Voor de toekomstige advocaat in ‘Legally Blonde’ was het nog belangrijk om naast heel slim en ambitieus ook heel ‘vrouwelijk’ te zijn; roze outfits, lief en vriendelijk. In recentere producties is het heel gewoon als ook zij, net als mannen, hard, gehaaid, professioneel of sociaal onaangepast is.

Programme offering a one-year residence and work permit attracts double expected number of applicants

More than 1 million undocumented migrants and asylum seekers have applied to regularise their status in Spain under a government programme to harness and defend the benefits of immigration at a time when most European countries are pulling up the drawbridge.

Although the massive regularisation initiative, announced by the socialist-led government in January, was originally intended to benefit about 500,000 people, it had attracted more than twice that number of applicants by the time the registration period ended on Tuesday.

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Some argue that it is now embarrassing, particularly for women. But the fatalism of Extremely Online discourse obscures the actual picture

As we wrap up pride month, I think the International Committee for Homosexual Advancement should give itself a pat on the back. Despite a challenging geopolitical environment, the gay agenda continues apace. Judging by recent headlines, heterosexuality has become somewhat embarrassing, particularly for women – a congenital condition you don’t really want to admit to in public and wish there was a cure for. But while there is no remedy for this modern malaise, there is a snazzy name for it: “heteropessimism”.

Asa Seresin is the scholar responsible for foisting this term (later amended to “heterofatalism”) on to the world. In a viral essay for the New Inquiry in 2019, Seresin explained it consists of “performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality … or hopelessness about straight experience”. That essay spawned a heteroload of thinkpieces and memes, a classic of the genre being a Vogue piece that asked: Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?. Even Zohran Mamdani weighed in on this very important question. For the record, he said no: “But if you’re worried that your boyfriend will embarrass you, you should probably get a new boyfriend.”

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The prime minister unveiled his long-awaited defence investment plan on Tuesday after months of delays

• UK politics live – latest updates

Keir Starmer has warned his successor not to borrow more to pay for defence as he raided energy, transport and housing projects to plug a military spending deficit with an extra £15bn over the next four years.

The prime minister revealed his long-awaited defence investment plan (Dip) on Tuesday, after an 11-month government row that cost him a defence secretary and arguably contributed to his downfall.

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gnsk has added a photo to the pool:

​Oranje kan met opgeheven hoofd vooruit kijken in het toernooi. De ploeg van Ronald Koeman weet de sterrenploeg van Frankrijk te ontlopen in de kwartfinale.

Vooraf werd gezegd dat een ontmoeting met de Fransen waarschijnlijk einde toernooi zou zijn, maar dankzij het knappe spel van Oranje weten ze dat scenario te voorkomen. Bondscoach Ronald Koeman: “Soms heb je een beetje geluk nodig en nu zit het gewoon echt even mee.”

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TEHERAN (ANP/AFP) - Iran stuurt woensdag "beslist" een delegatie naar Qatar om er te praten over bevroren Iraanse tegoeden. Dit zei de woordvoerder van het Iraanse ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken.

De Amerikaanse gezanten Steve Witkoff en Jared Kushner zijn dinsdag gearriveerd in Qatar. Zij spreken er met Qatarezen over onderhandelingen met Iran, meldde de regering van het emiraat.

Onder de bemiddelaars is de premier van Qatar, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. Qatar speelt net als Pakistan een belangrijke rol in de relatie tussen Washington en Teheran en heeft historisch gezien goede betrekkingen met Iran. Zo exploiteren de twee landen samen een groot gasveld onder de Perzische Golf. In Qatar is ook de grootste Amerikaanse luchtmachtbasis in de regio.

De Iraanse woordvoerder had eerder gezegd dat een Iraanse delegatie naar Qatar zou gaan om te spreken over het akkoord tussen Iran en de VS. Hij zei toen dat er geen onderhandelingen of ontmoetingen met gezanten van de VS waren gepland.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De Eerste Kamer heeft ingestemd met de begroting van Buitenlandse Handel en Ontwikkelingssamenwerking van D66-minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma. Hij moest een deal sluiten met PRO om het budget door de senaat te krijgen. Uiteindelijk stemden 39 senatoren voor en 33 tegen de begroting.

PRO beloofde de begroting te steunen in ruil voor 380 miljoen euro extra voor ontwikkelingshulp. Tegelijk lekte naar buiten dat er tussen regeringspartijen D66 en VVD nog een andere afspraak was gemaakt. In ruil voor steun voor extra geld voor Sjoerdsma, beloofde D66 het wetsvoorstel te steunen om verheerlijking van terrorisme strafbaar te stellen. Daar was D66 altijd tegen.

Toen de begroting door de Tweede Kamer moest, was er ook al gedoe. Sjoerdsma kreeg steun van onder meer JA21, omdat D66 geen steun meer gaf aan een voorstel van PRO om de subsidie te herstellen voor UNRWA, de VN-hulporganisatie voor Palestijnse vluchtelingen. Een paar dagen later kondigde Sjoerdsma aan de subsidie aan UNRWA toch te herstellen.

Microsoft's habit of adding unnecessary features to Notepad is a symptom of broader bloating in the Windows codebase. But it is possible to go back to basics with a version of the editor that fits in less than 3 kilobytes. Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer comes from an era at Microsoft when Notepad handled the simple stuff, and WordPad handled everything else. "We had some clear rules," said the Task Manager author on his YouTube channel, Dave's Garage. "Notepad was for plain text. WordPad was for RTF. And we were taught how important it was to never cross the streams. "So, Notepad stayed lean. WordPad got the fancy fonts, the spell check, and, for all I know, a recipe card feature." A few decades on, things are very different. WordPad is no more, and Notepad has endured multiple indignities as features have been piled onto it. Heck, it will even come up with Copilot-powered suggestions to tweak writing. Plummer is less than keen on the current iteration of Notepad, "so I rebuilt it from scratch. 2.5 kilobytes. No bloat. No telemetry. No nonsense. Just pure old school Windows done right." The result is TinyRetroPad, a fork of Dave's Tiny Editor (DTE) by Matt Power. Written in assembly and using the RICHEDIT50W from the WinAPI, the application relies heavily on components already available in Windows. There are Open and Save As dialogs. Font selection. Even printing. Plummer said, "Printing in Windows is kind of spooky. It's one of those subsystems that feels like you're opening a hatch in the floor and you discover a second operating system underneath." It looks and feels, as Plummer states, "exactly like you might remember Notepad Circa Windows XP," just with an even smaller binary. We ran up the code, and, after dire warnings from Windows about the safety of doing such a thing, TinyRetroPad ground into life, transporting us back to a time before Microsoft decided that what Windows users really wanted was new features added to simple tools rather than for their operating systems to just… work. Of course, while the binary might clock in at 2,686 bytes according to Plummer (it came in at 2,794 bytes after we attempted to compile it and occupied a mighty 4,096 bytes on disk due to the cluster size), the requirement while running is quite a bit higher. That is fair enough, considering the application demonstrates that the wheel does not need to be reinvented when there are perfectly acceptable components already available in Windows. Plummer asked, "If Notepad was the canary in the coal mine that signaled our descent into mediocrity, then what's the antidote?" To rebuild it without all the fluff accumulated over the years, maybe? The binary for today's Notepad.exe is more than 100 times the size of Plummer's executable, but we'd argue it is not 100 times better. And yes, there are plenty of Notepad alternatives, but few that are quite so aggressively trim. In the current era of skyrocketing storage costs, there is a definite appeal to keeping code lean and binaries leaner. Ditching decades of cruft is simply a bonus. ®