HARD NUMBERS: Spain jacks taxes for foreigners, North Korea blasts off again, Haitian displacements soar, Red Note noted by TikTok users

100: Thinking of buying a place in Spain? If you’re a foreigner, it could cost you dearly. The government has proposed a 100% tax on non-resident property purchases, up from today’s 6-10%. The measure is meant to address a growing housing crisis in a country where nearly 30,000 extranjeros bought houses last year – not to live in, says Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, but “to make money” by renting them as holiday homes.

2: The new year is off to an explosive start in North Korea, where the regime has already conducted its second large-scale missile test of 2025, firing a barrage of short-range ballistic weapons into the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. Last week, Pyongyang let fly a hypersonic medium-range missile, after spending much of 2024 testing missiles of all kinds. Over the past year, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has severely hardened his policy toward the US, South Korea, and Japan, which he accused of forming a bloc of “aggression.”

1, 041,000 million: The number of Haitians displaced by gang violence has tripled over the past year, reaching at least 1,041,000 people, according to a new UN assessment. The forced return of about 200,000 Haitians from the neighboring Dominican Republic had made the problem even worse. Last week, Guatemala was the latest country to join a Kenyan-led international mission in Haiti that is struggling to quash the powerful gangs that control much of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

300 million: With just days before TikTok’s ban in the US is set to go into effect, thousands of the popular app’s users are reportedly flocking – in both irony and protest – to another Chinese-owned video platform called Xiaohongshu, or “little red book,” which English speakers simply call “Red Note.” The app has 300 million users already and is mostly in Chinese, meaning most of the new users have to use translation tools to navigate it.