Aides to the Arizona senator were expected to get her groceries, fix her internet, and learn her very specific preferences for airline seats, according to an internal memo.

Forbes first reported the surveillance tactics, which were overseen by a China-based team at ByteDance, in October. Asked for comment on that story, ByteDance and TikTok did not deny the surveillance, but took to Twitter after the story was published to say that “TikTok has never been used to ‘target’ any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists,” and that “TikTok could not monitor U.S. users in the way the article suggested.” In the internal email, Liang acknowledged that TikTok had been used in exactly this way, as Forbes had reported.

Other countries have successfully transitioned from strict lockdowns. Beijing has wasted the last three years.

Spain's parliament on Thursday passed a bill that allows anyone 16 and over to change gender on their ID card without the need for psychological or medical evaluation. The move could make Spain one of the few countries to allow the change with a simple declaration. The bill still needs to pass the Senate. If it passes, it will become law within weeks.

A Tokyo court on Thursday found guilty five members of a group claiming to be the Japanese arm of U.S. conspiracy cult QAnon for forcing their way into local coronavirus vaccination sites earlier this year. The Tokyo District Court sentenced Hiroyuki Kuraoka, 44, a member of YamatoQ, a group that strongly opposes COVID-19 vaccinations to 18 months in prison suspended for three years. Two were given one-year sentences and the other two were sentenced to 10 months, all with three-year suspensions. Presiding Judge Kiichi Hiraide recognized Kuraoka played a leading role in the incident and was the most responsible of those involved. The acts were "premeditated and greatly disturbed the peace at the vaccination sites. They cannot escape severe blame as they committed the crime to force their opinions on others," the judge said. According to the ruling, Kuraoka and other members of the group barged into vaccination venues in the capital's Shinjuku Ward and other areas earlier this year. The group has been waging a campaign against COVID-19 inoculations, denying that the coronavirus exists and claiming that the shots are dangerous. YamatoQ is an incorporated association, which says that its business is to better children's health and education as well as contribute to society. Its website says that it is the Japanese wing of QAnon, a movement spreading conspiracy theories in support of former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Two alleged white supremacists have been arrested who, authorities say, were planning a heavily armed bank robbery they discussed in code as a fake screenplay. According to the criminal complaint provided to VICE News, police arrested Micheal J. Brown of Chester County, Pennsylvania, this week and charged him with conspiracy to commit bank robbery. They also charged Luke Kenna, who was recently arrested with a ghost gun during a traffic stop, with the same. The lead investigator was a New York State Police officer assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.  Brown allegedly ran a small but openly militant neo-Nazi channel on Telegram called Aryan Compartmented Elements (ACE) which shared videos of the group's purported crimes, including a short clip of a burning home which the arrested men claimed belonged to “education administrator” who allowed “CRT/LGBTQ approved books” into school libraries. Both Kenna and Brown ran small tactical companies where they offered military-style training and sold bespoke weapons like knives.  Brown, Kenna, and a third unnamed man were planning an armed bank robbery in Johnston, New York, according to court documents. Authorities were able to get the information from Kenna’s phone following his arrest. The trio surveilled the bank, texted each about plans in barely coded language in a chat they called the “SS Screenwriters Guild,” and sent each other maps of their planned assault route. They planned to bring handguns and other firearms along with them. 

A driver told authorities that their Tesla's "full-self-driving" software braked unexpectedly and triggered an eight-car pileup in the San Francisco Bay Area last month that led to nine people being treated for minor injuries including one juvenile who was hospitalized, according to a California Highway Patrol traffic crash report.

Scientists have discovered that the pace of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley has accelerated dramatically during the drought as heavy agricultural pumping has drawn down aquifer levels to new lows and now threatens to devastate the underground water reserves. The research shows that chronic declines in groundwater levels, which have plagued the Central Valley for decades, have worsened significantly in recent years, with particularly rapid declines occurring since 2019. “We have a full-on crisis,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrology professor and executive director of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security. “California’s groundwater, and groundwater across the southwestern U.S., is disappearing much faster than most people realize.” Famiglietti and other scientists found in their study, which was published this month in the journal in the journal Nature Communications, that since 2019, the rate of groundwater depletion has been 31% greater than during the last two droughts. California’s historic Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was passed in 2014 with the intent of curbing overpumping and stabilizing aquifer levels. But the law, known as SGMA, gives many local agencies until 2040 to achieve sustainability goals. Famiglietti said the findings indicate that timeline may be far too long, pointing to a need to speed up implementation of regulation under the law. The current pace of groundwater losses is now nearly five times faster than the long-term average since the 1960s. “We are seeing what appears to be a rush to pump as much groundwater as possible before new restrictions take hold,” Famiglietti said. “My fear is that by the time SGMA is fully implemented, it will be too late. There will be nothing left to manage.”

Sotheby’s New York Luxury Week auctions offered a surprising first earlier this month. This series of sales showcases “the best of the best” in opulent goods, from jewellery and cars to wine and handbags. So you’d expect rare Rolexes or a mint condition 911 Porsche Targa, but the rarest possession up for grabs this time was a skull. Named Maximus, it’s one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skulls ever discovered. The first of its kind to appear at public auction, it sold for $6,069,500 to one of a new breed of art collectors who view dinosaurs as collectibles. These fossil sales have been increasing for a while. A T rex skeleton named Shen, with an estimate of $25m, was withdrawn from a Christie’s auction in November. Before Maximus, Sotheby’s sold a gorgosaurus for $6.1m last summer – one of only 20 existing fossils of the species. Dinosaur skeletons are showing up at art fairs, too. In the UK this year, the David Aaron Gallery sold a 154-million-year-old camptosaurus at Frieze London and a triceratops skull at the Masterpiece art fair in July. The ArtAncient gallery was the first to bring fossils to Frieze London, selling a 50-million-year-old crocodile in 2019. “It used to be specialist collectors who bought fossils but dinosaurs have been picked up by collectors who would normally be more interested in art,” says Professor Paul Barrett, senior dinosaur specialist at London’s Natural History Museum. “Dinosaurs are rare and have aesthetic value. They can also reflect their owner’s personality in a way that a Rembrandt can’t. The T rex is a fearsome predator and a collector might relate to that. Also, in the same way that collectors diversified into fine wines and coins, fossils are a way of investing money.”

A bill package included in Congress’s end-of-year omnibus legislation will allow the richest Americans to park more tax-shielded cash in private retirement funds, in a win for giant asset managers like Vanguard and Fidelity. The SECURE Act 2.0, an expansion to tax breaks championed in 2019 by House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal (D-MA), has been sold as a way to address the retirement savings crisis. Today, about half of American workers don’t have a retirement account, and many of those who do end up saving very little. According to researchers at Boston College, Americans have a retirement savings shortfall exceeding $7 trillion. But Neal’s legislation is “a deeply cynical deficit-expanding giveaway,” according to Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at New York University. The SECURE Act 2.0 pushes back the age at which savers must start drawing down their accounts from 72 to 75, granting them years more tax-free growth. SECURE Act 1.0 had already raised the age for so-called required minimum distributions from 70½ to 72 just three years ago. Over the last 50 years, those in the top income bracket have seen their assets swell in private retirement accounts. PayPal founder Peter Thiel stashed $5 billion in a Roth IRA account, ProPublica found last year, joining the thousands of rich Americans legally avoiding taxes by maxing out their contributions to retirement plans. Since the SECURE Act 2.0 passed the House in March and appeared destined for passage later this year, progressive advocates have argued that it should be improved by inserting measures to improve retirement security for disabled and older Americans living in poverty. To accomplish this, Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Rob Portman (R-OH) introduced the Savings Penalty Elimination Act, which would raise the asset limits for beneficiaries of Supplemental Security Income (SSI), a federal program providing monthly income to nearly eight million low-income disabled adults and children. As a severely means-tested program, SSI bans participants from having more than $2,000 in savings. That asset limit, which has not been updated or adjusted for inflation since the 1980s, means most program participants must remain well below the federal poverty level in order to receive benefits. Meanwhile, SSI’s monthly cash benefit for individuals averaged $585 last year. It is the only source of income for most recipients. “SSI’s punitive and archaic asset limit is the most egregious anti-savings measure in federal law today,” Rebecca Vallas, co-director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative at the Century Foundation, told the Prospect. “And yet, we continue to see a lack of sufficient political will to allow people with disabilities to save.”

As lawmakers in Washington act to shore up the rickety foundations of America’s formal democracy, via the pending update of the Electoral Count Act and the official report and criminal referrals of the January 6 select committee, Congress is also poised to sign off on some preliminary measures to rein in the top-heavy configuration of the country’s political economy. In the omnibus bill to fund the government next year, two pieces of legislation seek to reform the long-neglected strictures on antitrust in American law. One bill significantly boosts funding for antitrust enforcers in the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission by imposing new fees on merger filings; the other greatly expands the jurisdiction of state attorneys general to pursue antitrust actions. Both measures seem at first glance to be stodgy and procedural fare, focused on altering the behind-the-scenes legal playing field rather than mounting frontal assaults on the gargantuan tech, financial, and health monopolies choking off both market access for small-scale enterprises and consumer choice. But in the enforcement-challenged realm of antitrust, procedural reform counts for a lot—particularly at a moment when the Biden administration is mobilizing executive agencies like the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to target monopoly control of the economy. “It’s the most important antitrust reform since 1976—a huge deal,” says Matt Stoller, director of research for the Economic Liberties Project. “What we’re seeing is a revolution in antitrust enforcement.” Still, for all this welcome new activity on the long-dormant battlefronts of antitrust, the package now before Congress is also noteworthy for two bills it doesn’t include, which specifically targeted the monopoly practices of Big Tech. Both bills—intended to prevent companies from giving preferential treatment to their own services and subsidiaries on their platforms and from strong-arming third-party market players to ensure unilateral platform control of the apps market—emerged out of extensive congressional hearings, and both were dropped from the omnibus at the behest of Senate majority leader Charles Schumer. Also left on the cutting-room floor was a third bill that would insulate local journalism outlets from the practices of Big Tech predation. “The reason that these bills didn’t pass is Chuck Schumer,” Stoller says. “He just lied about a lot of things. He said he’d allow a vote and then he didn’t.”

When someone is suppressed, restrained or otherwise pushed into a corner, the aggressor tends to assume unlimited power. The feeling of isolation and power imbalance gives the oppressor a form of momentum - as long as they can control the rules of the system, they are unstoppable, able to bend and crack someone to their will, even as onlookers attempt to intervene.

Two movies. Two sisters. One very confused me.

Jared Smith, the Hillsborough circuit judge whom voters ousted in August after his controversial ruling in an abortion case, won’t have to hang up his judicial robe after all. Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed Smith to fill one of the three vacancies Tuesday on the newly created 6th District Court of Appeal, which will be based in Lakeland. Smith’s appointment will take effect Jan. 1. Smith lost the August election for his judicial seat to Tampa attorney Nancy Jacobs. The unusually contentious race saw abortion loom as a key issue. Smith became a target of criticism from reproductive rights advocates after an appeals court overturned his decision in a case involving a 17-year-old girl who sought a judicial waiver to obtain an abortion without her parents’ consent. He’d concluded that the girl did not demonstrate the maturity, intelligence and other qualities necessary to make the decision. In a 2-1 ruling, a three-judge panel found that Smith abused his judicial discretion.

Luxury ships attract outrage and political scrutiny. The ultra-rich are buying them in record numbers. For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering. Andy Cohen, the talk-show host, recalled his first visit to a superyacht owned by the media mogul Barry Diller: “I was like the Beverly Hillbillies.” The boats have grown so vast that some owners place unique works of art outside the elevator on each deck, so that lost guests don’t barge into the wrong stateroom. At the Palm Beach show, I lingered in front of a gracious vessel called Namasté, until I was dissuaded by a wooden placard: “Private yacht, no boarding, no paparazzi.” In a nearby berth was a two-hundred-and-eighty-foot superyacht called Bold, which was styled like a warship, with its own helicopter hangar, three Sea-Doos, two sailboats, and a color scheme of gunmetal gray. The rugged look is a trend; “explorer” vessels, equipped to handle remote journeys, are the sport-utility vehicles of yachting. If you hail from the realm of ineligible visitors, you may not be aware that we are living through the “greatest boom in the yacht business that’s ever existed,” as Bob Denison—whose firm, Denison Yachting, is one of the world’s largest brokers—told me. “Every broker, every builder, up and down the docks, is having some of the best years they’ve ever experienced.” In 2021, the industry sold a record eight hundred and eighty-seven superyachts worldwide, nearly twice the previous year’s total. With more than a thousand new superyachts on order, shipyards are so backed up that clients unaccustomed to being told no have been shunted to waiting lists. One reason for the increased demand for yachts is the pandemic. Some buyers invoke social distancing; others, an existential awakening. John Staluppi, of Palm Beach Gardens, who made a fortune from car dealerships, is looking to upgrade from his current, sixty-million-dollar yacht. “When you’re forty or fifty years old, you say, ‘I’ve got plenty of time,’ ” he told me. But, at seventy-five, he is ready to throw in an extra fifteen million if it will spare him three years of waiting. “Is your life worth five million dollars a year? I think so,” he said. A deeper reason for the demand is the widening imbalance of wealth. Since 1990, the United States’ supply of billionaires has increased from sixty-six to more than seven hundred, even as the median hourly wage has risen only twenty per cent. In that time, the number of truly giant yachts—those longer than two hundred and fifty feet—has climbed from less than ten to more than a hundred and seventy. Raphael Sauleau, the C.E.O. of Fraser Yachts, told me bluntly, “COVID and wealth—a perfect storm for us.”

Movie studios can be sued under false advertising laws if they release deceptive movie trailers, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson issued a ruling in a case involving “Yesterday,” the 2019 film about a world without the Beatles. Two Ana de Armas fans filed a lawsuit in January, alleging that they had rented the movie after seeing de Armas in the trailer, only to discover that she was cut out of the final film. Universal sought to throw out the lawsuit, arguing that movie trailers are entitled to broad protection under the First Amendment. The studio’s lawyers argued that a trailer is an “artistic, expressive work” that tells a three-minute story conveying the theme of the movie, and should thus be considered “non-commercial” speech. But Wilson rejected that argument, finding that a trailer is commercial speech and is subject to the California False Adverting Law and the state’s Unfair Competition Law.

A chef who is believed to have invented the chicken tikka masala, regarded as Britain’s favourite curry, has died aged 77. Ali Ahmed Aslam’s death on Monday was announced by his Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow, which closed for 48 hours as a mark of respect. The eatery announced: “Hey, Shish Snobs … Mr Ali passed away this morning … We are all absolutely devastated and heartbroken.” His funeral was held at Glasgow Central Mosque on Tuesday. Members of the public were invited to attend. Aslam was born in Pakistan and moved with his family to Glasgow as a young boy before opening Shish Mahal in Glasgow’s west end in 1964. He was married and has five children, according to a social media post. In an interview with the AFP news agency, Aslam explained that he created the chicken tikka masala in the 1970s when a customer asked if there was a way of making his chicken tikka less dry. His solution was to add a creamy tomato sauce.

Thirty-three years ago, Raymond Santana and Kevin Richardson — both 14 at the time — entered Central Park not knowing their lives would be changed forever. The boys were ultimately wrongly convicted of an attack on a jogger in the park that took place that night, together with three other teens — Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, and Antron McCray. On Monday, Mr. Santana and Mr. Richardson returned to the park for the first time since that evening to witness a historic moment: the unveiling of the “Gate of the Exonerated.” The gate — the first to receive a new name since 1862 — marks the same entrance where the teens had entered the park on the night of the attack. The men, known today as the Exonerated Five, had their convictions overturned in 2002 and are among the nearly 320 New Yorkers who have been exonerated to date and to whom the new gate is dedicated. “I’m here with my family, I’m here with my friends, I’m here with my wife, and we are here because we persevered,” said Mr. Salaam, whose mother Sharonne was a driving force behind the push to commemorate the injustices her son and others have had to overcome.

A 40-year saga of kickbacks, threats, political maneuvering, and the humiliation of Pearl Jam

Leading up to the FIFA World Cup final this weekend, U.S. law enforcement seized 23 domains operated by pirate sports streaming sites.