'Safe and secure'

'I didn’t have enough time'

'Studied by all concerned'

'Everyone stares at the coffin in silent, horrified anticipation'

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Brazil has enacted a new law that mandates age verification across digital platforms, setting the stage for a broader move toward digital identification and the erosion of online anonymity. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed the measure into law last week, framing it as a necessary tool to protect children. However, embedded in the policy is a requirement for platforms to verify the age of all users through mechanisms that extend beyond self-declared age confirmation. Called the “Adultization Bill” or “Digital ECA,” the law will take effect in 180 days and applies to social media, online games, and other digital services. Platforms are now required to implement strict safeguards to shield children from harmful or illegal content. This includes blocking sexual exploitation, harassment, gambling, predatory advertising, and other forms of abuse. But the most far-reaching element is the obligation for all platforms to adopt age checks that regulators are still defining. This opens the door to digital ID systems that would permanently tie users’ online activity to their real-world identity. Brazil’s move follows a growing global trend. Governments in the United Kingdom, the European Union, individual states within the United States, and Australia are all pursuing age verification as a pathway to stronger regulation of the internet. These efforts are often introduced under the banner of protecting children but are increasingly laying the groundwork for mass identification, behavioral monitoring, and an internet where anonymity becomes nearly impossible. President Lula described the law as a step toward national digital sovereignty. “Freedom of expression is a nonnegotiable value, but it cannot serve as an excuse for committing crimes in the digital world,” he said, paying lip service to free speech. The law requires platforms to switch on the strictest parental controls by default. These include time limits, filters on recommended content, blocking of geolocation, and restrictions on adult contact. For users under the age of 16, accounts must be linked to a verified adult who can oversee usage and receive activity reports. Penalties for noncompliance are steep, with fines reaching up to 10 percent of a company’s revenue in Brazil, capped at 10 million dollars per violation. While the law is framed around child protection, the practical outcome is the introduction of infrastructure that transforms how users engage with the internet. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Brazil Enacts Age Verification Law Mandating Digital ID, Curbing Online Anonymity appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

In early modern Europe, life was a precarious affair. Plague, war, and disease were ever-present, and the bewildering fragility of human existence fuelled a deep-seated belief in witchcraft. Witches were thought to consort with the devil and were blamed for all sorts of misfortunes, from withered crops to unexplained deaths. In the third film in History Hit’s partnership with the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb investigates the shifting and often terrifying image of the witch in art in The Ashmolean Up Close: Witches in Picture. Guided by curator An Van Camp, she traces how these figures were depicted in prints and drawings from the 15th to the 17th centuries – a potent reflection of an era gripped by anxiety. The programme reveals a world where superstition, religion, and art collided in a desperate attempt to explain the unexplainable. Sign up to watch From mystery to menace The programme begins with a deep dive into the ambiguous world of 15th-century art. An Van Camp, the museum’s Curator of Northern European Art, shows Suzannah a print by the German master Albrecht Dürer from 1497, now known as ‘The Four Witches’ . While some might interpret it as a scene of temptation or a brothel, a closer look reveals unsettling details – skulls, bones, and bizarre creatures – hinting at something far more sinister. Pondering whether the picture is in part a comment on women’s sexuality, the artwork is a fascinating puzzle, reflecting an age when the line between human vice and dark magic was dangerously blurred. Next, Suzannah examines a more overtly “witchy” drawing: ‘A Witches’ Kitchen’ by Jacques de Gheyn the Younger, a popular artist of the time. This unsettling image, created in the early 1600s, is a stark contrast to Dürer’s work. It depicts a grotesque scene of figures that fit the stereotype of witches, a cauldron, and a disemboweled man, yet it’s also filled with scientific details that echo the era’s emerging study of anatomy. The drawing reveals a world where art, medicine, and the supernatural were intertwined, capturing the widespread fear of witchcraft in an age of accusations and witch trials, as well as religious persecution. ‘A Witches’ Kitchen’ by Jacques de Gheyn the YoungerImage Credit: Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University The witch as a symbol By the 18th century, the witch trials were beginning to fade into history, and a new, more satirical tone began to emerge in art. Suzannah and An study ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ by Claude Gillot. Created more than a century after the Dürer print, this etching is fantastical and almost comical. It depicts a chaotic scene of a witches’ sabbath, but it does so in a way that suggests it’s a social and political critique. The artwork reveals that by this time, the witch had moved from being a terrifying threat to a symbol for artists to satirise their contemporary world. As Suzannah notes, every time we talk about witches in this period, we’re also talking about something else: female sexuality, the study of science, political satire, and religious persecution. The art shows that the witch was a figure onto which people projected their deepest societal anxieties. This is a powerful reminder that these images were not just reflections of people’s fear of magic, but also their unease with changes in society, religion, and politics. The witch bottle The Ashmolean Museum’s collection offers more than just artistic portrayals of witches. Suzannah is given a chance to examine one of the most curious objects in the museum: a witch’s bottle. These stoneware jugs were sealed with a cork and often buried beneath the thresholds or in the walls of houses as a form of protection against harmful magic. Professor Suzannah Lipscomb (left) is shown a witch’s bottle by Ashmolean Museum curator An Van Camp (right).Image Credit: History Hit / Ashmolean Museum Inside the bottles, people would place items believed to repel or absorb the witch’s power, such as sharp iron nails, bent pins, and sometimes even the urine or hair of a person believed to be bewitched. This tangible artefact reveals a world where fears of witchcraft weren’t abstract – they were a constant and terrifying reality that people actively sought to fight against. The Ashmolean’s collection provides a unique and compelling insight into early modern fears. It demonstrates how deeply ideas of witchcraft ran through the daily lives of people, from the highest artist to the most common person seeking to protect their home. Through these enduring objects, we can begin to understand the complex anxieties and beliefs of a culture grappling with the unseen forces of the world. Join Professor Suzannah Lipscomb and An Van Camp as they uncover the hidden fears and fantasies of the early modern world in The Ashmolean Up Close: Witches in Picture. Sign up to watch

Mamdani Was Still Pushing to Defund the Police in 2022 and Beyond

Finding the source of symptoms could become faster, cheaper, safer and more accurate, all as a spin-off of advances in solar energy research.

Was their capture a case of mistaken identity?

On Thursday, President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff Jeff Zients sat down in a closed door session before the House Oversight Committee and confirmed what we all knew and saw, Biden wasn’t fully in charge of the White House. Among the blockbuster revelations: Hunter Biden sat in on meetings about who would be pardoned. The former chief of staff wasn’t in the final meeting about the “most controversial pardons” of his term – which included several members of the Biden family – that were issued on the final day in office. Zients confirmed he didn’t send the email that authorized use of Biden’s autopen. An aide with access to that email sent authorization on his behalf for some of the pardons. Zients called for a full cognitive test after Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Biden began having “difficulty remembering dates and names,” while “decisions that once required three meetings eventually began to require a fourth.”  First Lady Jill Biden urged Zients to adjust the former President’s schedule to get more rest and return to the residence early in the evening.   Former Biden Deputy Chief of Staff Annie Tomasini asked Zients to decrease Biden’s schedule and shorten the distances he would have to walk and the number of stairs to climb. Also on Thursday, President Donald Trump claimed Biden’s autopen was “illegally used, he [Biden] never gave orders.” The President has called the autopen scandal “one of the biggest, ever!”   However, this scandal remains too hot to touch for the broadcast networks.  NBC was the only network to cover the Zients testimony in a 1 minute, 48 second report by correspondent Ryan Nobles, on the September 19 NBC Nightly News.  However, in that report, Nobles never talked about Hunter Biden, the autopen authorization, the need for a cognitive test, or the steps limit. Nobles only reported about Biden forgetting dates, names, and Jill Biden’s rest requirements. It should be noted that the last 30 seconds of Nobles’ report dealt with Kamala Harris’s book and her squabbling with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. Overall, the broadcast networks (on their evening, morning, and Sunday roundtable news shows) have spent only 5 minutes, 50 seconds total in four months (June 18 through to September 19), since the hearings began. Those 5 minutes, 50 seconds all arrived on NBC and PBS. ABC and CBS have done NOTHING on the Biden mental decline hearings. NBC aired 5 minutes, 17 seconds on the hearings, PBS spent just a scant 33 seconds on them.      However, only one testimony (Zients) was mentioned, and it was only on NBC. Nothing on ABC, CBS, or PBS.  The broadcast networks covered up Biden’s decline when the world saw it happen in real time, so it’s not shocking that they’re still covering up the investigation into one of the biggest presidential scandals in recent history.   For this study MRC analysts looked at the broadcast evening (ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News), morning news shows (ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS Mornings, CBS Saturday Morning, CBS Sunday Morning, NBC Today, NBC Sunday Today), Sunday roundtable shows (ABC’s This Week, NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation), and PBS’s NewsHour from June 18 through September 19.