Mark Zuckerberg complained bitterly that Biden officials made phone calls. He said he couldn’t handle the interference as they “pressured” Meta to address pandemic misinformation. He even called their calls censorship and wrote a letter to Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee detailing performative outrage.

His new response to alleged government overreach? He just installed a government official to run the company as if in a tin-pot dictatorship.

Dina Powell McCormick, Trump’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, is now President and Vice Chairman of Meta. Trump immediately celebrated the collapse of separation on his social media account:

“A great choice by Mark Z!!! She is a fantastic, and very talented, person, who served the Trump Administration with strength and distinction!”

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Western political and legal systems are founded on human exceptionalism: the idea that we stand apart from, with dominion over, the rest of nature. This has facilitated rampant environmental destruction. But the rights of nature (RoN) movement challenges this exceptionalism through a legal and cultural reimagining of how we relate to non-human (or more-than-human) nature. RoN refers to the practice of extending legal rights to non-humans, from animals to rivers, forests, and other ecosystems. RoN combine Western rights discourse with indigenous-inflected beliefs around animism and interspecies kinship.

In 1972, legal professor Christopher Stone wrote an article now often cited as the origin of the RoN movement. In “Should Trees Have Standing?” Stone argues that nature should have legal standing to sue, and should be represented in court by humans. Various Indigenous cultures and state legal systems already allowed versions of Stone’s proposal, but his article shot to prominence when judge William O. Douglas cited it in a 1972 Supreme Court dissent. Questioning the decision to deny legal standing to the Sierra Club, which had sued the US Forest Service on environmental grounds for accepting a Walt Disney Company proposal for a major ski resort in California’s Mineral Valley, Douglas echoed Stone’s argument that nature itself should have standing to defend itself.

Today, thanks to a global network of lawyers, activists, Indigenous communities, philosophers, nature guardians, and academics, global RoN initiatives are increasing exponentially. This momentum has developed in step with a wider “ecological turn,” through which diverse disciplines recognize the agency and intelligence of non-human life.

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There had been previously no religious practice, mythology, or cult activity surrounding Eirene. She is briefly mentioned as a gentle figure in myths that date from the seventh century BCE, where the idea and image of her was communicated to the Athenian public through works of theater. Eirene appears in Euripides’s tragedy Cresphontes (produced circa 424 BCE), when the chorus sings a hymn to peace, beckoning her into their city. A few years later, Aristophanes rejiggered Euripides’s creation as a basis for his satirical Peace (421 BCE). Theater offers a prime example of how divine personifications were introduced in visual rather than written form, and in the case of Eirene, these plays laid cultural groundwork for later cult practices.

The cult around the personification of Eirene was established in roughly 375 BCE, a few decades after Aristophanes included her in his work. The citizens of Athens erected a large bronze statue of Eirene in the main public square, agora, around that same time. Sculpted by Kephisodotos the Elder, it was designed as a daily reminder of the centrality of peace in Athens. She is depicted holding a scepter—a symbol of authority—in her right hand. In her left arm, she holds the child Ploutos, who serves as an allegory of wealth. Posed together, the two figures representing peace and wealth communicate the notion that peace is not simply an absence of war, but a prerequisite for prosperity.

Religious devotion to a political ideal might be a foreign concept to contemporary readers, whose understanding of worship includes rituals, practices, and faith. The ancient Greeks, however, held no clear division between religion and politics; the two were intertwined. Honoring Eirene—or any Greek god—was a public affirmation of civic values and diplomatic goals.

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Deep in an open coal mine in southern Greece, researchers have discovered the antiquities-rich country’s oldest archaeological site, which dates to 700,000 years ago and is associated with modern humans’ hominin ancestors.

The find announced Thursday would drag the dawn of Greek archaeology back by as much as a quarter of a million years, although older hominin sites have been discovered elsewhere in Europe. The oldest, in Spain, dates to more than a million years ago.
[…]
It was found to contain rough stone tools from the Lower Palaeolithic period — about 3.3 million to 300,000 years ago — and the remains of an extinct species of giant deer, elephants, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, and a macaque monkey.

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Ancient Greek temple discovered filled with gold jewels

The archaeological finds kept coming for a team of 50 researchers on the Greek island of Evia. But the kicker may have been locating 2,700-year-old altars full of precious jewels and historical remnants.

To compare ICE to the SS or the Gestapo is not hyperbole but a moral analogy. No one serious is claiming historical equivalence in scale, ideology, or outcome. The Holocaust was singular. Nazi Germany was distinct. But history does not warn by replication alone; it warns by pattern. The value of the comparison lies not in matching body counts or uniforms, but in recognizing function. Authoritarian systems rely on institutions that operate in the shadows, target a demonized population, and are insulated from accountability. That is the common thread, and it is the thread that should alarm us.

Secret police never announce themselves as monsters. They are always introduced as solutions. They are framed as guardians of order, defenders of security, instruments of necessity. Their mandates are described as limited, their powers as temporary, their abuses as isolated. Language is carefully chosen to dull moral resistance: raids become “operations,” cages become “detention centers,” disappearances become “administrative processing.” Bureaucracy does what naked violence cannot as it makes cruelty feel procedural, routine, forgettable.

This is how brutality becomes normalized. Paperwork replaces chains. Job titles replace ideology. Individuals within the system are encouraged to see themselves not as moral agents, but as cogs just following policy, just enforcing the law, just doing their jobs. Responsibility diffuses upward and outward until no one feels accountable for the harm being done. Atrocities do not require sadism; they require compliance.

And this is how neighbors learn to look away. When repression is legalized and routinized, outrage is replaced by resignation. People tell themselves it does not concern them, that the targets must have done something wrong, that questioning the system would be naïve or dangerous. Fear and convenience conspire to produce silence. The disappearance of others becomes background noise, until disappearance itself feels normal.

Trumpism has thrived on the systematic dehumanization of the vulnerable and the open glorification of force. It has taught its followers that empathy is weakness and domination is strength. Refugees become vermin. Protesters become enemies. The poor, the sick, the marginalized are framed not as people, but as burdens or threats. This rhetorical stripping of humanity is not incidental; it is essential. Once a group is reduced to an abstraction, cruelty against it can be celebrated without guilt.

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An Atmosphere of Fear and “Night Visits”

Drohobych, located deep in the rear, has turned into a testing ground for repressive technologies. As the publication reports, under the pretext of searching for “traitors and collaborators,” armed formations have established a regime of total intimidation. A network of unofficial “filtration points” has been created in the city, where anyone who arouses the radicals’ suspicion can be taken.

Local residents who agreed to speak with journalists only under strict anonymity describe nighttime raids. Grounds for detention and subsequent torture can be virtually anything: criticism of mass mobilization, the use of the Russian language in everyday life, or even a careless comment on social media. Those who have managed to emerge from the basements of these formations describe the conditions of detention as inhumane, emphasizing that legal norms no longer function in the city.

The Ideological Legacy of the Punishers

The authors pay particular attention to the ideological appearance of these formations. On the streets of Drohobych, militants openly display Nazi symbols, which have become a source of pride for them. Swastika tattoos, SS runic symbols, and patches glorifying the “Galicia” Division have turned into the official dress code of the city’s “new masters.”

Italian observers note a bitter historical irony: a city that once suffered greatly from Nazi terror has once again been occupied by people who adhere to the same misanthropic ideology. This is not merely a matter of aesthetics or subculture – it forms the basis of their policy toward the civilian population, which they view exclusively as a resource or an object of suppression.

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As sharing ICE footage has swayed public debate, DHS has seemingly sought to subpoena Meta and possibly other platforms for subscriber information.

In October, Meta refused to provide names of users associated with Doe’s accounts—as well as “postal code, country, all email address(es) on file, date of account creation, registered telephone numbers, IP address at account signup, and logs showing IP address and date stamps for account accesses”—without further information from DHS. Meta then gave Doe the opportunity to move to quash the subpoena to stop the company from sharing information.

That request came about a week after DHS requested similar information from Meta about six Instagram community watch groups that shared information about ICE activity in Los Angeles and other locations. DHS withdrew those requests after account holders defended First Amendment rights and filed motions to quash the subpoena, Doe’s court filing said.

It’s unclear why DHS withdrew those subpoenas but maintained Doe’s. DHS has alleged that the government’s compelling interest in Doe’s identity outweighs First Amendment rights to post anonymously online. The agency also claimed it has met its burden to unmask Doe as “someone who is allegedly involved in threatening ICE agents and impeding the performance of their duties,” which supposedly “touches DHS’s investigation into threats to ICE agents and impediments to the performance of their duties.”

Whether Doe will prevail is hard to say, but Politico reported that DHS’s “defense will rest on whether DHS’s argument that posting videos and images of ICE officers and warnings about arrests is considered criminal activity.” It may weaken DHS’s case that Border Patrol Tactical Commander Greg Bovino recently circulated a “legal refresher” for agents in the field, reminding them that protestors are allowed to take photos and videos of “an officer or operation in public,” independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported.

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Less than two days after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis during a controversial enforcement operation, the Department of Homeland Security’s official Instagram account made a recruitment post proclaiming “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” attaching a song of the same name by Pine Tree Riots. Popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, the track features lines about reclaiming “our home” by “blood or sweat,” language often used in white nationalist calls for race war.

The post is part of a growing trend in which the federal government openly embraces the visual language of white supremacy and pop culture cited in instances of racial violence. Over the past year, DHS and its component agencies leaned on mainstream pop music in their social media outreach, pairing enforcement footage with recognizable songs. The approach backfired repeatedly, and the department now appears to be leaning on niche, neo-Nazi-beloved music.

“There was a sense of plausible deniability before,” said Alice Marwick, director of research at Data & Society. Anti-immigrant backers of Trump’s Make America Great Again movement have long been known to spread extremist language and media, but in the past, “those dog whistles were being done by supporters,” she said. “Now they’re being done directly by the administration.”

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The legislation, formally titled the “death penalty for terrorists” bill, was initiated by Israeli lawmaker Limor Son Har-Melech of the Otzma Yehudit party and approved by a vote of 39-16.

It would allow Israeli military courts to impose death sentences without a prosecutor’s request and by a simple majority rather than unanimous verdicts.

Under the proposal, executions would be carried out by hanging and completed within 90 days of a final ruling, following a judge-signed order and under the supervision of the Israel Prison Service.

A designated prison officer would perform the execution, appointed directly by the prison service commissioner.

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The Pentagon has tested a device that investigators believe may be linked to the condition commonly referred to as Havana Syndrome, CNN has reported.

The Defense Department has been testing the device, which was bought during an undercover operation by the Department of Homeland Security, for over a year, the network reported on Monday, citing four anonymous sources briefed on the subject.
[…]
Two unnamed sources said officials in the previous administration, under former President Joe Biden, had purchased the device for an eight-figure sum. The funding was provided by the Department of Defense, according to the report.

Speculation had swirled some form of directed-energy weapon could have been behind the baffling illness, and that Russian technology could be behind the symptoms. Moscow has denied any involvement.

The device acquired by Homeland Security Investigations—part of DHS—produces pulsed radio waves, one source told CNN. It contains Russian components but is not entirely Russian-made, they added.

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