It's not entirely unusual for people to go to the emergency room because they've inserted an object into their rectum and can't remove it. What is more exceptional is that the object in question is a 1918 artillery shell. Medical staff at Rangueil Hospital in Toulouse (Occitanie) were stunned early Sunday morning when they discovered that the object a 24-year-old man admitted to the emergency room had in his rectum was an artillery shell. The story has been reported by various French media outlets, such as Le Figaro, France 3 and The Dépêche du Midi

The anti-war message that is the novel Nothing new in the westErich Maria Remarque's novel contains some of the most harrowing sentences about the cruelty of war ever written. Published in Catalan in 1930 (Edicions Aymà, translated by Joan Alavedra), Chapter VII reads: "The horror of the brow sinks into the deepest recesses of ourselves as soon as we turn our backs on it; we mock it with ignoble and ferocious jokes. [...] the troops, who organize dances as soon as they leave the firing zone, it's indecent talk."

When World War I broke out, a group of women traveled to France to join the American Committee for Devastated Regions (CARD), founded by Anne Morgan (1873–1952), daughter of banker J.P. Morgan. Among these women was the American librarian Jesse Kit Carson (1876–1959), who revolutionized French libraries amidst the devastation of war. Among many other things, she founded five permanent libraries and created fifty mobile libraries in the north. “She refused to be defeated by the French bureaucracy, where many men were entrenched, sexist, and elitist, and she worked to ensure that libraries had children’s literature sections and open-access systems, both unheard of in France at that time,” explains the writer Janet Skeslien Charles (Conrad, 1971). The librarians on the front linesTranslated into Catalan by Mar Vidal and published by Navona.

With a cover of greenish tones, The headless ear It is an album of the adventures of Tintin that appeared in Catalan in 1965, thanks to the translation of the brilliant Joaquim Ventalló and under the seal of Juventud, the publishing house of Josep Zendrera Data (to whom we dedicate a profile in this series). The story takes place in the republics of Nuevo Rico and San Teodoro, two fictional Andean countries in Latin America. One of the characters featured is an enigmatic businessman named Basil Bazaroff, who may seem like a figment of Hergé's imagination, but is actually a reflection of a real-life figure: the arms dealer Basil Bazaroff, the most important businessman in the world at the time.