More population, lower density of bank branches. Catalonia, along with Andalusia and Madrid, the most populated autonomous communities, has the fewest bank branches per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the Bank of Spain. And regions like Extremadura, La Rioja, and Aragon, with smaller or more dispersed populations, are among those with the most. However, in both cases, the reduction in networks and supply, with the disappearance of savings banks through their transformation or absorption by other entities, has been drastic since the peak reached in 2008, the year the financial crisis erupted.

The far-right's victory on social media is so overwhelming that an overly defeatist narrative about the internet is taking hold. In the United States, people have been asking for years why a left-wing Joe Rogan doesn't emerge, and our equivalent would be asking the same question about Jordi Wild. These are two extremely popular podcast hosts among teenagers, featuring long conversations with diverse guests and blending entertainment, curiosity, and politics, always with a strong bias in favor of the new right's arguments. Rogan's numbers in particular, and the male-dominated online sphere in general, are so large compared to progressive alternatives that a significant portion of the American left has blamed this digital world for Donald Trump's reelection, just as here, every time Vox gains ground in the polls, we see editorials blaming Elon Musk's algorithms. This past week, these talking points resurfaced following... the Army Awards gala presented by Santiago SeguraThese anti-awards ironically recognize internet personalities and the most viral moments of the year, and have sparked controversy because several nominees left the event denouncing the unbearably fascist atmosphere.

1. Last Monday, in a debate on "The Future of Work and the Meaning of Life" at the European School of Humanities, Sara Berbel emphasized the importance of recognizing and dignifying work as a fundamental element of society, and the need to address technological changes from this perspective, changes that are often seen as a threat to a collective threat. If significant breaches have already opened in the logic of work culture in recent times, the instruments of knowledge advancement are now dizzying. And in this sense, AI, the great myth in full swing, generates great anxieties.

Bags and suitcases must pass through a scanner upon entering and exiting, which displays the contents in green and black. If a bag or suitcase contains an electronic device, such as a computer, a special sticker is placed on it. Upon exiting, the sticker is removed and discarded. I don't know if mobile phones count as devices, because never in my life, never once, in that public institution, has anyone been seen without their phone in their hand.

The "free" economy has become the greatest illusion of our time. We don't pay with money; we pay in kind. And a lot. Every click, every registration, every "free" update is an invitation to surrender something more valuable than our money: minutes of our lives, attention spans, fragments of our identity. Digital freeness has trained us in a lie: if it doesn't hurt the wallet, it doesn't hurt anything. And that's false. The tech industry discovered before anyone else that our scarcest resource isn't money, but attention. And it orchestrated a perfect system to capture it. The entry price is zero euros. The exit price is never clear: it's the trapped users.

This week we presented the main findings of the Survey on Sexual Violence by the Department of the Interior. These are alarming figures that should shake anyone to their core, but at the same time, they allow us to construct a clear picture of the serious problem and the impact of this violence. The fact that two out of every three Catalan women (67.3%) have suffered sexual violence at some point in their lives, and that 15.5% have experienced it in the last year, definitively shatters the myth that sexual violence is exceptional or circumstantial. It is structural, persistent, and deeply rooted, and even today, only 6% of those affected report it. This violence, as the data indicates, transcends generations, public and private spaces, and intimate relationships, and it remains silenced. This silence is not resignation or passivity on the part of women, but rather a response to institutional distrust, the difficulty in identifying situations of violence (many of which are normalized and internalized), and a reflection of the fear of reprisals and the social burden that still falls on those who suffer it in the form of guilt or shame.

Today I would like to talk to you about something that has been observed for some time and that, slowly, has been sneaking in through the back door until it has settled into our lives.

I imagine hell as a kind of hospital for the lonely, where only the word is heard. IAll the patients are condemned to repeat it spasmodically, but each time they do, the distance between them increases.

When technophiles feel challenged, they often brandish the example of Socrates's wary attitude toward a new technology that would change the destiny of humanity: writing. Socrates believed that the transmission of knowledge should be oral, that codifying our thoughts in writing would weaken our memory and intellectual abilities. Instead, his disciple, Plato, used this technology to bequeath us his thoughts, and also those of his teacher. Well, now we find ourselves at the exact opposite of that moment of technological transition.

Last year, Maria earned her C2 Catalan certificate and had to go in person to pick up a copy of the diploma at the Citizen Service Office located on Las Ramblas, in the Barcelona Ministry of Culture. This year, since Thaïs has been removed, she received an email with a link to her Private Citizen Area, where she could check her oral and written exam scores and download her certificate. This is one of the procedures the government had planned to streamline to reduce bureaucracy and costs and improve citizen service. "The digitalization of the Catalan exam certificate was a long-standing request from the public and Language Policy," explains the department's Catalan Knowledge Assessment and Accreditation Service, which until now had prioritized other areas, such as the surge in C2 level exams resulting from the mandatory certification for teachers.

The Telecommunications and Information Technology Center (CTTI), under the Generalitat (Catalan Government), will incorporate 25 new professionals, according to the agreement approved by the Government this Tuesday. This agreement is part of the Government Plan for the 15th term and the process of administrative reform and improvement of public services. These plans foresee a set of actions to advance toward "an easier, smarter, more accessible, closer, and friendlier administration, at the forefront of technology and in a more connected digital Catalonia," the deployment of the public fiber optic network throughout the country and the connection of all public offices to this network, digital data sovereignty, and a robust cybersecurity model.

Can you imagine a world where a medical consultation, a diagnostic test, or the monitoring of chronic diseases could be done from the comfort of your home? Technology applied to health can help us achieve this. our Health systems also contribute to a global problem that affects everyone? Some countries, like the United Kingdom and Canada, are already measuring the environmental impact of health systems, an issue still pending in our country.

A few weeks ago, at an institutional event in Brussels, a digital policy expert celebrated that Europe's commitment to defense opened a window of opportunity for European artificial intelligence. But he warned: "We will need a lot more data than we have now." No one in the room seemed to have any problem. No one mentioned that one of the most important principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is precisely that of limiting data collection to what is strictly necessary.

"Germany is back on track," proclaimed the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, as the Conservatives and Social Democrats announced their coalition agreement to govern Europe's leading economic powerhouse for the next four years.

Monday, April 28, 2025, will be etched in the collective memory as the day the Iberian Peninsula went dark. At 12:35 p.m., a massive power outage paralyzed essential services, halted trains, left hospitals running on emergency generators, and suddenly silenced our practically inexhaustible digital hyperconnectivity. Unlike the COVID-19 pandemic, which seeing what was already happening in other places We had days to assimilate that confinement could come, this time, with this type of electrical pandemic of duration relatively short, everything was sudden: the fiction of the apocalyptic series became reality without warning, and we all felt directly the vulnerability of depending on the light, and without the light the network fell, and with the network, the network in its broadest sense, and the very analogical nature of carrying a twenty euro note made twenty euros much more valuable than everything we can have in bank cards, transport cards, access cards... which for a few hours were of little use other than building castles.

The digital DNI will begin to take shape this Wednesday. The Official State Gazette (BOE) will publish the decree regulating its "issuance, management, and development process" so that it can be installed on mobile phones. The launch of the digital ID card was approved this Tuesday by the Council of Ministers and will coexist with the physical DNI, although the Spanish government's intention is to extend its use "universally," according to sources from the National Police.

This school year, families in Barcelona who want to access a lunch scholarship They will have to do it by means of an electronic signatureOn paper, eliminating red tape is intended to make the process easier, but in practice, it can become a new barrier for many vulnerable families.