Israel's security cabinet approved the establishment of 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move the country's far-right finance minister said on Sunday, January 21, was aimed at preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. The decision brings the total number of settlements approved over the past three years to 69, according to a statement from the office of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.

The latest approvals come days after the United Nations said the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank – all of which are considered illegal under international law – had reached its highest level since at least 2017.

"The proposal by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Defence Minister Israel Katz to declare and formalise 19 new settlements in Judea and Samaria has been approved by the cabinet," the statement said, without specifying when the decision was taken. Smotrich is a vocal proponent of settlement expansion and a settler himself.

"On the ground, we are blocking the establishment of a Palestinian terror state," he said in the statement. "We will continue to develop, build, and settle the land of our ancestral heritage, with faith in the justice of our path."

This year, to save me from bears
I'm going to post it on sh.itjust.works

Hello,

a Lemmy community member told me about uBlacklist.

Personally, I don't want to block any pages from search results because I (think that I) might miss important information from search results. On the other hand, I noticed that my "unfiltered" search results on Google or Bing are really bad. I pay for Kagi.com currently.

So, how is your experience? Which lists can you recommend? How does it affect your search experience with Google, Bing or any other search engine?

X wasn't fined for allowing free speech. This is absolute bullshit.

X was fined for:

• Refusing to disclose who buys ads
• Refusing to cooperate with researchers studying the algorithm
• Allowing scammers to obtain blue checkmark accounts without verifying their identities

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2934

German engineer Michaela Benthaus, who has paraplegia, traveled to space with Jeff Bezos' company Blue Origin.

German engineer Michaela Benthaus on Saturday became the first person with paraplegia to travel to space.

Benthaus, who is 33, was exuberant about her experience in space in comments made after her return to Earth. "It was the coolest experience ever, honestly," the engineer, who works at the European Space Agency (ESA), said.

Benthaus sustained a spinal injury during a mountain bike accident at the age of 26 and now uses a wheelchair.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44036066

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Spain’s beleaguered prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, faces a key test on Sunday when voters in the south-western region of Extremadura cast their ballots in the first major election to be held since a series of corruption and sexual harassment allegations enveloped his inner circle, his party and his administration.

Extremadura, once a stronghold of Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), has been in the hands of the conservative People’s party (PP) since 2023, when the latter managed to form a short-lived coalition government with the far-right Vox party, despite finishing just behind the socialists.

Sunday’s snap election was called two months ago by the regional president, María Guardiola, after the PSOE and her erstwhile allies in Vox voted down next year’s budget.

Though ostensibly a regional affair, the results of Sunday’s election will be felt well beyond Extremadura. Politicians and pundits will be scrutinising the poll to determine the extent of the damage that the allegations of recent weeks and months have inflicted on the PSOE, while the PP is likely to be forced, once again, to cut a deal with Vox to govern.

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On Dec. 15, the European Union imposed sanctions on the International Russophile Movement, or IRM. Few people had heard of it, but over the past three years it has effectively replaced official pro-Kremlin organizations formerly operating in the EU, where life for them became far more difficult after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian World Foundation, the Gorchakov Foundation, and Pravfond — all controlled by Russia’s Foreign Ministry — faced sanctions, asset freezes, staff expulsions and increased oversight. As a result, the IRM emerged in 2023 under the auspices of the Foreign Ministry and Konstantin Malofeev, a billionaire fraudster with ties to Russian intelligence services.

Although the movement is publicly presented as a grassroots initiative made up of EU citizens, in practice the IRM is backed by several Kremlin influence networks. The “Russophiles” openly said they feared sanctions and did not plan to create legal entities, but that did not help. The new structure appears headed for the same inglorious fate as the earlier Kremlin puppet organizations that were sanctioned after the start of the full-scale war.

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An alliance of political marginals and conspiracy theorists

The founding congress of the International Russophile Movement was held in Moscow in March 2023. According to the organizers, around 90 representatives from 42 countries attended the event. Prominent “Russophiles” among the guests included actor Steven Seagal, former French president Charles de Gaulle’s grandson Pierre, and Italian princess Vittoria Alliata di Villafranca (who translated The Lord of the Rings into her native language). The Guardian described the participants as “political marginals and conspiracy theorists.”

Those who came to support and guide the “Russophiles” included Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, his deputies Mikhail Bogdanov and Alexander Grushko; Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, Rossotrudnichestvo head Yevgeny Primakov, “Orthodox oligarch” Konstantin Malofeeev, far-right philosopher Alexander Dugin, and the chairs of the international affairs committees from both chambers of the Russian parliament — LDPR leader Leonid Slutsky and senator Grigory Karasin. At the congress, Lavrov read out a message from Vladimir Putin that noted the “targeted anti-Russian hysteria in many countries” and thanked the participants for their “firm resolve to oppose the Russophobic campaign.” General Charles de Gaulle's grandson Pierre de Gaulle with State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin at a meeting in Moscow

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See who instinctively reacts.

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Spain’s beleaguered prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, faces a key test on Sunday when voters in the south-western region of Extremadura cast their ballots in the first major election to be held since a series of corruption and sexual harassment allegations enveloped his inner circle, his party and his administration.

Extremadura, once a stronghold of Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), has been in the hands of the conservative People’s party (PP) since 2023, when the latter managed to form a short-lived coalition government with the far-right Vox party, despite finishing just behind the socialists.

Sunday’s snap election was called two months ago by the regional president, María Guardiola, after the PSOE and her erstwhile allies in Vox voted down next year’s budget.

Though ostensibly a regional affair, the results of Sunday’s election will be felt well beyond Extremadura. Politicians and pundits will be scrutinising the poll to determine the extent of the damage that the allegations of recent weeks and months have inflicted on the PSOE, while the PP is likely to be forced, once again, to cut a deal with Vox to govern.

...

PostNord’s decision to end service on 30 December comes after fear over ‘increasing digitalisation’ of Danish society

The Danish postal service will deliver its last letter on 30 December, ending a more than 400-year-old tradition.

Announcing the decision earlier this year to stop delivering letters, PostNord, formed in 2009 in a merger of the Swedish and Danish postal services, said it would cut 1,500 jobs in Denmark and remove 1,500 red postboxes amid the “increasing digitalisation” of Danish society.

Describing Denmark as “one of the most digitalised countries in the world”, the company said the demand for letters had “fallen drastically” while online shopping continued to increase, prompting the decision to instead focus on parcels.

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Arguably the biggest misconception of all [about Spain]... is that Spain’s economy, the EU’s fourth-largest, is “booming”. According to numerous key metrics, including productivity growth, unemployment, and (most tellingly) surveys of the country’s actual citizens, it isn’t.

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Compared to other EU countries, it is true that Spain’s GDP growth has been extraordinario in recent years. CaixaBank, the country’s largest domestic lender, reported earlier this week that Spain’s output has risen 10% since 2019, well above the eurozone average of 6.4% and a whopping one hundred times more than Germany’s anaemic 0.1% expansion.

The swift growth also shows little sign of subsiding. Earlier this month, the European Commission and the Bank of Spain both hiked their Spanish growth forecasts for this year to 2.9% – more than double the EU’s 1.4% average projected expansion. “Real GDP growth is expected to remain strong in 2025,” the Commission noted, adding that “economic activity” is also expected to “remain robust” until 2027.

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But as José Boscá, an economist at the FEDEA think tank in Madrid, points out, Spain’s GDP data “is not so promising” when adjusted for its population growth, which has also swelled in recent years. “If we only assess economic growth based on GDP data, there are factors that we are not taking into consideration,” Boscá said.

Indeed, Spain’s GDP growth is largely a direct consequence of its growing population. Soaring immigration – especially from Latin America – has caused Spain’s overall population to surge in recent years, and, predictably, has also caused its total output and consumption to rise.

According to the Elcano Royal Institute, the country’s immigrant population has risen by roughly 600,000 people per year since the end of the pandemic, pushing its population to a record high of just under 50 million. Roughly one in five people now living in Spain were born abroad.

In addition to boosting net output, the influx of workers has boosted government revenue and, by tempering wage rises, has helped keep inflation barely a fraction above the European Central Bank’s 2% target rate.

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But it has also exacerbated Spain’s chronic shortage of affordable housing and compounded the country’s cost-of-living crisis – especially for young people, the vast majority of whom still live with their parents and a quarter of whom are currently unemployed. According to the latest available data from Eurostat, the average Spaniard only leaves home at the age of 30: well above the bloc’s average of 26.

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Profound structural obstacles remain. These include high government debt-to-GDP levels inherited from the eurozone crisis and pandemic; widespread unemployment; and political instability partly engendered by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s minority government, which has been mired in corruption scandals involving his inner circle. Due to the political dysfunction, Spain hasn’t managed to pass a new budget since 2022, forcing the government to rollover the 2023 budget, even as its booming population and robust tax revenues have created a new reality in the country.

That said, not even a new budget would address Spain’s biggest problem: low productivity. Boscá noted that this is largely a result of the composition of Spain’s industrial sector, where 99.8% of firms are small and medium-sized enterprises consisting of fewer than 10 employees. This industrial landscape inevitably curtails productivity growth and domestic investment.

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Spain, in short, is growing – just not in the way many headlines suggest. Strip out the population surge and the picture looks far less miraculous. And unless productivity finally stirs, the boom will remain more statistical than real. For a country long burdened by clichés, it may turn out that the greatest misconception of all wasn’t about siestas or sangria, but about the strength of its comeback.

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Lile seriously Do you hate hexbear do you want it to not make money do you not want your network activity tracked and sold across sites?????? We NEED your cookies and your eyeballs and your clicks so we can make money off you

A new leak claims that a Half-Life 3 announcement might have been delayed due to the Steam Machine price. According to the insider, Valve is still trying to determine the console’s cost due to skyrocketing hardware component prices, such as RAM.

Rather than directly banning Medicaid reimbursement for transgender care, the rule would bar any hospital that accepts Medicaid funding from providing gender-affirming care for trans youth at all, regardless of whether that care is paid for by Medicaid.

The new rule contains no exceptions for patients already receiving care... For many, this would amount to forced medical detransition.

This rule appears to violate multiple U.S. statutes and constitutional limits on federal authority.

The government attempts to get around this by stating that gender affirming care is not part of “the practice of medicine.”

Hello my beloved bears I am back from my intensive 4 month emoji analysis