The Department of Homeland Security secretary has spent 2025 trying to convince the American public that identifying roving bands of masked federal agents is “doxing”—and that revealing these public servants’ identities is “violence.” Noem is wrong on both fronts, legal experts say, but her claims of doxing highlight a central conflict in the current era: Surveillance now goes both ways.

Over the nearly 12 months since President Donald Trump took office for a second time, life in the United States has been torn asunder by relentless arrests and raids by officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and federal, state, and local authorities deputized to carry out immigration actions. Many of these agents are hiding their identities on the administration-approved basis that they are the ones at risk. US residents, in response, have ramped up their documentation of law enforcement activity to seemingly unprecedented levels.

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“Many times, the prophet is shown a specific vision, but he doesn’t understand what he is seeing,” Rabbi Natan wrote. “This is explicitly stated by the prophets Daniel and Zechariah. Sometimes, the vision is a metaphor for future events. Sometimes, the visions show the events themselves, but the prophet is limited and can only describe them using his own vocabulary, using concepts and events that he is familiar with.”

“In his vision, the child, Nachman, saw the Statue of Liberty but didn’t understand what he saw and couldn’t put words to it. Only about 120 years ago were we finally able to understand what Nachman saw: a sign of the coming redemption, the destruction of the Statue of Liberty, a copy of the Colossus of Rhodes.”

This prophecy was also given by Rabbi Shimon Dahan, who passed away in Paris, France, about three years ago. Rabbi Dahan said in 2005 that the Statue of Liberty would be destroyed at a certain stage of the final redemption.

“When this happens, we will know that the Messiah is about to be revealed,” Rabbi Dahan taught.

While the destruction of the Statue of Liberty seems unlikely to most, in April, a French member of the European Parliament, Raphaël Glucksmann, demanded that the US return the monument his country had gifted to the US in 1876.

“We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: ‘Give us back the Statue of Liberty,’” local outlet France 24 reported.

“‘We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home,’” Glucksmann said at a convention of his Place Publique movement.

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The organization Mr. Bialiatski founded, Viasna, tracks the conditions of political prisoners in Belarus, population 9.5 million. After he was freed last Saturday along with 122 other prisoners, it determined that 1,103 were still languishing in jail.

Mr. Bialiatski’s release came about after an envoy for President Trump met Belarus’s president, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, and announced that the United States would lift sanctions on potash fertilizer, one of Belarus’s largest sources of cash. Also released were Maria Kolesnikova and Viktor Babariko, two of Belarus’s top opposition leaders.

Mr. Bialiatski, 63, expressed profuse gratitude for his freedom, but said he felt he had been “trafficked” as part of a transaction — released only when there was economic gain for Belarus.

“They just loaded me like a sack of flour and transported me across the border,” he said. “We are basically goods for sale.”

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The files, unveiled on Tuesday, include a series of haunting emails exchanged between Maxwell and “The Invisible Man” whose address is “abx17@dial.pipex.com”.

There is no indication that anyone from the Royal Family sent the email to Maxwell – and it is unclear who the person exchanging emails with Epstein’s former partner was.

Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has been pictured multiple times in recent rounds of new images, but the former Prince has always denied any wrongdoing.

In the email from August 2001, an unidentified person who signs his messages “A xxx” writes to Maxwell: “I am up here at Balmoral Summer Camp for the Royal Family.”

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The potent mix of capitalism, social media, and information overload has rendered most “stories” brief, disconnected, and designed for consumption rather than connection. Think TikTok reels, Instagram Stories, or the news cycle.

These structural changes are mirrored in our own shrinking capacity to engage with narrative. Both telling and listening to a story require deep attention, and we increasingly lack the patience for it. I reach for my phone while reading, my spouse listens to audiobooks at double speed, and my Gen Z sister skips dialogue in shows. We lack not just present time to devote to a story but also past time to draw upon, the temporal distance between events and their telling that traditional narrative requires. When all time is flattened into the present, narrative form begins to erode. Instant communication collapses tenses into an interminable “now,” and live streams keep us there. Finally, storytelling demands leisure, or at least a relaxed mind, since immersion requires the mental margin to forget ourselves and linger in the unfolding. That capacity for temporal extension—for losing oneself inside a story—is becoming harder and harder to exercise.

Brooks, Han, and the psychological trends we see all account for the changes in how we relate to narratives. What’s missing, however, is a more proactive dimension: storytelling is not just lost but is being reshaped as well. The rise of “content” is both a symptom of market forces and a sign of an aesthetic and epistemic pivot that reflects the current mood. We no longer trust the emotional cadence that traditional narrative imposes, and plot-driven storytelling no longer persuades when reality resists explanation and the search for meaning feels burdensome.

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Damer contends psychedelics hold potential for more than addressing the mental health crisis. He is driven by the belief that psychedelic drugs can crack open the minds of scientists and other problem-solvers. In 2023, he founded the nonprofit organization the Center for MINDS (Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions). Its philosophy: “Psychedelics and other consciousness practices may be our greatest underutilized tool for sparking paradigm-shifting breakthroughs.”

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December 3rd, Rinaldo Nazzaro—founder of The Base, ex-Pentagon contractor, current St. Petersburg resident, alleged Russian intelligence asset—released an audio message calling for “acceleration teams” to conduct “targeted attacks on essential infrastructure” in the United States.

December 21st, a fire at PG&E’s Mission Street substation knocked out power to 130,000 San Francisco customers. One of the largest urban blackouts in recent American history.

The Base, fundamentally a Nazi group, is a designated terrorist organization in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the European Union.

It is not designated in the United States.

The FBI under President Trump, as a matter of historical fact, is acting today like how President Wilson did 100 years ago. Director Patel has expressly refused to investigate foreign assets and domestic terrorists threatening Americans:
…openly rerouted resources away from investigations of far-right extremists.

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Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, once made a highly-debatable distinction between “friendly” right-wing “authoritarian” regimes (which were mostly U.S. and Western allies) and “unfriendly” left-wing “totalitarian” dictatorships (which the U.S. abhorred).

Around the same time, successive U.S. administrations were cozying up to a rash of authoritarian regimes, mostly in the Middle East, widely accused of instituting emergency laws, detaining dissidents, cracking down on the press, torturing political prisoners and rigorously imposing death penalties.

Kirkpatrick’s distinction between user-friendly right-wing regimes and unfriendly left-wing dictators prompted a sarcastic response from her ideological foe at that time, former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who shot back: “It seems to me that if you’re on the rack (and being tortured), it doesn’t make any difference if your torturer is right-handed or left-handed.”

Last month, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, warned that rigorous oversight of security and policing trade fairs is necessary to prevent prohibited and inherently abusive law enforcement equipment hitting the market after such items were found on display at Milipol 2025, an arms and security trade fair held in Paris from 18 to 21 November.

“Direct-contact electric shock devices, multiple kinetic impact projectiles and multi-barrel launchers cause unnecessary suffering and ought to be banned,” Edwards said. “Their trade and promotion should be prohibited across all 27 EU Member States and globally.”

Under the EU Anti-Torture Regulation – first introduced in 2006 and strengthened in 2019 – companies are banned from promoting, displaying or trading certain equipment that can be used for torture or ill-treatment. In 2025, the EU further expanded the list of prohibited and controlled law enforcement items, according to a UN press release.

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Investigators have formally charged Kasparov in absentia with public calls for terrorist activity and the public justification of terrorism.

If convicted, the former world chess champion faces a potential prison sentence of up to seven years under Russian criminal law.

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“These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office alleged in a press release that contains links to all five lawsuits. “ACR in its simplest terms is an uninvited, invisible digital invader. This software can capture screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time, and transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent. The companies then sell that consumer information to target ads across platforms for a profit. This technology puts users’ privacy and sensitive information, such as passwords, bank information, and other personal information at risk.”
[…]
It would be unreasonable to expect consumers to understand that Samsung TVs come equipped with surveillance capabilities, the lawsuit said. “Most consumers do not know, nor have any reason to suspect, that Samsung Smart TVs are capturing in real-time the audio and visuals displayed on the screen and using the information to profile them for advertisers,” it said.

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