Sociedad

One day after teachers rejected the educational pre-agreement in Catalonia, minister Esther Niubó was emphatic about the state of the conversations: “The negotiation is over,” Niubó declared in an interview on the program El món a Rac1. The minister acknowledged that the teachers’ rejection of the agreement, which will provide more resources to schools and entail a salary improvement for teachers, shows that “an entrenched discomfort has emerged.” However, she insisted that with the agreed improvements, “it is not a problem of resources.”

“I want to have a job that gives me a decent income to finish my 40-hour work week and be able to go out for a drink with my partner, with my friends, with my family.” Woman, 22 years old.

In Spain, more than 30% of people over 65 years old have hearing loss. However, many of them take more than eight years to seek a solution, which limits their opportunities to socialize, participate in daily activities, and maintain an active social life.

Minutes after the online consultation directed at teachers closed, the verdict is already known: 61% of voters have rejected the educational pre-agreement compared to 34.9% who approved it. The final participation was 61% of all public sector teachers, ten points higher than in March. Specifically, 60,686 teachers voted out of a census of 99,305. This is below the union expectations, which were counting on a massive response to the “educational emergency.”

Microsoft has presented its new quantum chip, Majorana 2, which is 1,000 times more reliable than its first version, presented in February 2025. The company has announced that the material architecture of this chip multiplies the reliability of its qubits, the minimum unit of information in a quantum computer, by 1,000. The qubits of Majorana 2 have an average lifetime of 20 seconds and peaks reaching one minute compared to the microseconds of conventional quantum chips. After the chip presentation, the company sets its goal to build a scalable quantum computer by 2029, halving the initial target timeline.

As every year, the Ministry of Health has launched its National Plan for Preventive Actions on the Effects of Excess Temperatures on Health with the main objective of reducing morbidity and mortality associated with heat waves of epidemiological impact. One of the main new features this year is that the plan updates certain temperature thresholds after a thorough review of historical mortality and heat series in Spain, incorporating new methodological criteria.

The impact of the DANA of October 29 is measured not only in mud but also in unprecedented economic paralysis. According to reports from the Valencia Chamber of Commerce and the Generalitat, the disaster affected more than 54,000 companies and put the livelihood of over 190,000 workers at risk due to ERTEs, reduced working hours, and layoffs. With nearly 10,000 shops and local businesses devastated, the reconstruction of the ground zero area demands a specialized workforce that the current market cannot supply.

The Spanish Government has been invited by the company Anthropic, like the rest of the countries of the European Union, to access its artificial intelligence model Claude Mythos, which for the first time will be tested outside the borders of the United States and the United Kingdom. This AI has been considered a very dangerous tool, because in its initial tests it identified hundreds of significant security flaws in all computer and mobile operating systems, which led Anthropic to create in mid-April a closed group of companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Amazon, among others, in the so-called Project Glasswing, which is now being accessed by European countries.

The combination of a rainy spring and the onset of heat has caused mosquito and cockroach populations to soar across much of the territory. This is warned by the Catalan Association of Environmental Health Companies (Adepap) on the occasion of World Pest Control Day, which will be celebrated next Saturday. The tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus), a confirmed vector of diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, remains the main threat in urban areas due to its ability to breed in small domestic water accumulations. Adepap also warns about the invasion of cockroaches in the underground and homes.

Silence from high politics and technological power before the papal encyclical on AI