"Our 60+ year embargo has been ineffective and counterproductive—it hurts the Cuban people, it strengthens hardliners, it gives rise to more refugees, and it undercuts our standing in the world," McGovern said in a social media publication.

As the United States renews its diplomatic push to end Russia's war against Ukraine, Moscow is making something clear: its position has not changed.

While U.S., Ukrainian, and Russian officials met for trilateral talks in January and again in early February — with another round expected next week — the Kremlin has used the same period to restate its position.

As Washington speaks of momentum and narrowing gaps, Russia's most senior officials have publicly dismissed key elements of the proposed framework.

For three consecutive days, from Feb. 9 to Feb. 11, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly undercut suggestions that negotiations were advancing.

His message was consistent and direct: Russia's territorial and political demands remain intact, and any serious discussion must revolve around Ukraine accepting them.

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Chancellor Friedrich Merz confirms discussions underway on a European nuclear deterrent, at speech in Munich.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that U.S. leadership can no longer be taken for granted and Europe must prepare to stand more firmly on its own, in a stark warning to world leaders in Munich.

“The leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” Merz said during the opening of the Munich Security Conference, laying out the starkest assessment yet from Berlin of a world increasingly defined by great-power rivalry. “In the era of great powers, our freedom is no longer simply guaranteed. It is under threat.”

He argued the global system itself may already have collapsed. “The international order based on rights and rules … no longer exists in the way it once did,” he said.

Merz also drew a lesson from Germany’s own history. “We Germans know a world in which might makes right would be a dark place,” he said. “Our country has gone down this path in the 20th century until the bitter and dreadful end.”

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When the public turns hostile: Political violence against parliamentarians

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Without getting into too many revealing details, my wife and I have a handful of Ring cameras that we are looking to replace, especially with the bullshit they've been trying to pull lately. They are used often, indoor and outdoor.

Last year, I tried rolling my own replacement with a standalone Frigate machine and the HA integration, but that ended up falling flat on it's face. I am not looking to troubleshoot that setup - that ship has sailed. Moving on.

Enter Unifi Protect. I'm already familiar with Unifi, my network has been running fantastically on the OG ~~trash can~~ UDM since it came out, plus a U7 Lite AP for extra coverage in our tall-ish 3-story duplex. The place is wired with Cat5, but since we rent, some areas will have to be handled with wifi-only units - the G4 instant looks suitable for this.

Questions:

1. Ring has a very "wife-friendly" interface. How does the Unifi Protect UI fare in comparison?
2. I'm looking at the NVR Instant to handle about 6x FHD cameras. Would a 1TB WD Purple be suitable for that?
3. Motion detection - How is Unifi Protect with this compared to Ring? Better, worse, or equivalent? How flexible is it?
4. (less important) I'm reasonably certain I can set up a doorbell replacement via HA, zigbee button, and a G4 Instant. No Cat5 to the front door unfortunately, just the usual pair of wires to the wall-mounted ringer inside. POE is not an option here. Viable? Or should I do something else?

Don't exactly know what the problem is, but it seems that healthcheck curl commands to https://example.com/ currently fail, probably because of a ssl failure. This causes container that rely on this to fail. Just wanted to let you guys know.

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Someone was abducted at 10 AM by ICE on Central Ave. Their coworker says they’ve lived here for over 20 years, are documented, and have 3 kids who were born here. Don’t be fooled by headlines when they’ve been lying to us the whole time. We still need you out patrolling until every agent is gone

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European leaders divided over how far to accommodate Trump’s ‘wrecking ball’ politics and foreign policy

US Democrats will use a security summit this weekend to urge European leaders to stand up to Donald Trump, with the continent divided over how to keep the unpredictable US president on side.

Democrats at the annual Munich Security Conference will include some of Trump’s most outspoken critics, such as the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Arizona senator Ruben Gallego and the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

Newsom has already urged Europeans to realise that “grovelling to Trump’s needs” makes them “look pathetic on the world stage”, telling reporters at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month he “should have brought a bunch of knee pads”.

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Back in 2021, in the thick of pandemic mania, The Register gleefully reported that "radioactive hybrid terror pigs" were thriving in Japan's Fukushima exclusion zone.

The image of feral swine exposed to 300 times the safe human dose of cesium-137 after the 2011 nuclear meltdown, interbreeding with wild boar and roaming a post-apocalyptic hellscape, proved unusually popular with readers. It even spawned fan art. I suppose we were all extremely bored.

As the old saying goes, never let the truth get in the way of a good headline. However, new research into the Fukushima fiefdom suggests the reality is less mutant horror hog and more brisk genetics.

....

What hasn't faded is Mom's influence.

The problem is that for the entire fourth quarter of 2025, she raised just $822,000 in small contributions. That would mean that, after raising more than a half million in one day from regular people, she raised just $287,000 more over the next two and a half months. As a candidate, some drop off after launch day is expected, but to drop that far and that fast raises major concerns about how much momentum there is behind her bid, especially considering that the Democratic Party in Washington has turned on its small-dollar fundraising program for Mills. The party has carpet-bombed inboxes on her behalf, but people seem not to be responding.

The Mills campaign did not respond when asked to clarify these day-one fundraising issues.

I'm aware of what end-to-end encrypted means in a technical sense, but does the lack thereof guarantee the messages are just plaintext readable to whoever's manning the machine?

My guess is yes but I've been known to have wildly incorrect guesses so I want to double-check.

404 Media previously reported kids said they were using photos of Trump and G-Man from Half Life to bypass the age verification software in the popular VR game Gorilla Tag. That game uses the service k–ID, which is the same as what Discord is using.

I've asked this before, and I'm pretty much an optimist

Archive.

During the Super Bowl, Anthropic ran a dystopian AI ad about dystopian AI ads featuring an AI android physical trainer hawking insoles to a user who only asked for an ab workout. Not to be outdone, Amazon ran a commercial for its AI assistant Alexa+ in which Chris Hemsworth fretted over all the different ways AI might kill him, including severing his head and drowning him in his pool. Equally bleak, the telehealth company Hims & Hers ran an ad titled “RICH PEOPLE LIVE LONGER” in which oligarchs access such healthcare luxuries as facelifts, bespoke IVs, and “preventative care” to live longer than the rest of us. It was an anti-billionaire ad by a multibillion-dollar healthcare company.

Turn on the TV today, and you will drown in a sea of ads in which capitalists denounce capitalism. Think of the PNC Bank ads where parents sell their children’s naming rights a la sports stadiums for the money to raise them or the Robinhood ads where a white-haired older man, perhaps meant to evoke Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, curses the “men of means with their silver spoons eating up the financial favors of the one percent” from the deck of a yacht.

After years of ingesting the mainstream discourse around surveillance capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, and democratic socialism, corporations are regurgitating and even surpassing the rhetoric of the modern left. Naturally, it’s all a winking sleight of hand meant to corral us back into engaging with the same capitalism they portray as a hellscape — but with new and improved privatized solutions. In another widely reviled Super Bowl ad, the video doorbell company Ring tells us that every year, 10 million family pets go missing, and by opting into a web of mass surveillance, the company has reunited “more than a dog a day” with their families.

Modern advertisers descend from those ad men of the 1960s who first perfected the art of channeling our angst with society writ large into buying more junk. As historian Thomas Frank wrote in his book “The Conquest of Cool,” midcentury advertisers constructed “a cultural perpetual motion machine in which disgust with the … everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

The machine has hummed on ever since, retrofitting capitalism’s reprimands into its rationales. It churns out commercials reframing the precariat’s pain not as the product of plutocracy but as the product of buying the wrong products. Advertisements pitch that the good life is to be secured by procuring high quality goods, by curating the right combination of AI assistants, locally crafted beer, paraben-free dryer sheets, Jimmy Dean breakfast biscuits, Capital One Venture X points, BetMGM spreads, Coinbase crypto wallets, on and on.

It’s lunacy. Buying Levi’s won’t give you deep pockets. Brand promises, like all promises, are made to be broken. As AI anxiety fueled fears of mass layoffs, Coca-Cola soothed American workers’ worries about “AI coming for everything” with a glossy 2025 Super Bowl ad, featuring Lauren London, where the gleaming actress flexed her dimples and told us everything would be all right. Ten months later, Coke automated its advertising with generative videos, replacing the actors they’d paid to soothe our worries about being replaced by AI with AI itself.

I really hope they die soon, this is unbearable…