24 hours after the largest rhetorical and diplomatic clash between Israel and Spain in recent decades, the jihadist group Hamas intervened to thank the words of the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez – and also of the Belgian Prime Minister, Alexander De Croo – against the massive Israeli military offensive launched in response to the terrorist attack on October 7.

After learning of Hamas' praise, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen wrote on the X network: “The congratulations of the terrorist organization Hamas to the prime ministers of Spain and Belgium are shameful and dishonorable.”. “We will not forget who supports us in these times and who supports a murderous terrorist organization that is holding more than 200 hostages,” he reacted with the same harshness with which he did on Friday, after the speeches at the Egyptian border crossing in the Gaza Strip. , announced that he would summon the ambassadors of the two countries for a “reprimand.”

“We appreciate the clear and bold stance of the Belgian Prime Minister, Alexander De Croo, who affirmed his rejection of the destruction of Gaza and the murder of civilians, and of the Spanish Pedro Sánchez who condemned the indiscriminate killings of the occupying State against civilians in the Strip” Hamas had communicated, also praising Sánchez for raising “the possibility that his country unilaterally recognizes the Palestinian State, if the European Union does not take this step.”

Sánchez had stated that “the time has come for the international community, especially for the EU, to make a decision on the recognition of the Palestinian State.”. “It would be worthwhile for many EU members to do it together, but if that does not happen, Spain will make its own decisions.”. In this sense, while Sánchez supports the creation of a Palestinian State alongside Israel, Hamas, also recognized by the EU and the US as a terrorist group, asks that it be in place of Israel.

But the general Israeli unrest – which goes far beyond the right led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – exploded because from his words it can be deduced that Sánchez accused Israel of intentionally and indiscriminately murdering civilians in the war against Hamas..

Given that this is not the first time that Sánchez or someone from his government accuses Israel, the “problem” was also the timing and location of his words.. On one of the most dramatic days in their country, Israelis waited on Friday afternoon for the first time since October 7 for the arrival of kidnapped children and elderly women.. With their nerves on edge, they only saw Sánchez and De Croo at the Rafah border crossing. Their presence there was not understood, among other reasons, because they had nothing to do with the four-day truce agreement.. His words against the Israeli offensive ended up translating the anger in the networks and media into Israel's official reaction.

Netanyahu criticized Sánchez and De Croo's statements for “not holding Hamas fully accountable for its crimes against humanity and for massacring our citizens and using Palestinians as human shields.”. Cohen, who in a few weeks must be replaced by Israel Katz (rotation decided a year ago) called these words “support for terrorism” and summoned the Spanish ambassador, Ana Sálomon Pérez.

Surprised by the Israeli reaction, Spain recalled that Sánchez condemned the Hamas attacks in his intervention in Egypt and responded in the same way by summoning the Israeli ambassador Rodica Radian-Gordon. After “categorically” rejecting the accusations of his Israeli counterpart, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares defined them as “totally false, out of place and unacceptable.”

An event as dramatic as the war in Gaza has uncovered a latent political factor in the relations between Israel and Spain in recent months.. While Netanyahu formed his most right-wing government a year ago (nuanced by the entry of Benny Gantz's centrist party due to the war), Sánchez's government coalition includes some clearly anti-Israeli ministers and deputies.. Among them two new ministers who did not condemn the Hamas attack on the European Parliament. The political clash, therefore, was inevitable beyond the excellent bilateral relations in numerous fields.

“The secret of the Finns to being the happiest country in the world for years is based on three pillars: values, nature and technology,” Stefan Lindström, advisor for Digitalization and New Technologies at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reveals to a group of journalists in Helsinki. of Finland, considered the happiest nation in the world for the sixth consecutive year.

The Nordic country shares the values of the EU, to which it has belonged since 1995, but on the other side of its territory it also shares 1,300 kilometers of border with the country that threatens those values: Russia. In that 'tweezer' in which Finland finds itself, it seems that technology is the main ingredient in the recipe for its happiness, which some Finns rather reduce to “being satisfied with the life they have” (which is no small thing).

Finland, the latest member to join NATO with one of the most powerful armies in the Alliance, is the first country in the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI) that measures the progress of the member countries of the European Union (EU) towards digitalisation (also known as digital transformation) through four key indicators: connectivity, human capital, digital technology integration and digital public services.

It is the mirror in which Europe 3.0 is seen, of which the European Parliament will be the guarantor of its development, but also of the protection of our, increasingly, online life.

Digitalization is one of the EU's priorities for this decade, which seeks to improve the quality of life of European citizens. It is about the integration of digital technologies in companies and in different sectors of society: transportation, energy, agri-food system, telecommunications, public services, health or education. “Digitalization has to be based on trust in institutions, on how they treat their citizens' data, on the consumer feeling protected: values are the most important thing,” defends Lindström.

If we return to the thesis that a digitalized society tends to be happier, we find that the European countries at the top of the DESI index are also at the top of the World Happiness Report (led by Finland): Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Luxembourg.. Coincidence or not, Mikko Mattinen, director of the Finnish Population and Digital Data Services Agency – in charge of promoting digitalization in society and the availability of data – insists that technology improves the lives of citizens: “When “A government implements the things that are really practical for a society, basic needs are covered and, therefore, a society that is considered, in general, happy is achieved.”

93% of Finns benefit from the digital architecture of private and public services through the intuitive website suomi.fi, which registered 200 million transactions last year in a country of almost six million citizens. In the case of people less familiar with technology, such as the elderly, since 2017 Finland has had digital authorizations that grant virtual power to relatives or guardians of that person to represent them before the State and be able to carry out any online management on their behalf. a measure that was very useful during the pandemic.

“It is a practical Government that does things for you without having to give your data over and over again,” adds Niko Ruostetsaari, advisor to the Finnish Ministry of Finance.. Basically, any daily task can be done through a screen: from establishing a joint custody regime in a divorce, to carrying out all the procedures after the death of a family member quickly and easily.

Goal:2030

The EU's digital transformation strategy has a goal, the year 2030, with very clear objectives, including: promoting an inclusive, transparent and open digital environment, centered on human beings and based on fundamental rights; bridge the digital divide; ensure secure and accessible digital and data infrastructures; promote an EU digital regulatory framework to help businesses or ensure online participation in democratic life for all.

The long-distance race proposed by the EU is, however, becoming a sprint. The advances of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have reshaped our way of interacting with technology, and will have repercussions that we have not yet imagined.. The main characteristic of this new technology is its ability to learn and adapt, just as societies will have to do so that the new reality brings more advantages than threats.. And this is where European institutions play a key role in regulating its use.

One of the most recent examples, which has reached European institutions, is found in Almendralejo (Badajoz), where the dissemination of montages of nudes of minors created with AI triggered the debate on the need to put limits as soon as possible on this new technology.

“We citizens are going to discover more and more that the Internet is a world as real as the physical world, therefore we have to learn to behave. With prevention, but also with the ability to enjoy and take advantage of the enormous advantages we have in the physical world.. Now there are more crimes committed in the online world than in the physical world, and there are all kinds. We have to know how, without fear, to act against cybercrime. There are many risks and we have to eliminate them,” explains to this newspaper the Spanish MEP Javier Zarzalejos (EPP), rapporteur of a report approved last Wednesday in the European Parliament on Regulations to prevent and combat the sexual abuse of minors on the internet.

The text – which will enter the negotiation phase with the Council and the Commission – is based on a proposal from Brussels to force EU internet providers to evaluate the risks of their services in the dissemination of content of child sexual abuse or recruitment of minors, to adopt effective prevention measures and to report or eliminate content if necessary. “Services that use AI will have to evaluate these risks, and also those companies that offer AI tools susceptible to creating images of child sexual abuse,” explains Zarzalejos who, on the other hand, emphasizes that companies can also make good use of of this technology to keep the different internet services clean of this type of materials. “That is the double face of technology, it creates problems but solves others,” he points out.

Artificial Intelligence Law

MEP Ibán García del Blanco (PSOE) is one of the speakers of the Artificial Intelligence Law (which they hope to approve in the December plenary session), of which Europe is a global pioneer, as it was also the data protection law and intellectual property: “No one can anticipate the future, but I see more opportunities to improve the quality of life, well-being and even to build kinder societies through AI and, above all, the controls that are going to be established from a regulatory point of view. “There are certainly risks, what we have to do is approach them maturely, just as we do with any type of technological advance.”

The task of institutions in the face of these new challenges, points out García del Blanco, is to anticipate them and carry out “a massive task of digital literacy.”. That is, make society aware of the era they are going to enter and of the need to become familiar with new technologies “to prevent citizens from being terrified in case they are going to lose their job, due to the risks of cybercrime or because gaps are created between generations.”

In 2020, the pandemic highlighted the importance of technology in education, the business world, health and social interaction, but at the same time it revealed the digital gaps between Member States. To prevent Europe 3.0 from being two speeds, the European Parliament approved the Digital Europe Program in 2021, endowed with 7,588 million euros, aimed at bringing technology closer to companies, citizens and public administrations with the aim of implementing digital first and achieve a greener Union. “We are trying to avoid two-speed Europe at a digital level through the most powerful figure that the Union has to regulate, which is Parliament. It is the way to guarantee harmony in development,” emphasizes García del Blanco, who highlights the giant qualitative leap that Spain has made in recent years, placing it in number seven position in the DESI.. “And then there are curious cases like Estonia, a small country that even has a police force dedicated to the Metaverse,” the MEP reviews.

The EU thus seeks to reinforce its sovereignty and follow its own rules, not those of others.. “And if we want to transform ourselves digitally, it is not only for the citizens, but for our own competitiveness in the international geopolitical space,” he concludes.

The President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, opened yesterday to recognizing the Palestinian State during his thorny trip to the Middle East. “It is something that many EU countries believe we have to do together, but if this is not the case, Spain will make its own decision,” he warned.. In Moncloa it is insisted that the “two-state solution” – Israel and Palestine – is, beyond an old demand that has been repeated like a mantra without any success by the international community for decades, the starting point for solve the Arab-Israeli problem. However, the reality is that to date it has been of little use that almost three quarters of the nations of the globe do recognize the existence of the Palestinian State – neither powers as decisive as the United States nor the majority of the members of the European Union-.

The United Nations General Assembly resolution of November 1947 recommended the partition of the territory of Palestine then still under the British Mandate into two states: one Israeli and one Palestinian, with the city of Jerusalem to remain under a international trusteeship regime. Israel declared its independence a year later and, as is well known, the Arab countries did not recognize it, which places us before the origin of the latent conflict more than seven decades later.

It would not be until 1988 – after several regional wars – when the Palestine Liberation Organization proclaimed the establishment of the Palestinian State, something not clearly recognized by Israel, which is considered by the UN as the “occupying power” of the Palestinian territory.. Among the many problems that the issue raises is that no one would know how to define its borders today, since thinking of an independent country with the square and bevel lines drawn in 1947 is already more than a chimera.. Another of the great obstacles would be how to resolve the status of Jerusalem, the essential capital for the two contending parties.

But as soon as the PLO was proclaimed, dozens of countries rushed to Palestinian diplomatic recognition, including all Arab or Muslim-majority nations, and virtually all of the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement.. Currently, 136 nations recognize Palestine.. Several European countries including: Malta, Albania, Greece, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Iceland and Sweden.

Its request for international recognition has been of no use to Palestine, since it has not been able to exercise any control of the territory over which it claims sovereignty.. The most it has achieved in these decades of conflict was the establishment of a Palestinian National Authority under the Oslo Accords (1933) to exercise limited administration over part of the territories of the West Bank and Gaza (in the Strip the coming to power of Hamas left the ANP out of the game).

In 2014, the Congress of Deputies urged the Government then led by Mariano Rajoy (PP) to recognize Palestine, a request that remained in limbo.. Two years earlier, our country had supported the granting of observer state status in the United Nations – an organization of which it is not a full member. The PSOE included “recognizing the Palestinian State” in its 2015 electoral program. And after the arrival of Pedro Sánchez to the Government on the back of the motion of censure that removed Rajoy from Moncloa, its then Foreign Minister, Josep Borrell, announced a “internal process” of consultations with their European counterparts to reach a common position on Palestine. Also then the issue was buried by other priorities of international politics. We will see what happens now with Pedro Sánchez's announcement.

Almost overnight, Javier Milei stopped being a roaring lion and metamorphosed into a cunning fox.. Bathed in increasingly generous doses of pragmatism, the Argentine president-elect is getting rid of old traveling companions while incorporating former adversaries or people with whom he had no close relationship. As a backdrop, his dollarization plan that is coming into question and the insistence that very hard months are coming for an Argentine economy that is facing collapse.

“I received messages from people I hadn't spoken to in 30 years…. 'How are you?', they tell me. Well, there was a little journey,” explains Milei. And laughs.

“The problems that Argentina has are too big. We are putting together a selection. I don't care where you come from. I have this problem, can you solve it? Well, then you're in,” he added in an interview on “Neura FM” radio.

The problem is that the assembly of this team is being, in the opinion of many Argentines, chaotic.. Names that are announced fall, while others that no one expected arise. And the big issue for which Milei was elected with 55.6 percent of the votes, the economy, is beginning to raise doubts.

The president-elect was due to fly to the United States this Friday to pray at “El Ohel”, the tomb of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson in New York. “El Ohel” is a place of pilgrimage, something especially sensitive for Milei, who studies the Torah and considers converting to Judaism.

But the “spiritual journey” had to give way to the reality of the earthly and accelerated journey that Milei is making in the five days he has been elected president..

“We don't have money,” he stressed with a serious gesture in one of the many interviews he gave to local media in recent days.. “2024 will end with fiscal balance. “Minister who spends more, I miss him.”

The amazing thing about Milei these days is that he is telling Argentines, in every possible way, that on December 10 a very profound “adjustment” begins. If for twenty years many were convinced of what Kirchnerism said, that where there is a need there is a right, from now on there will only be rights if there is money to finance them. And Milei already said it; there's no money.

There is none in the Central Bank, about which this Friday Milei insisted that he will close it: “That is not negotiated”. There is none in the public administration in general, to which the imminent president wants to apply an immediate five percent reduction in spending.. The wave of privatizations that Milei foresees has to do with this reduction in spending, but these privatizations take time. Meanwhile, a proclamation with demagogic overtones: the adjustment “will be done by politics, the people will not be touched”.

It is a symbol, more than a real solution: political spending in Argentina may be seen as excessive in the eyes of many, but it is an insignificant percentage in the sea of public spending.. Milei, who donates his salary as a deputy, earns $1,700 a month. On the other side of the Andes Mountains, in Chile, they charge ten times more for the same work.

There are also disruptive proposals: instead of privatizing it, Milei proposed handing over Aerolíneas Argentinas, the loss-making state aviation company, to its employees.. It will give you money to run it for a year and make the adjustment that makes it viable.. Horror gripped many union members.

Milei still does not confirm the name of his Minister of Economy, although Luis Caputo, former Minister of Finance of Mauricio Macri, looks like a favorite. That led Emilio Ocampo, the already announced next president of the Central Bank, to decline the offer.. With it also goes the dollarization plan that Milei was going to implement.

“His idea of replacing the peso with the dollar will have to wait, most likely, a long time,” said analyst Ignacio Miri this Friday in “Clarín”. Demien Reidel, a physicist with a doctorate from Harvard, will be the new president of the Central.

“It doesn't matter who leads the economy: everyone who closely follows Argentina's numbers knows that a bridge of dollars is needed to get through the summer and begin to see the currencies from the soybean harvest,” warned Florencia Donovan in “La Nation”.

After the big rise on Monday after the elections, Argentine stocks have fallen on Wall Street. Meanwhile, Milei builds bridges with Peronist figures, but also with the woman whom he left out of the runoff and the dream of being president: Patricia Bullrich will be his Minister of Security, the same position she held in Macri's government.

The Government led by the far-right Islamophobe Geert Wilders in the Netherlands is faltering before negotiations even begin. The candidate of the People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), Dilan Yesilgöz, announced by surprise this Friday that her party will not become part of a coalition government due to its poor electoral results: “We have 10 fewer seats; no it is appropriate to appoint ministers now.”

The leader of the Liberals, belonging to the party of the still acting Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, has not refused to sit down to negotiate a center-right Government, but has assured that she does not want her party to be part of it hiding behind the vote of punishment that has received. Yes, it has been open to allowing Parliament to form that Executive, but then remaining in the opposition.

In Wednesday's elections, Wilders' far-right (PVV) won 37 seats, the VVD was third with 24, and the Christian Democrats of the New Social Contract (NSC) had 20 seats in the Lower House. Wilders intended to negotiate a coalition government between these three parties and the Peasant Movement (BBB, with seven deputies). By leaving Yesilgöz, an essential step is dropped for the historic leader of the Dutch far-right to be named prime minister.

The truth is that the VVD has lost 10 seats after Rutte has been prime minister for the last 13 years. The rest of the formations of the outgoing Government have also suffered extensive setbacks, with which the Dutch have voted against the outgoing Executive.

As soon as her announcement was made public, harsh criticism has rained down on the liberal candidate from the rest of the formations on the right and the center and also from her own party.. Wilders has assured that this decision “is very disappointing” because “the Dutch want a center-right government”. Similarly, the leaders of the NSC or BBB have rejected this position because it “contradicts the result of the polls.”

Some VVD deputies also reject this position, adopted in a “hasty” manner and “without taking into account the rest of the party, since the leadership has not discussed it,” they have assured.. However, several acting VVD ministers support Yesilgöz's position.

MINORITY GOVERNMENT

The formula suggested by Yesilgöz, a minority government of Wilders with specific support from Parliament by the liberals, would give more strategic autonomy to the Dutch PP, without being tied to the extreme right seven months before the European elections.. This Executive could count on the active support of 64 deputies in a Chamber of 150 and the specific support of the VVD, which has 24.

Still, multi-party talks have not yet begun and Wilders himself has not ruled out changing the liberals' minds.. “I'm optimistic and it wouldn't be the first time they've changed their mind in recent weeks,” he noted ironically.