Jesús Moral (1959, Còrdova) is a mathematics professor and has worked for almost two decades in the Department of Education. He has been head of the Center Organization service, secretary of the School Council of Catalonia, secretary of the Superior Council for the Evaluation of the Educational System, and deputy director general of Innovation and Training. In 2018, he was part of the department's team responsible for organizing the PISA tests. In a conversation with ARA, he analyzes the error that has invalidated the inclusion of Catalonia's results in the international tests and which, therefore, makes it impossible to compare the level of Catalan students with that of other territories and with previous years.

It was one-thirty in the morning this Wednesday and all of Barcelona's police had his photo and were looking for him. The man turned himself in at the Mossos d'Esquadra police station in Eixample, located in Plaça d'Espanya. He was deeply disturbed. In fact, he initially received psychiatric treatment. Finally, however, the police arrested him as the alleged perpetrator of the murder of his partner, a 34-year-old woman, a few hours earlier at their family home, on Andrade street, in the Sant Martí district. It was not the first time the police had been to that address.

Despite being aware of it since March, the Government still does not know how the error occurred that invalidated the inclusion of Catalonia's results in the international PISA tests and, therefore, makes it impossible to compare the level of Catalan students with that of other territories and with previous years. In a parliamentary appearance, the Minister of Education, Esther Niubó, admitted this Monday the "gravity" of the situation, but defended that the executive launched an internal process four months ago to gather information and reconstruct the facts with the aim of clarifying the origin of the incident that led the Generalitat to dismiss 23% of students, even though the OECD sets a maximum of 5% for this percentage. The report has not yet been prepared and, therefore, Niubó said that they still have no conclusions on why the high rate of students exempt from taking the exams was not detected in time.

A blockage in the connection well of the works to bury the R2 line, on the border between Barcelona and Montcada i Reixac, swallowed a large crane and more heavy machinery this Wednesday at noon, but it did not cause injuries. Adif sources explained to ARA that no personal injuries were registered as a result of the incident, but the sinkhole has forced to to preventively interrupt the railway traffic between Montcada i Reixac and Sant Andreu without a specific restoration date, with affectations on R2, R2 Nord and R11.

In the last decade, there have been supply problems in pharmacies and difficulties accessing certain therapies that the Spanish government attributes to scientific, industrial, and social changes that have fully impacted the pharmaceutical industry. For this reason, this Tuesday the executive has approved in a Council of Ministers the draft law on medicines and health products, a comprehensive reform that seeks to prevent shortages, facilitate access to innovative medicines, and adapt prescription and dispensing to the new needs of the national health system. It also incorporates a new pricing system with which it aims to "promote competition and the penetration of generics".

Key step by the Spanish government to toughen the crackdown on tobacco. This Tuesday, the Council of Ministers approved the new anti-tobacco law, which includes new smoke-free spaces, such as bar and restaurant terraces, and also new ways of smoking, such as electronic cigarettes and vapes. Minors will be prohibited from smoking, as until now only sales to this group were prohibited, and it foresees sanctions starting from 200 euros. Now the text will be sent to the Congress of Deputies, where the different parliamentary groups will debate whether or not it is finally approved and in what way.

Elisabet Jané (Barcelona, 1951) thought that this spring she was going to take the trip of her life and, in a way, it has ended up being so, but not for what she expected. She is a doctor and a lover of birds; in fact, she defines herself as a birdwatcher. On April 1st, she embarked on a cruise that would take her to see remote islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where species of birds live that cannot be found anywhere else in the world. However, what was supposed to be a unique experience about nature and biodiversity ended up becoming a global public health crisis, spurred on by the specter of the covid-19 pandemic. The hantavirus outbreak detected on board the MV Hondius has closed with 13 positive cases, three of whom have lost their lives, and now Jané reviews how the episode was experienced from inside the ship.

For a year now, Europe has had two approved drugs to slow the progression of Alzheimer's, but Catalan patients have not yet been able to benefit from them because they are not yet authorized in Spain, which continues to unsuccessfully negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies. This week there was a new meeting that ended without an agreement. The interministerial Commission on Drug Pricing has rejected their inclusion in public healthcare, considering that "the demonstrated clinical benefit is very limited" and that the cost of the drugs "is very high for the clinical value they provide," according to sources from the Ministry of Health. The two drugs are approved in about fifty countries, including the United States, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom, and are the only ones to date that have shown they can change the course of the disease.

Just a month ago in the Bon Pastor neighborhood of Barcelona, two people were evacuated to Vall d'Hebron Hospital with gunshot wounds. A street argument in broad daylight ended with one person seriously injured and another slightly injured who was hit by a ricocheting bullet. Like them, up to 27 people have been injured by firearms in the first half of the year in Catalonia, just one less than in all of 2025. The same applies to firearm deaths: last year there were eight, and this year seven people have already lost their lives to a firearm. The Government attributes a large part of the proliferation of firearms to drug trafficking and calls for harsher penalties for their illicit possession and also for large marijuana plantations.

Neither medicine nor mathematics. In recent years there has been a paradigm shift in Catalan universities, which are seeing their students show increasing interest in studying a double degree. This 2026, for example, the highest cut-off grade in Catalonia is for the first time the degree in Law and International Relations at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), surpassing the degree in Physics and Mathematics, also from the UAB, which has topped the Catalan cut-off grade rankings for the last three academic years. Paula Ramió is one of the graduates from the latest cohort of this double degree and explains that, although it was very demanding, it was also very rewarding.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended modifying the flu vaccine to provide better protection against circulating strains, which is why the campaign to vaccinate the most vulnerable citizens against respiratory viruses in Catalonia is being postponed until October 5, one month later than in previous years. This was announced this Wednesday by the Department of Health, which, to compensate for this delay, will open appointment booking systems at the end of July with the aim of allowing the population to schedule their injection in advance. One of this year's novelties is that vaccination among teachers and professors will be reinforced, as children are the main transmitters of the flu and are highly exposed.

Some 200 million people worldwide suffer from a disease that causes blindness due to the malfunction of photoreceptor cells, which are responsible for detecting light in the eye. Although the rest of the retina functions, the brain is unable to process vision because it does not receive light signals. Now, researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have led a study in which they have managed to restore the vision of blind mice with a new class of drugs called photosensitive drugs, a type of medication that is activated precisely by light. According to its authors, the research published this Wednesday in the journal Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) represents "a major step forward" in the search for treatments to restore vision in humans.

Civil Protection has ordered the first preventive evacuations this Monday due to the fire in Aiguamúrcia, in l'Alt Camp. An ES-Alert message has asked residents of Ranxo Bonany, Can Llenes, Can Joan de la Costa, and les Cases Romanill, in the municipality of Querol, to leave their homes in an orderly manner. In any case, they emphasize that there is no imminent danger from the advance of the flames and expect that the evacuees will be able to return to their homes in the evening. The rest of the areas affected by the fire remain confined. Civil Protection has asked the evacuated residents to take their documentation, medications, and pets with them, and to leave their houses and windows closed. People who do not have a vehicle will receive transport from emergency teams.

The Generalitat Firefighters have had to make a very great effort this week to respond to hundreds of fires, many of which, moreover, have burned simultaneously. The high temperatures and low humidity have favored the fire making its way easily in different parts of the country, and this has forced hundreds of people to be confined and also to review forest management in recent years. The forecast was that this Saturday there would be a respite in the form of a temperature drop, but it hasn't been enough to prevent new fires that have maintained the pressure of recent days on emergency services ahead of a new heatwave next week. One of them broke out in Mont-roig del Camp and forced the confinement of several housing developments, in addition to closing roads and train lines. The other originated between the Camarasa reservoir and the village of Fontllonga, in La Noguera, where a hundred firefighters were mobilized to extinguish it.

The Department of Health reported this Saturday afternoon that the suspected case of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, hospitalized in the high-level treatment and isolation unit of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, has tested negative for the tests performed. It is a person who had been in the north of Spain, an area where the ticks that transmit the disease are present, and presented a compatible clinical picture, which led health professionals to suspect it and activate the relevant protocol. Once the case has been ruled out, the patient will continue to be studied at the hospital to clarify their diagnosis. Health officials emphasize that the episode poses no danger to the population.

The fire in Pla de Manlleu, which was brought under control last night, would have had a potential 20 times greater if it weren't for the presence of a vineyard that broke its propagation capacity. The fire could have burned up to 10,000 hectares if it weren't for these crops, which slowed the advance of the flames, and in the end only about eighty were burned. This is an example of the impact of forest and agricultural management in the face of fires, which is why the Government has planned an entire strategy to have more safety strips like this one, which it is already deploying and which will culminate in 2033.

Although two out of three Alzheimer's patients are women, sex has not been considered a key variable in the research of this disease, which still has no cure. With the aim of trying to fill this gap, researchers from the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) have studied the behavior of three neurodegenerative diseases in men and women and have discovered relevant differences in the blood proteins of people with Alzheimer's. Sometimes the cells in our body produce an excess of certain proteins when we get sick, and in the case of women, they have observed that when they have Alzheimer's, they present a higher number of proteins in their blood than men, which opens the door in the future to designing personalized treatments with a gender perspective.

The low income level, the high concentration of poorly maintained houses, and the extreme temperature of these forty municipalities make them the towns and cities in the Barcelona region that suffer most from the effects of heat, especially now that temperatures are so high. This is a combination of social determinants that directly impacts the health of people living in these localities. For this reason, the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA) calls for priority action in these 39 municipalities and proposes as an emergency measure the distribution of air conditioners among the most vulnerable. The list includes medium-sized towns and cities such as Manresa, Cardona, and Artés, where the state of housing is particularly worrying and temperatures soar during the day, to populations such as l'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Santa Coloma, Badalona, Cornellà, and Sant Boi, where it doesn't cool down at night and the apartments are old.

Catalonia is experiencing the second heatwave of this summer, which is expected to be extraordinarily long and will not end until next week. The Secretary of Public Health of the Generalitat, Esteve Fernàndez, warns in an interview with ARA about the serious consequences that high temperatures have for the health of citizens and calls for extreme precautions, especially among the most vulnerable.

Cora Farré was calmly sitting on the sofa at her home, in the Les Garrigues urbanization of Pobla de Claramunt, when her parents entered shouting that they had to leave, that their house was burning. The following 24 hours have been a constant fight against the flames in ground zero of the Anoia fire, which has burned almost 500 hectares and is now stabilized. "We were all crying, you don't know what to grab, what you leave behind forever," she recalls of the first moments. She explains that her father and brother were cutting down the trees closest to the house to prevent the fire from reaching it and losing everything while they waited for the Generalitat Firefighters, who worked all night to minimize the fire's impact on the houses. "Five firefighters slept on the living room floor of the house in case it flared up again," she explains.