“Which floor are you going to?” asks a girl to a woman who is walking with a child by the hand, carrying a large travel bag and waiting for the elevator in the building’s entrance. “To the sixth,” replies the woman. Coincidentally, both are going to the same floor, and both are also dressed in a strictly Islamic manner: black tunic and headscarf, and a mask covering part of their faces. Inside the elevator, they don’t exchange many words either: like everyone else, they comment that it’s too hot in Kabul these days. When they reach the sixth floor, they realize they are not only going to the same floor, but also to the same place.

From the outside, it looks like a small venue, but upon entering, stairs lead down to a huge basement, carpeted and divided into different rooms with large curtains. There, dozens of girls, young women, and women memorize the Quran, sitting on the floor with crossed legs and in front of small plastic tables on which they rest the holy book. All of them wear their hair covered with a veil. Some also cover their faces with a mask, or with a black niqab typical of the Gulf countries, which only leaves the eyes exposed and which women in Afghanistan had never worn. The traditional veil was the burqa, blue or any other color, although the result is the same: being covered from head to toe. It was also not common for them to wear black gloves so that their hands would not be seen, but some young women who are sitting studying the Quran also wear them.

The arrival at Kabul airport was always chaotic: long queues that moved slowly as the officials on duty checked passports, pushing and crowds of passengers to pass luggage through the mandatory scanner before leaving the terminal, and spontaneous individuals who took over all the trolleys to carry suitcases and asked for money if you wanted to use them. This time, however, everything was much more agile: different queues for men and women for passport control, and efficient and fast officials. Smoothness in passing luggage through the scanner. And dozens of trolleys available for suitcases, without the need to pay.

"Every day that Asra goes to school, I am very happy…", says Anita with a broken voice, and she can no longer continue the sentence because she bursts into tears. Asra is the 13-year-old daughter who this year has completed the second year of the secondary education. If they had stayed in Afghanistan, if they had not been able to flee, Asra would now be confined to her home and would not have been able to start secondary education, because the Taliban have prohibited girls from studying from the age of 12. “In Afghanistan I have my sister, my nieces, my sister-in-law… They are there, unable to do anything”, laments Anita, who tries to compose herself while wiping away her tears. “Here we are fortunate”. That is why she does not miss any opportunity to work, study, get to know new places or even play football. She wants to enjoy every moment of her freedom. Because that is what she values most about being here: freedom.

They wear shorts and a t-shirt in the blaugrana colors, and pose smiling in front of the goal with several footballs. Anita Rafat appears a bit shy: she wears a kind of turban on her head and black tights and an undershirt so that neither her arms nor her legs are visible. In contrast, her sister, Fereshteh, has no complexes: she shows her hair and thighs. They are 37 and 28 years old, and fled Afghanistan in August on one of the Spanish evacuation flights. Now in Barcelona, they do what they could never do in their country: play football.

I wonder if we would be scandalized if the European Commission invited members of the Islamic State to Brussels, the terrorist group that terrorized Europe with attacks and beheaded foreign journalists in front of a camera to then disseminate the images. That's why I'm so surprised that the news that the Commission plans to meet in Brussels in the coming weeks with a delegation of the Taliban, who are more or less like the Islamic State, has gone unnoticed.

“He didn’t get out today either”, says Eglis Manaure, 50, resignedly, as she climbs the stairs leading to her home in a residential block in Guatire, a town about 50 kilometers from Caracas. She smiles and pretends to be normal, but her eyes betray her: she has a profoundly sad look. "I barely sleep. At one in the morning I'm already awake watching the news to see if they've released him,” she confesses. Her husband, Enrique Parada, was arrested more than six years ago, on April 20, 2020, and since then he has been in a prison more than 450 kilometers away, in the city of Maturín, in northeastern Venezuela. To get there, Eglis takes fourteen hours by bus and can only go every three or four months. She has to choose between paying the cost of the ticket or covering the medicines he needs. Her economy doesn't allow for anything else. The man, 45, has pancreatic cancer.

In Barcelona it is impossible to find someone who knows anything about Barcelona. The general response is total silence. Only a young man, after thinking a lot, says: "Ah, yes, you have Barça". Possibly, however, the same would happen in the Catalan capital if we asked what people know about Venezuelan Barcelona. Venezuela, in the same way as Catalonia, has a city called Barcelona. It is the capital of the Anzoátegui region, in the northeast of the country, where a good part of the so-called Orinoco Belt is located, which concentrates the largest oil reserves in the world and which is expected to become the center of foreign investments now after the partial lifting of American sanctions. There, for example, the American Chevron operates.

The direct flight connecting Madrid with Caracas was half empty days ago, and it can be said that the majority of those traveling were Venezuelans. It was easy to distinguish them by their peculiar Latin accent and because, upon arriving at Simón Bolívar International Airport, they waited for their turn to go through immigration control with their Venezuelan passports in hand. “Migration,” read a sign at the counter written in four languages: English, Russian, Chinese, and another with Arabic script. In that order. A good metaphor for Venezuela's disparate international allies after the United States "extracted" Nicolás Maduro from the country on January 3rd.This is how Venezuelans refer to the arrest of the former president of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores. That is, as if it were a rotten tooth that had to be pulled, even if it meant disregarding national sovereignty and international law.

It was almost nine at night and at the emergency admissions desk of the Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, two people were attending to the patients arriving. There was a third desk, but it was closed because the worker there was chatting quietly with two other colleagues. Perhaps they were talking about work, but the feeling that they were ignoring those of us waiting was exasperating: if you go to the emergency room, it's precisely because you need someone to attend to you urgently. I had the misfortune of having to go there last Friday to accompany my partner.

Her hair really catches the eye. She herself admits that she feels observed wherever she goes and that she is tired of being stopped in the street to be asked if they can touch her hair or if they simply touch it without her permission. Isabel Balde, 32, has beautiful afro hair. The kind that's a huge ball of curls. "People are not aware that touching someone's hair is invading personal space," she says, as her hairdresser styles it and she looks proudly in the mirror. It wasn't always like this. She used to hate her hair.

A 34-year-old worker at the meat processing company Embutidos Monells, in Sant Miquel de Balenyà (Osona), died on Monday after becoming trapped while operating a machine. It is a company that produces 45% of the bacon sold throughout SpainThe company also specializes in cooked ham, turkey, and cured pork loin. It works with all supermarket chains, and 65% of its products are sold sliced. The company's CEO, Maria Àngels Sebastià, confirmed the accident to the newspaper ARA but declined to provide further information because "it is under investigation by the competent authorities." "We are deeply saddened and deeply regret the loss," she emphasized. The incident occurred around 6:30 a.m. So far, only the worker's age—34—has been released; his nationality has not been specified. The Embutidos Monells factory in Sant Miquel de Balenyà employs approximately 650 people, 55% of whom are foreign nationals from forty different countries. In addition, the company has another production plant in Les Masies de Voltregà, also in Osona, with another 150 workers. Emergency Medical Service (SEM) personnel were dispatched to the factory, but were unable to save the worker's life. Citizen security and investigation patrols from the Vic police station of the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan Police) were also dispatched and reported the accident to the duty magistrate in Vic and the Catalan Government's Department of Business and Labor.

It's a village in Osona with little more than four streets and only about 1,200 inhabitants, but it's home to the meat processing plant that produces 45% of the bacon sold in all of Spain. The company employs more than half the village's population, and 55% of those workers are foreigners from forty different countries. The village is called Sant Miquel de Balenyà and belongs to the municipality of Seva; the meat processing plant is Embutidos Monells. They could be considered an example of what's happening throughout the region, but perhaps taken to an extreme.

Fifty-year-old Sylvie remembers almost vomiting on her first day working in a slaughterhouse. She had to cut the pigs' tongues and hearts with a knife in a room so cold her hands nearly froze. They were enormous pigs, weighing between 80 and 100 kilos, unlike anything she'd ever seen. "In my country, pigs are small. Here, they're as big as cows." And endlessly, one pig after another. Like on an assembly line.

It's a village in Osona with little more than four streets and only about 1,200 inhabitants, but it's home to the meat processing plant that produces 45% of the bacon sold in all of Spain. The company employs more than half the village's population, and 55% of those workers are foreigners from forty different countries. The village is called Sant Miquel de Balenyà and belongs to the municipality of Seva; the meat processing plant is Embutidos Monells. They could be considered an example of what's happening throughout the region, but perhaps taken to an extreme.

Fifty-year-old Sylvie remembers almost vomiting on her first day working in a slaughterhouse. She had to cut the pigs' tongues and hearts with a knife in a room so cold her hands nearly froze. They were enormous pigs, weighing between 80 and 100 kilos, unlike anything she'd ever seen. "In my country, pigs are small. Here, they're as big as cows." And endlessly, one pig after another. Like on an assembly line.

Anti-government protests in Iran continue to escalate. Tonight, massive demonstrations filled the streets of Tehran and other cities across the country, with calls to overthrow the Islamic regime. Authorities responded by cutting off internet access nationwide. Phone lines are down, flights have been canceled, and news websites are only updating intermittently. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei delivered a televised address in which he accused the protesters of acting under the orders of Donald Trump and warned that Iran "will not yield to those who commit acts of vandalism." The trigger for the protests this time was high inflation and the collapse of the local currency, the rial. But after twelve days, the demonstrations are putting the ayatollahs' regime on the ropes. Since December 28, the wholesale shops in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, Iran's economic engine, have been closed. Schools in the capital also suspended classes, and universities canceled end-of-term exams. The mobilizations have spread like wildfire across the country's 31 provinces: there have been demonstrations in more than a hundred cities.

"Praised be the most holy sacrament"," the nun would announce loudly in the middle of the dormitory in the morning. And they, half asleep in bed and with their eyes still stuck shut with sleep, would answer in unison mechanically:May He be forever blessed and praised"The nuns would wake them up like that day after day. Maria Forns remembers it perfectly, even though it was more than half a century ago. She was 16 years old when she was placed in a convent against her will.

She's a woman and an imam. A binomial that is a priori antagonistic. Seyran Ateş She was born in Turkey into a Muslim family but grew up in Germany. A lawyer by profession, she has lived under police protection since 2006. She began receiving death threats because she helped Muslim women who were being forced into marriage. Later, because she published the book Islam needs a sexual revolution (Islam needs a sexual revolution). And finally, because she opened a liberal mosque in Berlin, the Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque, where women and men pray together in the same space. The documentary Seyran Ateş: Sex, Revolution and Islam (Seyran Ateş: sex, revolution and Islam) tells her life story.

These are not low-quality videos, but the opposite. The set is meticulously prepared, the editing is impeccable, and the sound quality is high. The podcast is called Return to the truth and has 46,800 followers on Instagram. "A man needs his wife to be willing when he wants to be with her. And it is forbidden [in Islam] for her to refuse, unless she has a legitimate reason: menstruation, if she is going through a difficult time… (…) Even if she is cooking, she must stop cooking and go," says Sheikh Yusuf Soldado in one of the podcast's videos, talking with other Islamic influencer Aleksandar Petrov, that is even more popular. Petrov has 508,000 followers on Instagram.