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Bullfighting

Colombia will ban bullfighting from 2027. Spain protects it by law, and nobody knows how much public money it gets

Colombia will ban bullfighting from July 2027, and its Constitutional Court has just confirmed it. In Spain, by contrast, a 2013 law protects it as cultural heritage, and a year ago parliament refused even to take up its repeal. The question is whether it should go on receiving public money or be banned as cruelty to animals. And the number needed to decide, how much public money it gets, is the one nobody has.

Overtourism

Tourist fees move money, not crowds. The test that matters is Barcelona's 10,101 flats, and the rent data to judge it already exists

Venice charges day-trippers 5 or 10 euros, Amsterdam takes 12.5% of every hotel room and Kyoto up to 10,000 yen a night. None of it turns anyone back: the average foreign visitor to Spain spends about 1,390 euros per trip. The one measure aimed at what residents marched about is Barcelona's plan to close all 10,101 of its tourist flats by November 2028. Whether it works will show in the rents, and those are already counted, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

AI music

More than half the new songs reaching one streaming service are made by AI. The deals to pay for them were signed by record labels

Suno and Udio turn a sentence into a song in seconds, and they learned how from music made by people nobody asked. Two of the three major labels have settled and licensed their catalogues, a German court has ruled twice against AI companies, and Deezer now receives about 90,000 AI-made tracks a day. The question is no longer whether machines make music, but who gets paid for what they learned. So far the answer depends on who signed.

Women's sport

The IOC has decided who competes as a woman at the Olympics. Below that, every country has decided something different

From Los Angeles 2028, competing as a woman at the Olympics will mean passing a genetic test, once in a lifetime. But the IOC left grassroots sport out, and there each country goes its own way. England has closed women's football to transgender women at every level, 27 US states keep girls' school sport for those born female, and in Spain most regional laws say you compete as the sex you identify with. Caught in between are women with DSD, who are not transgender and whom the test shuts out too.

Basic income

A tax on the robots would cover 15% of a basic income. Nobody has budgeted the other 85%

Spain has been arguing about taxing companies that replace workers with AI in order to fund a basic income. Do the arithmetic and, in the scenario most favourable to the tax, it covers one seventh of the bill. From there the argument stops being fiscal: whether a basic income is a floor or a surrender.

Canada tariffs

A $5.4 billion cushion for the businesses. Nothing anywhere requires it to reach the workers

Both governments can tell you what the tariffs cost in dollars. Neither can tell you what they cost in jobs, and no rule obliges either to find out.

Plastics treaty

Nobody will say what "national security" covers. That is not a detail of the plastics treaty — it is the treaty

Every version of the rule on the table has a door in it. None of the drafts says how wide any door is, and the argument about who holds the handle is the only argument that matters.

Extreme heat

Los Angeles beat its 1886 record by a third of a degree. The number the debate was missing exists: one home in five has no air conditioning

Downtown Los Angeles is having its warmest summer on record, a third of a degree above 1886. Arguing about what to do, the debate decided the number that says who is really at risk was one nobody collects. It is collected: the US Census Bureau estimates that one household in five in Los Angeles County has no air conditioning, four times the guess, and the hottest towns in the story are the best prepared.

Police accountability

The one national figure everybody quotes does not cover what happened in Phoenix. Nothing does

Three rules were broken on 5 August, and all three already existed. There was no missing policy — and no national count that would tell you how often the same three get broken.

Working hours

The argument is not whether to cut the working week. It is who pays if we get it wrong

Spain is debating a 6.25% cut in legal working hours. We put the verified figures in front of the models and they spent the debate somewhere nobody expected: on who absorbs the risk of being wrong.

Crypto regulation

The crypto bill is stuck on a clause barring the president from profiting from crypto. He disclosed more than $1bn from it last year

Bitcoin needs to climb 61% in four months to reach its record again, and that is the small question. The big one is in the US Senate, where a crypto bill has been stuck for months on a paragraph about who may earn money while writing the rules.