THE HULK AND THIEL WILL ROT IN HELL! Hulk Hogan y el poder DELIA RODRÍGUEZ · jul 31, 2025 Dijo Baudrillard que el secreto mejor guardado del poder es que no existe. Como ocurre con el dinero, para extinguirlo bastaría con que nos levantáramos todos una mañana y decidiéramos que aquello a lo que hemos dado valor ya no lo tiene. Pero mientras nos ponemos de acuerdo, del poder sí se notan, y mucho, sus efectos. Cuanto más poderoso es alguien, más lejos llega su influencia tanto en el tiempo como en el espacio, y más difícil resulta trazarla. Veamos un ejemplo. La semana pasada murió el luchador Hulk Hogan, conocido en España como un freak de un entretenimiento televisivo menor. Es mucho menos sabido que sirvió de herramienta para la venganza —desmedida, subrepticia y diferida en el tiempo— de un gran poderoso, el inversor Peter Thiel. Gracias a ese tipo anabolizado de bigotes rubios fue destruido el primer gran grupo independiente de medios digitales. En 2012, Gawker publicó un extr...
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Amid unrelenting attacks on Ukraine, mental health researchers seek to understand psychological toll Studies of soldiers and civilians could provide clues to diagnosis and treatments 31 Jul 2025 2:00 PM ET By Richard Stone A nighttime drone strike on a Kyiv, Ukraine, apartment building forced residents into the street on 10 July.REUTERS In the child’s drawing, a blue-and-yellow umbrella the size of a city block shields homes and apartments from fighter jets screaming toward Dnipro, an industrial city in southeastern Ukraine that Russia has hit hard and often during the war. Ukraine Wants Peace! the elementary school artist titled the work, an entry in a competition staged earlier this year by the M.S. Poliakov Institute of Geotechnical Mechanics for families of its staff. “This is a small way to help people cope. To relieve the terrible stress we are all under,” says Anatoly Bulat, the institute’s director. After years of daily air raid alerts and predawn fusillades o...
Adam Tooze confirms what I have advanced a long time: - China will end up isolated and encircled. Western nations, however, pay little heed to social cohesion. It's Sparta versus Athens all over again. Historically, Sparta won. But Rome overcame both city-states by extending citizenship to "foreign clientelae". There's a lesson to be learned there, somewhere... China and the rise of the new global city The writer is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter Adam Tooze · 1 Aug 2025 We used to know what the future of a globalised world looked like: cosmopolitan cities like New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong. These places had national character but blended together people, ideas and money from all over the world. Many were once capitals of far-flung empires. Some, like London and New York City, had been hit hard by economic restructuring in the 1970s. They were re-energised and transformed by global growth. The unstoppable trend of globalisation wo...
Geopolitics underpin race for cross-border payment innovations Elettra Ardissino elettra.ardissino@ft.com · 1 Aug 2025 The Trump administration has helped usher stablecoins into the financial mainstream as a way of making payments between individual users. Behind the scenes, the starting gun has also sounded on projects to innovate cross-border wholesale payments. The issue may be technical but the potential stakes are geopolitical. Currently, the vast majority of crossborder payments are enabled by western technology or currencies, giving the US and its allies disproportionate power to sanction adversaries. For some countries, the chance to reshape that architecture is very valuable indeed. Most cross-border payments happen through the correspondent banking network. This can be slow and expensive — especially for transactions that involve far-flung countries or infrequently traded currencies. To receive international payments, a local bank needs to hold an account at a foreign ba...
Stupid Europeans. Microsoft terms hurting cloud rivals, CMA says SUZI RING AND TIM BRADSHAW · 1 Aug 2025 Microsoft’s software licensing terms are harming competition in the cloud computing market, an investigation ordered by the UK antitrust regulator has found, driving up costs for its Big Tech rivals. The finding by an independent panel of the Competition and Markets Authority said yesterday that the UK cloud market “is not working well” and recommended the agency impose conduct requirements on Microsoft and Amazon to boost competition. On Wednesday, Microsoft reported soaring profits, boosted by its Azure cloud computing unit, whose global revenues rose 34 per cent to a record $75bn in the year to June. The CMA’s panel found that the cloud market was highly concentrated, with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure each commanding up to 40 per cent of UK customer spending, and Google trailing in a distant third place. But it singled out Microsoft’s “significant market power”, driv...
The battle for Ukraine’s geological wealth The nation’s vast deposits of critical minerals have drawn interest from Russia and the United States 31 Jul 2025 2:00 PM ET By Richard Stone The Zavallievsky Graphite Mine is a candidate for the U.S.-Ukraine minerals agreement.THOMAS PETER/REUTERS In late June, Russian forces advanced in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, seizing another few square kilometers of ground—and a significant deposit of lithium. The loss adds to a growing tally of Ukraine’s geological riches that have fallen into enemy hands. It is also one more blow to a landmark agreement that the United States and Ukraine had signed weeks earlier, enabling U.S. firms to gain access to the nation’s mineral wealth. SIGN UP FOR NEWS FROM SCIENCE DAILY HEADLINES Get more great content like this delivered right to you! Under the 30 April deal, the U.S. and Ukraine pledged to establish an investment fund to rebuild Ukraine with revenues from mineral, oil, and nat...
War-torn Ukraine has become a breeding ground for lethal drug-resistant bacteria Urgent action underway to prevent dangerous microbes from spreading beyond country's borders 27 Nov 2024 12:30 PM ET By Richard Stone Medics treat a wounded Ukrainian soldier near the front line in the Donetsk region. Prophylactic use of broad-spectrum antibiotics in triage centers promotes the evolution and spread of drug-resistance genes.TANYA DZAFAROWA/GETTYIMAGES On the morning of 20 April 2023, shrapnel shredded the abdomen of a 32-year-old Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign “Black.” After he was evacuated from the front, doctors stitched up a ruptured intestine, removed part of his colon, and plied him with antibiotics. But his condition remained “extremely serious,” recalls Viktor Strokous, a surgeon at Kyiv City Clinical Hospital No. 6. Black had sky-high levels of white blood cells and other signs of sepsis, an often life-threatening infection. Tests indicated the presence of extrem...
Civilian scientists are helping make Ukraine’s military more tech savvy The work extends far beyond drone innovation. It includes projects on multispectral mobile camouflage, directed-energy weapons, and glass ceramics for rockets—all closely guarded secrets. “There are some absolutely amazing projects that we can talk about only after the war ends,” says Olga Polotska, executive director of the National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU). But Ukrainian scientists recently agreed to lift the veil on some other research efforts for Science , allowing a reporter to observe work in an array of areas, including sea drones, military medicine, and technology for safeguarding critical infrastructure and iconic historic buildings. A Ukrainian soldier pilots a first-person view (FPV) drone in the Kharkiv region. Ukraine has vowed to make 4.5 million FPV drones this year.TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES VIA REDUX The war is touching many researchers personally as well as profes...
Australia (a sewer full of Chinese rats) outlines cost of foreign espionage NIC FILDES — SYDNEY · 1 Aug 2025 Foreign spies are “aggressively” targeting Australia in sectors spanning rare earths to Antarctic research and even stealing rare plants, according to the head of the country’s intelligence service, as he estimated the financial damage from espionage for the first time. Australia’s role in the Aukus nuclear submarine pact with the US and UK was also the subject of “a very unhealthy” amount of interest from foreign intelligence services, said Mike Burgess, director-general of security at the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. He said espionage had cost the country’s economy A$12.5bn (US$8bn) in 2024, according to Asio research conducted with the Australian Institute of Criminology. It is the first time that Asio has estimated the annual cost of successful espionage attempts. Burgess described the figure, which included state-sponsored intellectual property theft as we...
‘The Economist’ pide que Pedro Sánchez dimita El presidente del Gobierno, Pedro Sánchez, tras un despacho con el rey Felipe VI, en el Palacio de Marivent, el pasado martes en Palma. ISAAC BUJ - EUROPA PRESS (EUROPA PRESS) Las disculpas de Pedro Sánchez por los casos de corrupción que salpican al PSOE no bastan para restaurar la confianza en la democracia española, muy dañada tras la imputación de sus dos últimos secretarios de Organización, según el semanario The Economist, que este jueves dedica un duro artículo a la situación de “parálisis” de la política española y en el que pide la dimisión del presidente del Gobierno. “Para restaurar la confianza en la democracia española, el presidente del Gobierno debería asumir la responsabilidad y dimitir. No existe una razón de peso para que continúe en el cargo“, afirma el texto, que esgrime que los buenos datos de la economía no son excusa para ello. ”El crecimiento económico de España comenzó antes que s...
THE "FIELD OF DREAMS" FALLACY - Suckerberg will fall flat on his nose 🐽 The most famous thing about Field of Dreams , the Kevin Costner movie in which a farmer is urged by a disembodied voice to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield, is the line “if you build it, they will come”. That’s not exactly what the voice says, but it doesn’t matter. The principle is now lodged in the popular imagination — and that of high-spending Silicon Valley executives. Mark Zuckerberg is a true scholar of Costnerian thinking, and with some reason. Meta Platforms’ second-quarter earnings showed that his company’s enthusiastic spending on artificial intelligence over the past couple of years was winning real money from customers — primarily advertisers who use Meta products, including Facebook and Instagram, to sell their wares. The numbers were impressive enough to send Meta’s shares up more than 10 per cent on Wednesday, adding almost $180bn of market capitalisation. The price...