"Two guys were fighting with a knife on the corner. They looked like two roosters. I was so scared that I ran away". Antònia walking past Blesa street in Barcelona's Poble-sec neighbourhood when she saw the fight, which ended with both men involved in a health centre. Neither sustained serious injuries; one was stabbed in the buttock and the other in the leg. According to police sources, the two men knew each other and are known in the area. The police are investigating the incident and no arrests have been made. Blood stains could be seen on the pavement an hour after the double stabbing. The blood stains go all the way to a large metal gate, where someone has already poured buckets of water to make them disappear.

The heat wave that is already noticeable in Catalonia will reach its peak this weekend and the Generalitat will apply measures in areas with the highest risk of fires. There are 275 municipalities in 20 counties that will be at level 3 of the Alfa plan, the maximum alert. In these areas camping and hiking will be banned from Friday until Monday, as will sporting activities in the natural environment. All this will only be allowed in inhabited areas. As for summer camps, sports stays and equivalent activities, they will not be allowed to leave the surroundings of the buildings where they are staying. These are two measures which, unlike the rest, will start being applied this Friday at 12 noon.

Doubts have arisen after Catalonia's High Court announced it considers applying the ruling which forces schools to teach 25% of classes in Spanish a "legal impossibility". The professor of administrative law of the Universitat de Girona (UdG) Josep Maria Aguirre answers in four questions on the future of the legal case.

The new school year will begin with the ruling demanding 25% of classes be taught in Spanish in schools across Catalonia put on hold. Catalonia's High Court wants to appeal to the Constitutional Court as it believes the new legal framework passed by the Catalan government and Parliament are unconstitutional. The High Court admits that the legislation also implies "a situation that prevents the execution of the [25%-in-Spanish] sentence". For this reason, the Catalan High Court judges have asked the parties and the Prosecutor's Office to take a position within 10 days on their proposal to ask the Constitutional Court on the legislation's unconstitutionality.

As the year progresses, crime data is getting closer to 2019 data. That year, Barcelona City Council spoke of a "security crisis", with a record high in crime in the city. But the pandemic changed the trend. Now, over two years after the first wave of covid, Catalan police are preparing for a summer in which they expect there could be as much crime as in 2019. Some figures prove it: until May, violent robberies in the street have risen by 4% and have gone from 6,158 to 6,406. Rape and other sexual crimes are also on the rise, with higher growth percentages, despite the fact that this is attributed to the fact that more of them are are reported.

"We should no longer talk about a summer campaign, because the risk of fires, as a result of climate change, is all year round," says Catalan Home Affairs minister Joan Ignasi Elena. Yet on Wednesday Elena presented the Fire Service's plan for this summer, repeating the warning he gave at the beginning of May: "We face one of the toughest and longest campaigns in recent years". This Wednesday, for example, up to 55 firefighters three fires. Elena warned of the persistence of high temperatures and dryness due to lack of rain makes the danger "evident".

Since tolls were removed on the AP-7, 40% more vehicles use this motorway. According Catalan Home Affairs minister Joan Ignasi Elena, the AP-7 "has a saturation problem" that is not exclusive to weekends because the number of hours and kilometres of queues is "practically the same" every day. For this reason, the Government has announced new measures after the latest traffic jams, the Government has announced new measures: additional lanes on the motorway, more tow trucks to remove vehicles which have suffered an accident and restricting lorry traffic. Elena has warned that in some sections the AP-7 has more vehicles than the road can absorb and has asked the State to make "the promised investments", in addition to reversing the "decades of neglect of commuter trains".

A week ago, the day after Arooj and Anisa Abbas arrived in Pakistan, they were murdered. The two sisters from Terrassa were killed in a family home in Gujrat, Punjab, where their mother was also staying. When the double murder was committed, the woman was able to escape but fled without her 9-year-old son, who was also in the house. Pakistani police tracked down the mother, who the family also wanted to murder, Pakistani consul in Barcelona Mirza Salman Baig has informed ARA.

"I have received many threats, but I am not afraid of anything." Says Huma Jamshed Bashir, founder and president of the Pakistani Women's Cultural, Educational and Social Association (Acesop), shortly after organising a rally in Barcelona against the murder of two Pakistani sisters who wanted to leave their forced marriages. The protest brought together a dozen Pakistani women and this small turnout, for Jamshed, is a revelation in itself: "There are few because they are banned".

Viruses permitting, after two years of the pandemic, this summer will again resemble 2019, the last before covid struck. Since Easter, the city has been full of tourists and even more are expected to come. Their increased presence is linked to a growth in crime, often with foreign visitors as recurring victims. Thefts and robberies, in fact, are already above 2020 numbers – when crimes bottomed out – and last year, but still below 2019, when they reached an all-time high and there was talk of a "security crisis" in the city. With this data, the Guardia Urbana and also the Mossos are preparing for a summer that will bring back some old problems, although not all: the presence of street sellers in Barcelona is at a minimum, according to data from the City Council.

Sisters Arooj and Anisa Abbas (aged 24 and 21) from Terrassa, killed in Pakistan because they wanted a divorce, were forced into their marriages. They are not alone: Catalan police have detected 198 victims of forced marriage in the last 13 years. They are all women, mostly between 13 and 23, who were forced to marry a man against their will. Sometimes marriages can even be carried out online or by phone, as pointed out to ARA on Tuesday the Pakistani consul in Barcelona, Mirza Salman Baig. Social worker Ruth Rosique, from the technical team of Valentes i Acompanyades –a charity campaigning against forced marriages– explains that some victims have distance weddings, which are then confirmed when they visit their country of origin or their husband comes to Catalonia.

Abdul explains that the police showed up twice at the property and showed him the photo of the two girls. "Of course I know them. I've crossed paths with them plenty of times in the staircase," he replied. Still, he hadn't seen them for days and didn't even hear a sound in the apartment where they lived, as if no one was there. Abdul is Arooj and Anisa Abbas's neighbour. The two sisters (aged 24 and 21) were killed in Pakistan because they wanted to divorce the cousins they had been forced to marry a year ago. The girls lived with their parents and their three brothers on Historiador Cardús street in Terrassa, in a humble four-story block with no lift and a long steep staircase. The family's name does not appear on the mailboxes and this Tuesday, if you knocked on the door of the house, no one opened.

A doctor from the Department of Home Affairs, with the initials J.P.D., has been reported for sexual abuse by three policewomen whom he saw in the autumn of 2019. The first report was filed in February 2020. Home Affairs, then in the hands of JxCat, decided the man could continue to see women as long as he was accompanied by a nurse. It was not until November last year that the department, now ERC's hands, opened disciplinary proceedings against the doctor and banned him from seeing women patients until there was a final finding. Since then two more complaints have been filed: one in February this year and another last Friday, which led to the man's arrest. This month Home Affairs has suspended him without pay.

Three people died and a fourth was critically injured after a fire broke out last night at a residential building in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, with three more suffering minor injuries. As reported by the city council, the fire broke out at a building on Sant Joaquim street and the firefighters, who sent in ten teams, have already extinguished the flames. Eduard Martinez, the head of the Fire Service of the northern metropolitan region, explained to RAC1 that when they arrived they found a fire burning with two simultaneous outbreaks: one on the ground floor (in the metre room) and another in the second.

Five months ago Parliament set up a commission to debates on the policing model of the Mossos d'Esquadra, the Catalan police force. It is the same commission that was set up in 2013 after Ester Quintana who lost an eye after police fired rubber bullets on protesters during a general strike. The commission proposed a ban on the use of rubber bullets by the Mossos, alongside another 48 suggestions. At least the last two have not been fulfilled. One of these states that Department of Home Affairs had to draft a protocol to pay compensation to victims of actions by the Catalan police. The protocol was approved in 2014, but to implement it, a commission to repair the damage had to be created, which Home Affairs has taken eight years to create: just a month ago, in March, the first meeting was convened.

They did not comply with covid restrictions. They looked for holiday lets in rural Catalonia where they could organise huge parties with about 300 or 400 participants. The landlords were led to believe they were renting the houses to families, and were then left out of pocket as no payment was made for the rental. The organisers did not pay for material they rented either, nor for catering and beverage services: all the invoices remained outstanding. The organisers of these covid parties did, however, charge for admission and also for the drinks. The Mossos d'Esquadra have arrested three people who formed a criminal group which, according to the police, had seen an opportunity in the middle of the pandemic and organised these illegal parties. They are estimated to have defraud around €200,000.

In the first full month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, inflation has reached a new record high in Catalonia. The month of March has closed with an increase in prices of 9.5% compared to a year ago, according to the consumer price index (CPI) published on Wednesday by the National Statistics Institute (INE). It is the sharpest increase since 2002, when the INE began collecting separate data by regions.

At 3.50 am, the neighbours living in the block of buildings between València, Avinguda de Roma, Calàbria and Rocafort streets in Barcelona were awakened by a loud explosion. The deflagration started in a bar, but has generated fireballs that have spread up the building's façade and inner courtyard, which have also caused small fires in apartments in nearby properties. In total the fire has affected eight buildings. "We heard a clap of thunder thunderclap and I saw that a window had fallen out of its frame. With the explosion everything shook and I thought it was an earthquake", explains Laia Cardona, a neighbour who lives in the building where the fire started. Four people have been hospitalised, three in Vall d'Hebron hospital –one of them in serious condition– and one in Sagrat Cor. The seriously injured person is the owner of the bar, who the firefighters found in the street and who is in police custody suspected of starting the fire. The events are currently under investigation.

The production of marijuana in Catalonia that is then sold to Europe continues to rise, and it is causing a new phenomenon: it is becoming a gateway to crime. Some 53% of the 1,998 people arrested last year for marijuana offences – up 14.5% from 2020 – had no criminal record. "That 1,066 people enter the criminal world may respond to job insecurity and the geographical mobility of people arriving in our country," the head of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Catalan Police (Mossos d'Esquadra), Intendant Joan Carles Granja, explains. This is the second year in a row that more than half of those arrested for marijuana offences had no record, and the Home Affairs minister Joan Ignasi Elena warns of the magntic force this illegal business has, as it moves a lot of money and allows an "easy enrichment".

The saga of the maintenance service of the Generalitat Fire Department's vehicles continues. While the 14th Court of Instruction of Barcelona maintains the investigation for alleged corruption, the Department of Home Affairs has stopped the new tender which sought to fix the irregularities of the past. As ARA has been able to confirm, the Department has announced that the tender – which was in the bidding phase and had not yet been awarded – is on hold because of the bid submitted by Iturri, the company that has so far always provided this service and which the judge is also investigating. Home Affairs says that Iturri has made a "disproportionate" proposal that represents an "imbalance" and that might be decisive to obtain the contract.