As governments dragged their feet, the Maharaja of Nawanagar took action.
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“To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.” |
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(Alewis2388/CC BY-SA 4.0) |
As the name suggests, our Bright team is all about uplifting stories. This particular tale of the noble heart is about how an unlikely prince came to the rescue of hundreds of Polish refugee children during WWII.
As governments, bureaucrats, and agencies dragged their feet, the Maharaja of Nawanagar took action. Our writer Walker Larson explains how the prince always honored their heritage, while promising to treat each child as his own. |
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| Ivan Pentchoukov
National Editor |
| | Simon Veazey Senior Editor |
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| Ivan Pentchoukov
National Editor |
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| Simon Veazey Senior Editor |
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Good morning! It’s Saturday. Today’s lead story is introduced by our colleague Beige Luciano-Adams, who experienced the dark world of what children may see on Snapchat after she set up an account on a brand-new phone as a 13-year-old girl. Beige’s experience follows right after today’s top stories: |
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Surveillance technology giant Flock Safety announced sweeping changes to its platform on Aug. 13 aimed at addressing concerns about data access, privacy, and cases of law enforcement members allegedly abusing its camera network.
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Luigi Mangione, the man accused of gunning down a healthcare executive on a New York street, pleaded guilty to two federal stalking charges, admitting to trailing the executive and shooting him on a Manhattan street in 2024.
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President Donald Trump announced on Friday his intention to declare the Strait of Hormuz a U.S. territory, introducing a new position regarding the strategically vital waterway at the center of the ongoing conflict with Iran.
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The Epoch Times traveled to Venezuela after Maduro was removed from power and met with citizens, dissidents, journalists, and former prisoners who described Venezuelans as a traumatized population. However, they shared a common belief that they can transform their home back into the prosperous and free country it once was.
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🍵 Health: Blood carries more than oxygen. Here’s how to nourish it.
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(Illustration by The Epoch Times, Freepik)
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Beige Luciano-Adams
Reporter |
I started this story with a question: “What does a 13-year-old see on Snapchat?” Recent research suggests kids may be exposed to a startling amount of “unsafe” content on the platform—despite sophisticated safety features meant to combat dangers like sexploitation and illicit drug sales.
Snap has dismissed those findings as a tiresome technology panic, alleging researchers used tainted conditions to engineer “fringe” results that have little to do with a typical teen experience on the app. That made me curious enough to subject myself to even darker corners of the internet than usual.
I bought a $40 burner phone, opened a new Gmail account, and entered a fake birth date to create a Snapchat account for my teenage avatar, “Maddie.” I figured I’d linger for a few days, practice my Gen Alpha slang, and see if someone tried to sell me Xanax. The result was more than I bargained for.
Without prompting, Maddie’s “Spotlight”—a heavily moderated public video feed—became an endless loop of soft porn slop that remains difficult to describe in this family-friendly publication.
What was shocking was the scale and mimetic onslaught—the algorithm served pantomimed sex acts and suggested sexual violence, glamorized incest, age-gap sex and pedophilia—and little else—continuously, over the course of a week.
As an adult, I found this “research” disturbing and psychically taxing, its imprint lingering long after I put the phone down. I’m not sure how I would experience it as an eighth grader with typical social anxieties and a more malleable sense of self.
In conversation, Snap representatives were puzzled by the findings; they removed the violative content I asked about, but didn’t comment on why it would be the default experience for a 13-year-old. I also spoke with parents who are suing Snap about safety features and about what they hope will come from a public trial.
The new wave of social media litigation largely circumvents questions of content—rather focusing on product liability claims that platforms knowingly engineer their algorithms and features to addict and exploit vulnerable users.
Social media companies may not be liable for the proliferation of garbage currently drowning the internet. Increasingly, they are being held to account for how their very clever, unblinking algorithms deliver it, in frictionless feeds that compete for the attention of young users.
Read Beige’s exclusive report. |
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Nevada GOP chair Michael McDonald walks on stage before speaking ahead of Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nev. on Jan. 27, 2024. (John Locher/AP) |
- Six Nevada Republicans, who were accused of submitting a certificate falsely declaring President Donald Trump had won the state’s 2020 presidential election, will not face a trial after a judge dismissed the case against them on Aug. 13.
- A district judge in Boise, Idaho, issued a ruling on Aug. 13 that loosened the state’s near-total ban on abortion.
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Newly declassified documents released by the White House Transparency Task Force reveal a prior secret FBI operation to discredit intelligence reports from confidential informants related to corruption in Ukraine before the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
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Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel on Thursday announced charges against five noncitizens accused of voting in the 2024 general election and one U.S. citizen accused of registering her noncitizen spouse to vote.
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Chinese leader Xi Jinping (L) and U.S. President Donald Trump (C) visit the Temple of Heaven in Beijing on May 14, 2026. Trump became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Beijing in nearly a decade. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images) |
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Beijing has prepared strategies to counter the United States in various scenarios ahead of ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping’s visit, including potentially canceling the trip, according to insiders within the CCP’s system who spoke with The Epoch Times in recent days.
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A public hospital in Chengdu has ordered all employees, including permanent staff, contracted workers, and temporary workers, to disclose their religious beliefs, while education officials in the southwestern Chinese city have also been collecting information on students’ religious backgrounds and those of their parents, according to leaked internal documents and individuals familiar with the practices.
- Crude oil tankers are trickling through the Strait of Hormuz despite Iranian threats and the U.S. Navy’s blockade, using a “shuttle” system orchestrated by Abu Dhabi and Kuwait that Tehran and Washington appear to be tolerating—at least for the moment.
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Thousands of Europeans were driven from their homes on Aug. 14 as wildfires fanned by strong winds burned simultaneously in France, Germany, Spain, Greece, and Croatia, after weeks of heat and drought left forests across the continent primed to burn.
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An American missionary pilot who was held captive in Niger for nine months has been released to U.S. officials, the Christian organization he worked for said on Friday.
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Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Aug. 13 that a Russian plot to kill a man who held dual Ukrainian and U.S. citizenship in Warsaw has been thwarted.
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- A Disaster the CCP Still Won’t Talk About—by Wang Weiluo (Read)
- I Hate to Say I Told You So About Avocado Oil—by Mollie Engelhart (Read)
- The Scandal of the Dance Marathon—by Jeffrey A. Tucker (Read)
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Worth making just for the alluring aroma wafting from the kitchen oven, this delicious Italian meatloaf is essentially one big giant meatball, says Jennifer Segal. Simple, comforting and satisfying, it is best served with a big Italian salad and Parmesan smashed potatoes. And if you can resist the temptation for seconds (or even thirds), Jennifer promises it’s even better the next day, sliced and topped with melted cheese in a warm sandwich. |
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Spot the Difference is our readers’ favorite. Play it here. |
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— Simon Veazey, Ivan Pentchoukov, Madalina Hubert, and Kenzi Li |
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