Tehran Residents’ Social Media Offer Nightmarish Glimpse of Humanitarian Crisis

Residents of Iran’s sprawling capital, Tehran, woke up earlier this month to scenes that they could probably imagine only in horror films. Clouds of smoke had shrouded the metropolis of 10 million, toxic rain blended with oil poured down from the sky, and the sun remained invisible through noon on the morning of March 8. Hours earlier, Israel had launched airstrikes on 30 oil facilities in Tehran…
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Palestinian Women Arrested to Bait Their Relatives Israel Labels as “Wanted”

Israeli soldiers stormed Suhair Barghouti’s home in the town of Kobar, north of Ramallah in the central West Bank, on Jan. 1. They were looking for her son, Muhammad, 26, who had been released just months earlier after two years of administrative detention without charge. Muhammad wasn’t home at the time; he was visiting his wife’s family in Jericho. Upon learning he wasn’t around…
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USCIS Aims to Expand Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants and US Citizens

The Trump administration is expanding its surveillance of social media — and targeting both documented immigrants and U.S. citizens. Documented spoke to Emile Ayoub, a senior counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program, about a new U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) vetting rule, greenlit last week, that he says poses a serious threat to privacy and…
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French Police Raid X’s Offices in Investigation of Grok’s Deepfake Porn Problem

French police have raided X’s offices in Paris and summoned its chairman, Elon Musk, to testify, in an escalation of a multifaceted investigation into the social media platform’s data use, deepfake porn generation, and other allegations of wrongdoing. Cybercrime investigators in France have been probing the company for over a year, with authorities looking into the company for allegations of…
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New US TikTok Spinoff Will Be Controlled by Trump-Aligned Billionaires

After years of bipartisan attacks on TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, which for a time included an effort to potentially ban the social media app in the U.S., a new U.S. TikTok spinoff has been announced, set to be owned and overseen by a tight-knit consortium of tech and financial megabillionaires, many of whom have had direct business relationships with Trump and members of his…
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Trump’s Response to Reiner’s Death Shows the Cruelty at the Core of His Politics

There are moments when death demands humility, compassion, and moral restraint. Donald Trump, more often than not, answers such moments with cruelty. His reaction to the deaths of actor and filmmaker Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, is not merely a morally repugnant expression of indecency; it is emblematic of an age in which ruthless brutality has become a political style and…
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