The police are continuing their relentless search for Manuel F. A., the 64-year-old man suspected of carrying out the attack that shocked Oviedo, in Asturias, northern Spain, on Tuesday. The suspect planted an explosive device inside a backpack, killing one police officer and seriously injuring another, who remains hospitalized. Officers have been searching for more than 24 hours. Police sources say investigators have pursued several false leads and are conducting roadblocks with the assistance of the Spanish Civil Guard.

The fugitive has a criminal record containing around 10 previous offenses involving ordinary criminal activity, according to several police sources, including theft and minor assault. Some investigators are therefore puzzled by the severity of the incident, as Manuel F. A. did not appear to fit the profile of a particularly dangerous individual.

The events unfolded shortly after 7 a.m. on Tuesday when, following an alleged argument with a 17-year-old neighbor in a building on Rafael Urrusti Street in the Villafría neighborhood, he reportedly shot her five times. It has yet to be determined whether the projectiles were bullets fired from a firearm or some other type of ammunition. The young woman was injured but is recovering at the Central University Hospital of Asturias. Access to the building remains restricted, and several residents have been evacuated.

Police launched an operation in the Asturian capital to track down the fugitive after discovering a backpack containing a homemade explosive device in the entrance hall of the building in the Villafría neighborhood. As officers attempted to handle the device in order to deactivate it, a police sub-inspector from the force’s canine unit, named Juan José Rodríguez Rodríguez, who was nearing retirement, was killed instantly. A member of the TEDAX unit—the police’s elite squad specializing in the detection, neutralization, and deactivation of explosive devices—suffered serious injuries to one leg.

The operation launched in response, which involved setting up checkpoints at all exits from the Principality of Asturias and at the bus and train stations in Oviedo and Gijón, is temporary in nature, according to the police sources consulted. As time passes, they explain, the chances of finding the fugitive through such measures diminish.

The checkpoints remained in place throughout the night, although the search area has expanded beyond Oviedo, the sources said. “Searches are also being conducted in nearby towns,” one police source explained. Nearly 100 officers are involved in the operation. The provincial intelligence brigade, homicide squad, and judicial police are also participating in the investigation.

Asturias Chief of Police Jordi Moreno said in remarks to the media on Wednesday that the force’s absolute priority is to “arrest the person responsible for the shooting,” according to the news agency Europa Press. Regarding the condition of the injured TEDAX officer, who remains hospitalized, Moreno said he was “stable” after spending many hours in surgery, although his injuries are serious and there is a risk he could lose sight in one eye.

The partner of the main suspect was arrested on Tuesday morning. During questioning, she reportedly provided a location where the man might be found, but officers were unable to locate him there. Sources confirmed that she remains in custody.

The National Police are concerned that Manuel F. A. may be armed. Some sources say he is carrying both a handgun and a long gun, and they have not ruled out the possibility that he may also be carrying additional explosives. Officers are using drones to survey the area. According to several police sources, investigators have also received calls reporting possible sightings that they believe to be false from people who think they spotted the fugitive after his photograph was published in the media. Images show a thin, bald, clean-shaven man of athletic build and average height.

The explosion also killed Deny, a three-year-old German shepherd police dog who was working alongside the officer who died.

The Oviedo City Council has declared two days of mourning, and political parties in Asturias have decided to suspend their pre-election campaigning in the region. In a post on X, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez also said he was “deeply shocked” by the officer’s death.

The Buenavista Police Headquarters in Oviedo will host an official funeral for the deceased sub-inspector on Thursday. The ceremony will be held behind closed doors. “You have to have tremendous strength of character, be a good person, and be a good police officer to show up for work today after experiencing what happened yesterday,” the chief of police in Asturias added in his remarks, praising the officers’ work.

Behind the sensational details surrounding Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s admission of an extramarital affair is an alleged Chinese espionage plot to gain access to the technology giant’s most advanced chips.

The United States has been investigating the powerful executive, who is close to President Donald Trump, for nearly a year. But it was a letter from Huang that brought the matter into the headlines last Sunday. The 63-year-old admitted in a letter to Nvidia’s board that he had been unfaithful to his wife with a woman named Alice Huang, who is suspected of being a Beijing spy. The Chinese government has denied the allegations, and Trump himself weighed in, saying the FBI was investigating the matter but that he did not believe the head of the world’s largest chipmaker had any reason to worry.

The alleged scheme recalls other industrial espionage cases that have rocked prominent companies. This week, a case in which the United States government accuses Chinese company Huawei of being a “criminal” enterprise that “stole” from American companies to establish itself as a telecommunications giant was heard in court.

US accuses China’s Huawei of theft

“Theft, deception, and concealment” were three words used by Justice Department attorney Taylor Stout during a November 9 hearing in a New York court.

“For 20 years, that’s how Huawei, a massive Chinese telecommunications company, victimized American companies and abused the American financial system, all in an effort to dominate the telecommunications industry around the world,” Stout argued, according to Reuters. The alleged misconduct attributed to Huawei by the United States included a conspiracy to steal trade secrets from several American companies, including Cisco Systems and T-Mobile.

The company’s defense rejected the allegations. “It’s about competition, not conspiracy. Innovation, not theft. Ordinary business dealings, not criminal conduct,” attorney Brian Heberlig said, according to Reuters.

The case dates back to 2018, when the United States accused Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, of fraud and alleged violation of U.S. sanctions. Prosecutors said the company had misrepresented its business dealings in Iran to circumvent the sanctions and move money through the U.S. financial system. The allegations later expanded to include the alleged theft of trade secrets, which Huawei maintains was limited to “actions by individual employees” that were addressed at the time.

The case also made headlines in 2018 when Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver at the request of the United States. The executive fought extradition for three years and was able to return to China following a diplomatic agreement among the three countries involved. The charges against her were dismissed in 2022 as part of an agreement, but her statements are expected to be used as evidence in the current case against Huawei.

Wind turbine manufacturer nearly bankrupted after losing its technology

When wind turbine manufacturer AMSC did business with Chinese company Sinovel Wind Group, it could not have foreseen an outcome that would bring it to the brink of bankruptcy. In 2018, Sinovel was found guilty in a U.S. court of stealing trade secrets from AMSC and was handed the maximum fine allowed by law: $1.5 million. That figure was negligible compared with the more than $550 million in losses AMSC suffered, according to a court in Madison, Wisconsin.

“Rather than pay AMSC for more than $800 million in products and services it had agreed to purchase, Sinovel instead hatched a scheme to brazenly steal AMSC’s proprietary wind turbine technology, causing the loss of almost 700 jobs,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement at the time.

The scheme was carried out with the help of Dejan Karabasevic, the former head of the engineering department at an AMSC subsidiary in Austria. Two executives from Sinovel’s research and development division persuaded him to join their company and take with him the source code used in AMSC’s turbines.

Karabasevic downloaded the code from a computer in Wisconsin, United States, onto a computer in Klagenfurt, Austria. Sinovel subsequently commissioned several wind turbines from AMSC and copied the stolen code into them, completing the theft for which it was later held responsible in a U.S. court.

The ‘Spygate’ scandal that rocked Formula One

In this case, the fine was considerably higher: $100 million. The penalty was imposed on McLaren in 2007 after the team was found to possess confidential information belonging to its competitor, Ferrari.

At the home of Michael Coughlan, McLaren’s chief designer at the time, investigators found a dossier of approximately 780 pages containing detailed technical information about the design, engineering, construction, testing, and development of a Ferrari Formula One car. The dossier also included information about the vehicle’s weight distribution, aerodynamics, and fuel systems, according to a document outlining the decision by the International Automobile Federation (FIA).

The investigation also found that Coughlan had held dozens of telephone conversations and exchanged more than 100 text messages with Nigel Stepney, who was then employed by Ferrari.

P&G contractors rummage through Unilever’s trash

The two consumer goods giants became embroiled in a dispute in 2001 after Procter & Gamble acknowledged that contractors had searched through and taken documents from Unilever trash bins outside its offices in Chicago, Illinois.

Procter & Gamble agreed to pay nearly $10 million and allowed an independent auditor to monitor the company, assuring its competitor that it would not use the nearly 80-page hair-care business plan that the contractors had retrieved from the trash.

No further details of the out-of-court settlement were disclosed at the time. Procter & Gamble said the contractors had not broken the law but had violated the company’s ethical policies. The company itself informed Unilever that the contractors had improperly obtained the plan related to its hair-care division, according to an article in The New York Times.

Wages, housing, prices. Under that slogan, Spain’s two largest unions, CC OO and UGT, are calling on workers to walk off the job this Wednesday in the first general strike they have called in 14 years. The unions themselves admit the call is “unorthodox,” for several reasons. It is not a response to a specific piece of legislation or to any single government body. It grew out of a wave of public outrage over an eviction and out of protests organized by a group that is not a labor union. It also falls 18 days before a general election, and it comes after a train accident that has brought about “a certain shift in the country’s mood,” according to Unai Sordo.

That is why UGT and CC OO, while calling for “massive” support, expect turnout to be “uneven.” They predict less backing in regions less affected by the housing problem and are unsure about the ones that are hit hardest. According to a 40dB. survey for EL PAÍS and Cadena SER, 23% of employed respondents say they will strike, while 36.3% say they will not. Another 22.4% say they will not strike but support it, and 10.3% say they don’t know what they will do.

The unions argue the strike is justified by the bite housing takes out of paychecks. Wages are rising more slowly than prices, they say, because the CEOE employers’ confederation refused to sign a national collective bargaining agreement. They also say the general strike didn’t come out of nowhere: it caps a surge in labor unrest over recent months, with the number of workdays lost to strikes tripling compared with last year. They are calling on workers to stop work and also to join the afternoon demonstrations, which are threatened by rain forecast for much of the country.

At Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, which only days earlier was filled with tents in protest against the housing affordability crisis, the leaders of the two big unions urged workers on Tuesday night to join the general strike, which begins at midnight. “Housing is this country’s great fault line. Young people of Spain, this is your day. We have to fill the streets and demand ambitious policies that free this country from the scourge of rentierism,” said the head of CC OO. He called for a “flood of people” so that the authorities “take the hint,” and to “run the vulture funds out of town.”

UGT’s secretary general, for his part, said that “no salary can keep up with the price of housing.” “This strike is directed at every level of government. We are going to make it clear to whoever governs after November 29 that they need to start listening,” said Pepe Álvarez. He also responded to the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who on Tuesday urged Alberto Núñez Feijóo to put an end to “the whole union caste.” “She can go to hell. Let the marquise of Puerta del Sol hear that,” the UGT leader said. After the speeches, hundreds of union members marched toward Cibeles chanting “strike, strike, general strike.”

Alicia del Río, spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union (Sindicato de Inquilinas), told EL PAÍS on Tuesday that November 11 marks the start of “a new cycle of struggle that can finally win the major gains our country needs, such as the right to housing and better living conditions for the working class.”

The strike began with a push from Del Río’s organization, the Tenants’ Union, the group that supported Maricarmen during her eviction. Public anger over what happened to the Madrid woman ran so high that the government responded by approving decrees with housing measures, which were later rejected by the right-wing majority in Congress. That vote on Friday, October 2, led to mass demonstrations the next day, Saturday, October 3, led by the Tenants’ Union under the main slogan “toward a general strike.”

At that point the major unions had doubts, but some smaller ones, such as CGT, did not and promised to back the call in the workplace. The Tenants’ Union even said it would go ahead with the strike without CC OO and UGT, alongside smaller unions, if the two refused. On Monday, October 5, hours after Pedro Sánchez called the election, UGT and CC OO announced their support for the strike, raising it to a different level. Without their strength in workplaces, where they have 228,000 shop stewards (more than two-thirds of the total), the strike would have had little impact. That is what happened with the last general strike call, which CGT organized last year over the massacre in Gaza and which drew very little participation.

The past month has been a whirlwind for the unions, which have put their organizers to work to pull together a general strike in under a month. Sources at the major unions stress that the overlap with the election campaign has made the job harder, given the political right’s accusations that the strike is an electoral ploy. “It didn’t help to have the left saying this strike is against the opposition [as María Jesús Montero said], or the right accusing us of doing the government’s bidding,” said a CC OO representative. The unions expect the strongest support in the most heavily unionized sectors and in the regions hit hardest by the housing crisis.

According to CC OO’s count, some 4,500 works councils, staff committees and union branches have already signed on to the strike, a thousand more than on Friday. They include representatives at some of Spain’s largest employers, such as Mercadona, El Corte Inglés, ONCE, Acciona, FCC, Correos, Eulen, Inditex, Ferrovial, Iberdrola, Santander, BBVA, Telefónica, Carrefour, Ford and Seat.

The strike is also backed by civil society groups (such as CEAR, the LGTBI+ Federation and Greenpeace), and figures from the cultural world have signed a manifesto in support. Besides the unions already mentioned, the strike is supported by the Basque unions ELA and LAB, the Galician unions CIG and CUT, the Andalusian SAT, the Aragonese SOA, CNT, CO.BAS, Solidaridad Obrera, Alternativa Sindical de Clase, the Union of Actors and Actresses, the Progressive Union of Labor Inspectors, the screenwriters’ union ALMA and the journalists’ union FeSP, among others.

Most professional and sector-specific unions reject the strike as electioneering. These organizations are strong in some key sectors, such as the central government civil service, rail transport and the medical profession, and as a rule they did not support the 2012 general strike either. They include the civil servants’ union CSIF, the teachers’ union ANPE, the doctors’ union Amyts, the train drivers’ union Semaf, the transport union SLT, the pilots’ union Sepla, the retail union Fetico and the financial sector union FINE, among others. One class-based union that is not sector-specific, USO, is also among those not backing the strike, though it did support the 2012 general strike.