If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The FBI is buying Americans’ location data again. Director Kash Patel confirmed it to lawmakers on Wednesday, confirming what we already knew: that it has resumed purchasing commercial surveillance data, including detailed location histories, from data brokers. The brokers feeding that data pipeline source much of it from phone apps and games that people use daily without realizing they’re being tracked. By the time a precise location record reaches a federal agency, it may have originated from a weather app or a mobile game, passed through an advertising middleman, and been packaged for resale, with the person who generated it never consulted or notified. Senator Ron Wyden asked Patel directly whether the FBI would commit to not buying Americans’ location data without a warrant. Patel declined. The agency “uses all tools…to do our mission,” he told the committee. He followed up by confirming that “we do purchase commercially available information that is consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act,” adding that it “has led to some valuable intelligence for us.” Wyden called that arrangement exactly what it is: the government buying what it cannot legally seize. Purchasing information on Americans without a warrant is “an outrageous end-run around the Fourth Amendment,” he said, referring to the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The workaround is not unique to the FBI. Federal agencies are generally required to convince a judge that probable cause exists before demanding private records from a tech or phone company. The commercial data market offers a way around that requirement entirely. Agencies simply purchase what they would otherwise need a warrant to obtain, creating a market for data grabbing and exploiting a legal gap that courts have not yet addressed. Wyden and other lawmakers introduced the Government Surveillance Reform Act last week, which would require a court-authorized warrant before any federal agency can purchase Americans’ data from brokers. The bill is bipartisan and bicameral. Without it, the gap that lets agencies buy their way around the Fourth Amendment remains open. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post FBI Resumes Buying Americans’ Location Data Without Warrants appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

For five centuries, the image of Anne Boleyn has been analysed, scrutinised, and reimagined. Yet while her name is synonymous with the seismic shift of the English Reformation, a fundamental question remains: Do we actually know what she looked like? In History Hit’s compelling documentary ‘The Face of Anne Boleyn: Capturing a Queen’, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb visits Hever Castle – Anne’s childhood home  – to explore a landmark exhibition, Capturing a Queen, that brings together the largest collection of Anne’s portraits ever assembled. The documentary highlights the cutting-edge forensic science being used to determine if any of these surviving portraits’ “faces” capture the real woman, or if they are merely products of dynastic propaganda. Sign up to watch Beauty vs. deformity The mystery begins with conflicting contemporary accounts. Contemporaries of Anne often noted her “beguiling dark eyes” and an elegant, olive-toned complexion. However, as Professor Lipscomb notes, “When it comes to Anne Boleyn, we need to think about who is writing the account.” The most enduring – and infamous description came decades after her death.  In 1585, Catholic polemicist Nicholas Sander claimed Anne had a projecting tooth, a large cyst under her chin, and six fingers on her right hand. Writing 50 years after her execution, Sander’s “witch-like” caricature was a calculated attempt to delegitimise her daughter, Elizabeth I. This tug-of-war between admiration and vilification has coloured every artistic representation of Anne for centuries. The “Most Happy” discovery The documentary explores the collection of portraits of Anne from the 16th century, many of which depict her wearing a ‘B’ necklace – the iconic pearl strand that has become Anne’s visual shorthand. It also highlights a rare artefact: ‘The Moost Happi Medal’. Loaned from the British Museum, this lead medallion from 1534 was cast when Anne was thought to be pregnant with a son. It is the only contemporary likeness of Anne undisputed by historians. Though damaged, it serves as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for her features, providing a vital prototype to compare against later, potentially fictionalised paintings.  ‘The Moost Happi Medal’ – Left: original medal, damaged. Right: original sketchImage Credit: British Museum / Hever Castle / History Hit Icons of authority In her lifetime, Anne was often defined by her personal iconography, which would have been familiar to everyone at court. These included a crowned falcon perched on a rose-bearing stump (a potent symbol of fertility and her promise of a male heir), and a leopard (a fierce emblem of royal authority). Such symbols of Anne were also found on her personal possessions. At Hever, Suzannah examines Anne’s personal velvet-covered Book of Ecclesiastes. As Assistant Curator Kate McCaffrey remarks, “Her DNA is all over this.” It is in these intimate objects that we find a more authentic trace of Anne than many stylised portraits. A dynastic mask After her execution in 1536, Anne’s image was effectively purged from the royal record. It only resurfaced decades later during the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth I, as wealthy patrons commissioned ‘corridor portraits’ to signal Protestant loyalty to the Queen. Scientific analysis, however, reveals a startling truth: many of these images were created using standardised “patterns” or stencils. Under-drawings suggest artists weren’t painting a woman they remembered, but were likely mapping Elizabeth I’s long, elegant face backward onto her mother. During a perilous period for Elizabeth I’s reign, this “Elizabethanising” of Anne served to visually cement the Queen’s legitimacy to the court. As Suzannah summarises, this also implies that by the 1580s, painters didn’t know what Anne Boleyn looked like, so they were essentially “creating Anne from scratch on the basis of her daughter.” Production shot of Prof Suzannah Lipscomb and Dr. Owen Emmerson discussing one of Anne Boleyn’s portraits on display at Hever CastleImage Credit: History Hit The Hever Rose portrait A lot of the research done at Hever Castle has been focused on a well-known portrait in their own collection – the ‘Hever Rose Portrait’.  Unlike the standardised Elizabethan patterns, this painting displays distinct facial variations and a deliberate later inclusion of Anne’s hands – showing a normal number of fingers – holding a rose of Lancaster, likely a direct rebuttal to Sanders’ ‘six-fingered’ rumours. Dendrochronology has dated the wood panel used in the portrait to 1583. The portrait was sent to the Hamilton Kerr Institute at the Fitzwilliam Museum where an array of non-invasive technologies – including infra-red, x-rays, X-radiography and micro-invasive sampling – were used to help peer through the centuries of pigment and analyse the chemical composition of the paint. Research scientist Paul Van Laar explains that “The exciting thing about many of these techniques is that we can look beneath what we see with the naked eye. We see the top paint layer but we never know what’s hidden underneath”. Analysis of the Hever Rose portrait of Anne BoleynImage Credit: History Hit The findings suggest that while this specific portrait was painted in 1583 – a perilous year for Elizabeth I’s reign – it was transferred from a master “pattern” that likely pre-dates the painting by decades. Could that master image date back to Anne’s own lifetime? This offers a tantalising possibility: a surviving link to a master image created during Anne’s actual lifetime. The search continues Finding the “real” Anne is about more than aesthetics. As Dr. Owen Emmerson observes, her contemporaries valued her “style, charisma, and intelligence” over her physical features. Yet, the quest to find the real face of Anne Boleyn is more than mere curiosity. Reclaiming her true likeness is an act of historical justice – stripping away the propaganda of her enemies and the political filters of her descendants to see the woman herself. Join Suzannah Lipscomb at Hever Castle as she aims to uncover ‘The Face of Anne Boleyn: Capturing a Queen’. Sign up to watch

Yo, Chuck! Remember When 'Defender of the Faith' Meant Something to a British Monarch?

He now holds the coveted title of greatest distance covered in a motion-sensing vehicle by a goldfish in one minute.

Rogue waves were dismissed as nonsense for centuries, until New Year's Day in 1995. Their counterpart – rogue holes – were only proved real in 2012.

Plus why if astrophage were a thing, it would be up to the amateur astronomers to save us all.

Prominent Democrat lawyer David Boies, best known for representing Al Gore in Bush v. Gore after the contested 2000 election, riled many of his fellow Democrats by recently  writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed, "Partisanship on Iran Is Dangerous for America," with the subtitle of "Trump is doing the right thing for the U.S., and we Democrats should judge the war on the merits." Needless to say this set many liberals on edge, including a highly irked Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker. He doesn't tolerate dissent from the Democrat party line well. Earlier, Politico found an anonymous Democrat strategist to characterize Chotiner's book interview with former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last October to “watching Mike Tyson fight a baby.” Therefore when Chotiner later interviewed Boies he couldn't contain his derangement over the support of the Democrat lawyer for Trump on what he is doing in Iran as you can see in his Monday inquest, "Why David Boies Thinks We Should Support Trump’s Iran War." His questions put to Boies in the interview came off as a highly partisan primal scream mix of the accusatory and the downright frustrated as you can see starting with the following question. This war was started by a President who frequently seems unstable, who can’t lay out a clear reason for the war, and who makes vague threats against our allies. We have a Secretary of War who seems to delight in death and destruction. The White House X feed is putting out fascistic video edits of military attacks that delight in violence. How do you synthesize all that with the point you’re trying to make? In response to this unhinged TDS, Boies calmly replied in an utterly reasonable manner as if ignoring the angry screeching of a small child: Sure. I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, Do you believe that this war is necessary or not? And I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, first, Do you believe it’s acceptable for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them? If you believe that, then the next question you have to ask yourself is: Could we have achieved that goal of eliminating the threat that Iran poses by some other means? Apparently this answer by Boies did not placate Chotiner because he later followed up with yet more Orange Man Bad bluster: It just seems like it’s not clear what he’s doing. His Administration has laid out a number of different reasons for the war. Sometimes it is about nuclear weapons. Sometimes not. And it seems like President Trump could keep this going for a very long time. It also seems like he could pull the plug at any minute and decide that the war is over. So it’s very hard to separate the means from the ends, since we don’t know what the ends are. And the means, in terms of civilian casualties and negative effects on the global economy, seem quite perilous. Of course, it was almost inevitable that Chotiner would repeat the F-word in the course of this interrogation: I mentioned the White House posting fascistic video edits of strikes on Iran and the things Pete Hegseth says about killing people. Something just feels wrong about egging them on. Chotiner did not even wait for the results of an investigation into the bombing of a girls school in Iran before reaching the conclusion that he seems to want to be true: There was an American strike that killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, many of them Iranian schoolgirls. The U.S. government denied this for a long time. The President himself is still denying it. It doesn’t take someone supersmart to realize that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth do not care that much about the fact that an American strike killed a bunch of Iranian schoolgirls. I’m curious how you synthesize that with your larger feelings about the war. Chotiner eventually descends into rude smart-alecky potshots about the one who apparently lives 24/7 in his head: Sir, you’re a very, very smart guy. You don’t think Donald Trump actually cares about casualties, do you? And if you think Chotiner merely suffered a brief episode of derangement, he later made clear that he is in fact a very angry liberal who cannot be reasoned with at all as you can see in this question: I’m also thinking of Pete Hegseth gleefully talking about the Iranian warship that we sunk in the Indian Ocean. It does seem like they’re gleeful about death. And also, just knowing what I know about Donald Trump, it makes me wonder how much these things really hurt him emotionally. So kudos to David Boies for putting country ahead of party, but it is obvious that one cannot reason with someone with the anger issues of Isaac Chotiner. In fact, the only thing that could make Chotiner even angrier than he already is would be if Iran concedes defeat in the near future due to Trump's actions. And giving Trump any credit for that would be sure to absolutely enrage him despite the world ending up as a much safer place.

Do you eat steak? You’re killing the planet! So say climate activists. Silly media agree: Vox warns that beef is the “worst thing we eat when it comes to global warming.” The World Economic Forum, which says it’s “committed to improving the state of the world,” released a video promoting a future where “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. You’ll eat much less meat.” How does meat threaten the climate? Cows give off methane — a greenhouse gas. “Cow flatulence,” says Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) on MSNBC, “it actually is an issue.” As usual, she gets it wrong. It’s not flatulence that produces most methane — it’s burping, from the other end. Bill Gates suggested the world should genetically modify cows to “not be so much a source of methane emissions.” Celebrities believe. Ellen DeGeneres tells viewers: “Be neat. No meat.” Arnold Schwarzenegger went vegan and now says, “Less meat, less heat! ... Livestock ... creates more pollution than all the transportation combined.” Is it true? Probably not. In our newest video, Stossel TV Fellow Linnea Lueken checks out the facts. She interviews Sailesh Rao of Climate Healers, a group that promotes global veganism and the end of all animal agriculture. That means no leather for shoes, no wool or cashmere, no eggs or milk. Rao claims animal agriculture has “caused more than half of the warming we are experiencing today.” “That’s just nonsense,” says Gregory Wrightstone, director of the CO2 Coalition. “The life cycle of methane is just 11 years. Any methane emitted today will be gone by the year (2037).” Lueken pushes back, “The United Nations says methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.” “It is 30 times, not 80,” replies Wrightstone, “and CO2 population in the atmosphere is 300 times as much as methane. That means methane’s warming potential itself is actually 10 percent of that of CO2.” He acknowledged that methane does increase warming, but he says that’s not a threat. “We’re going to see 0.05 degrees Celsius warming in the next 50 years from methane,” says Wrightstone. “That’s an extremely small number that you can’t even measure.” “You’re just a science denier,” replies Lueken. “That’s not only wrong, it’s quite insulting to me and my other scientists,” says Wrightstone. “What we’re doing is trying to bring the scientific method into the climate change debate.” I assumed science is what climate scientists do, but Wrightstone says reasonable research rarely gets published. “A lot of the experts, particularly at universities, only get funding if they toe the company line.” The “company line” says climate change is a horrible crisis, so climate researchers need more money. The climate activists push imitation meats like Beyond Meat and Impossible burgers. “Veggie burgers,” says Rao. “Burgers made of mushrooms. The planet is paramount!” But mock meats have never surpassed a 2 percent market share, and lately, sales have been dropping. “Do you really think that Americans are going to give up their hamburgers?” Lueken asks. “It’s a hard sell,” admits Rao, “but nature cannot be argued with.” Activists at the United Nations and World Economic Forum push even more dubious alternatives, such as “insect-based proteins.” The WEF lists “5 reasons why eating insects could reduce climate change.” Ready to eat bugs? Fortunately, the conversation around climate has shifted. The doom and gloom narrative has weakened. “There is no climate crisis,” says Wrightstone. “Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering. Humanity is benefiting. We should celebrate that, not demonize it.” And we should stop spending taxpayer money subsidizing crackpot schemes of climate hysteria promoters like Al Gore and his rich friends. Linnea Lueken is the newest Stossel TV Fellow. To apply to be a Fellow, and make a video with our team in New York City, apply at www.johnstossel.com/fellow. Every Tuesday at JohnStossel.com, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Government Gone Wild: Exposing the Truth Behind the Headlines.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation remains a crime scene.Recent reporting by John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy adds more evidence that a once-vaunted law enforcement agency was used for overtly political purposes for nearly a decade, starting in 2016. Documents and interviews cited by Just the News describe four consecutive code-named countersurveillance operations that cast a dragnet around President Trump and his supporters.The time for mean tweets and angry letters is over. If the republic matters, fundamental reform must happen now.The files for these operations — Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost — were reportedly tucked into “prohibited access” files, shielding them from routine disclosure and keeping them under the control of senior FBI leadership and those who knew where to look.This reporting reopens a question Washington keeps trying to close: What does real FBI reform look like?We are not dealing with a handful of discreet scandals. We are dealing with a pattern that was enabled by a systemically broken and corrupted agency. A scalpel won’t fix it. Only a sledgehammer will do — followed by a rebuild.The fork in the roadThe road to FBI reform is long, and the last year has been bumpy — with more than a few premature victory laps. This moment offers an opportunity to get the agenda back on track.The fork in the road is simple: Continue with a piecemeal approach — or revive the demand for total accountability, not only for individuals but for the institution itself.Yes, good people work there. That’s not the issue. The problem lies in the parts of the bureau most capable of using FBI authorities for political ends — federal public corruption, counterintelligence, and domestic terrorism — where ideological activism too often becomes a job requirement.A decade-long patternOver the last 10 years, the FBI has engaged in an unbroken series of ideologically driven investigations targeting conservatives. That includes scorched-earth investigations of President Trump on the thinnest of pretexts — while, at the same time, the bureau appeared to show far less urgency toward well-documented questions involving the Biden family’s foreign-influence and money-trail allegations, including reports of millions of dollars routed to multiple Biden family members through a network of 20 shell companies.The bureau also deviated from law, policy, and investigative procedure in ways that protected Hillary Clinton from the full consequences of her misconduct, while applying a very different standard to President Trump and those around him.Worse, recent reporting suggests a sweeping, coordinated effort — more reminiscent of the old East German Stasi than a constitutional law enforcement agency — to suppress politically damaging evidence under laughable pretexts.RELATED: The next big Supreme Court shift might not be abortion or guns Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesFar beyond a single caseThe pattern extends well beyond these investigations.The FBI interfered in elections on a scale Americans had never seen.The bureau helped censor First Amendment-protected speech at industrial scale.FBI directors and senior officials routinely misled Congress.The FBI stonewalled congressional oversight demands.The bureau smeared peaceful dissenting groups — including faithful Catholics — as potential domestic extremists, as if disagreement with progressive orthodoxies amounts to a predisposition to violence.The FBI routinely slow-walked or obstructed transparency obligations, including FOIA-driven document production.The bureau benefited from a stable of media stenographers at legacy outlets whose livelihoods depend on illegal leaks and unchallenged talking points that reliably advance the same ideological narratives.The FBI abused its authority in ways that look less like policing and more like intimidation: targeting families, punishing speech, and applying radically different enforcement standards depending on the target’s politics.The FBI cannot fix itselfThe FBI has not meaningfully corrected itself after repeated exposures. In case after case, the bureau offers the same ritual: Mistakes were made; things are not as bad as they look; reforms are under way; no one should worry. Then nothing changes.One recent example says it all: A deputy assistant director of counterintelligence had the audacity to advise Congress that she had not read — or even been briefed on — the Durham report’s findings. That posture is not reform. It is contempt.As of today, FBI senior leadership includes people who participated in these abuses or watched them unfold and did nothing. How many are now subverting efforts to expose the truth by slow-walking document production, limiting evidence releases, and dribbling out incomplete records?The time for mean tweets and angry letters is over. If the republic matters, fundamental reform must happen now.Start with the sacred cowThe first step is taking on the FBI’s most protected function: counterintelligence.Israel’s Shin Bet and Britain’s MI5 offer an important contrast. Their governments separate intelligence collection from law enforcement power. Those agencies gather intelligence. They do not carry routine arrest and prosecution authority. That structural separation limits the risk of domestic spying on political dissidents and helps prevent the rise of an unaccountable secret-police state.The FBI has repeatedly proven itself incapable of maintaining that boundary. It has refused congressional oversight, abused its powers, and used intelligence authorities to subvert a duly elected president. That cannot continue.Reform means separating intelligence collection from domestic law enforcement. Strip the FBI of its counterintelligence function and reassign it to an intelligence agency that lacks routine police powers and is subject to tighter controls.RELATED: Trump promised ‘retribution.’ Congress keeps funding the machine. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesReform that imposes consequencesThis step should set the tone for what follows.There must be prosecutions for civil rights violations committed under color of law. There must be large-scale reassignments for those involved — not only the shot-callers but the enabling middle management that kept the machinery running.Transparency and oversight need a full overhaul. Selective briefings to a handful of congressional offices have become a substitute for systemic reform. That approach has trained the public to tune out. People can’t absorb yet another “shocking” revelation that produces nothing but hearings and headlines.Instead, the government should dump documents directly to the public — at scale — so that independent investigators can mine them. What a few gatekeepers do now should be done by many. The oversight and FOIA machinery is broken by design, and bureaucrats use delay as a veto.One example should alarm every American: the FBI’s cozy relationship with Netflix. If the country’s dominant cultural propaganda machine coordinated with federal law enforcement, the public has a right to know. Those documents should not be trapped in the decaying Hoover Building.This won’t be easy. It was never supposed to be.The first year has been rocky. Now comes the test: whether the people in charge will rediscover the courage to destroy what is broken — before it can be turned back against Americans again.

Biden administration officials and so-called experts characterized COVID-19 vaccines as "safe and effective" during the pandemic. In the face of an avalanche of tragic evidence to the contrary, the powers that be waged costly and unsuccessful propaganda and censorship campaigns to cure Americans' skepticism.Although the Trump administration has alternatively acknowledged the risks and fallout associated with the vaccines — the Food and Drug Administration admitting, for instance, that the vaccines killed numerous children — a coalition of medical organizations is fighting to legally force the government to keep recommending the COVID jabs to healthy kids and pregnant women.That legal effort appears especially questionable given the finding in a recent study that children spared from the vaccine also appear to have been spared from an unfortunate health complication.'I only feel more vindicated I didn't take the COVID shot.'The peer-reviewed study — conducted by researchers at the University of Oxford, the University of Bristol, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and published in January in the scientific journal Epidemiology — looked at the safety and effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccine in healthy children ages 5-15 following the rollout that began in late 2021.Using data from the OpenSAFELY-TPP database with the blessing of NHS England, the researchers compared the "effectiveness and safety of: (1) the first vaccine dose versus no vaccination and (2) a second dose versus a single dose only."Specifically, they compared 141,711 children ages 5-11 and 410,463 adolescents ages 12-15 who were given a first dose of the vaccine with equal numbers of unvaccinated children from the same age groups.RELATED: 'Rogue' Biden judge blocks critical pieces of RFK Jr.'s vaccine reform Photographer: Emily Elconin/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesThe researchers found that the vaccination provided some benefits, including an "initial protective effect" that waned by 14 weeks as well as a lower incidence of emergency room visits than recorded among the unvaccinated cohort.They noted, however, that "myocarditis and pericarditis were documented only in the vaccinated groups, with rates of 27 and 10 cases/million after the first and second doses, respectively."As late as January 2023, the U.K. Health Security Agency said that "the reported rate for heart inflammation (myocarditis and pericarditis) was 13 per million first doses and 8 per million second doses of the monovalent Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine" among those under the age of 18."That there were no cases of myocarditis or pericarditis in the unvaccinated group does not mean that such events cannot occur without COVID-19 vaccination, only that these events were not observed in the unvaccinated groups in our specific matched analyses," the study noted.Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment from Blaze News.For adolescents, the reduction in risk of COVID-19 hospitalization following vaccination was larger than the corresponding increase in risk of both myocarditis and pericarditis, said the researchers. The same could not, however, be said of younger children."The reduction in risk of COVID-19 hospitalization in children (−0.02 for first dose vs. unvaccinated) was lower than the increase in risk of pericarditis (0.22)," said the study.Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who introduced legislation last month that would strip the liability shield from vaccine manufacturers, said in response to the study, "As it stands right now, families are limited as to how they can seek justice due to legal carveouts for COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.""We ought to pass my bill, the End the Vaccine Carveouts Act, to hold pharma accountable properly," added Paul.Turning Point USA contributor Riley Gaines said, "As more time passes, I only feel more vindicated I didn't take the COVID shot. I feel sorry for the people who did."Last year, the FDA required Pfizer and Moderna to start noting the estimated unadjusted incidence of heart conditions following administration of the 2023-2024 formula of the BNT162b2 and Spikevax vaccines as well as the longitudinal results of a 2024 study concerning cardiac manifestations and outcomes of vaccine-associated myocarditis in American youths.H/T Evie MagazineEditor's note: This article has been edited after publication to note that Blaze News reached out to Pfizer for comment but did not receive a response.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!