Eight days after the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office asked for 24 years in prison According to the judge, José Luis Ábalos has been remanded in custody without bail because he considers the risk of flight to be "extreme," "maximum," and "intense." The former Minister of Transport and former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) He is one step away from the dock. for the purchase of face masks during the pandemic, and although Leopoldo Puente rejected it in June and October, he now believes that the proximity to the trial does justify his imprisonment. Furthermore, the magistrate has also ordered pretrial detention for Koldo García, who was an advisor to Ábalos at the ministry and for whom the public prosecutor is requesting 19 and a half years in prison. He made this decision after, for the first time, the Public Prosecutor's Office joined the private prosecutions, led by the PP (People's Party), in requesting provisional detention. Both will spend the night in Soto del Real prison, the same prison from which... Santos Cerdán left Last Wednesday, after 142 days. Following the announcement of the decision, Ábalos launched an attack against Pedro Sánchez and hinted in an interview that The World that Begoña Gómez – Pedro Sánchez's wife – influenced the Air Europa bailout. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, from the People's Party (PP), has called for a rally on Sunday in Madrid to protest "against the corrupt and all those who support them."

"As inspectors, we can only recommend wearing a mask inside carriages. We have no power to force or sanction anyone who breaks the rule," explains a TMB worker on the platform of Liceu station, on line 3, which until August 17 acts almost as the end of the line, since work is being done on Drassanes station and there is no service between Liceu and Paral·lel. It is a good place to check how many people observe the mask mandate inside trains, as well as follow the advice to wear masks on platforms, since there is more staff helping travellers. Private security guards don't have the power to force or sanction travellers either; they give passengers information on the disruption to the metro line, but not one of the thirty-three unmasked people who enter the station during the four-minute wait for the next train are reminded of the rules regarding masks.

The purchase of masks and medical supplies in Madrid during the pandemic threatens to become the first major problem that the new leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, will have to face. The Madrid's Court of Instruction no. 47 has admitted the complaint filed yesterday by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office against two intermediaries who allegedly swindled the Madrid City Council. This comes after a separate investigation was opened to attest whether Madrid regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso's brother used family ties to secure a contract. One thing unites the two cases: in both cases intermediaries received very juicy commissions at a particularly dramatic moment for Spain.

The Spanish government will eliminate the mandate to wear masks indoors after Easter. The measure will be passed on April 19, according to Efe news agency. However, there will be exceptions: they will still be mandatory in hospitals, old people's homes and on public transport. This Tuesday the public health commission met, and its experts proposed that the mask mandate stay in place until Easter, and even then stay in force in certain places. This Wednesday afternoon the inter-territorial health council is to meet, and the new measure should receive its approval.

"It was a risky operation, but we did what we had to do because we needed the material to protect health professionals. We had to fend for ourselves and we did not make a mistake," said Minister of Health Josep Maria Argimon, who appeared on Thursday before Parliament's ordinary health committee at his own request to defend the controversial contract for the purchase of masks and PPE from Basic Devices, signed during the first days of the pandemic. The contract was made through the emergency route for an initial value of €60m and Catalonia's Anti-Fraud Office investigated and qualified the operation as "reckless" due to the lack of solid references about the company – it was the first time it was supplying the health system – and the advance payment made to ensure the acquisition, which was finally carried out and €35m were paid. "It is always more comfortable not to take risks, but in the situation of maximum shortage and pressure on care we were in, we had to do it. We did what we could," reiterated Argimon, who was the director of the Catalan Health Institute (ICS) at the time.

As of today, masks are no longer mandatory in the street and will only have to be worn indoors as long as the current rates of transmission of the virus, which are still very high, are maintained. Outdoors, on the other hand, health authorities restrict its use to crowded spaces.

The Spanish Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, has announced this Friday that next week masks will no longer be compulsory outdoors. In an interview with SER she has stated that the end of the mandate will be approved next Tuesday by the cabinet and the following day it will be published in the Official Gazette of the State. "It was a very important non-pharmacological measure throughout the pandemic that we recovered because it was very effective as a barrier effect but we also knew that we would keep it for the time strictly necessary, until the indicators showed that we could act differently," she argued.

The Spanish government believes that the use of masks outdoors and the acceleration of vaccination should be enough to control the situation in the face of the escalation of infections due to the Omicron variant. This Thursday the Council of Ministers approved a royal decree amending the new normality law to recover the mandatory use of facemasks outdoors for people over 6. Both the government's spokesperson, Isabel Rodríguez, and the Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, have insisted that the main weapon against the spread of the virus is vaccination, and have refused to position themselves in the debate on whether more restrictions are needed. In fact, Rodríguez remarked that "the government supports all regions' measures". This includes Madrid, which has almost none, to Catalonia, which will return tonight to a curfew.

The president of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez, has convened a conference of regional presidents three days before Christmas in the midst of an escalation of contagions and hospitalizations caused by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. The meeting, which should have happened earlier as the situation has been critical for days, turned out to be a mere mockery of co-governance: Sánchez only informed his regional counterparts of the decision to make it compulsory to wear masks outdoors in towns and cities (not in the countryside nor on the beach) and of the details of a plan to accelerate vaccination, which had not been discussed beforehand with regional governments. If co-governance is to take measures in a consensual manner, this Wednesday has been just the opposite. In these circumstances, the unease expressed by Catalan president Pere Aragonès and Basque president Iñigo Urkullu is perfectly understandable.

A new economic, political and social cycle is beginning. The events of recent weeks suggest that things are beginning to change. The climate is one of political détente, of gestures to prepare the ground for dialogue. With the pandemic on its last legs - from the 26th we will be able to take off our face masks outdoors - the time is clearly ripe for an economic upturn. No one expects miracles, but after the coronavirus disaster, three years of turbulence in the streets and instability in the institutions in Barcelona and Madrid, this new beginning is a breath of fresh air. And we must take advantage of it, first of all to relieve people's worries - the social precariousness is worrying - to encourage business activity and to bring the sovereignty conflict back to the political arena.

The protection that the two doses of the vaccine give citizens is "effective", as proven by the great vaccination campaign being carried out all over the world. Therefore, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) has published a report which, for the first time, proposes to start dispensing with masks and physical distance in some specific cases. The first scenario in which Europeans could again show their faces is in encounters between people who have already received two doses of the vaccine (or a single dose in the case of Janssen). They could also dispense with the mask between fully vaccinated people and others who are not part of risk groups, that is, young and middle-aged people who do not have health problems that can be complicated by covid-19. It is considered that a person is no longer middle-aged when he or she is over the age of 60 or 65.

When it comes to managing a pandemic well, you have to have as much information as possible to be able to take the right decisions. This knowledge is provided by science. But social urgency comes up against the fact that, by design, science is slow: it has to be very convinced before reaching any conclusions, to make sure it is correct. This difference in pace has created moments of tension since the emergence of covid-19, regarding, for instance, the issue of how the virus is transmitted: despite the months that have passed, no agreement has yet been reached, and this complicates defining the measures that are most effective in preventing contagion.