Teresa Jiménez is a hematologist and medical director of the Blood Bank at the Blood and Tissue Bank Foundation of the Balearic Islands. She has witnessed firsthand the change in the recruitment of marrow donors in the Balearic Islands: from 44 new registrations in 2023, they went to 545 in 2025. Despite this increase, more are still needed, especially young people and those of diverse backgrounds. Jiménez explains what it means to join the Bone Marrow Donor Registry (REDMO), how compatibility is checked, and what happens if, years later, the call comes.

Guillermo donated bone marrow without going through the operating room or having to take days of rest. Contrary to what many people believe, this is what happens in most cases. "I walked out and went to do my shopping at Mercadona," he explains. He had spent three hours lying down with a needle in each arm while a machine extracted stem cells from his blood and returned the rest to him. "It was as simple as donating blood, just a little longer." He is 25 years old, is from Malaga, lives in Palma, and signed up in 2023 to the Bone Marrow Donor Registry (Redmo), which is managed by the Josep Carreras Foundation.

Jimmy Showman, born Jaime Horrach Lillo, holds a piece of costume jewelry in the palm of his hand. “This isn’t plastic, it’s jet,” he clarifies while searching with his eyes for a hanger full of party dresses. Bright colors mix with feathers and sequins. The ground floor in Palma where he has moved is full of paintings, portraits, and remnants of a life on stage that won’t fit inside a house. Part of his wardrobe and his memories sleep in two storage units. Past 80 years old, Jimmy talks about the stage as if he had just come out of the dressing room. For more than half a century, he dressed as a woman to perform, without ever considering that it expressed a hidden identity. “I have always been me. I would finish performing, take everything off, and go out with a clean face. Heels, I almost never wore them, because they didn’t suit me well. Breasts, neither, unless the act required it, and sometimes I would go out without them because I had forgotten them. I would say to the audience: ‘Oh, I’ve left my tits in the dressing room again!’. And it was true.”

The fast track that Palma City Council announced in May 2024 to speed up the granting of urban planning licenses has only accelerated 15 of them so far. The City Council assures that there are ten more licenses in process, but it has not provided the rest of the data necessary to evaluate how the system is working. More than two weeks after receiving the questions from ARA Balears, Urban Planning continues to not clarify how many applications have been submitted, what the average timeframe is, how much the service costs, or if the queue for the ordinary process has been reduced.

The story of Mateu Martorell (Palma, 1939) is that of a man who has always remained in the same place while everything around him changed or disappeared. When he speaks of himself, he is actually speaking of the neighborhood where he has lived for 87 years, of his family, of his neighbors, and, of course, of Can Vinagre. Of the bar counter on Carrer dels Oms from which he has watched the transformation of this urban space. He disappears from the narrative as if his identity were more outside than inside, as part of a generation that explains itself by talking about others. He does not lament his sacrifices nor does he recognize this idea—so contemporary—of self-sacrifice, of a whole life spent working. "Only a year ago I was still serving behind the bar, but now my legs no longer respond," he reveals, calmly.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen has received well-deserved recognition for El reino and As bestas, two good films, the latter extraordinary. And perhaps, out of inertia, he is receiving praise for El ser querido, which could have encountered the handicap of a story similar to that of the also overrated Valor sentimental, but that was not the case. The developments are different. Sorogoyen, always with Isabel Peña as co-writer, has built this time a film based strictly on four scenes that are worth it and that sustain the intensity of a proposal that is leaking on many other fronts.

Sara del Mar (Las Cabezas de San Juan, Seville, 1970) leaves a meeting at the UGT headquarters in Palma wearing a red t-shirt in defense of hospitality rights. She takes it off with an energetic gesture that makes her hair flow. She doesn't mind the clinging heat. She asks, decisively, where she should stand for the photographs while she adjusts her hair. Her bare back reveals tattoos all over her skin. On her left arm, a bricklayer's trowel and a ball of yarn with two knitting needles stand out. “My parents were always very hardworking, all their lives in the fields. They were illiterate and, as adults, they went to adult schools to get their basic education. My mother said she didn't want to have to sign with a cross. My father worked as a bricklayer and she has always loved sewing. She makes beautiful little baby dresses. She has incredible hands.”

The Council of Mallorca has on its table a report from the General Intervention, the highest auditing body of the institution. It uncovers a presumed unjust enrichment of 41.4 million euros by Tirme, the waste concessionaire. Faced with the financial scandal, the response of the Galmés government has been to announce a new audit that is “more extensive and more powerful”.

I spent my Erasmus year in London denying I was Italian and answering the same questions at the pub where I worked: no, I didn't understand what my Prime Minister was doing in the Azores photo; the euro had made everything more expensive for us (they nodded proudly); Aserejé was just the phonetic adaptation into English of a disco-rap song and – to their disappointment – it meant nothing; and no, I didn't frequent Magaluf. For the customers to whom I served pints and shots, pronouncing Magaluf lit up their faces. For me, it was just a place that was very far from all the nightlife areas of Palma and whose appeal was eating ecstasy pills on a Saturday night at BCM. I'd say I hadn't even set foot there. Therefore, I limited myself to nodding with a smile while returning their change in pounds from their Foster's or Carling. I didn't want to add another disappointment to that of the Ketchup, famous at the time at Tony Blair's level.

The Detailed Urban Plan (POD) of Palma still has no timetable two years after municipal technicians took over its drafting. It is a fundamental instrument for interpreting and applying Palma's General Plan, approved by the Pact shortly before losing the elections. Cort assures that the document handed over by Territorios y Ciudad “did not meet the necessary conditions for its approval,” but does not specify what deficiencies it had, what work has been done since April 2024, or what remains to be completed.

At the time when the Moon had already begun to eclipse the Sun, a pair of German posers were clashing shopping bags from the golden mile stores and four Jehovah's Witnesses were waiting in vain to proselytize. As if an exceptional astronomical phenomenon were not about to occur. On the way to the terraces of Es Baluard, a street vendor was placing, bored, his straw hats. "Do you have glasses?". He shook his head because he knew they were asking him for the eclipse ones. Already at the top of the museum, a foreign couple had decided to cut in half the only pair they had and their children were looking at the Sun with one eye and covering the other with a hand.

Maria Joaquina Ferrer is no longer the Director General of Costs and Littoral, but a good part of the team that worked with her does not seem willing to let her dismissal be read only in terms of a management crisis. Twenty-one officials from the agency have signed a letter addressed to the Minister of the Sea and the Water Cycle, Juan Manuel Lafuente, in which they express disagreement with the Government's decision and claim the way Ferrer has led the agency in recent months.

Two years after the Palma City Council rescinded the contract with Territorios y Ciudad to draft the Detailed Planning Plan (POD), the conflict remains open in the courts. The company claims 348,794.91 euros from Cort, VAT included, for work it claims to have carried out and not been paid for. The company calculates that the ruling on the contractual resolution could arrive during the first quarter of 2027.