The general idea of the snus-bans is that snus is not commonly consumed outside of the Nordics, so it’s better to pre-emptively ban it. They are trying to nip it in the bud before it becomes a problem.

Cigarettes are socially and culturally engrained after a century of normalization, and it’s a lot more difficult to ban it. Even vapes are already somewhat at the stage where it’s nornalized enough that outright banning it becomes difficult.

No problem. You can edit the post’s description to add the link after the fact.

It’s a paywalled article, so here’s an archival link

https://archive.is/8PwGR

“Smoke-free” in this case means fewer than 5% of people smoke daily. As of 2025 that figure stands at 4.8% in Sweden

The proportion of daily smokers dropped from 16 to 4.8 percent between 2003 and 2025, according to the new report.

Meanwhile, Sweden has seen a sharp increase in the use of snus in recent years – the small nicotine pouches popular in Sweden – a factor that the tobacco industry often highlights as a major reason for Sweden’s low proportion of smokers.

Fewer smokers is good of course, but I am not sure if the consumption of tabacco is really going down significantly. It rather seems to be moving from cigarettes to snus, which I’m not sure is a good thing.

Snus is banned in the rest of the EU. Sweden has an exemption on that ban, which they pre-emptively carved out when they were in talks for joining the EU

Some of the most democratic nations are constitutional monarchies, but let’s ignore that little factoid lest we upset some Americans…

That being said, I agree with you. The UK definitely needs democratic reform. The House of Lords being largely unelected and the House of Commons being elected through first-past-the-post is outdated at this point, and needs updating.

The reason why I remark on it being reasonable, is because over here in the Netherlands we have been seeing increasingly more places that just outright ban smoking on the entire premises. They specifically choose not to have designated smoking spaces.

In practice this does not work at all, because smoking is an addiction and you can’t expect smokers not to smoke for hours upon end. So in practice they smoke outside anyway, and you are worse off than you would have been in a situation with designated smoking spots.

My boyfriend has a Kobo, and he has an integration with his library that allows him to borrow ebooks.
I’d have to ask him how it works exactly, but it sounds pretty convenient.

This guy can go suck an egg…

He also added, “Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans […] just remember to leave your phones at home.”

It’s not that difficult to see the difference between having the option to decide not to bring your phone if you don’t want to be tracked, and not even getting an option to avoid AI-powered CCTV systems all over town.

New regulations from 2026 – smoking will only be permitted in designated smoking areas.

Frankly that seems to me like a pretty reasonable regulation. It’s not nearly as extreme as the post’s title would suggest.

As part of the trade agreement, Europe requires America to honour and implement their part of the agreement as well. If Trump starts raising tariffs again that would be a clear breach of the trade agreement, and Europe no longer has an obligation to honour their end of the deal either.

There is also an expiration date in the trade agreement for 2029, if I’m understanding correctly

Does anyone know whether the mutual acceptance of each others vehicle standards is still part of this agreement?

Back in August / September there was reporting that, as part of the trade deal, both parties would “accept and mutually recognise each others norms for cars” and that “the agreement voices a desire to align vehicle standards”

https://brusselsenieuwe.nl/europese-steden-slaan-alarm-grote-amerikaanse-autos-horen-niet-op-onze-weg/

I really do not want those massive American death-machines on European roads. It would undo decades of work making European roads safer.

I wouldn’t mind it if we started negotiations to let the UK rejoin in some capacity, but I think that there should be certain guarantees that they won’t just up and leave again in a couple of years. And I also believe they should not be granted any exemptions to Schengen and the Eurozone that they may have had before.

You can selfhost your cloud storage, for instance using Nextcloud, if you want to maintain complete control

It’s not only “like” stealing, I would just call that stealing.

Over the past four years Russia has been ever so slowly gaining small amounts of territory, bit by bit.

I guess that can be described as a “winning streak”, because if that continues infinitely without change, eventually in a couple of hundred years they would have all of Ukraine’s land.

However, that ignores the cost of war, and how Russia will pay for keeping that up.

Milka is Swiss and this is a German court case.
Where did you get the Americans from?

They’re both very similar.

Both still use Google and Bing for part of their search results (albeit with the search queries somewhat anonymised). And both have been working together on a European search index which they have been slowly rolling out over the past year orso now.

Ecosia differentiates itself from the competition by using part of their profits to plant trees, and by promising that their servers are run on renewable energy.

Personally I use Ecosia over Qwant, because I found the search results for news articles to be a bit better. But ultimately both are very similar.

…accused of antisemitism…

Taking a stance on Israel’s war in Gaza does not automatically make one anti-Semitic 🙄

Ecosia (Germany) does too. They work together with Qwant on that.

Both don’t exclusively use their own indexing, and still depend on Google and Bing for part of their results. But you have to start somewhere

The article is from two weeks ago, so it’s probably safe to assume they’re the same case

I personally quite like the burgundy passport my country uses. And afaik most countries in the EU use burgundy for their passports.

What exactly would be the added value of changing the colour of our passports?