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Girona’s ‘El Celler de Can Roca’ is considered the world’s second-best restaurant by ‘Restaurant’ magazine. Thus, the establishment run by the three Roca brothers has ceded its crown, which it obtained in 2015 and 2013, to the Italian restaurant ‘Osteria Franciscana’. The gala event, moved from London to New York for the first time, also awarded chef Joan Roca as best chef. “This is very important, because it represents mutual understanding and recognition from chefs that I truly admire” stated Roca. Catalan restaurant ‘Tickets’, by Albert Adrià climbed from the 42^nd position it occupied last year to 29^th this year. Adrià was dessert chef at El Bulli, which was run by his brother Ferran Adrià and was recognised as the best restaurant in the world on five occasions.

This Monday, the first American tourist group of the ‘From Bark to Bottle’ program arrived in Catalonia. About ten people saw the extraction of cork from a tree in the north-eastern Catalan region of Baix Empordà.  The objective of the tour is to shine light on the value and culture of cork as well as the positive aspects of Catalonia. Additionally, the objective is to educate: far from the Mediterranean, many Americans believe that trees are cut down to make cork, which is not the case. In fact, the director of the CFCA, Patrick Spencer has specified that they will not increase the number of tours nor make them bigger to not impact the environment too negatively, but additionally to keep the quality of the tours high and also “intimate”. 

50 extremely old flint tools have been unearthed at an archaeological campaign near Tarragona, a city 80 kilometres south of Barcelona. The tools are thought to be between 800,000 and a million years old, according to a report issued by the Catalan Institute of Human Paleo-Ecology and Social Evolution (IPHES), the organisation at the head of the excavation. The site near Tarragona “contains the oldest files on human evolution in Catalonia and on the Iberian Peninsula” of which the potential is still unknown, stated Co-director of the excavation and researcher at IPHES, Josep Vallverdú. The area in which the tools were found is known as La Mina – the area was also host to, along with the manmade artefacts, many animal remains. These include skeletal remains and coprolites, most notably those of deer, horses, cattle, rhinoceros, and even hyenas. A more extensive area is set to be excavated at La Mina, in order to introduce the area to the academic and EU university field. 

The Catalan branch of the conservative People’s Party (PP), which has ruled the Spanish Government since 2011, has opted again for Jorge Fernández Díaz, currently the Spanish Minister for Home Affairs, to run for the Spanish Elections in Barcelona province.Fernández Díaz assured that “some messages in Catalonia incite hatred” especially against PP, who is usually “demonised”. He also accused those parties who defend holding a unilateral referendum on independence in Catalonia of being “a problem for coexistence” and assured that “the world has already enough problems without politicians inventing new ones”. Focusing on the lack of agreement amongst the main Spanish parties after the elections, which led to the calling of new elections, PPC urges voters to avoid experiments and trust “those who were most responsible for taking this country out of the crisis”.

Alstom, a French developer and marketer of systems, equipment and services for the railway sector, is to hire one hundred new people for the first time in many years. These new employees will work at the Santa Perpètua de Mogoda plant (in the Vallès Occidental area, next to Barcelona), and the contracts will begin to be made from September 2016 until the end of the year. These posts will be added to the already existing 550 direct employees and 250 indirect jobs. The President of Alstom Spain, Antonio Moreno, stated that another novelty is a 30,000-metre-square park for suppliers, in which suppliers can interact with the process, which will become more streamlined. Moreno also explained that workload is guaranteed for the coming two years, and the company already works on transport systems in many foreign countries. By 2017, Alstom will also be more digitalised, utilising tools such as tablets and virtual reality.

The economic contribution to Catalonia’s GDP from the 2015 Sonar music festival was 72 million euros. Along with Sonar+D, a series of conferences about the relationship between creativity and technology, the event brought in 111,000 visitors from 104 different countries. This data was presented at the pre-festival press conference on Thursday. Indeed, the festival has been interested in tracking its economic impact since it created a study group to do so in 2004. To be held on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of June, Sonar 2016 will include 130 concerts by artists from 28 different countries, and will be based on a “more social” rhetoric. Meanwhile, Sonar+D will include activities in about 180 different formats, with 400 registered participants, and more than 4,000 professionals from 57 countries. Some new additions to the festival will be the new SonarCar stage, and a one-hour delay of the Sonar by Day portion of the festival. In 2016, Sonar is also offering a map of Barcelona showing the creative training offerings one can find in the Catalan capital. The metro strike should not affect the festival.

Catalan independence, and how to achieve it or stop it, was one of the main topics on the Spanish general electoral campaign trail on Friday in Catalonia. The candidates of the two parties of the governing ‘Junts pel Sí’ coalition, liberal Convergència (CDC) and left-wing Esquerra (ERC), presented different views on the idea of a unilateral referendum on independence, while ‘En Comú Podem’, the Catalan branch of ‘Unidos Podemos’, warned against organising, again, a non-consented consultation such as the one on the 9th of November 2014. “It wouldn’t be useful to call a unilateral referendum on independence if ‘no’ voters decide to boycott it”, said CDC candidate Francesc Homs, who is actually facing trial for helping to organise the 2014 consultation. Such a vote would be “worrying”, said Xavier Domènech, from ‘En Comú Podem’, who has always pointed out that his party, if victorious in the election, would call an official referendum. The candidate from ERC, Gabriel Rufián, stressed that they “will always support initiatives that give a voice to the citizens”.

‘Amb les teves mans’ (‘With your hands’) is a Catalan NGO which has cre-ated a mobile dental clinic to attend refugees in Greece. The idea was born in March when some of the volunteers from this organisation trav-elled to Lesbos and Idomeni, on the border between Greece and Mace-donia. The doctors they talked to at the Idomeni camp explained that one of the main difficulties they have to deal with regarding the dental problems of the refugees is that many children under 13 have never had the opportunity to visit the dentist before. They will first carry out en-dodontic treatment, fillings for cavities, and tooth extractions for those who need them. The Catalan Association of Dentists has got involved in the project and is helping to find professional volunteers and the re-quired material.

A compound in green tea, epigallocatechin gallate, along with a protocol of cognitive stimulation, improves the intellectual ability of people with Down syndrome. Additionally, this compound may actually modify excitability, and functional connectivity of the brain, as discovered in a phase 2 clinical trial carried out by a team of scientists led by the Mar Institute of Medical Research (IMIM) and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, along with a research group specialising in neuropharmacology, Clinical Pharmacology and Neuroscience Integrated Systems. Dr. Rafael de la Torre, one of the researchers working on the project, said that he expressed “surprise” at seeing that the results and changes also “suggest that the functional connectivity of neurons in the brain is modified”. The next step for De la Torre and for the head of the Cellular Neurobiology and Systems at the CRG and principal author of the study, Dr. Dierssen, is to move forward and conduct these studies on children, in which brain plasticity is not as limited.

The conservative People’s Party (PP) will win the Spanish elections but ‘Unidos Podemos’, the coalition between Podemos and Izquierda Unida (IU), will come second and oust the Socialist Party (PSOE), which would become the third party, according to a poll published on Thursday just hours before the Spanish electoral campaign kicks off. ‘Unidos Podemos’, which is the only Spanish political force that supports the celebration of a Catalan referendum on independence, would be the most voted political option in Catalonia, achieving between 14 and 15 seats, followed by the left-wing pro-independence party Esquerra Republicana (ERC), which would come second with between 8 and 9 deputies. The Catalan Socialists would be third, with 8, and the liberal and pro-independence Convergència Democràtica (CDC) would come fourth and get between 6 and 7 members of parliament. The Spanish Congress, however, would continue to be deeply fragmented and the balance of power could, once again, fall into the hands of the Catalan parties, as no major party would have the numbers to form a majority government.

The Catalan President, Carles Puigdemont, rebuffed on Thursday a request by the radical left-wing party CUP to “rebuild bridges” of trust after their veto of the 2016 draft budget bill. “The best bridges are those that you do not burn”, he said in a plenary session in the Catalan Parliament. The Catalan Government, led by the pro-independence coalition ‘Junts pel Sí’, expected the parliamentary support of the anti-capitalists following an agreement between the two parties in January that saw former Catalan President Artur Mas stepping aside and Puigdemont taking office. But CUP presented an amendment to the budget bill, the most important law of the parliamentary term, thus making it impossible for the Government to pass it. Following this, Puigdemont announced he will submit himself to a vote of confidence in September. CUP MP Mireia Boya said that the pro-independence forces should “rebuild bridges” from “today”, adding that the anti-capitalists feel “responsible but not guilty” for the current situation. Meanwhile, sources close to the Government suggested to the CNA that Puigdemont will use the summer to widen support for his government and depend less on CUP.

CUP’s veto on the budget for 2016 has provoked not only the extension of the bill for 2015 but also other major political consequences. One of them is the vote of confidence that Catalan President, Carles Puigdemont, announced he will submit himself to. “I trusted you and I defended you until the end”stated Puigdemont, addressing radical left pro-independence CUP and added that the lefties “let down the hopes of millions of people”. Puigdemont considers the conditions which led to the agreement between the pro-independence forces after the 27-S elections to “have now changed”and therefore it will be up to the Parliament to decide whether to restore confidence in the current Government or call for new elections. “We can’t continue like this, we go nowhere with such a volatile basis”, he admitted.

Carbon dioxide emissions by Catalan companies subject to EU regulation grew by 4% between 2013 and 2014, according to the report entitled “The Situation of the Worldwide Emissions of CO2”, and published by the Business and Climate Foundation, an organisation that works for an entrepreneur agreement on the fight against climate change. The figure is lower than the Spanish one, which increased by 7.2%. It is the first year that CO2 emissions have grown after many years of declining figures in Catalonia and one of the explanations given for the phenomenon by the author of the report, Arturo De las Heras, is the “reactivation of the economy after the closure of companies during recent years and the associated decrease in production”. Catalan companies emitted 13.5 million tons of CO2, which puts Catalonia in fourth place in the ranking among other Spanish regions, after Andalusia, Asturias and Galicia. 

Catalan President, Carles Puigdemont considers pro-independence radical left CUP’s veto on the bill for 2016 to “mark a turning point” and assumes that the stability agreement reached between pro-independence forces CUP and cross-party list ‘Junts Pel Sí’ is now broken. However, Puigdemont nuanced that this doesn’t mean that the current term of office is over but assured that from now on ‘Junts Pel Sí’ will rule in minority, with the 62 MPs they have in the 135-seat Catalan Parliament. During a meeting with the Catalan executive held this morning, right before the debate over the budget, Puigdemont stated that the bill for 2016 won’t be passed “at any price” and that the Government’s project is not “for sale” as the main goal continues to be achieving independence

The stability of the parliamentary term in office and the relationship between the Catalan Government and the radical left-wing party CUP are at risk after the latter decided on Tuesday to maintain its total opposition to the 2016 draft budget bill. The Catalan Vice President and Catalan Minister for Tax Office, Oriol Junqueras, said that the decision will have “extremely severe consequences” and that “social services” will be particularly affected. The Catalan Government spokeswoman, Neus Munté, warned that the stability of the current term was “hit” and regretted that CUP didn’t respect the agreement with the pro-independence cross-party list ‘Junts Pel Sí’, the main party in the Parliament, through which they committed to “guarantee parliamentarian stability”. Munté also warned that CUP’s veto “will have consequences” but emphasised the government’s aim to “continue working to put Catalonia at the gates of independence”. CUP’s rejection of the bill, which they considered insufficient and still too “autonomic”, forces the Catalan Government to extend the 2015 budget.