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⚡ Quick Take

• Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma star Jack Haven chatted with us about portraying Little Death and Jane Schoenbrun film connections.
• Haven previously starred in I Saw the TV Glow and revealed a connection between Maddie from that film and Little Death.
• He also dives into what it is like to reteam with Jane Schoenbrun.

Filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun’s mind-bending horror masterpiece, Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma, is slashing its way to theaters this weekend on August 7th. At the center of this love letter to ‘80s horror is the masked killer, Little Death, portrayed by I Saw the TV Glow star Jack Haven. Nerdist had the opportunity to sit down with the versatile and charismatic actor, where they discuss the inspirations for Camp Miasma and Little Death, working with Jane, and the secret link between Maddie and Little Death. 

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Nerdist: First off, congratulations on the film! I really loved the work that you all did, and particularly, I really loved your performance. I think maybe general audiences may not realize how difficult it is to bring a character to life that has no dialogue– strictly through a physical performance. So I’m just curious about what your approach was like for the character of Little Death, and how it differed from a more dialogue-driven role?

Jack Haven: The most important thing to me was finding the physicality, obviously. Because, like, that’s what I had, was the body. So I made a few friends– once at a pier in Jersey, and then once in Fort Green Park– film me doing different walks. I would just, like, stomp across the grasslands, and then watch them afterwards and try to incorporate different characters.

I was consuming mass amounts of slasher films so I had a color palette of slasher movements, and also just what felt scariest in my body. And it ended up being, like, a Terminator type of thing. Like a Michael Myers, Terminator thing that was totally unmoving in the shoulders. 

I also wanted it to feel like it could have been anybody in the suit. Because I felt like there was a whole cast of people who had played Little Death over time.

Mubi

Oh, I love that! I’m curious, what was your visibility like in the mask? I love the montage of the murders in the original Camp Miasma, but I’m very curious what sort of vision you had from such a challenging mask to wear?

Haven: Yes. Well, I’ll give you a sort of overall picture. So it was extremely tight to the head, because it was a fitting of my scalp that I’d done. So it was, like, scalp, but on top of scalp. Same size.

Then the screen pressed directly against my nose. There was, like, a black mesh screen inside. And then it was a little hole. So I couldn’t really see anything, which was honestly, for me, ideal.  Because it felt like I was in, like, a log cabin alone. And I was just looking out my window at stuff that was happening that wasn’t really my concern, you know?

So obviously, the film pays such a loving tribute to the slasher subgenre of films, and the impact it’s had on audiences throughout the last 30-40 years. Do you have a fond slasher memory, or remember the first one you saw?

Haven: I think the first one I saw that really moved me was Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original, and I saw it when I was older. I saw it when I was 23, I think. I saw it while I was making a movie in Cape Town, and it was, like, a sleepover vibe with everyone. I just remember almost vomiting. Like, running around the room screaming because it was so intense. I still feel that way when I watch that movie! I still feel sick to my stomach, and I love that feeling. I find it really clarifying.

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I love the influences that Jane pulled from for this film, both with Friday the 13th, and, kind of more interestingly– particularly with Little Death– the influence of something like Sleepaway Camp. How aware were you of that film, and sort of the cultural relevance it had, and did that impact your character at all?

Haven: I watched Sleepaway Camp because Jane told me that it was referenced, and that was my first time seeing it. I think it’s amazing. I think that ending…that last moment is, like, gut-wrenching. It’s… it’s really amazing that moment of Angela with the mask. 

But yeah, I mean, I think it’s fascinating to know our roots. To know the roots of the perception of transness. But to me, I think I always find it really tickles me because I think it’s sort of sweet to see how innocently we’ve been affected as audiences. And the ways that our fears are actually,

just kind of like us? And we’re nerds, you know? It’s like, they’re scared of just us, and we’re just nerds.

So this is your second time working with Jane now. How has your creative relationship evolved from I Saw the TV Glow to Camp Miasma, and at what point did you become part of this project?

Haven: So, Jane asked me to do this after we saw the Brat Summer tour, Charlie XCX. 

Amazing. 

Haven: They’d asked me about this movie and described, like, the helmet and the slobbering tongue, and I was totally in. 

We’ve talked a little bit about it being, like, a continuation of Maddie. That it sort of feels like a heightened Maddie. This character that has, like, removed their self from the accepted reality, and is watching from the outside. Sort of what seems, like, vacantly, but is actually deeply invested in humanity.

And yeah, I think my collaboration with them just gets deeper, because I feel like we just get closer and trust each other more.

Mubi

I loved the way that Jane framed excess and pleasure in a lot of ways in this film, particularly when it came to junk food. I’m very curious, do you have a sort of, like, ideal movie snack?

Haven: Movie snack? Yeah, straight up popcorn and peanut M&Ms, mixed. Yeah, I don’t… I don’t waver from that.

That’s the correct answer. 

Haven: A burrito would be good too though. Because it’s something you can hold, and you could eat it in a movie. 

What do you nerd out about?

Haven: Oh my god, well, I nerd out about a couple things. The radio station WFMU, which is a Jersey local free-form radio station. One of the last in the country, and the greatest radio station in the universe. Particularly the show “Well-Dressed Fancy Dandies with Kens and Andys”– which is Andy Breckman, the creator of Monk, that’s his show.

I also nerd out about multidimensional beings, basically. And, like, hyperdimensionality, and…yeah, I guess, like, the unreality of space-time. 

Yeah, I won’t get started on that now.

Teenage Sex and Death At Camp Miasma hits theaters August 7th. 

The post CAMP MIASMA’s Jack Haven on Little Death’s Killer Instinct appeared first on Nerdist.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted 8-5 along party lines Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress.

The former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases repeatedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment during his congressional appearance last week.

“There will be repercussions for your refusal to testify,” warned Committee Chair Senator Rand Paul at the time. Paul has long sought to punish Fauci for his role in overseeing America’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fauci testified before Congress countless times over the course of his 38-year career atop the health agency. He advised seven U.S. presidents over that time, and oversaw research on a range of issues including HIV/AIDS, ebola, influenza, zika, and finally, the coronavirus.

Paul charged Fauci with lying to Congress during a July 2023 hearing on Covid. Paul’s claim was never proven, and the issue was eventually wiped away via a pardon to Fauci issued by former President Joe Biden.

Last month, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer warned Fauci that the pardon would not cover his latest congressional hearing. He then posted hundreds of pages from Fauci’s pandemic-era diary to his website, summarizing the unredacted collection with a conspiratorial slant and a pink pen, which Fauci said was “aimed at embarrassing and intimidating” him.

Exactly what comes next for Fauci is not clear, even to the Republicans trying to charge him.

“There is not a lot of precedent for a lot of this, but it isn’t law so there isn’t any exact procedure that it has to follow,” Paul told CNN on Tuesday. “It’s a referral, it’s a recommendation.”

Thursday’s decision will likely be passed along to Vice President JD Vance, who as the de facto president of the Senate will need to sign off on the atypical request. It’ll then be passed to the Justice Department, which will determine on its own accord whether to bring formal charges against Fauci. But legal experts have already warned that the charges are unlikely to succeed in court.

If the DOJ moves in that direction, it will likely boil down to a long, tumultuous legal battle.

This story has been updated.

Suno's watermarking feature comes as the company is fighting legal battles on several fronts.

President Donald Trump, the guy who was sent to a military high school where the bad kids go and then assiduously dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, has never served his country a day in his life. Yes, that includes his terms as president. Trump serves himself, not his country But Trump does love the trappings of being a military man, and oh boy does he love the big ships and…

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President Donald Trump is crashing out about a report that he confronted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the U.S. military’s depleted munitions stockpile.

Trump took to Truth Social less than an hour into Thursday to hit back at The Washington Post for reporting that tensions between Hegseth and the president had “boiled over” on the sidelines of a Cabinet meeting at Camp David last week.

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump wrote. “Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed. Defense companies are building the largest number of plants and factories in our country’s history.”

“The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down. Long term jail sentences will be sought!” Trump wrote. Notably, Trump didn’t deny unloading on Hegseth.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has challenged reports that the country’s weapons stockpile is low, and still managed to threaten the leakers with jail time. If the story is false, then why would it be treasonous to tell it?

The shortages of long-range guided missiles and air-defense interceptors caused Trump to pull back from launching any massive strikes against Iran, one source familiar with discussions told the Post. On Monday, the president claimed he’d changed his mind about launching “the biggest attack since World War II.”

Meanwhile, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that the confrontation “literally never happened,” but didn’t respond to the claims about the U.S. weapons stockpile.

“This B.S. story was shopped to many outlets by someone clearly out to disparage the Secretary, for whatever reason. Unfortunately for them, the President loves the Secretary and thinks he’s doing a tremendous job. FAKE NEWS!” she wrote on X.

Assistant Secretary of Defense Sean Parnell joined in, writing on X, “We told the Washington Post the same thing. They ran with the fake, anonymously sourced B.S. anyway. Complete & total Fake News.”

It’s been more than five months since Trump launched his military onslaught against Iran, and multiple reports have raised concerns that the United States is running out of weapons.

Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs have come back to bite him.

In a court filing submitted in the U.S. Court of International Trade Tuesday, Customs and Border Protection official Brandon Lord wrote that as of July 31, the government had allocated approximately $100 billion for companies that had to pay higher import fees due to the president’s illegal levies.

The memo also noted that, as of July 31, the CBP entity created to track and deliver tariff refunds had received more than 252,000 refund declarations for 25.1 million import entries.

While the refund figure is steep, it still doesn’t cover everything the Trump administration owes. In another legal filing, Lord revealed that the government generated roughly $166 billion from the tariffs. That would mean the government is currently repaying 60 percent of what it owes, and that there are still significantly more funds to be doled out.

The filing was submitted in response to a class action lawsuit brought by a coalition of small businesses that suffered under Trump’s tariff plans. Collectively, they claim that there are still obstacles to obtaining the refunds they’re legally owed through CBP.

Trump’s tariffs were one of his major second term policy points. But the ultraconservative Supreme Court ruled in February that his tariff plan—which was introduced under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—was beyond the power of his office, effectively dismantling the president’s foreign and economic agendas in one fell swoop.

Yet the president was still trying to spin his costly, unconstitutional tolls as a win during an interview with Fox News Tuesday.

“Tariffs have been incredible. We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars,” he told the network. “Supreme Court gave us a little shot, but we’re allowed to do it in a different manner.”

But Trump’s other unconventional tariff attempts are also facing legal challenges. Last month, Trump was sued mere hours after he attempted to invoke new duties under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which some economic law scholars told CNBC would likely not pass muster with the courts since the president is “using the statute in a fundamentally different way.”

Blue Origin has identified the engine component at the center of May's spectacular New Glenn pad explosion, which left the Jeff Bezos space tentacle facing a substantial rebuild. "The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," CEO Dave Limp posted. Limp did not explain the valve's failure mode or explain how the anomaly led to the explosion. New Glenn, whose first stage is powered by seven BE-4 engines, was on the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station's Launch Complex 36 for a preflight hotfire test in May when it suddenly exploded. The blast destroyed the rocket and key ground equipment. Blue Origin has since been rebuilding the facility at a breakneck pace. In June, Limp said the company still planned to launch in 2026 and later explained that the replacement pad would support a revised integration process. The stages will be assembled horizontally and rolled out before the payload is mated with New Glenn in the vertical position. Limp said extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests had been conducted "to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations." "The path forward is clear," he wrote. "We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We're manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month." Blue Origin is not the only BE-4 customer. United Launch Alliance (ULA) uses two of the engines on Vulcan's first stage. Vulcan is already sidelined from US Space Force missions following an unrelated anomaly in a Northrop Grumman solid rocket booster during its last launch in February. The payload reached orbit, but the Space Force wants the problem resolved before Vulcan flies for it again. ULA did not immediately respond when asked whether its stock of BE-4 engines would require the same valve modifications. ®

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 6:31 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 6:30 a.m. on August 6

• Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in San Lorenzo Valley has one-way traffic because of ongoing work. This closure will last until August 31.
   
• Alternating lanes are closed on Highway 9 at Riverdale Park in San Lorenzo Valley because of bridge work. The closure is expected to last until 6:59 a.m. on April 30, 2027.
   
• A wheel chalk was found in the #1 lane between the #1 and #2 lanes on northbound Highway 1 at 41st Avenue in Capitola / Soquel. No vehicle was found nearby. The incident was reported as a traffic hazard today.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Thursday morning traffic: Highway 9 lane closures, traffic hazard on Hwy 1 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Due in "fall 2027," Ford said Thursday that it won't reveal what Fathom looks like until early next year.

Refugees fleeing persecution only to be swept up by ICE win support of congregation, including some who voted for Trump. By Jeremy Lindenfeld for Capital & Main Pastor Kevin Kang had only been at Tujunga United Methodist Church for a couple of years when, in December of last year, he was asked if he could house formerly detained refugees on church grounds.

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The startup's platform predicts what product a shopper wants next, learn their general taste, and fine-tune continuously based on what they do in real time. 

Mirendil has signed a $100 million-plus Google Cloud partnership to expand its compute infrastructure, powering research into self-improving AI systems designed to accelerate scientific discovery and AI development.

When 25-year-old Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz took her three daughters and boarded a plane from St. Louis to Guatemala City on June 17, her friends begged her not to go. But Glendy had no other option: Her husband, Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz, who worked as a roofer and was the family’s breadwinner, had been deported a year earlier.

On July 22, just weeks after Glendy reunited with Nixon in rural Guatemala, neighbors found the couple bound and shot to death in a sugarcane field. Their 14-month-old daughter Giovanni was crying, dehydrated, next to their bodies. Two communities—one in Missouri, the other in the western Guatemalan region of Retalhuleu—are left to pick up the pieces. 

In Guatemala, that includes Nixon’s older brother, Rolando Pérez Paz, who was deported alongside Nixon in 2025. Now, Rolando and his wife are caring for his three nieces. He can’t help but wonder what could have been. 

“If my brother hadn’t been deported, he might—well, only God knows—but he might still be alive,” Rolando told me in Spanish from his home in Retalhuleu. “Both of them might still be alive.” 

“If my brother hadn’t been deported…he might still be alive. Both of them might still be alive.” 

News of the couple’s deaths slowly got back to St. Louis. Glendy’s friend Laura, who asked to use a pseudonym out of fear that she, too, might be targeted by ICE, got a call from another friend: “Glendy is gone.” An email circulated within the Fuerza organizing committee, a local immigrant workers rights group for which Glendy rarely missed a meeting. By the time St. Louis Public Radio picked up the story, Glendy and Nixon’s friends were already planning a vigil. 

Asked about Nixon and Rolando’s deportations, an ICE spokesperson wrote that Nixon had two convictions for driving while intoxicated. Mother Jones was able to corroborate only one of those charges, and there are no court records under Rolando’s name.

To Alicia Hernandez, an organizer with the legal aid group MICA Project, the story was familiar: a husband taken in a traffic stop and sent away and a wife forced to leave the United States to reunite with him. Their deaths are part of a broader story of revenue-seeking policing in a region that once withstood intense federal scrutiny and has now become part of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.

The St. Louis area is home to 54 separate police departments. Some have fewer than 10 officers and serve townships with a thousand or so residents. Those municipalities—sometimes no larger than one or two subdivisions—rely on their police departments as a major source of local government revenue, extracting money through traffic stops and municipal court fines. ICE’s deportation surge presents a new financial opportunity.

“I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and he said no.”  

After the 2014 police shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, the St. Louis area’s patchwork law enforcement apparatus came under national scrutiny. Some departments consolidated; others, under pressure from the federal government, enacted rules meant to limit racial profiling and profit-motivated traffic stops. But now, instead of pushing the region’s police toward reform, the federal government is offering financial incentives to target immigrants like Nixon and Rolando. ICE is paying six St. Louis–area police departments to deputize officers as federal immigration enforcers under what’s known as a 287(g) agreement.

“It’s quite a bit of money,” Scott Robinson, chief of police for Breckenridge Hills, a small municipality bordering Overland, told a local TV station earlier this year. ICE has promised some participating departments money for equipment, salary and benefits reimbursements, and $100,000 for new vehicles. For Breckenridge Hills, which employs just over a dozen officers, that’s a substantial sum. “They sign these 287(g) agreements to supplement their budgets,” Hernandez said.

About 60 percent of ICE arrests in St. Louis start as traffic stops. “We see situation after situation where someone is pulled over for rolling a red light, driving without a driver’s license, having a broken tail light,” Hernandez told me. “And then from there, they are put on an ICE hold.”

Locally, immigrants know where the “hot spots” are, Hernandez said. They issue warnings like “Don’t drive through Overland.” About a quarter of all ICE arrests in the St. Louis area during President Donald Trump’s second term so far have happened in Overland, a suburb of small midcentury brick homes. Glendy and Nixon settled there around 2020.

According to a statement from ICE, Nixon and Rolando were picked up by federal agents on April 15, 2025. “They got us at 5 in the morning—we were maybe 50 meters or so from our house when they grabbed us,” Rolando said. First, they spoke with Nixon, who was in his 40s, then they questioned his older brother. They shackled their hands and their feet. “I asked if there was an arrest warrant for me, and [the officer] said no,” Rolando said. 

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case.”

The two brothers were held in downtown St. Louis, Rolando said, then moved to Phelps County Jail, a small rural jail operated by a sheriff’s department that entered into a 287(g) agreement with ICE this year. (The Phelps County Sheriff’s Department refused to answer a Freedom of Information Act request, instead deferring to ICE.) 

As the month dragged on, Rolando said, the Pérez brothers were moved to yet another rural Missouri jail, then to Louisiana. By the middle of May, Nixon and Rolando were back in rural Guatemala. There, Rolando was reunited with his wife, but Nixon’s family was left thousands of miles away.

Glendy, then 24 and nine months pregnant with her third child, was left to fend for herself. “Her world completely collapsed,” her friend Yohana, who asked to use a pseudonym, told me in Spanish, “because she was left all alone.”

She tried for a year to make it work without her husband, all while worried that she would be deported herself. The Department of Homeland Security had its own solution: self-deportation. 

“Leave on your OWN terms,” ICE threatened in a September 2025 social media flyer. “Avoid the jail cell. Avoid the humiliation.” Last year, then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem spent over $200 million on advertisements pushing that same message. US Customs and Border Protection has even launched a “self-deportation app,” CBP Home. 

But self-deportation, researcher Austin Kocher explained, is a marketing tactic meant to appeal to Trump’s base by declaring that if people would only follow the law and immigrate the “right” way, they could be safe. “It’s trying to develop legitimacy for a deportation program that is not always particularly popular if people understood the normalcy of the people who are wrapped up in it,” Kocher said.

Representatives with Fuerza, the immigrant rights group, said Glendy had an open asylum case with a hearing set for 2027. She came to the United States as a teen mother fleeing violence and poverty in Guatemala six years ago. But that likely would not have stopped her from being criminalized and deported, as the vast majority of asylum claims in Missouri are rejected.

“This administration seems to believe that everybody requesting asylum must inherently be a bogus asylum seeker and not really an authentic humanitarian case,” Kocher said. According to UN data, 32,000 people have been deported to Guatemala in the first half of 2026 alone. “This is a consequence of having a whole system that is so bent towards deportation that it can’t even listen to the legitimate claims of legitimate asylum seekers.” 

“I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?” 

Records from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University show that there are 49,576 backlogged cases in the Kansas City Immigration Court, which oversees the state of Missouri. In the first half of 2026, over 95 percent of asylum applications processed by that court were denied. The same week Glendy and Nixon were killed, the Trump administration launched a new plan to expedite deportations of asylum seekers.

After her husband’s deportation, Glendy took on two jobs, working in a factory during the day and cleaning offices at night. Sometimes, Laura watched the kids while Glendy worked. Laura and Glendy’s daughters—girls so close they had their first communion together and saw each other nearly every day—had sleepovers that stretched from one night into the next. Laura and Glendy took turns driving them to school. Whenever Glendy made tamales, she shared some with Laura’s family. They helped each other out wherever they could. 

But Glendy couldn’t stop worrying. She gave Laura and another friend power of attorney to help her children in case she was taken. “I won’t let that happen,” Laura said. 

On June 17, Glendy and her daughters got on a plane to Guatemala at St. Louis Lambert International Airport. Courtesy Missouri Workers Center

This past April, police officers working with ICE arrived at Glendy’s local middle school, asking questions about three students there. District Superintendent Chris Kilbride rushed to the scene and “got the officers away from the school as quickly as possible,” he told me. Although no students were detained, parents in Overland were terrified.

A few weeks after Glendy gave birth to her youngest daughter, Giovanni, she started bringing Laura to monthly meetings held by the local immigrant advocacy group Fuerza. “She was like, ‘Hey, let’s go! You can get informed about what’s going on in the community,’” Laura remembered. There, they commiserated, shared meals, and got reports of the latest ICE arrests. At every meeting, there was childcare. “We would take our daughters for them to know what’s going on as well.”

As members of Fuerza, the women went door-knocking, asking neighbors to join their cause. They met with local officials to ask them not to sign 287(g) agreements. Organizing for their rights helped them feel less alone, but Glendy still feared leaving the house to go to work.

“For those of us without children, it’s a bit easier to manage,” said Yohana, a Nicaraguan Fuerza member who works in construction. “But if you have children at home, you can’t just tell them ‘there’s no food today.’” Glendy had no reliable transportation and worked irregular hours; the bills kept piling up. “I picture the situation and ask myself, ‘My God, how did Glendy sleep?’ How could Glendy sleep peacefully, knowing she had to feed her daughters the next day?” 

Teachers from the Ritenour School District, which two of Glendy’s daughters attended, reached out to help; friends offered rides and childcare. But a year after Nixon’s deportation, it still wasn’t enough. By May 2026, Glendy was telling her friends she planned to return to Guatemala. 

“I didn’t want her to leave. And she told me she didn’t want to leave but she was obligated to,” Laura said. “It’s just getting hard,” Glendy told her, shortly before getting on the plane. The last time the two saw each other was the first time Laura saw Glendy cry. 

“They should never have gone back, but the laws of this country made them go,” Yohana said. In a photo taken June 17, the day Glendy returned to Guatemala, she grins alongside her daughters outside St. Louis Lambert International Airport. The two older girls carry large stuffed bears. Glendy’s youngest daughter is in a carrier strapped to her chest, smiling at the camera in pigtails. It’s a warm and sunny day in St. Louis, but they’re all wearing jackets in case it gets chilly on the plane.

A memorial from an August 3 vigil in Overland, where hundreds of people gathered to remember Glendy and Nixon. Courtesy Missouri Workers Center

Nixon and Glendy’s family buried the couple side by side after a procession through the Guatemalan countryside. The Guatemalan National Civil Police and Public Prosecutor’s Office are investigating the killing, but they have not publicly identified a suspect or motive. At an early August vigil for the couple outside Overland City Hall, the town’s mayor said Overland will not sign a 287(g) agreement—though two municipal police departments bordering Overland have already done so. 

Laura and Yohana are fundraising for Nixon and Glendy’s three daughters and talking to the press. But neither was willing to use their real names in this article, out of fear that they, too, would be targeted. In late July, Laura tried to tell her 10-year-old daughter what happened to her best friend’s family.  

“Why are people so mean?” Laura’s daughter asked. “She literally just left, and now she has no mom or dad, and I don’t get to see her anymore?” 

Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it’s published anywhere. * Sign up for the free weekly newsletter, The Tom the Dancing Bug Review! Not nearly as good as joining the…

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The launch of these new features reflects Google’s ambitions to transform Google Maps from a navigation tool into an assistant that's capable of helping users complete real-world tasks.

Nearly three-quarters of businesses surveyed in the UK, France, and Germany fear Washington could abruptly cut their access to the US tech platforms on which they depend. The finding comes from a survey of 1,500 businesses in the three countries conducted by Proton, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, which was founded by scientists who met at CERN. Businesses have long relied on companies such as Microsoft and Google for email and productivity software. Moving those tools into the cloud has also given providers a central switch with which to withdraw access. Geopolitical tensions between European countries and the Trump administration have brought concerns about such a possibility to the fore, especially after the US government issued an export control directive preventing any non-US citizen from accessing some Anthropic AI models. A previous study by Proton claimed that over 74 percent of all publicly listed European companies depend on US-based tech services, and a report last year from Synergy Research found that the European cloud infrastructure market is sewn up by the big American operators, with local firms making up just 15 percent of it. Proton says nearly three in four respondents (73.9 percent) were concerned that the US government could cut off their access to American technology providers. Just one in 20 expressed no concern at all. More than half (54.5 percent) of respondents said they could continue operating for no more than a single business day before shutting down if they lost access to cloud and digital services entirely. Among large businesses, 28.7 percent estimated that a day offline would cost more than €100,000 ($115,000), while 45 percent put the damage above €50,000 ($57,000). These concerns have been widely discussed, such as at the Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels earlier this year, where (surprise, surprise) open source was held up as the solution to the problem. But as The Register also reported back in May, the problem goes deeper than many suspect. Identity and Access Management (IAM) is entirely dominated by US vendors, for example, meaning that "the layer of infrastructure responsible for authenticating every user and authorizing every access decision is, in most cases, operated by a vendor incorporated in the United States and subject to American law." Proton nevertheless found an appetite for escape: 67.8 percent of respondents said they would switch providers if government action cut off their access. Few appear ready to make that switch in a hurry. Only 44 percent have a documented business continuity plan that they test regularly, leaving the majority without a proven fallback. Among those preparing for disruption, email and cloud file storage were the top priorities for fallback services, Proton said. Proton has more than an academic interest in the findings: it sells a business continuity platform covering email, conferencing, and productivity tools. But it maintains that disruption is not hypothetical for European businesses. Every respondent reported at least one disruption during the previous 12 months, ranging from outages and cyberattacks to losing access to a service. "The kill switch is no longer an abstract geopolitical concern but a business continuity crisis," commented Proton chief operating officer Raphaël Auphan. "The study captures a clear shift in how European businesses perceive operational risk. Geopolitical risk applied to digital dependence is no longer a boardroom abstraction. It is joining the same threat register as criminal attacks, with the same sense of urgency and the same expectation that it could materialize without warning." ®

The Series B is the company's second fundraise since it last raised capital in 2020. In that time, it has increased its ARR by 10x to $60 million.

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we lovingly poke fun at other organizations' security screw-ups, in hopes the rest of us can learn a valuable lesson. This week’s story involves an IT department that ought to know better putting user credentials in the precisely wrong place. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our terrifying tech tale comes courtesy of Marc Bishop, director of business growth at Wytlabs, a marketing and SEO company. In the course of his career, Bishop came across one firm where the people guarding the henhouse left the keys out where almost anyone could get them. Bishop’s client company was responsible on the surface. They had a strong password policy and even made users take security training. Then they moved offices, and that's when basic security hygiene went out the window. The company decided to take some old laptops and give them out to new users. To make life easy for the recipients, they put sticky notes – everyone’s favorite credential-sharing tool – on the laptops with the name of each employee and their initial login credentials on it. Let’s just stop for a moment to remark on how bad it is to put usernames and passwords on a piece of paper where the wrong person could see them. Even the IT department should not know your password, should someone in IT themselves turn rogue. So, even if the laptop stayed on a shelf in a closet that only the support staff had access to, having that sticky note would be bad. However, our situation is even worse because the laptops in question were stored in a conference room while the facilities team finished readying the office for the move. During that time, anyone who had access to the conference room could go in and get multiple user account credentials. And that's exactly what happened: A contractor entered the conference room and took pictures of the sticky notes. This non-employee later logged in remotely and accessed all kinds of proprietary data, including planning documents that were sitting on shared drives. What’s particularly shocking about this story is that the IT department was the cause of the information leak. People who work in tech and are charged with maintaining security should never put a password, even a temporary password, out in the open. Password security is paramount. If someone is starting with a new account, send the credentials through an encrypted channel - and preferably ensure only the intended recipient can view the temporary password. ®

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A pioneering California law meant to sharply limit use of the familiar “chasing arrows” recycling symbol has been blocked by a federal judge who said it probably violates the First Amendment.

In a preliminary injunction issued last month, US District Judge William Hayes halted enforcement of SB 343 after food, packaging, and retail groups sued, finding that key provisions were “unconstitutionally vague” and likely infringed protected commercial speech. Enforcement of the law, passed in 2021, was expected to start this fall.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud.”

The decision is a blow to environmental advocates, who had hoped to remove the familiar symbol from a huge array of plastic products, in line with a statewide study showing that only a fraction are widely collected and actually recycled. SB 343 said only goods and packaging accepted by recycling programs serving at least 60 percent of Californians and then actually sorted for recycling—not collected and thrown away—could bear the chasing arrows.

Hayes’ constitutional reasoning surprised supporters of SB 343 because similar arguments against environmental marketing regulations have historically struggled in court.

“The First Amendment protects free expression, not a corporation’s right to commit consumer fraud,” said Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “We see this exact playbook every time the plastics industry is asked to stop misleading the public—they suddenly hide behind the Constitution.”

In his decision, Hayes applied a standard four-part test to determine whether SB 343 would unduly restrict companies’ speech rights. The law passed the first two tests handily, as it regulates “potentially misleading” speech and was intended to serve California’s legitimate interests in reducing consumer confusion and improving recycling rates.

The next tests are where the law ran into trouble. Hayes, siding with the industry trade groups, argued that the legislation would not advance those “legitimate interests.” Rather than encouraging companies to redesign their products and packaging to comply with California’s real-world recyclability criteria, he said the law would prompt them to remove the recycling symbol altogether. Products recycled at a rate below the 60 percent threshold that the law requires would no longer make it into recycling bins, which could in theory leave more of them bound for the landfill.

Hayes said a less stringent regulation could have better advanced California’s goals. For instance, the state could have passed a law requiring more descriptive qualifiers alongside the recycling symbol. He offered a hypothetical example of a label explaining that an item is “accepted by recyclers in the greater Los Angeles area but nowhere else in California.” Such a label would provide consumers with more and better information, he argued, but would not be allowed under SB 343.

Heidi Sanborn, executive director of the nonprofit National Stewardship Action Council, said the judge’s reasoning reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the problems facing California recycling systems. People are throwing too much stuff into their blue bins, she said. In addition to not actually being recyclable, much of this refuse—including plastic bags and other plastic films—can gum up sorting machines, causing operational delays and creating safety risks.

Polluters regularly cite the First Amendment to fight regulations that require them to disclose information to the public.

“People are wish-cycling, they’re so desperate to recycle,” Sanborn told Grist. “We have to pull all this [contamination] out, which is very labor-intensive, and then everybody wants to know why their bills go up.”

Industry groups welcomed the injunction, saying it would prevent California from “censoring truthful information on packaging.”

Scott Hochberg, general counsel and litigation director for the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, said he’s seen free speech challenges to environmental rules many times before. Big polluters have frequently invoked the First Amendment to oppose regulations that require them to disclose information—like their greenhouse gas emissions—or tone down statements about their sustainability.

“What’s relatively new and concerning is when these arguments succeed and states are blocked from implementing common-sense initiatives to protect their residents,” he said.

A lawsuit Hochberg’s organization is pursuing against Coca-Cola illustrates the same debate. It alleges the company presents itself as a “sustainable and environmentally friendly company” despite its outsize contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola argued that statements about its sustainability efforts—including plastics recycling—were protected political speech rather than commercial advertising. A federal judge rejected that argument in 2024.

The companies that sued California didn’t make that same distinction; their suit is more like one filed in 1992 that sought to block a California law restricting the use of terms like “biodegradable,” “ozone-friendly,” and “recyclable.” A judge upheld the law, ruling that it would not stifle free speech because corporations could still use a restricted word or phrase as long as they included qualifiers explaining how, where, or under what conditions it applied.

The injunction against SB 343 leaves California with few easy options. Hayes’ ruling suggests the state faces a difficult road if the case proceeds to trial. Lawmakers could amend the law to address some of the judge’s concerns, though that may be unlikely given the politics surrounding the issue. California could also appeal the injunction, but the lower court would still have to decide the case on its merits.

Earth Island Institute and Californians Against Waste announced on July 27 that they are joining California as defendants. Hochberg said he hoped to provide the court with more information “about how the recycling system actually works.” Losing the lawsuit will make it harder for other states to pursue similar labeling regulations, he said. 

It could also jeopardize California’s nation-leading extended producer responsibility law, which shifts responsibility for collecting, recycling, and reducing plastic packaging from taxpayers and local governments to the companies that produce it. It relies on the same definition of recycling and is currently being challenged by a separate lawsuit.

Whatever happens next, Sanborn said she’s ready to work with industry to come up with other solutions—including legislation to clarify labeling rules at the national level. “We can and should work together to solve this,” she said. “But you should not have the right to lie to people.”

Prisciliano Trejo Ricano spent his 29th birthday on July 10 in Georgia’s Stewart Detention Center. In the privately-run facility that can hold about 1,900 detainees at a time, Trejo Ricano felt “like a number or like a placeholder.” Two days later, in a Facebook post from July 12, Trejo Ricano, who was born in Mexico, described his worsening medical symptoms. “I’ve been dealing with a bad sore throat, coughing blood in the morning and night and really bad migraines,” he wrote. He said he hadn’t received treatment or medication and told relatives he had a bruise that refused to heal. Asking for prayers, he continued, “This is truly the worst feeling of my life.”

A few days after Trejo Ricano posted on Facebook, his family in Durham, North Carolina, got news that he had been admitted to a hospital’s intensive care unit. There he was diagnosed with acute leukemia, a type of blood cancer. By the time ICE released Trejo Ricano from custody to be with his family, the 29-year-old was in a coma. He later passed away at the hospital on Friday, July 24. A fundraising page set up by a relative to cover medical and funeral costs describes Trejo Ricano as “a confident, funny, and outgoing person” who “dominated a room with jokes and was silly with everyone he met.”

But in the ever-growing tally of ICE detainee deaths—the number is now more than 50—Trejo Ricano’s name doesn’t appear. Advocates say that’s because he had already been released from the agency’s responsibility. That obfuscation of the detention death toll isn’t the result of any oversight in record-keeping. This summer, the Trump administration rescinded a Biden-era policy requiring ICE to report and investigate deaths that occurred within 30 days of someone being released. “ICE is returning to the standard practice of reporting deaths that occur while an individual is in agency custody,” said a memo from acting ICE director David Venturella first reported by the Washington Post.

The Department of Homeland Security told Newsweek that Trejo Ricano had been arrested and charged with driving while impaired and a hit-and-run. Durham County court records show charges for a June 19 DWI, leaving the scene with property damage, no operator’s license, and driving the wrong way on a one-way street. A law enforcement officer’s affidavit states that Trejo Ricano appeared to be asleep at the wheel and “smelled of alcohol.” He was later transferred to ICE. (DHS said Trejo Ricano was a “criminal illegal alien.”)

Trejo Ricano’s father said his son had been healthy, employed by a welding company, and going to the gym twice a week. He wanted to be a trainer. But during the three weeks he spent in detention in Georgia, his family said his health became progressively worse from when he first complained about feeling unwell on July 6. Then he went several days without adequate care. When the family finally was able to see him at the hospital, he had been intubated and could no longer communicate.

In an email, a DHS spokesperson repeated a statement shared with other publications saying Trejo Ricano had been “released from ICE custody on July 16, 2026, with an order of recognizance,” and that claims that he didn’t receive medical care were false. “He received medical screening when he was admitted to Stewart Detention Center,” the spokesperson said. “He also received medical care after complaining of a cough and sore throat.” The email also stated that Trejo Ricano tested negative for strep and received QC Mucus Relief Sinus for his cough. In addition, he was treated with a saline IV, Amoxicillin, Ibuprofen, and Tylenol. DHS described medical treatment offered to ICE detainees as “the best healthcare that many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, 55 people have died in ICE detention, according to the agency’s own data. Twenty-two deaths happened in 2026 alone. The mortality rate of ICE detainees is at the highest level in more than a decade and four times that of the Biden presidency, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report documenting the increase in detention deaths.

The most recent recorded death on ICE’s website is that of Jesus Manuel Arenas-Silva, a 45-year-old Venezuelan man the agency said died on July 13 from a suspected cardiac arrest while being transferred from the Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, to another facility. But on Monday, the agency issued a press release about another detainee death, reporting that Edwin Lopez-Cornejo from El Salvador “experienced a medical emergency” at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall before passing away.

Lopez-Cornejo had been in the United States for more than two decades and had a 12-year-old daughter. His mother, Maria Cornejo, told the New Jersey Monitor that he had diabetes and high blood pressure and hadn’t been receiving regular medication in detention. “I have a recording from the hospital that says when he arrived his heart had already stopped,” she told reporters during a press conference on Tuesday. The family is calling for an investigation.

Speaking on social media about Lopez-Cornejo’s death, Democratic Rep. Rob Menendez mentioned that another person held at Delaney Hall had recently passed away after being quickly released to the hospital. Once again, their death wasn’t reported as a result of ICE’s policy change. “This is meant to keep the number of deaths that are being reported in ICE custody to as low a number as possible,” he said. DHS didn’t respond to specific questions about the death of Lopez-Cornejo, instead referring Mother Jones to the ICE press release.

“Nobody is safe for any amount of time in ICE custody because immigration detention has always been abusive and deadly by design.”

As Trejo Ricano and other cases show, official numbers of deaths in detention don’t tell the whole story. Earlier this year, a 31-year-old asylum seeker from Haiti died from hypothermia at a Pittsburgh bus stop only three days after being released from ICE custody. Daphy Michel, who suffered from severe mental illness, was found more than 20 miles away from her home in Charleroi, wearing summer clothes in freezing weather. In June, Michel’s death was ruled a homicide. An attorney for the family said they are planning to file a lawsuit. Michel’s death isn’t recorded on ICE’s website. “ICE had NOTHING to do with this woman’s death,” DHS declared on social media.

ICE reporting also doesn’t account for people who died shortly after being removed from the United States. Consider the case of Randall Gamboa Esquivel. Originally from Costa Rica, he was detained in south Texas for months and, in September 2025, deported to San José on an air ambulance in a vegetative state. The following month, Gamboa Esquivel passed away in the hospital.

“These avoidable tragedies underscore what we’ve known to be true for many years,” Laura Hernández, executive director of the abolitionist organization Freedom for Immigrants, said in a statement. “Nobody is safe for any amount of time in ICE custody because immigration detention has always been abusive and deadly by design.”

Amilcar Valencia, the executive director of El Refugio, which advocates for immigrants held at Stewart and their families, and who has been in touch with Trejo Ricano’s father, said it isn’t uncommon for detainees to be hospitalized only when they’re in critical condition. While it’s unclear if Trejo Ricano’s death could have been prevented, Valencia said the circumstances raise many questions for the family. “His dad asked why my son, who was in good health and did a lot of exercise, was very young and active, died all of a sudden,” Valencia said. “They want to know exactly what happened.”