GoKawiil
Tech News
Over the weekend, large crowds in several European countries took to the streets, with demonstrations in France escalating into riots marked by burnt-out cars and smashed storefronts. Social media footage showed similar unrest spreading across Spain, Belgium and Portugal, with hundreds of thousands reported to have joined the protests.
A traveler returning from a trip through France, Spain and Portugal reports that Dynamic Currency Conversion, the practice of letting merchants bill purchases in a tourist's home currency instead of the local one, has become harder to avoid. Many payment terminals now default to charging in dollars automatically, often without a clear prompt asking the customer to choose, making it easy to unknowingly accept a worse exchange rate.
After the April 2025 blackout across Spain and Portugal shut down its production lines and spoiled tonnes of meat, Spanish processor Fribin lost hundreds of thousands of euros in a single incident. The company has since bought two five-megawatt-hour battery storage modules, together worth about €1.5m, partly funded by EU Next Generation grants, to keep operations running during future outages.