into more than just a naval operation: a piece in a much larger battle for control of the global energy flow. A new red line. If you like, the final scenario is the most uncomfortable and dangerous. A Russian tanker detained in Gibraltar It is no longer just a sanctioned ship, it may be the first link in a chain of tensions that escalate rapidly. Because if those ships start to go armedeach interaction at sea stops being administrative and becomes potentially military. And at that point, the question stops being whether the shadow fleet can continue operating, and becomes what will happen the day someone shoots first. Image | kees torn In Xataka | The Canary Islands and Galicia have set off the Navy’s alarm bells. Russia’s ghost fleet has arrived in Spain with warships In Xataka | A ghost fleet has mapped the entire underwater structure of the EU. The question is what Moscow is going to do with that information.

The problem is that there are already gas stations that have absorbed them

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The liter of diesel reached 1.96 euros on average last Saturday, its highest since the conflict broke out in Iran, and gasoline was dangerously close to two euros. However, that same weekend, it came into effect the government’s tax reduction. Prices have dropped, but now the question is how long it will last. Why has fuel increased? The conflict in the Persian Gulf has increased diesel prices by 44.8 euro cents per liter, and gasoline by 28.2 euro cents, according to a study published by the OCU. The trigger is the war in Iran, which has strained the crude oil markets through the Strait of Hormuzan artery through which nearly 20% of the world’s oil transits. In just three weeks since the start of the conflict, prices at the pumps ended up skyrocketing to levels not seen since the Ukraine crisis. What has the Government done? The Executive approved on Friday, March 21 a shock package which includes, among its most important measures, lowering the VAT on fuel from 21% to 10% and temporarily eliminating the special tax on hydrocarbons. The estimated savings were around 30 cents per liter, which represents around 20 euros of savings per tank, according to the estimates of the Government itself. The measure published in the BOE on Saturday it came into force immediately, although it will have to be validated in Congress this Thursday. The Government has set the validity of this temporary reduction until June 30, at which time it will review the impact of the measure depending on how the energy markets evolve. How much have prices really dropped? This Monday, March 23, the average price of 95 gasoline in Spain was located at 1,595 euros per liter and diesel at 1,786 euros. The drop is real and significant. And in fact, if you go to almost any gas station, you will see that the prices have nothing to do with those of a few days ago. However, it is worth putting it in perspective. And the average price of a liter of diesel on March 19 was 1,917 euros, and the VAT reduction reduces it by about 17.4 cents. That is still well below the average increase of 45 cents that we were able to verify between March 2 and 19. Likewise, the tax decrease does not fully compensate for what fuel prices have increased in recent weeks. ANDl rocket and feather effect. The fact that VAT drops on paper does not guarantee that the price at the pump will drop just as quickly or completely. Economists call this the rocket and feather effect: When the price of oil rises, fuels immediately reflect that increase, while the declines are much slower. Part of this slowness also has an explanation: the cut in the hydrocarbon tax has not yet been applied to all gas stations because many are depleting the stock they had bought with the previous tax. ANDthe first day of the descent. In about 42% of service stations the VAT reduction from 21% to 10% did not fully materialize the first day, and the situation was even worse in agricultural and transport cooperatives, which in most cases had not yet passed on the discount. Some have attributed this to the lack of time to adapt the computer systems (the announcement came on Friday, the publication in the BOE on Saturday and the reduction was to be effective on Sunday) since many stations had purchased fuel at higher prices just the day before. The director of the Spanish Confederation of Service Station Employers (CEEES), Nacho Rabadán, has indicated that in many cases there have been service station managers who the day before purchased fuel with a price increase greater than the impact of the VAT cut. And a quarter of gas stations took the opportunity to go up. The most striking thing comes from FACUA. And it is that according to the data According to the consumer organization, 1,837 gas stations that communicated new prices to the Ministry on Sunday took advantage of the VAT reduction to apply a new increase. Of them, 177 completely absorbed the tax reduction by maintaining their prices without adjustment, and another 40 even increased it compared to the previous price. In the specific case of diesel, FACUA calculates that, if the tax reduction had been fully transferred, the decrease would have reached 17.8 cents, placing the average price at 1.785 euros; However, the real price was somewhat higher. FACUA concludes that lowering taxes without setting price ceilings is “exactly the measure that speculators have been demanding.” 2022 is not that far away. We have the most recent precedent in the bonus of 20 cents per liter that the Government applied during the Ukraine crisis. This cost us around 4.25 billion euros, according to a study of the economists Juan Luis Jiménez, Jordi Perdiguero and José Manuel Cazorla-Artiles. The effectiveness of the bonus was, to say the least, questionable. And in addition to the study, other independent reports from Esade and Funcas They also concluded that a significant portion of that aid did not reach consumers. The CNMC began an investigation that concluded last February with a fine of 20.5 million euros to Repsol group companies for abusing their dominant position. This history is precisely the reason why the Government has opted this time for a direct tax reduction that acts on taxes instead of repeating the universal bonus. From the CEEES, Rabadán had already qualified the 2022 bonus as “well-intentioned, but poorly designed and worse executed.” What a difference the measurement makes this time. Unlike the 2022 bonus, the VAT reduction acts directly on the tax included in the final price, which theoretically makes it more difficult for gas stations to appropriate the benefit. However, given FACUA’s complaint after the events of the first day of the sale, we see that the fact that it is more difficult for the price to be absorbed does not mean that it is not impossible. Given the … Read more

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