The United States has accelerated preparations that officials and analysts say could support a potential large-scale military strike on Iran, marked by a critical diplomatic drawdown and a historic massing of regional forces. On February 27, the U.S. State Department officially updated its travel advisory, authorizing the departure of non-emergency government personnel and their families from Mission Israel. In an overnight email, Ambassador Mike Huckabee urged staff wishing to leave to “do so TODAY,” signaling an urgent window for departure before commercial options could become limited if regional security degrades further.

“You’ll have to ask my husband.” That moment has arrived. Former President Bill Clinton will sit for a deposition Friday, and face House Oversight investigators eager to revisit the questions Hillary Clinton answered — and the ones she deflected — during her six-hour testimony about Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton’s deposition is expected to go “even longer” than his wife Hillary Clinton’s testimony, which lasted over six hours on Thursday, according to Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer. Republicans said that Hillary Clinton answered most of their questions, but they were disappointed that the former secretary of state and first lady told them around a dozen times, “You’ll have to ask my husband,” Comer said. “So, we have a lot of questions for her husband tomorrow,” the House Oversight chairman told reporters on Thursday evening. “And I’m confident that deposition will last even longer than this one.” Hillary Clinton also spoke to reporters outside the performing arts center where her deposition took place in Chappaqua, New York, and blasted Republicans for asking “very repetitive” questions after she stated that she never met Epstein. Hillary Clinton also suggested that her husband will focus on the “chronology” of his relationship with Epstein and argue that he only spent time with the financier before Epstein was charged and pleaded guilty to soliciting a child for prostitution. “I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of people who had contact with [Epstein] before his criminal pleas in ’08 were like most people, they did not know what he was doing,” Hillary Clinton said. “And I think that is exactly what my husband will testify to tomorrow.” The former president will likely have much more to address during his deposition than his wife, as Bill Clinton traveled numerous times on Epstein’s private plane. He also appears in multiple instances in the Epstein files recently released by the Justice Department, including in photos that show the former president schmoozing with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as multiple photos that show Bill Clinton in a swimming pool with Maxwell and enjoying a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted. The former president was also seen in a picture getting a back massage from Chauntae Davies, one of Epstein’s accusers. Davies has not accused Clinton of acting inappropriately. Neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton has been accused of any wrongdoing related to Epstein’s sex crimes, and the former president and first lady have stated that they never visited Epstein’s private island. After photos of Bill Clinton were released among the millions of Epstein-related documents and files by the Justice Department, the former president’s chief of staff, Angel Ureña, accused the Trump administration of scapegoating Bill Clinton.  “The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” Ureña said. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy, 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be.” Documents released by the Justice Department also show that Maxwell had a major role in the founding of the Clinton Global Initiative, a project of the Clinton Foundation to bring world leaders together to discuss future action. While coordinating with Epstein, Maxwell took part in budget discussions when the former president was first attempting to launch the initiative in 2004, just two years before Epstein was indicted, The New York Times reported. Maxwell, a British former socialite, told the Justice Department during an interview last year that Bill Clinton was her friend, “not Epstein’s friend.”

'Persons may wish to consider leaving Israel while commercial flights are available'

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Watch Monsters on TV and Fight The Real Monsters Banning Books Plus: Exploring space and dispatches from Minneapolis By Molly Templeton | Published on February 27, 2026 Photo: Apple TV Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Apple TV Is anyone else counting the days until daylight saving time kicks in? I could just, you know, really use a little more sunlight. My solar cells need recharging. My evening walks need brightness! Let there be liiiiiiiiight! Sorry. Having a moment. While I would like to make like a cat and curl up in a sunbeam, oblivious to the world, I’m entirely too online for that. So I’ve been reading, and asking for recommendations, and getting really really really excited for the return of a certain monster-centric TV show this week. It’s time! It’s really time! Brace yourself for titans, stay warm, and tell your friends you love them. It’s Monarch Time and I’m So Freaking Ready FINALLY. Today, Friday, February 27, we finally get the second season of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a show in which I did not at all expect to get deeply invested in when it premiered in 2023. I haven’t kept up with the Godzilla movies. I have been feeling deeply franchise-shy after the diminishing returns of the MCU. But this is something else—character-driven, intriguing, rich with mysteries and complications, and despite the Titans, human-sized. The cast is great across the board, but I really, really love Anna Sawai, who went on to win a Golden Globe for her work in Shogun. The Expanse’s Dominique Tipper shows up all too briefly (everyone on The Expanse, like everyone on The Magicians, should get a million excellent roles). Kiersey Clemons (The Flash) deserves them as well. If you found the younger Russell, Wyatt, quite grating as John Walker, I absolutely do not regret to inform you that he makes up for it in this show. He plays the younger version of a character played by his dad, Kurt, and it works better than it should. It’s all very complicated and intergenerational and fantastic; bravo to creators Matt Fraction and Chris Black for making it work. If you haven’t watched the first season yet, get thee to Apple TV, immediately. Megan Giddings Stays Open-Hearted in Minneapolis Megan Giddings writes fantastic books. Her haunting debut, Lakewood, was an NPR Book of the Year. Her second novel, The Women Could Fly, is the kind of dystopia that isn’t, really; its vision of a nation controlling its women is all too real. (I loved that book.) Giddings is also an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, which means she lives in Minneapolis—and that’s what she writes about in a new piece for McSweeney’s. In “Open-Hearted in Minneapolis” she writes, “Here we are in Minneapolis donating food, we are donating games and books and art supplies to kids who can’t go outside or visit their friends, we are donating coats, we are donating meals, we are donating time, we are donating the same fifty dollars back and forth, we are donating whistles, we are learning how to make a functional community when it’s our own government disrupting our lives.” It’s a beautiful, infuriating, necessary reminder that while the headlines from Minnesota may have changed, the reality of living there hasn’t. The way she ends the piece cracked something in me—maybe something that needed cracking. It’s so hard to stay openhearted. But it is also necessary to try. Books! In! Spaaaaaaaaaaace! You ever have a little subgenre awakening? Like, say, you realize that you’ve loved a genre all along, and you just hadn’t quite figured that out about yourself? I’m having a space opera moment. I want to read all the big epic massive (yes, I’m being redundant on purpose) space books. Space fantasy also welcome, always. This is, in part, because I’ve just read Claire North’s Slow Gods, and Bethany Jacobs’ This Brutal Moon is up next, and there’s a new book in James SA Corey’s Captive’s War coming soon. But I need more. So I asked the internet for recommendations, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten so many, so quickly. Among the ones I most want to read just as soon as I have time for more books: Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series; Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan series; Megan O’Keefe’s Devoured Worlds; and Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds. There are just so many. They all look so good. So I’m telling you about them. Let’s have a little space opera moment, shall we? The Book Banning Attempts Continue—And Are Getting Worse (Almost) every week, in these posts, I write “Call your reps” in the intro. I don’t often specify what about, simply because there are just too many things to be angry about at any given current moment. But this week there’s a specific thing that just popped up on my radar: a nationwide book ban bill that has been introduced in the House of Representatives. The bill seeks “To amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the use of funds provided under such Act to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” It then goes on to define “sexually oriented material” as material that “includes any depiction, description, or simulation of sexually explicit conduct (as defined in subparagraphs (A) and (B) of section 2256(2) of title 18, United States Code)” or “involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism.” As Kelly Jensen writes at Book Riot, “The latter is an intentionally harmful word used as a cudgel to harm trans people. Such a broad definition also ensures that this kind of bill could be applicable in any situation where it would benefit the banners. It isn’t a stretch to see a bill like this used to outright ban all books by or about LGBTQ+ people under the guise of it being ‘sexually oriented.’” You know what I’m going to say here. Call your reps. Especially if they are among the sponsors of this horrendous bill.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: Watch Monsters on TV and Fight The Real Monsters Banning Books appeared first on Reactor.

New attack ads from candidates in the race for Texas’ Senate seat, along with recent polling, have brought the race to a boiling point. Republican Candidates Get Vicious On Wednesday, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, released an ad against his primary opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, for “cheating on his wife” and “now sleeping around with a married mother of seven.” The ad then states Paxton’s net worth increased by 7,000% while in office, and that his actions in office are “even more troubling.” Paxton was then accused of “giving money to left-wing orgs,” which include those who “perform gender affirming surgeries to children as young as seven.” Paxton did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. On Tuesday, the Star Liberty PAC, a repeated contributor to Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton’s campaign, aired an advertisement attacking his primary opponent, Rep. Wesley Hunt, for his voting record. “Hunt has missed 85% of the vote this year,” the ad said. “Hunt has one of the worst voting records in the House.” Hunt has repeatedly missed votes in the House of Representatives to be with voters in Texas ahead of the election. Most notably, Hunt missed a key appropriations vote in January. The ad then said Hunt has gone “AWOL,” and accused him of stalling President Donald Trump’s agenda. “By going AWOL, Wesley Hunt has stalled President Trump’s agenda, but Hunt has made time for luxurious island trips and made taxpayers reimburse him for $65,000.” Hunt and Cornyn did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. Another ad released by Texans for a Conservative Majority, a PAC that has contributed to Cornyn in the past, called Hunt “woke,” after it was reported in December that he served on a private school’s board of trustees while it made diversity, equity, and inclusion “foundation” to the school’s principles. Another ad against Hunt called him “fake MAGA.” In response, Hunt said on social media that “when it mattered most, John Cornyn didn’t fight. He folded. He compromised. He surrendered to the Left.” Recent polling of likely voters shows Paxton leading Cornyn by a point with Hunt in a distant third. Nearly 30% of Emerson College’s poll said they were “undecided,” however. Trump has yet to endorse a candidate. NEW: TEXAS POLL Democratic Senate PrimaryJames Talarico 47%Jasmine Crockett 38%15% undecidedRepublican Senate PrimaryKen Paxton 27%John Cornyn 26%Wesley Hunt 16%29% undecided@PPowerRanker analysis: https://t.co/5bJUNDp6hAFull results: https://t.co/wxpd9dIOdU pic.twitter.com/uTAqmRbZs3— Emerson College Polling (@EmersonPolling) January 15, 2026 Democrats’ Senate Fiasco On the Democrat side, the race between Texas State Rep. James Talarico and Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Senate nomination is a “coin flip,” according to Luke Warford of the Agave Democratic Infrastructure Fund, a group supporting Democrats in the Lone Star State. Warford recently told NOTUS that “this is the most competitive Democratic primary we’ve had in a long time.” Victory will likely be determined by non-white voters, as a majority of the Democrat base in Texas is non-white, NOTUS noted, citing a study by the University of Houston Hobby School of Public Affairs. “We’ve seen in the polling that Jasmine Crockett is clearly winning among Black voters, and Talarico probably has a not as big magnitude, but a slight lead among … white voters and Latino voters, depending on what poll you look at,” Warford told NOTUS. A recent Emerson poll showed Crockett in the lead by double digits over Talarico, with 56% of respondents choosing Crockett and 44% choosing Talarico. Talarico, however, might be able to make a final push for victory given Crockett’s recent comments about Hispanic Republican voters. Crockett claimed Hispanic Republicans have a “slave mentality.” “It’s almost like a slave mentality that they have,” Crockett said. “It is wild to me when I hear how anti-immigrant they are, as immigrants, many of them. I’m talking about people that literally just got here and can barely vote that are having this kind of attitude.” Crockett and Talarico have not responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment. The post Texas Primaries Reach Boiling Point With Help of Vicious Attack Ads appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Rumble has completed the rollout of Rumble Shorts across every major platform. The feature went live on the web at rumble.com/shorts earlier this month. Google Play approved it for Android on February 13. Apple signed off on iOS on February 25, making it now available cross-platform. The full stack is live; vertical videos of 90 seconds or less, swipeable, personalized, and tipped through Rumble Wallet. Short-form video is the dominant format on the internet right now, and the dominant platform for it has spent the past year demonstrating exactly what centralized content control looks like at scale. TikTok’s censorship controversies, its terms of service rewrites, and the political pressure applied to its existence have pushed creators and viewers toward alternatives. Rumble is the most prominent video platform built around a different premise. “Rumble Shorts provides a digestible viewing option, and of course, there’s free speech with every swipe,” said Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski at launch. “With Rumble Shorts, we stay true to our mission of defending free expression, while we also boost creator discovery and offer even more opportunities for creators and channels to grow and get paid.” The contrast with TikTok’s model is built into the product. On TikTok, the algorithm decides what you see, and the platform decides what creators are allowed to say. Rumble’s Shorts feed is personalized, too, but the platform’s pitch is that what fills it won’t be quietly throttled for political content, that a creator who posts views inconvenient to governments or advertisers won’t find their videos mysteriously failing to reach anyone. “Rumble Shorts delivers quick, easy-to-consume videos, with free speech built into every swipe,” Pavlovski said following the iOS approval. “At Rumble, we are reinforcing our commitment to protecting open expression at the same time we’re helping creators get discovered, expand their audiences, and increase their earnings. Once again, Rumble is showing why it’s the top destination for content creators.” The monetization angle is important here, too. Rumble Shorts integrates tipping through Rumble Wallet, a crypto-based payment system the company launched earlier this year. Creators on platforms that censor them don’t only lose reach, they lose income. A platform where speech and payment infrastructure are both outside the reach of a single app store or payment processor is a meaningfully different thing from YouTube or TikTok, where demonetization is a routine enforcement tool. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Rumble Shorts Is Everywhere Now, and It’s Coming for TikTok appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Two senior Republican lawmakers are demanding answers from the British government about its secret order forcing Apple to break its own encryption. The UK has until March 11 to respond. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast sent a joint letter on Wednesday to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, pressing for a formal briefing on the Technical Capability Notice (TCN) served on Apple under the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act. We obtained a copy of the letter for you here. It’s the latest move in a surveillance fight that began over a year ago and has rattled the US-UK relationship at the highest levels. In January 2025, UK security officials secretly ordered Apple to build a backdoor into iCloud that would allow them to decrypt any user’s data, anywhere in the world. Not just suspected criminals, not just UK citizens. Everyone. The order targeted Apple’s Advanced Data Protection (ADP) feature, the optional end-to-end encryption that ensures even Apple can’t read iCloud backups. Apple’s response was to pull ADP from the UK market entirely in February 2025, stripping strong encryption options from roughly 35 million iPhone users rather than comply with a demand it couldn’t legally discuss. UK law makes it a criminal offense for companies to confirm or deny the existence of such orders, even to their own government. Apple couldn’t tell the US Department of Justice that the order existed. The DOJ couldn’t verify whether it complied with the CLOUD Act, the bilateral agreement governing how the two countries share access to digital evidence. That agreement explicitly states it “shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data.” The UK’s order appears to do exactly that. The reaction in Washington was bipartisan. Senator Ron Wyden and Congressman Andy Biggs slammed the order as “effectively a foreign cyber attack waged through political means.” President Trump compared the UK’s conduct directly to China’s. Speaking to the Spectator after meeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump said: “We actually told [Starmer] . . . that’s incredible. That’s something, you know, that you hear about with China.” DNI Secretary Tulsi Gabbard called any attempt to compel Apple to create security weaknesses an “egregious violation” of privacy and confirmed legal and intelligence teams were assessing the implications. The pressure worked, partially. Gabbard announced in August, 2025, that Britain had backed down from its demand for access to data belonging to Americans. But British citizens are still at risk. A UK government spokesperson reaffirmed its commitment to cooperating with the US on security while also protecting civil liberties, stating: “We will always take all actions necessary at the domestic level to keep UK citizens safe.” The core demand, reshaped with a domestic focus, reportedly remained on the table. After the original order triggered backlash in Washington, the British government reissued the demand with a domestic focus, seemingly to avoid international fallout. The legal infrastructure that produced the original order hasn’t gone anywhere. In a telling sign of internal contradictions, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre quietly removed its own guidance advising users to enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS devices, without any public explanation. At the same time, the Home Office was pressuring Apple to undermine that very same encryption. Jordan and Mast first raised these concerns in May 2025 with then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. They received a response from Security Minister Dan Jarvis in June. The relevant details remained undisclosed. Their letter to Mahmood states plainly that they have “serious concerns that the actions of the UK are weakening the security, privacy, and constitutional rights of American citizens.” The UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal ruled in April 2025 that “bare details” of Apple’s legal challenge could be made public. Justices Rabinder Singh and Jeremy Charles Johnson stated “[w]e do not accept that the revelation of the bare details of the case would be damaging to the public interest or prejudicial to national security.” What that ruling confirmed: a legal demand for backdoor access existed. Everything beyond that remains classified. The Committees are also citing the UK’s own Investigatory Powers Commissioner, who stated in his December 2025 annual report that “[w]e welcome the decision of the Tribunal to order that the bare facts of the case to be disclosed to the public as we consider it is vitally important for there to be a mature and informed public debate about lawful access capabilities.” Jordan and Mast quote it back directly at Mahmood: “For there to be a ‘mature and informed public debate,’ it is imperative that the Committees fully understand the actions taken by the UK government with respect to the TCN issued to Apple.” Their request is straightforward: a briefing before March 11, and permission for Apple to disclose TCN details “to the U.S. Department of Justice to ensure compliance with our bilateral agreement with the UK under the CLOUD Act.” A year of asking has produced a letter from a junior minister and classified silence. The Apple case is not an isolated incident. Under Starmer, arrests over social media posts have become common, police forces have expanded facial recognition with minimal oversight, and the government is advancing plans for a centralized digital identity system. The encryption fight is part of a pattern. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post US Republican Lawmakers Demand Answers on UK’s iCloud Encryption Backdoor Order appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The FTC just told companies they can collect children’s personal data without parental consent, as long as it’s for “age verification.” That’s the practical effect of a policy statement the agency issued this week. Under COPPA, websites collecting data on kids under 13 generally need verifiable parental consent first. The FTC’s new statement carves out an exception: gather whatever personal information you need to verify someone’s age, and the Commission won’t come after you for it. The agency calls this child protection. The infrastructure it’s enabling looks different. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said “Age verification technologies are some of the most child-protective technologies to emerge in decades,” and framed the announcement as a tool for parents. What the statement actually does is green-light personal data collection from minors, on the theory that knowing someone’s age requires knowing who they are first. The exemption is conditional. To avoid enforcement, sites must delete age verification data “promptly” after use, restrict third-party sharing to vendors with adequate security assurances, post clear notices about what they’re collecting, and use methods likely to produce “reasonably accurate” results. These requirements are unverifiable by the people whose data gets collected, and enforced by an agency that just announced it won’t enforce. COPPA supposedly exists precisely because children’s personal data is sensitive and companies can’t be trusted to protect it without legal pressure. The FTC’s new exemption uses that same sensitive data as the price of admission for age verification, then steps back from enforcement. The agency is weakening the law’s protections in order to expand the infrastructure that the law was supposedly designed to regulate. The breach record makes that contradiction concrete. Discord’s disclosure that roughly 70,000 users may have had government IDs exposed through a third-party vendor handling age appeals was a preview of what’s to come. Identity documents collected for age verification are high-value targets stored and processed in systems that, as Tea demonstrated months later, can be left completely unsecured. Collecting more of that data, from more platforms, under softer enforcement, doesn’t protect children. It just creates more of the same risk at a greater scale. That breach is instructive. The IDs weren’t collected by Discord as part of general surveillance. They were collected specifically for verification. The FTC’s new framework would permit exactly that arrangement while calling it a safeguard. Policy statements describe how an agency plans to use enforcement discretion, not law. The FTC acknowledged this implicitly by announcing it also intends to review the COPPA Rule itself to formally address age verification. The current statement stays in effect until that review concludes in revised regulations, or until the agency pulls it back. What gets built in the meantime is the issue. Every site that deploys age verification creates a new pipeline: identity documents, biometric scans, or behavioral profiles flowing to platforms to third-party vendors, all of it operating under standards the FTC won’t actively police. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post FTC Says Companies Can Collect Kids’ Personal Data, As Long As It’s Called “Age Verification” appeared first on Reclaim The Net.