By striking the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, one of the greatest holy sites of Christianity, Putin has forever put his name on the list of history’s worst barbarians. He should be damned for centuries. And he will lose this war. From the Horde in the 13th century to the Nazis and Bolsheviks in the 20th century, Kyiv’s sacred monasteries have suffered numerous barbarically attacks. Now we are dealing with Russian terrorists who have already outmatched ISIS in their crimes against cultural heritage. Only Russian scum who have nothing sacred can deliberately damage the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a unique UNESCO heritage site under special protection. We will be urgently initiating all relevant procedures within UNESCO and all other international mechanisms, demanding immediate and adequate responses to this state barbarism. We expect strong reactions by international institutions and capitals. No vague words, silence, or weak steps. We need action now to stop Russian barbarism.

As Director-General of UNESCO, Khaled El-Enany has not issued an official, standalone quote or statement directly condemning Russia. Will he do it now? Ever? Drop him a line @UNESCO_DG

Tulsi Gabbard is parroting false Russian propaganda. Her treasonous lies may well cost lives.

RT @anyaxmar: having ukrainian children forced to stand there and listen to the country attacking them being celebrated gotta count as a fo…

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.

A common dynamic I observe with AI: it feels most impressive when you don’t know much about the subject, don’t care or don’t have a clear idea of what the you want. This applies across design, code, legal, and more. If I don’t know code very well, every piece of code it writes feels very impressive. Once you know what something should feel or look like, it becomes almost impossible to guide AI there. And you definitely can’t one-shot it.

non-designers who have never designed anything: "designers are cooked!" people who have worked in code, want to work in code, always will work in code: "future of design is code!" companies selling tokens: "move that button 4px with a prompt!" designers:

‼️ New findings from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab show that major Russian energy companies, including Gazprom and Rosneft, are directly linked to networks responsible for the detention, indoctrination, and militarization of Ukrainian children. The Ukraine Congressional Caucus is calling on the Administration to halt any sanctions relief for Russian oil entities. According to the report, nearly 2,200 of the more than 20,000 abducted Ukrainian children have been held in facilities tied to these companies. One such site, the “Prometheus Camp,” is reportedly connected to state-linked oil interests that could benefit from sanctions relief. “Returning these children requires dismantling the infrastructure behind these crimes—including camps, networks, and the entities supporting them. If companies like Gazprom and Rosneft helped fund or operate these systems, they must face full international accountability,” the statement from the UA Caucus says, signed by - @RepMarcyKaptur (D-OH-09), @RepBrianFitz (R-PA-01), @RepMikeQuigley (D-IL-05), @RepJoeWilson (R-SC-02), @RepGregLandsman (D-OH-01) Full statement: 👇 kaptur.house.gov/media-cente…

Today, the Ukrainian delegation in Brussels received the European Union’s accession benchmarks for the final three negotiating clusters. This means Ukraine now has the full set of requirements to meet for EU membership. Ukraine is moving confidently along its path to European integration. The swift completion of the official screening of Ukrainian legislation for compliance with EU law demonstrates the country’s institutional capacity and readiness to move to the next stage. The next steps are successful closure of the clusters and signing of the Accession Treaty, the final step toward Ukraine’s full membership in the European Union. Today, Ukraine received the details for Cluster 3 “Competitiveness and Inclusive Growth,” Cluster 4 “Green Agenda and Sustainable Connectivity,” and Cluster 5 “Resources, Agriculture and Cohesion Policy.” In December, the Ukrainian side received the benchmarks for three other clusters: Cluster 1 “Fundamentals of the EU Accession Process,” Cluster 2 “Internal Market,” and Cluster 6 “External Relations.” The Ukrainian government will continue to fulfill the accession requirements, implement the necessary reforms and measures, and report to the EU on progress. Moving forward together!

DESIGNING DESIGN: “Verbalizing design is another act of design.” —Kenya Hara (2011) There is a wonderful book on design from Lars Müller Publishers that is unfortunately no longer in print. It was written by one of Japan’s foremost designers, arguably at the peak of his career. Everyone knew about Hara-san in Japan, and this book in English put his flag everywhere as an understated, perfectly designed book. Instead of a Phaidon coffee table book with pictures pictures pictures. With all the blah-blah about “taste” out there #DesignInTech right now, Hara’s book stands out for its restraint (= “taste”) and its audacity (= “taste”) in the context of the non-digital domain just as computers began to emerge. To me, the work of designers Erik Spiekermann and Hartmut Esslinger carry a similar nuanced genius that is revealed thru directly experiencing their work, and sometimes in their writings. More often, the artifacts of their work spoke for them. Loudly. Similarly, it’s only by flipping through the pages of Hara’s book when the actual pages as text become secondary to the book-as-object-itself. Its weight. Its binding. Its printing. Its exceedingly high paper quality. This is the kind of design experience that many in the newer generation may not have had a chance to “feel” because frankly, great design objects are usually priced out of their market. While we hear about “world models” in the AI universe, it’s increasingly clear to me that for many centuries artisans, artists, and designers have held very clear models of our world that couldn’t easily be reduced to written language. And for that reason alone, the idea of automating “taste” with modern generative models will remain an elusive task. Long live design. —JM

yearly reminder to watch the dieter rams documentary

In relation to the recent statements by Congresswoman @RepLuna, the Embassy is always ready to provide fact-based information. Some facts: ☑️With deeds, not words, Ukraine fosters a diverse religious landscape. We have over 30,000 registered religious organizations, many of which cannot operate in Russia. Only the one with ties to Moscow speaks about persecutions. ☑️From 2022 to 2025, 1,378 religious communities decided to change their canonical and organizational subordination. It’s their right. Some communities are divided; those tensions are exploited by Russian propaganda. Ukraine is a democracy; all disputes will be resolved through the courts. ☑️The activities of the Russian Church pose a direct national security threat. It is the Church that publicly supports war. Ukrainian law does not restrict religious beliefs, worship, or doctrine; it prohibits the ties with this organization. Regarding the letter from the person who is under trial: those claims do not withstand even basic fact-checking. In the entire Ukrainian penitentiary system, there are around 34,600 inmates. There are no political prisoners. As a state in war, Ukraine works to hinder the activities of persons acting in the enemy’s interests. But everyone has the ability to defend themselves in court.

“For Russians, performative cruelty is a tool of war,” British historian Antony Beevor told The Telegraph. Russia’s actions in Ukraine are not an anomaly. They are the continuation of several centuries of an especially brutal military culture that the West has long ignored. The mass rapes, torture, and killings in Bucha were systematic. The more than 19,500 kidnapped Ukrainian children reveal the true meaning of “Russian liberation.” The Russian soldier is shaped inside a system of violence. In the 1990s, five thousand conscripts took their own lives every year. The generals laughed about it. Recently one commander ordered new recruits to dig their own graves because “they’ll need them soon.” This is how the “chain-of-abuse effect” works: those brutalized by the system go on to brutalize others. In 1945, the victims were Polish, Hungarian, and German women. Today — Ukrainian women. In Berlin, they even raped exhausted concentration camp prisoners. The Russian logic is simple: “the victor is never judged.” The very concept of legitimacy in war simply does not exist there. The cruelty in Bucha began when Russia’s blitzkrieg failed. Beevor draws a historical parallel: the Nazis turned to gas chambers in 1942 when they realized they would not defeat the USSR. A frustrated occupier always becomes more brutal. After the war, hundreds of thousands of broken, traumatized, and criminalized Russian soldiers — including former convicts from “penal battalions” — will return home. Even now, new crimes are being documented, committed by the “heroes of the special military operation” who received amnesty for their service. Russia’s losses are about 1 million: around 250,000 killed and 750,000 wounded. The Kremlin deployed mobile crematoria to hide the bodies. Beevor says Putin will break any ceasefire and blame Ukraine and Europe — and Trump will support him. Real peace is highly unlikely. Just as after World War I, when Britain and France could not believe anyone would start another war — and therefore underestimated Hitler — today the world is stepping on the very same rake again. Source: translated and adopted from Tymofiy Mylovanov

The Ukrainians Stuck in Russia’s New Gulag nytimes.com/2025/11/29/world…

RT @richardbranson: The utter irony of Putin and Trump meeting soon in Budapest to jointly seal Ukraine’s fate should not be lost on anybod…

Witkoff says eastern #Ukraine should belong to #Russia because its residents speak Russian. The reason they speak Russian is because the Soviets depopulated the area of Ukrainians and repopulated it with Russians. It’s the Russians who need to return to Russia, not the land.

Isn't he behaving exactly as he would if he was a Russian asset ? What would he do that is different from what he's actually doing ?

At least 21 civilians were killed and more than two dozen injured following a barbaric direct Russian strike with an air bomb on ordinary people lined up to receive pensions in the village of Yarova in the Donetsk region. This heinous crime demands worldwide condemnation and action. We urge the world to speak out and act immediately. We call on European partners, the United States, G20 members, and all who value human life and the UN Charter to take action. We are currently informing all of our partners and international organizations about the details of this horrific crime. And we expect strong responses. Russian criminals must face justice for this and other atrocities. Russian propaganda claims to be "saving" people in the Donetsk region, but in reality, it is dropping massive air bombs on people who came to receive pensions. Russia brings only death, horror, and destruction. Collective and decisive action, including devastating sanctions pressure and additional support for Ukraine's defense and resilience, can and must stop Russian terror.

So, in other words, we are living in this timeline: in Europe, a devastating war has been raging for the fourth year, the largest since World War II. The victim of aggression, Ukraine, in its attempts to stop the war economy of the great aggressor power, strikes its oil and gas sector — and meanwhile, the populist pro-Russian regime in Hungary, unlike the rest of Europe, has for all three years of the full-scale war refused to sever its mafia-style ties with the Kremlin and its dependence on shady schemes of cheap Russian oil deliveries through the war zone. And now, on the very day of yet another bloody Russian missile strike on civilians in Kyiv, the Hungarian regime can think of nothing better than to “ban entry into Hungary and the entire Schengen zone” for a Ukrainian drone forces commander, an ethnic Hungarian (who may even hold dual Ukrainian-Hungarian citizenship), simply for carrying out combat missions and fighting the great power aggressor in the fourth year of the war. And this is just a small fragment of the moral degradation and corrupt vileness that surrounds this war against Ukraine.