Last March it already did so with the Adamuz accident, and now, it is back at it. The European Public Prosecutor's Office has opened another investigation, the second one, to clarify a possible fraud in the funds destined for the maintenance of the Madrid-Seville high-speed line, which has accumulated two accidents in less than a year: in January, in Adamuz, with 46 fatalities, and less than 10 days ago another train crash in Urda, with 69 deaths.

It may seem like a cliché, but the phrase "you cannot put doors on the countryside" summarizes to a large extent what the police and judicial fight against large international criminal organizations is like. This phrase, uttered by General Pedro Antonio Pizarro, head of the Civil Guard in Catalonia, has resonated at the College of Notaries of Catalonia, where members of police forces, the judiciary, and the notariat have banded together to face one of the main challenges not only for Catalonia, the State, or Europe, but also for the world: dismantling the economic structure of the mafias.

"It's impossible": this is the reflection, brief and clear, made this week by a source in the bus sector regarding the possible ban on passengers standing during intercity bus journeys. The debate was reopened last week, following the accident of a Sagalés company bus in Fogars de Montclús, in the Montseny, which caused 83 injuries, ten of which in serious condition. The bus went off the road on a curve and fell down a 20-meter embankment.

More than two thousand years ago, Greek medicine attributed some women's ailments to a uterus that moved through the body as if it were a restless and mischievous animal. It was believed that it could cause choking, convulsions, pain, or fainting depending on the place where it moved. It was even recommended to use pleasant or unpleasant odors to make it return to its place. Over the centuries, hysteria, a word derived from the Greek hystéra (uterus), became a label that grouped together very diverse manifestations, often interpreted based on the gender stereotypes and prejudices of each era. When medicine did not know how to explain what was happening to women, it seemed that the answer was always found in the fact of being women.

Barcelona has made the right of first refusal one of its main levers to expand the city's public housing stock. The tool, which gives the City Council the final say on every entire building block sold in the Catalan capital, has allowed the municipal government to acquire 1,600 apartments in the last ten years. The mechanism, however, constantly places the municipal government in a dilemma: having to decide what to buy and what not to buy.

The Government has now specified what the minimum services will be for the general strike on November 11th in Catalonia. The Department of Business and Labor has decreed that on November 11th, Rodalies, the metro, the Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC), the tram, and urban and interurban buses will have to guarantee 25% of the regular service during peak hours, from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. and from 4:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. In contrast, the bus service connecting Barcelona with the airport will operate at 50%. In the healthcare sector, the normal operation of emergency services and special units will be maintained, while in schools, there will be one teacher for every six classes in preschool and primary education.

Although Rosa R.R. has lived in Martorell for years and has requested to register on the municipal census on numerous occasions, the City Council has always prevented her from doing so. Because of this, she filed a lawsuit against the local government, and now the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has ruled in her favor. The court declares that the municipal refusal to process her registration application, despite her demonstrating that she lives in the municipality, violates the fundamental right to equality. The ruling, which was reported by Nació Digital, recalls that registration in the municipal census is an obligation of local administrations and that its purpose is to certify the place where a person actually resides, regardless of whether they have a rental contract, a property title, or an authorization from the property owner.

Until recently she had a photo with her daughter on WhatsApp, but with the publication of the book she is corresponding with more people who do not know her –for interviews, promotion– and she decided to change it. It is 128 pages long titled Nadie merece nada (Quaderns Anagrama) where Jahel Queralt defends and dissects the concept of meritocracy. She, the daughter of parents who had her just after finishing high school, grew up –very happily– in a country house without electricity. Statistics indicate that, as an adult, she should be a low-income person. But she earned a law degree, a PhD in political theory, and is a professor at Pompeu Fabra. Far from believing in personal stories of overcoming adversity, she champions class consciousness and has specialized in distributive justice.

A new investigation by Amnesty International has documented about thirty new cases of mistreatment of migrants in Ceuta by the military in recent weeks, despite the Ministry of Defence's announcement to open an investigation into previous cases of "torture". The organisation, which made the information public this Thursday, has reported up to 28 new cases of beatings, humiliations, vexations, and abuses by members of the Spanish armed forces against migrants who are still in the autonomous city after the mass entry from Morocco on the 30th and 31st of July. Among the victims are 13 minors. With these, there are now 50 cases of mistreatment documented and reported by Amnesty International, some of which could "constitute torture due to their severity," according to the organisation.

It is not considered Blocus as such, but it was indeed the first indicator that the student protests in France could be replicated in Catalonia. On October 21, three days before the riots and looting that surprised everyone in Barcelona, similar events were also recorded in Manresa, albeit of less severity, following a student protest. The demonstration was not called only through social media, nor did it have posters made with AI that have become popular lately, but it had several elements in common with Blocus, starting with the age of those involved —very young— and that they took the incidents in Paris as a reference. This Thursday, the Mossos d'Esquadra explained that they have already arrested 14 youths for these riots.

In the hospitals of the future, there will be specific treatments for each patient, adapted to their characteristics and needs, which will allow for the improvement of their prognosis and quality of life. This is what is known as personalized medicine, a goal that scientists around the world have been pursuing for years through research and that is increasingly being translated into clinical practice. The better a disease is understood, the more specific and effective the treatments that are developed. One of the ways to advance in this personalization is to simulate the progression of diseases and predict how each patient will respond to treatments before they are administered.

Over time, the railway has been the scene of numerous fatal accidents. The reality is this: due to various circumstances, beyond the safety measures established in signal codes and traffic controls, trains have collided with people, animals, vehicles, railway equipment, and other trains, and have also been victims of the dominant weather conditions on exceptional days. As an example, and leaving aside individual accidents, we focus on significant episodes that have taken place on the tracks of the Barcelona to Portbou line, the densest in terms of traffic in the Girona district.

The ball is back in the court of the Barcelona City Council. On Tuesday, the Barcelona Urban Planning sub-commission –made up of representatives from the Generalitat and the council– gave the green light to the modification of the General Metropolitan Plan (PGM) to establish that the habitual and permanent use of housing is the "priority" in the city and that it takes precedence over temporary use. A legal umbrella that now allows the council to deploy its own regulation to combat seasonal rentals and business models such as co-living.

Next academic year, the stability of teaching staff at schools and institutes in Catalonia will face another jolt. Starting this Thursday, the application period opens for the state transfer contest in Catalonia. A process that takes place throughout Spain every two years and is an opportunity for teachers who are already civil servants to change schools. As ARA has learned, the Department of Education calculates that some 20,500 civil servant teachers will have to participate in this procedure. Bearing in mind that the public network has about 85,000 teachers this year, the transfer contest could cause the mobility of one in every four active teachers and professors, although in many cases there are teachers who already wish to stay in the school where they are and succeed in doing so.

The Catalan Institute of Finance (ICF), the public investment bank of the Generalitat, has sealed an alliance with the Official Credit Institute (ICO), of the Spanish government, to channel the financing of housing and strategic business projects. The objective is to boost in Catalonia the resources of the public-private fund España Crece intended to provide continuity to the Next Generation European funds linked to the post-pandemic recovery plan –whose application period ended last August– and also the lines intended for companies.

The until now president of Adif, Luis Pedro Marco de la Peña, presented his resignation this Wednesday to the Spanish government's vice president, Carlos Cuerpo, who was also debuting today as Minister of Transport. This is confirmed by sources from the Spanish government. Marco de la Peña has resigned from his position at the railway operator the day after the now former Minister of Transport Óscar Puente also resigned, and one week after the tragic train accident in Urda (Toledo), which has left 69 fatalities.

Catalonia had not recorded any wolf births in the last hundred years, but it seems that this trend is beginning to change: for the second consecutive year, a pair of wolves (Canis lupus) has bred in our region. As confirmed this Wednesday by the Rural Agents, in the last few days, five pups have been born to a pair of wolves in Alt Empordà and Alta Garrotxa.

The same night that dozens of supermarkets in several European countries suffered a cyberattack that spoiled tons of food, some blood banks in France were also the target of a very similar attack by unknown hackers. As confirmed this Wednesday by the French Ministry of Health, during the night from Sunday to Monday, cybercriminals remotely accessed the software that regulates the temperature of the cold rooms where plasma bags are stored and reprogrammed them so that the temperature would go from -30 ºC to 110 ºC.

The trickle of arrests against the Blocus agitators in Catalonia does not stop. This Wednesday, the Mossos d'Esquadra and the National Police have reported the arrest of an 18-year-old woman in Barcelona who they consider an "instigator and dynamizer" of the group that carried out the looting of shops in the center of the Catalan capital on October 24.

One in ten men in Spain acknowledges having had some sexual conduct against children or adolescents throughout their life. This is one of the conclusions of a nationwide study conducted by the University of Barcelona (UB) based on surveys of 6,010 adult men residing in Spain. The research, which distinguishes between sexual attraction and sexual violence behaviors, shows that 22.2% of participants state they have felt "some degree of sexual attraction towards people under 16 years old" since they reached adulthood, without this implying they had any contact. In contrast, up to 10.2% of the adult men in the study acknowledge having engaged "at least once in their life" in some sexual violence conduct involving people under 18 years old. Furthermore, 3% of the men in the sample have reported any of these behaviors in the last year.