unleashed

why the Obradoiro gargoyles have unleashed a heritage revolt in Santiago de Compostela

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Neighbors have had enough of sodomized gargoyles in Santiago de Compostela. “artistic attack“, “a barbarity“, “creepy“, “absolute aberration“Three months of complaints have led the Xunta to take measures on the facade of the Hostal dos Reis Católicos. Despite the complaints, the architect responsible for undertaking the reform, Fernando Cobos, has considered that this controversy has no reason to exist. Firstly, because metal pipes strung on sculptures were already planned in 1561. Secondly, because in addition to being the “most effective” and “least bad” solution, he believes that it cannot do much more than sodomize a stone gargoyle. The oldest in Spain. This hostel and parador, considered the oldest operating accommodation in Spain and one of the most protected buildings in Plaza del Obradoiro, has been undergoing modernization and rehabilitation works since 2025. Turespaña and the Ministry of Industry and Tourism, with a budget of around eleven million euros, have been in charge of undertaking these improvements. And within the Master Plan it was decided to extend the Renaissance gargoyles with metal tubes – the “spears” – to direct rainwater away from the baroque balcony and avoid humidity that was deteriorating the stone. So far, everything perfect. The General Directorate of Cultural Heritage of the Xunta authorized this intervention on an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) and the municipal technical organizations did not see anything strange, assuming that this was a functional solution to a real conservation problem. But as soon as the scaffolding was removed and the copper pipes were exposed on the 18 gargoyles of the main façade, spitting water from the anus, it got messy. One complaint after another. The first public complaint was filed by Maite Vieites, the neighbor who spread photographs by networks of “intubated” gargoyles. The debate spread among Compostela residents, pilgrims and heritage associations. The Fonseca neighborhood association described the intervention as an “aberration” and “an attack against our heritage.” Entities like Apatrigal, the Ateneo de Santiago and the Casino Cultural Association They raised their complaints to Icomos-Spain—an organization in which Cobos also serves as an advisor—arguing that the solution contravened principles of the Venice Charter: minimum intervention, reversibility, compatibility and respect for the cultural landscape. An “ass with a pipe” was read differently: more than a mere drain it was a gargoyle “sodomized” by sin, a symbolic violence, an unnecessary eschatological joke. Why PEC tubes. The architect Fernando Cobos, responsible for the Hostel’s Master Plan, has defended actively and passively that this is a measure “reversible and less damaging” for the monument, insisting that the tubes “exit, not enter” and that similar metal channels are common in international historical heritage. The sexual reading also dates back to the Middle Ages. New requirement. Faced with pressure, the Xunta no longer thinks the same: first it announced that it would look for “a better formula” and asked Turespaña for a more aesthetic option. Then, Autonomous Heritage set deadlines to present alternatives and demanded, at least, shortening the spear of the only anthropomorphic gargoyle. Now, the Galician government has ordered the tube of the human figure to be cut and has given the architect 25 days to design an internal and hidden drainage system that maintains functionality without altering that whimsical erotic reading. Asses and throats. Gargoyles are part of hydraulic engineering in medieval architecture. On thousands of facades of cathedrals, abbeys and even public buildings. They are sculpted drains that project rainwater away from the walls to prevent erosion of the stone and mortar. The term, which comes from French gargouilleliterally refers to the “throat”, alluding to the internal channel that transports water and food from one end to the other. Over time, the technical function became loaded with symbolism: grotesque beings, chimeras, hybrid animals and deformed human figures acted as a reminder of the dangers of sin and as apotropaic devices to drive evil away from the temple. The cathedral of Laon, in Picardy, built in the mid-12th century, already had this water injection through pipes coming out of zoomorphic figures. The semiotics of the matter do not have much more. Gargoyles and historical memory. The conflict has its reason for being: when democratic memory or community aesthetic perception collides with certain technical impositions, it is easy to read an “erasure.” Resignifying aesthetic elements alters the genealogy of the building. In Gijón, several memorial associations They demanded the withdrawal of the “Héroes del Simancas” monument, on the façade of the La Inmaculada school, interpreting it as an apology for Francoism. And the law of democratic memory obliges private owners to remove elements contrary to that memory when they project into public space, with the intermediate option of keeping the pieces accompanied by an explanatory plaque in buildings of special historical value. And speaking of plates, in Tarragona and Barcelona removing Francoist plates is costing more than desirablewith neighbors complaining about the paradox that the cost of removing them falls on the communitieswhile the threat of sanctions and the possibility of museumizing these pieces comes from the administrations. In short, these cases open a battle over who decides how to intervene in the skin of untouchable historical monuments. Let us remember that the Supreme Court forced a company to dismantle a metal structure that barely invaded the adjacent facade by 20 centimeters. Luckily, in Spain there is Horizontal Property Law which gives a voice to the neighbors and the authority for the Spanish justice system to take measures on gargantuan works on terraces or structures that alter the exterior configuration of the buildings without the consent of the community. Condemned to understand each other. The legend of Saint Romain and the dragon of Rouen tells that, in the 6th-7th centuries, an amphibious monster called La Gargouille flooded and devastated the surroundings of the city until the bishop subdued it and its fireproof head was hung in the cathedral as a drain and protective amulet. From those dusts, these muds. Because the story was misplaced and rewritten in the 14th century to justify the annual … Read more

Chile approved a direct submarine cable to China. The decision unleashed a diplomatic scandal with the US in the middle of everything

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For decades, Chile has tried to reduce its digital dependence on North America. The arrival of China Mobile as an alternative seemed like a solution to all their problems with the laying of a submarine cable from Valparaíso to Hong Kong. However, the issue has led to a tremendous geopolitical mess that is difficult to deal with. All because the United States had not liked the move one bit. Dependent independence. Almost all of the submarine cable infrastructure that connects Chile with the rest of the world passes through US territory or is in the hands of North American technology companies such as Google, Meta or Amazon. When Chile sought a direct route to Asia, it found that the only viable option passed through China. And of course, that set off all the alarms in Washington. What was being negotiated. China Mobile, a Chinese state telecommunications company, presented a $500 million proposal to lay an underwater cable of about 20,000 kilometers between the Chilean city of Concón and Hong Kong. The project, called Chile-China Express, would have been the first transpacific data connection from Latin America to Asia without passing through North America. The Chilean Ministry of Telecommunications approved the proposal last January. Washington’s response. Just like share Rest of World, two days after Chile signed the concession decree, the ministry annulled it, alleging “a technical error.” According to the mediumChilean officials had been urgently summoned to the US embassy in Santiago. And on February 20, the State Department revoked the visas of the Minister of Transportation and Telecommunications, Juan Carlos Muñoz, along with two other senior officials in the sector. The official notification was that their actions had “compromised critical telecommunications infrastructure and undermined regional security.” Munoz explained to Rest of World that the sanction prevented him from visiting a key country for his work and that it had damaged his reputation. What Chile defended. From Chile’s perspective, the evaluation of the project was an ordinary procedure. Jorge Heine, former Chilean diplomat, pointed out to the environment that diversifying digital communication sources is essential to avoid outages caused by geopolitical tensions. “The State Department entered uncharted territory,” he said, by sanctioning officials for doing their jobs legally. The new president inherits the problem. The change of government on March 11 complicated the scenario even more. The previous president, Gabriel Boric, acknowledged having ordered the withdrawal of approval after threats from the United States about long-term consequences. His successor, the right-wing José Antonio Kast, came to power with the poisoned task of maintaining relations with China, his main trading partner, without raising blisters to the United States (which is his main foreign investor). Complicated. The US ambassador to Chile made it clear shortly after the inauguration that the Chinese cable was “ruled out.” The official position has become more nuanced. The Kast government initially counted on Google’s Humboldt cable, that will connect Chile with Australia in 2027made the China project unnecessary. But more recently, executive sources have acknowledged that the China Mobile project “continues to be evaluated.” Pedro Huichalaf, cybersecurity researcher and former secretary of telecommunications, explained to Rest of World that for Chile “it still makes sense to create redundancy” with a main and a secondary route to Asia. The geopolitical trap. The Google cable does not completely solve the problem. And according to point Heine, intelligence agreements between the United States and Australia mean that South American data trafficking to the Asia-Pacific will continue under American supervision. And there is already precedent for this, since after Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s global surveillance programs, Brazil and the European Union accelerated the deployment of the EllaLink cable to connect directly and avoid passing through North America. How the board looks. China has been expanding its digital presence in Latin America. And the country operates 5G networks and data centers in Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina through companies such as China Telecom, Huawei, ZTE and Alibaba Cloud. Brazil, for its part, is promoting its own 35,000-kilometer cable that would connect with China, India, Russia and South Africa. Washington views each of these moves as a threat to its influence in the hemisphere. In fact, just as stands out In the middle, the so-called Donroe Doctrine of the Trump administration formalizes that position by not allowing “foreign adversaries” to use trade as a lever to control critical infrastructure in the region. And in the long term. Just like point Rest of World, the most solid solution for Chile is not to choose between Washington and Beijing, but to reduce dependence on both. Aisén Etcheverry, former Minister of Science and Technology in the Boric government and a technology consultant, told the media that “Latin America has built lasting relationships with a wide variety of partners. Although this provides resilience, it is not enough. Developing its own capabilities must be a priority.” Cover image | aboodi vesakaran and AI generation with Gemini In Xataka | An unexpected salvation for the end user emerges from the memory market debacle: Chinese chips

has unleashed an invasive species that drains its rivers

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If historically there is a star tree species for reforestation and wood production, those are conifers. The pine of all life. We have seen it in the mountains of Galicia, in Euskadi and also in New Zealand. There are no shortage of reasons to choose them: they grow very quickly, they are cheap, they withstand adverse conditions well, they provide versatile wood and their seeds disperse very well. They fulfill their mission of reforestation. Maybe too well: its seeds have a kind of membranous wings that allows them to fly far with the wind, escaping from the plantations. So much so that in New Zealand the “wild conifers” or “wilding conifers” They are already a national problem. what’s happening. That conifers originally planted in managed plantations are escaping from those areas and their control, colonizing open landscapes. As details The New Zealand Ministry of Primary Industry, there are already more than 2 million hectares affected. Before they decided to launch a control program, it was even worse: they were expanding at a rate of 90,000 hectares a year. Why is it important. The fact that there is a pine forest where it shouldn’t brings serious problems: They drain the water. The conifer canopy intercepts water before it reaches the ground, so runoff is reduced, aquifers are recharged less, and there is less water in rivers and reservoirs. The estimated loss is up to 40%. And if there is less water in rivers and reservoirs, it can affect the production of electricity with hydroelectric plants. They affect biodiversity. The introduced species were not native and their rapid expansion displaces native vegetation in one of the most biodiverse countries on the planet. Fires and agricultural production. Its uncontrolled presence reduces the space for agriculture and favors the spread of fires. Why were they planted? This problem that is bringing the New Zealand government to its head began precisely with government programs of the 60s and 70s. At that time the administration massively planted Pinus radiata, Pseudotsuga menziesii and other exotic species with the aim of reforesting areas, avoiding deforestation and protect the inland highlands . In fact, The New Zealand Parliament recognized in 2023 how he had sprinkled with seeds by air. And as we have already seen, conifers are the perfect invader: productive, resistant and fast growing. What could go wrong. The difficult and expensive task of keeping the wild conifer at bay. The oceanic country has been trying to stop wild pines for more than a decade and almost 200 million dollars. In 2015 they approved the strategy against wild conifers with a vision of containment and eradication by 2030 (spoiler: it will not be like that), but the lack of financing has been its endemic evil. With specific injections like the one in 2020 100 million dollarsframed within a post-pandemic job creation project, then even the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) of New Zealand has had to write a letter to the president to complain about the lack of means. Without sufficient and sustained funding, the program takes one step forward, another step back: controlled areas are recolonized. Who should pay? The tricky issue about the matter, which touches on elements as critical as water or electricity production, is that it requires an ambitious and continuous plan over time to be effective. The PCE points out explicitly to the state, which promoted plantations and aerial seeding, but also points to the logging industry insofar as it has also benefited from these problematic species, posing a possible tax. On the other hand, and as affected are the energy companies, who are as interested as anyone in solving the problem. In fact, the prime minister has already entered into talks. In Xataka | The Mediterranean Sea is becoming tropicalized: the Balearic Islands welcome an invasive plant that until now was impossible in its waters In Xataka | The US has such a big problem with Asian carp in its rivers that it has decided something extreme: electrocute them Cover | Kerin Gedge

the concert industry is unleashed

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Shakira will close her world tour in Spain with a temporary stadium built specifically for her by Live Nation and which will be called Shakira Stadium. It is not the first time it has happened (Adele did it in Munich in 2024) but the phenomenon speaks of something deeper: the live industry has entered a phase in which mainstream artists do not adapt to existing venues. Rather, the enclosures adapt to them. When he said it. Was in the RTVE program ‘Al cielo con ella’broadcast on March 15: will close its world tour in Spain with this exclusive stadium. The artist stated that “it was going to be something from another world, a production that I think has not been seen before in Spain.” Without revealing dates or location, he confirmed that there will be more than two nights of concerts, a kind of residency. Among the possible locations there are means that They point out the Iberdrola Music in Villaverde, the same space where Mad Cool is celebrated. Continuing success. Shakira is right now one of the main Latin artists in the world. His Women No Longer Cry World Tour has collected 421.6 million dollars and sold 3.3 million tickets in almost a hundred concerts: it is the highest-grossing Latin tour in history, surpassing the Luis Miguel Tour 2023-24 that held the previous record. The tour started in February 2025 in Rio de Janeiro and has toured Latin America, the United States and Canada. The leg on the other side of the Atlantic, stopping in the Middle East, India and Egypt before reaching Spain, will close the tour. Come on, the Shakira Stadium is more than justified. The precedent: Adele. In August 2024, Adele performed ten times at the Adele Arenaa temporary enclosure built on the grounds of the Messe München in thirty days. It took 700 workers to build it and it had a capacity for 80,000 people. Total attendance was around 730,000 spectators. A 220-meter LED screen crowned an infrastructure whose total cost was estimated about 130 million dollars. The advantages. What characterizes This type of stage on conventional stadiums is the scale: a conventional touring stage is 60 meters wide, Adele’s was 220. “The fact of not having to tour the show means that the scale can be much larger,” explained production director Malcolm Birkett. Significantly, Adele’s promoter was also Live Nation. The stadium also included Adele World: a perimeter ring with an amusement park, a replica of a London pub and additional performances. It is likely that Shakira will set up comparable facilities. The “staging” of the live. To understand why something like the Shakira Stadium happens, you have to follow the music industry over the last fifteen years. When the streaming revenue from the sale of physical formats sank, live streaming emerged as the economic core of the business. Today, that process is completely consolidated: the global live music market has an annual growth rate of 8.78%. Live Nation alone reported $23 billion in revenue in 2024, and 151 million attendees at its events. In Spain, the Association of Music Promoters billed only with tickets 725.6 million euros in 2024, 25.32% more than the previous year. This growth has a very specific architecture. As we told at the time1% of artists generate 60% of revenue from live performances. The average ticket price of the top 100 tours rose more than 20% between 2022 and 2024. The market is growing, but is concentrated. Dynamic prices, VIP packages and Ticketmaster commissions have turned big concerts into luxury goods. The barrier to entry is increasingly higher for the public, and the losers are also the artists who do not have the capacity to fill stadiums. The logic of the own stadium. And so we have things like the Shakira Stadium. When the artist doesn’t need to move the stage between cities, he can build something that would be impossible to fit into a traveling tour. The investment is enormous, but the concentration of the public in a single point for several nights allows it to be amortized. And it’s worth keeping in mind, too, that Live Nation, whose business practices are being investigated It is the only company in the business with the capacity to execute it on this scale. In Xataka | We Spaniards have stopped watching TV, going to the cinema and reading books: the only thing that interests us is going to concerts

the magnificent seven are now the unleashed seven

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They are popularly known as “the magnificent 7” because their capitalizations have increased in recent years that already equal or exceed the GDP of a few countries, although despite the fact that the name takes into account companies from the last decades, They have existed since at least the 18th century.. Although its power is undoubted, there is no corporation that is eternal or immune to “earthquakes” like the advent of DeepSeek or a year as crazy as 2025, spiced by the rise of Donald Trump and his questionable decisions. Or yes. The Magnificent Seven Goes Cruising Speed. Because on December 23, 2025, the shares of the powerful septet recorded an average annual return of 27.5%, well above of the S&P 500 index. Of course, the future of each of them had a different fate last year with one clear winner, another strong follower and the rest, who have held up quite well. 2025 was the year of Alphabet. Google began the year with several open fronts that promised to ruin it by 2025, but the Menlo Park company not only emerged victorious but It is the strongest big tech of the moment. Well, in 2025 Google’s matrix has skyrocketed, standing out from the rest. The keys? In addition to winning several trials, Gemini and its integration and the optimism around chips. In 2015 Google began to develop its TPU, but in recent months it has announced that it would begin to sell it in large quantities. as Goal or Antropic. Google you is competing with NVIDIA where it hurts the most. In fact, with a rise of 65.8% according to TradingView dataAlphabet is today the most profitable company in the world. NVIDIA has a bitter silver. The second is NVIDIA, the company that has benefited the most from the AI ​​and data craze. Its profitability is 40.9%, outstanding compared to the rest but notably more modest compared to the increases of 171% and 239% in 2024 and 2023, respectively. Doubling its year-on-year income is, objectively and in isolation, very good news. Of course, competition from Alphabet on the one hand and from AMD and Broadcom threaten its days of wine and roses. This graphic from Visual Capitalist shows how Magnificent Seven stocks performed in 2025, according to the aforementioned TradingView data: Performance of the Magnificent Seven shares in 2025. Via: Visual Capitalist After Alphabet and NVIDIA, the list softens, passing through Tesla and its 20.2%, Microsoft and its 15.5% and Meta and its 13.6%. It is worth stopping at the last two because this position constitutes a real warning to sailors. Apple’s (more or less) skinny cows. With 8.8% profitability, Cupertino is not going through its best moment: the company is behind the competition in AI and its vitaminized Siri it seems to never arrive. In 2025 several managers they have abandoned ship. Furthermore, this 2026 has all the ballots to be the one of the goodbye from your CEO. Amazon is no longer so all-powerful. Closing the list is Jeff Bezos’ company, which has registered “only” a 5.8% profitability that falls within a context of slowing growth in its cloud computing business throughout the year. His fall in October caused a widespread internet blackout which doesn’t help either. In Xataka | The highest-paid CEOs in the technology industry, gathered in a simple graph In Xataka | The “Magnificent Seven” believe they dominate the world: this graph shows how 18th century corporations already doubled their value Cover | Visual Capitalist

When nuclear energy orbited the Earth. The day a Soviet satellite with a reactor fell in Canada and unleashed a crisis

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In the late 1970s, the idea that a nuclear reactor could fall from space ceased to be science fiction and became a real problem on the table of several governments. A Soviet satellite with a reactor on board It had lost control and was heading towards the Earth’s atmosphere, without anyone being able to specify where its remains would end up or what consequences the impact would have. In the midst of the Cold War, secrecy and urgency marked decisions. From there, questions arose that remain uncomfortable today: what was a nuclear reactor doing in orbit, why that risk was accepted, and what happens when technology escapes the script. As CBC points outOn January 24, 1978, the Soviet satellite Kosmos-954 re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere after weeks of tracking by American radars. No one knew with certainty where he would fall or in what state his remains would reach the ground. Eventually, fragments of the device were scattered over a vast region of northern Canada, from the Northwest Territories to areas that are now part of Nunavut and northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. What began as an orbital control problem suddenly became an international emergency with scientific, diplomatic and health implications. The day the Cold War left radioactive remains over Canada Kosmos-954 was neither a scientific satellite nor an isolated experimental mission, but one more piece of a Soviet military system designed to monitor the oceans. It was part of the US-A series, designed to locate large ships, especially American aircraft carriers, using radar. To power this system, which is very demanding in terms of energy consumption, the Soviet Union resorted to a compact nuclear reactor, a solution that allowed operate for long periods without depending on solar panels. That technical choice explains why the satellite had fissile material on board and why its loss generated so much concern. The technological heart of Kosmos-954 was a BES-5 reactor, known as “Buk”, developed specifically for Soviet military satellites. This type of reactor used uranium-235 and was designed to power the US-A system radar for the life of the satellite. The BBC estimates that 31 devices were launched with BES-5 for this family of satellites, and places the use of reactors in space until the end of the 1980s, with launches that continued until 1988. That history was not a clean line, according to the BBC: there were previous failures and accidents, including serious problems in one of the first flights in 1970 and the fall of another reactor into the Pacific Ocean after a launcher failure in 1973, in addition to the plan security plan contemplated moving the core into a waste orbit to prevent its return to Earth. Arctic Operational Histories explains that The signs that something was wrong came weeks before re-entry. Tracking systems detected that Kosmos-954 was progressively losing altitude, an anomaly that indicated a serious failure in its orbital control. The United States began to follow its trajectory with special attentionaware that the satellite had a nuclear reactor on board. The big unknown was not only when it would fall, but whether the Soviet security system would manage to separate the core and send it to a safe orbit before the device entered the atmosphere. When it was confirmed that the debris had fallen on Canadian territory, the problem took on a completely new dimension. Authorities knew the fragments were scattered over a vast, largely remote, snow-covered region, making any quick assessment difficult. The first measurements detected radiation in some points, although without a clear map of the contamination. Faced with this uncertainty, Canada had to quickly decide how to protect the population and how to locate potentially hazardous materials in an extreme environment. To confront an unprecedented situation, Canada turned to international cooperation. Operation Morning Light mobilized Canadian and American military personnel, scientists and technicians, many of them from units specialized in nuclear emergencies. From improvised bases in the north, flights equipped with sensors capable of detecting radiation from the air were organized. Each anomalous signal led to more detailed inspections, in a race against time marked by extreme cold and lack of infrastructure. As the search continued, it became clear that the contamination was more complex than expected. Not only visible fragments of the satellite appeared, but also much smaller radioactive particles, difficult to detect and remove. This forced the teams to take extreme precautions expand tracking areas. At the same time, delicate communication work began with the northern communities, who wanted to know what real risks existed for health, water and the fauna on which they depended. As the weeks passed, the operation narrowed its objectives. The official Morning Light phase lasted 84 days, although CBC describes the search effort as extending through most of 1978 and the search covering an area of ​​124,000 square kilometers. In this process, 66 kilograms of remains were recovered and Canada considered the immediate threat to the population and the environment contained. The economic cost was raised and Ottawa claimed 6.1 million dollars from the Soviet Union, which in 1981 agreed to pay half, opening an unusual diplomatic process for an incident of this type. The case of Kosmos-954 was not closed with the removal of the remains from the ground. In the months since, the incident reached international forums and fueled an uncomfortable debate about the use of nuclear power in space. Several countries demanded greater security guarantees and more transparency in programs that, until then, had been developed under strong secrecy. The episode served to reinforce the idea that space accidents do not understand borders and that their consequences could directly affect third countries. Images | Arctic Operational Histories In Xataka | Mars is left with one less line of coverage: NASA loses contact with its key orbital repeater

Mariah Carey has unleashed a schism at a concert in Singapore

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Although she no longer appears on the front page of the news as she did in the nineties, Mariah Carey continues to attract the world’s attention, especially as Christmas approaches. However, a concert recent event in Singapore sparked some controversy among the public: can you listen to ‘Fantasy’ without getting up to move your hips or is it materially impossible? Mariah moment. Mariah Carey’s favorite dates are approaching. Christmas is inaugurated by the diva as soon as Halloween passes, and with this she begins to add reproductions of her ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You‘ until reaching milestones like the one a year ago, becoming lMost played Christmas song in Spotify history. A couple of days ago he received the award for MusiCares Person of the Year for his philanthropic work. But it’s not all good news. Also a few days ago, without going any further, there was a brawl at one of his concerts in Singapore. What happened. The International Business Times website account that a Mariah Carey concert in Singapore held on October 8, 2025 as part of her The Celebration of Mimi tour, went viral after some attendees they will count on social networks what had happened there. In them they were seen arguing with other spectators about whether they should remain seated, as most of the theater where the concert was taking place, or could get up to dance, applaud and sing the songs. Zombies with Mariah. At the event held at the Arena @ Expo Singapore there were 6,600 people, but unlike what is usual at a concert in Europe or the United States, the attendees remained seated. This caused some users, such as the tiktoker @advlogss called the audience “Zombi” for remaining impassive before the diva’s repertoire. Another user of the social network, @sha_nikitarelates: “there was a lady behind us saying ‘You have to sit down! It’s a sit-down concert!’ Different forms of enjoyment. What happened is that cultural differences between the inhabitants of Singapore, where the public tends to behave more reservedly than in the West, and people from other backgrounds collided, which, as can be seen in the videos, was the case of those who broke with tradition. On Singapore news website ‘The New Paper’ They explain it perfectly: A British security guard who has been working in the country for years, Joe Borg, claims to understand both sides. “I would understand if some people were upset because they couldn’t see the concert,” he says. According to Borg, concert-goers in Singapore are less likely to participate due to “less alcohol consumption and rowdiness” than in other countries. The respect is very nice. There’s another interviewee in ‘The New Paper’, a K-pop fan called Ms Tay, who says there are “appropriate times to sit down and times to stand up.” She has worked as an usher at concerts, and can therefore attest that banners and glow sticks can be “annoying” when they block the view of others. And in fact, he has even seen people stand on chairs just to see better. In our book of concert etiquette, that crosses several boundaries. ​ In Xataka | Spanish stadiums are desperately looking for money, and it is not on a whim. 19 business days a year are no longer enough

The suicide of a teenager unleashed a crisis in Openai. We already have the first measures that will arrive in Chatgpt

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The chatbots of AIs are in the spotlight for their possible risks on mental health, especially chatgpt. We recently deepened this problem following the accusations that Chatgpt was the culprit of causing delusions and even the suicide of a teenager In the United States. Although we already saw that reality is much more complex that a simple “the fault is AI”, OpenAi has responded to the wave of criticism and already has A package of measures that will integrate into chatgpt To avoid more similar cases. OpenAI’s plan. In response to the controversy after the case of Adam Raine, Openai has detailed the measures that will reach Chatgpt, which will focus on facilitating access to emergency services, contacting trustworthy people and reinforcing protection measures focused on adolescents. The company puts a period of 120 days to integrate these novelties, although it warns that some will take a little more than others. Reasoning models. GPT-5 Choose the best model automatically depending on the needs. One of the solutions proposed by Openai for conversations that take a worrying address is to automatically direct them to their reasoning model, regardless of the user selected. Parental control. It will arrive next month and the minimum age to use will be 13 years. Parents can link their children’s account to their own and can deactivate functions such as chat memory and history. In addition, they will receive a notification if it detects that their son “is in a moment of acute anguish.” Collaboration with experts. OpenAI ensures that all these improvements will be implemented under the supervision of mental health experts. For some time they have an artificial welfare and intelligence experts that has been expanded with experts in addictions, eating disorders and adolescent health. The demand. It is not the first case in which Chatgpt is placed as responsible for a mental health crisis, but one of the most popular. Adam Raine’s parents They sued Openai after their son’s suicideclaiming that Chatgpt validated his “most harmful and self -descetive thoughts.” In some of his conversations he came to discuss details of how to make the knot in the rope with which he planned to commit suicide. Weak safeguards. In his Fake Friend reportthe ‘Center for the Fight against Digital Hate’ has already verified that the safeguards of chatbots are very fragile and the case of Adam Raine corroborates it. Chatgpt detected several times that there was a risk of self -injuries and insisted to call the suicide prevention line, Adam managed to dodge these messages simply telling him that he was looking for information for a fiction story. The new parental control sounds like the first stronger measure against this problem. Image | Kaboomps, via Pexels In Xataka | In 2011 someone published in Reddit “A858”. Fourteen years and thousands of messages later, the mystery is still disound

20 years ago the button of a Samsung unleashed madness. So much that Mediamarkt had to take away the battery

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A phone with such a curious button that Mediamarkt had to take away the battery so that users did not abuse it. It is the story of a Samsung proposal born 20 years ago, with a mechanism that aroused the curiosity of anyone who approached this phone. As you collect Xataka mobileit is one more proof of how Samsung has been the king of folding format for more than two decades. Launched in 2004, the Samsung P510 It was a phone Concha typewith double screen (interior and exterior) and a fairly particular characteristic. At that time, Concha type phones were not so different from the folding now: some force had to be made to open them. But Samsung wanted to go further with this particular model, and completely mechanized the operation of the hinge. It was enough to press a button so that the phone opened and closed its upper part, the lid. Being an electronic mechanism, this curious opening-giving was accompanied by an addictive sound. Nils Raetting account, Technological journalistthat there for 2004 he was working on an old German Saturn. Among the most prominent devices in sales in its store, the P510 takes the prize. Raetting reports that the influx of curious who went to the store in order to test the button was high. To this point, that the battery had to be removed from the exposure model so that both potential clients (as simply curious) did not abuse this mechanism. Social networks show Some short videos with the phone mechanismstill functional in several well preserved units. Surprise the speed at which the phone opens and closes, taking into account that we talk about a phone released in 2004. Although the P510 does not enjoy a memory as prominent in memory as other legends in the style of Motorola Razr V3 or the Nokia 6820, Some units are still sold on websites like eBay about 100 euros. We see descriptions such as “completely motorized, weird”, since this is a trend that the rest of the manufacturers did not follow. In fact, Samsung herself continues to bet in the middle of 2025 for the folding format of the shell type on phones such as the Galaxy Z Flip6. A telephone that there is no trace of a similar button, and to which it would not be easy to implement it given the folding nature of its panel. Image | Phonewizz In Xataka | The folding market is completely stagnant. It’s excellent news for Apple

Anthropic lifts another 3.5 billion investment. It is just what they need to survive in an absolutely unleashed segment

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It’s as if money It is not over. At least in the case of AI, a sector in which spectacular investment rounds follow each other continuously. The confidence in startups and companies that work in AI models is extraordinary in the United States, and we have a last example of that AI fever. Anthropic lifts 3.5 billion dollars. The company has announced which has managed to complete a new investment round that will allow you to have 3.5 billion dollars from now on. It is not a figure as high as those they achieved OpenAI either XAI Recently, but it is still colossal. This time the great protagonists have not been Amazon or Google, but Lightspeed Venture Partners and other venture capital firms. It is worth more than Mercedes-Benz. That round makes the current assessment of Anthropic ascend to 61.5 billion dollars, an equally unique figure that would place it ahead of Mercedes-Benz (60,000 million dollars of valuation) if we equate that assessment with the market capitalization of the German automotive giant. But far from OpenAi. The investment round raised was going to be about 2,000 million dollars, but there was more demand than expected and finally raised much more money. Of course, its current assessment is still far from Openai’s, which is estimated to be around 300,000 million dollars. Money to continue working in AI. Those responsible for Anthropic point out how that new capital injection will allow them to continue developing “smarter and most capable AI systems that expand the ability that the human being can achieve.” Income is encouraged, but …. The projected income rate (Revenue Run Rate) of Anthropic was in 2024 of 1,000 million Ded Dolla, but now it is estimated that this rate has grown by 30%, a really fast pace. It is a remarkable figure, but it is probably well below what the company spends over a year to disappoint its models and maintain all its operational infrastructure. It is estimated which in 2024 spent 5.6 billion dollars. Claude 3.7 Sonnet animates things. The recent launch of its new hybrid model, Claude 3.7 Sonnethas once again demonstrated that the company is still a clear reference in this sector. The performance of this model is outstanding, especially in areas such as programming. But his future is complicated. Despite having one of the best generative products in the market, the company It depends absolutely on risk capital And of these investment rounds, at least for now. The competition is fierce And it also comes from companies with many more funds, which further complicates the thing for Anthropic. Investment in AI is unleashed. But for now it does not seem that the rhythm decays. The investment rounds continue to reach both these startups and companies already settled and the new ones that for example created recently Look Murati either Ilya Sutskever. The expectations about AI remain huge, and that continues to make money not stop. That is good news for the segment in general, but above all for Anthropic in particular. In Xataka | Choose between security and survival: the dilemma that terrifies the CEO of Anthropic in the US and China AI war

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