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Hundreds of thousands of Americans are about to lose their Obamacare coverage.

While the president was busy threatening Iran, Cuba, and Mexico during a protracted speech at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday morning, the rest of his administration was preparing to radically pare down the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Vice President JD Vance said that 750,000 people were fraudulently enrolled in the program and that their access would be imminently canceled. Vance added that additional verification would be taken for another 419,000 people in the marketplace.

“We’re going to make sure that they’re, first of all, legal residents of the United States of America, and second of all that they meet the income threshold requirements in order to receive these Obamacare benefits,” Vance said.

He added that the administration would also suspend some ACA brokers that it believes inappropriately enrolled Americans into the government subsidized program.

The Affordable Care Act’s marketplace has had an immense impact on the way that the U.S. approaches health insurance coverage. Roughly one in seven U.S. residents are enrolled in the marketplace, according to data from the Treasury Department. A record 24 million Americans signed up for coverage through the ACA marketplace at the beginning of 2025, roughly double the number of people who enrolled just four years earlier, amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yet Republicans have fought tooth and nail to repeal and replace the program since it was signed into existence in 2010. Donald Trump originally campaigned on the issue in 2016, promising to end Obamacare, though he and his allies have not yet proven completely successful.

Last summer, the conservative caucus slashed $1.1 trillion from the ACA’s appropriations via Trump’s “big, beautiful” law.

Yet their opposition to the program ignorantly dismisses its results: Health care is remarkably cheaper when everyone is insured. Historically, large numbers of uninsured Americans have made premiums more expensive for the insured.

Quick Take

• Pokémon is celebrating its 30th anniversary with an Adidas collaboration.
• From Pikachu to Gengar, plenty of Pokémon are represented in the collection.
• From very out-there designs to more subtle nods to character color schemes, the set of 12 new pairs has something for everyone.

Even 30 years after the brand’s inception, Pokémon cards are still a major market and point of interest for kids and adults alike. Over the past few years, especially, Pokémon has been a hot topic with a new mobile game and high-value cards to find in booster sets. Packs are flying off the shelves with buyers hoping to get their hands on a card with crazy value. In other words, Pokémon has still got it. To celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary, Pokémon is partnering with Adidas to bring some brand new Pokémon kicks inspired by the characters. From Pikachu (obviously) to Gengar, one of your favorites is bound to be represented. And the best part is, these Pokémon Adidas are now on sale.

Pokémon / Adidas / Nintendo

The collection features a variety of Pokémon. Of course, Pikachu steals the spotlight with three pairs of Adidas Superstars. However, Charmander, Charizard, Gengar, and Mewtwo, among a handful of others, also make an appearance.

The Pokémon collection spans various styles of Adidas shoes, from Superstars to Megaride F50s. Some of the shoes have graphics of the creatures, but others are more subtle, simply following a character’s color scheme. For modern streetwear and casual Adidas fans, the Mewtwo Sambas in a light lilac are perfect. The only hint of the collaboration appears on the sneaker tongue.

Pokémon / Adidas

Quite a bit more “out there” in the Pokémon Adidas collection are the Pikachu Superstar IIs, which are bright yellow, fluffy, and adorned with the character’s yellow and black ears on the sneaker tongue. The high-top Pikachu Superstar IIs are also fuzzy but with what appears to be a coarser fur, and have a silicone graphic of the Pokémon on the side.

Pokémon / Adidas

These fun textures continue across most of the line, with the Charizard and Charmeleon Superstars both bringing in something exciting. The Charmeleon Pokémon shoe has dinosaur-looking stripes replacing the uniform straight Adidas stripes along the side, and a lizard-y texture. The Charizard pair has a wing on each shoe and a slightly different but still reptilian texture to it.

Pokémon / Adidas

The outliers to the texture game focus mostly on color scheme and graphics. The third Pikachu option, another Superstar II, features an all-over graphic of the character. The Charmander shoe replaces the classic stripes with flames. Both of the Mewtwo shoes in the Pokémon adidas collection are color-scheme-driven, though the ZX 9000 includes a raised silicone detail near the heel, mimicking the character’s ears. The Gastly shoe draws from the character’s color, an Adistar Control 5, black with purple and white accents. The Haunter shoe is an Adistar, too, with a purple body and darker purple accents. The tongue is designed to look like the character’s outline.

Pokémon / Adidas

With 12 pairs to choose from, the collection has something for everyone. The Pokémon x Adidas collaboration is now live.

Originally published on August 4, 2026.

Ella R. Dunn writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post Pokémon Celebrates 30th Anniversary With Brand New Kicks appeared first on Nerdist.

Even Republicans are abandoning President Donald Trump over his disastrous handling of the war against Iran.

CNN Washington bureau chief David Chalian joined anchor Pamela Brown Tuesday morning to discuss the damning results of a recent CNN survey taking the public temperature on Trump’s extended military campaign in the Middle East.

The poll found that nearly two-thirds, or 64 percent, of respondents said that the United States was not winning the war against Iran. That result is especially humiliating for Trump considering that the president has spent months falsely claiming that the U.S. has already won the conflict.

Even worse, only 26 percent of respondents approved of how Trump was handling the war.

“That was 33 percent back in March,” Chalian said. “This has never been a popular war, Pamela, but it’s down seven points here overall, largely driven by Republicans abandoning the president on this issue.

“He’s down 13 percentage points in Republican approval of his handling of the war,” Chalian continued. “This war is nothing short of a political disaster for Donald Trump.”

Trump’s supposedly “six-week war” has extended to more than seven months with no sign of stopping ahead of November’s midterm elections—in a troubling sign for the president’s party.

Last week, multiple U.S. military sources claimed that more service members had died in the conflict than previously disclosed by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon also released estimates that the war has already cost American taxpayers roughly $45.1 billion, not including the tens of billions of dollars it will cost to replace munitions.

President Donald Trump’s attempt to use White House resources to launch a self-promoting YouTube propaganda channel dubbed “Trump TV” has been an immediate failure. The livestream, given the full title “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” was launched late on Monday. It follows Trump’s recent ban of three news outlets—Politico, CNN, and MS NOW—from covering his administration…

Source

Chinese AI giant Z.ai has apologized after developers caught it pulling a Grok, packaging up and uploading user workspaces to cloud storage. In a case that’s highly reminiscent of the issues over which Elon Musk’s xAI was scrutinized in July, Z.ai’s code-generation harness wing, ZCode, was found packaging and git-encrypting entire user workspaces, including complete project histories, and shipping them off to Alibaba Cloud. Worse still, the private key used to decrypt the data was only held by the server under Z.ai’s control, meaning users could not access the files ZCode had uploaded, nor delete them. Ferstar, the researcher who first highlighted the issue, claimed there was no option for users to disable the behavior in their settings, and there was no disclosure of the practice in ZCode’s privacy policy. They said the core problem lay with the tool’s Repository Index functionality, which triggered the uploading of files after Repo Wiki generated pages in the cloud. ZCode released a statement on Monday apologizing for the “security issues” and confirming the data it uploaded had never been used to train its models. “We sincerely thank the community developers who previously identified issues in ZCode. Going forward, we will establish an ongoing product security vulnerability reporting and response process,” it Xeeted. “We welcome developers to continue reviewing ZCode and reporting potential issues, and we will provide rewards based on the severity of the issues reported.” ZCode said it tasked the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) and Beijing security company NSFOCUS to probe its product following the implemented changes. The company claimed the two outside assessments concluded that all the previously uploaded data has now been deleted and said the Repo Wiki feature was removed. ZCode also open sourced the entire project on GitHub, “placing the code under community scrutiny and making ZCode more open and transparent.” “Once again, we sincerely apologize and welcome continued scrutiny from the community. The full security assessment report will be released soon.” Ferstar confirmed the open sourced code showed no signs of the Repo Wiki still being implemented, but criticized the company for wiping commit records and the source code ZCode used to upload files pre-patch. For the uninitiated, Z.ai, formerly known internationally as Zhipu, is among the world’s AI heavyweights and one of the most heavily backed LLM-focused companies in China. It is the first AI company in the post-Gen AI era to launch and subsequently IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Other Chinese AI giants are publicly traded, such as Alibaba and Baidu, but these were all established well before the AI era began. Z.ai is a startup with its roots in academic research. It spun out of Tsinghua University’s Knowledge Engineering Group research lab in 2019 and now develops AI models that it claims compete with the best in the West. Last month, the company claimed that its latest model, GLM-5.3, is as good as the most advanced equivalents developed by Anthropic and OpenAI at hunting for security vulnerabilities. Z.ai has also previously claimed the accolade of developing the first advanced model entirely on Chinese (Huawei) hardware. Meanwhile, the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI have reportedly expressed concern over the capabilities of models from Z.AI and Moonshot, while the US government mulls restricting access. ®

Our Summer of Merch series is a wrap! Your community-powered suggestions were dropped each week and we gotta say—we had a lot of fun checking them out! It looks like the community had some fun too. Some of these merch items were big hits. That’s why we’re bringing back your favorites. Maybe you missed a drop. Maybe you meant to grab something and forgot. Or maybe you bought one and have…

Source

Researchers say another looming threat hangs over some of America's most important critical infrastructure.

Quick Take

• Mike Flanagan will remake yet another Stephen King classic, as he’s now tackling a new version of King’s 1980 novella, The Mist.

Writer/director Mike Flanagan is tackling yet another iconic Stephen King property. And unlike some of his others, like Doctor Sleep and Gerald’s Game, this one might prove a bit controversial. According to a report from Deadline, Warner Bros. is remaking The Mist, King’s 1980 novella that became a beloved film by Frank Darabont back in 2007. So the new movie will come out barely two decades after the first one. Darabont’s version of The Mist remains beloved by fans and critics, especially for its shocking and uncompromising ending. King fans are probably wondering why this needs another remake. A TV series adaptation already came out in 2017. Maybe this story is just destined for a remake once a decade?

MGM

In The Mist, a small town in Maine (where else?) becomes fully engulfed by a thick fog. Out of this strange fog come several deadly creatures that begin attacking the local townsfolk. A group of survivors finds refuge in a grocery store. And this is where the true horror story begins. Quickly, we learn the human beings inside are as bad, if not worse, than any otherworldly monsters looking to kill them. It is a timeless story, for good or bad. But can Mike Flanagan really outdo the original film?

Flanagan recently revealed that he was currently in the process of writing his script for The Mist. He noted that “he has no interest in remaking a movie he admires, and he says the differences between his version and Darabont’s start on the first page.” Flanagan shares everything about his version of The Mist, how we get into the Mist, how we get through it, and how we get out are all different in his version of the story than Darabont’s. Of course, in King’s The Mist novella, there was no actual resolution to the tale. And that gives Flanagan all the room in the world to differentiate his version of The Mist from the Darabont movie.

There were theories that elements of It: Welcome to Derry would tie into The Mist, but those theories proved wrong. Perhaps the Welcome to Derry producers caught wind of a remake of The Mist in development, and steered clear? Who knows. There’s no word yet on when The Mist goes into production, but it might be a minute, as Mike Flanagan has several other projects in the works. His remake of King’s first novel, Carrie, will soon arrive as a TV series. But every other version of Carrie has been a disappointment in some way, because Brian De Palma’s 1976 original is an all-time classic. Will the same reaction befall a new iteration of The Mist? We’ll have to wait and see.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

Originally published in February 10, 2026.

The post Mike Flanagan Remaking Stephen King’s THE MIST appeared first on Nerdist.

President Donald Trump bragged to the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday about looting Venezuela—and threatened that Cuba may be next.

“Last month, we signed the largest oil deal in history, covering 65 billion barrels of oil which will benefit both Venezuela and the United States enormously and help drive down the cost of energy all over the world,” Trump said.

“So it’s perhaps the biggest deal—it was a war, but it is perhaps the biggest deal ever made. ‘To the visitor belong the spoils,’ you’ve all heard that.”

It seems that Trump may mean that literally. Americans and Venezuelans have no idea what’s happened to the billions of dollars in revenue from oil that the Trump administration stole from Venezuela.

The president continued to boast about his mounting (and illegal) military action in Latin America, before turning his attention to the next target of his takeover.

“My administration is also seeking a fundamental change in the situation in Cuba, where the Communist regime is under great pressure, the biggest pressure they’ve ever been under,” Trump said. “It’s an absolutely failed state. It’s failing like never before, and it will fall.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was already “deep into negotiations,” Trump said. The Cuban delegation walked out of the room during this portion of his speech.

Of course, Trump’s statements—and his actions—are an affront to the United Nations, which was established to foster international cooperation and curb unchecked aggression.

The campaign group which forced the EU's highest court to strike down past US-EU data sharing deals has slammed the latest changes to European data protection laws designed to accommodate AI. Led by Austrian lawyer Max Schrems, None of Your Business (noyb) claims the proposal to alter the data protection legislation “in the context of AI” amounts to an abandonment of data protection principles. In September, the Commission said it would launch an “ambitious program” to strengthen the EU’s competitiveness and “radically lighten the regulatory load for people, businesses and administrations.” It proposed “immediate adjustments” to digital legislation to the boost competitiveness. Earlier, the EU had proposed changes in the legislation governing the processing of personal data, governed by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “Where the processing of personal data is necessary for the interests of the controller in the context of the development and technical operation of an AI system … or an AI model, such processing may be pursued for legitimate interests,” a briefing note said. Noyb argues the amendments to Article 88c (original here) proposed by the European Commission (a leaked EU Council compromise draft renames it as article 88bis) would allow Big Tech to use all personal data collected over the past decades with virtually no restrictions, as long as this happens “in the context” of AI. Schrems said: “Under these proposals, the profits of AI companies would trump Europeans’ fundamental right to privacy. This is nothing but a digital expropriation of Europeans.” The campaign group said the changes could mean people who have never been customers of an AI company, whose data was entered into a system decades ago – for example in chats or on social media – may find their personal data is placed in the hands of an AI company. There is no need to ask users for consent: companies are automatically assumed to have an overriding “legitimate interest” if they train or use any AI product, the group said. Schrems added: “A likely majority of EU member states are now saying that the interests of Elon Musk, Marc Zuckerberg, Google or OpenAI, in making enormous profits, should take precedence over Europeans' fundamental right to data protection. This is nothing short of the ‘digital expropriation’ of Europeans. Everything we have ever entered into digital systems, or that AI corporations have otherwise obtained, becomes fair game for AI corporations to use.” The campaign group said the European Commission had abandoned its data protection priorities in the interests of the tech industry lobby. Meanwhile, the view of the European Parliament was mixed. However, the Court of Justice could examine whether the proposed changes can be reconciled with EU fundamental rights. “In the past, the European Court of Justice has struck down EU law in cases involving much less significant infringements of EU fundamental rights, such as data retention or the transfer of EU data to the United States,” it said in a statement. Noyb is famous for having successfully challenged and dismantled two major transatlantic data transfer pacts through the Court of Justice of the European Union: The Safe Harbor Agreement (in 2015, in the Schrems I case) and the EU-US Privacy Shield (2020, Schrems II). Schrems said the legal route might be the only option left to prevent the dilution of data protection law to satisfy the AI industry. “If the legislator has lost all sense of proportion and direction, then the people can only turn to the courts. Any extreme law that has a high risk of being overturned would at the same time only create more legal uncertainty – instead of promised simplification,” he said. ®

A massive new report from ProPublica shows that the FBI was investigating Republican Senator Susan Collins for an alleged illegal pay-to-play scheme with a defense contractor—until the Trump administration killed it.

In 2019, Collins Super PAC head Scott Reed met at a D.C. coffee shop with three executives from Hawaiian defense contractor Navatek and asked them for a $500,000 contribution. The executives counter-offered—proposing an even bigger donation in return for tens of millions of dollars in federal defense contracts. They suggested obscuring the donation through a fake shell company called “the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers”—as it is extremely illegal for government contractors to make political donations and for Collins to exchange federal contracts for said donations.

The Collins PAC received $150,000 from Navatek CEO Martin Kao right after the meeting, and two months later he told the company that Collins committed to giving them $32 million in naval contracts. Kao was eventually federally charged for campaign finance crimes and loan defrauding in 2022, and faces years in prison. No one from Collins’s office was charged.

Kao made all of this known to the FBI in the hopes of lessening his sentence, giving interviews all the way up into 2024. His statements revealed a massive pay-to-play apparatus that involved multiple staffers and sitting members of Congress, totaling $900,000 in Navatek donations and more than $40 million a year in federal contracts in return.

According to ProPublica, the FBI was prepared to open a massive bribery probe at the end of 2024, but the team heading the FBI investigation was eliminated when President Trump returned to office—with some of its members even being fired for investigating Trump in the past.

This is yet another instance in which the Trump administration turned a blind eye to corruption. This had the potential to be one of the biggest probes in recent history. Now we may never know the extent to which Collins—and other members of Congress—were in the pocket of this defense contractor. Kao has made political donations to dozens of politicians from both parties, including Jim Clyburn, Lindsey Graham, Joe Biden, Dick Durbin, Jeanne Shaheen, and Tulsi Gabbard.

ProPublica writes that Collins was by far Navatek’s most important business partner, doing everything she could to funnel government contracts to Kao as his company funded her campaign, even getting checks within 24 hours of votes on the defense spending bill. Collins once told Kao, “You’ve seen me deliver,” in a meeting, and Collins specifically thanked Kao, suggesting that she knew the details of their arrangement.

An even more troubling detail: The product of Navatek’s massive federal contracts were 3D-printed boats that the Navy never actually wanted—and never received.

Collins’s office denies any allegations of pay-to-play, calling them “outlandish.” This report of her accepting bribes from a defense lobbyist turned felon comes in the midst of her highly contested November Senate election.

Read the full report here.

In recent weeks, a fresh crop of people connected to the artificial intelligence industry have emerged to warn that AI is possibly going to kill us all, spreading the word with various degrees of credibility or self-interest. Anthropic chief and co-founder Dario Amodei has also called to slow down the development of AI technology, a recommendation that Sam Altman of OpenAI and even notorious good judgment-haver Elon Musk quickly cosigned. Meanwhile, the Trump administration and the president himself have continued to insist that AI is essential for American technological advancement and military might. As a very strange public debate has ensued, it’s become clear that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other people connected with the administration view AI as an essentially masculine tool: “dominant,” a word they keep using over and over, powerful, and able to be kept in check only by a strong ruler.

The Trump administration has become a place where very odd politics around both gender and “wokeness” are constantly on display. Trump issued a garbled executive order immediately upon retaking office that attempted to redefine “male” and “female.” Hegseth is obsessed with testosterone, announcing in July that military members will be screened for low T regardless of their gender. The intense focus on gender and wokeness has also been true of their approach to AI: last year, the administration promised that it would require AI companies with federal contracts to make sure their large language models match the administration’s views on things like climate change; transgender identity; and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. (The administration characterized the mandate as a way to only purchase AI tools that “prioritize truthfulness and ideological neutrality.”) 

Trump has turned “a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.” 

It’s now increasingly obvious that Trump and his administration view AI technology as something akin to a large, dangerous dog that only a masculine owner can control. Trump has repeatedly called warnings that AI could harm human beings “a hoax,” writing on TruthSocial that the “only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” 

“The people that say AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change,’” the president also posted, with his trademark random capitalization. “That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one. These people are Revolutionaries, but Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause. Soon you’ll find out they’re working for people that do not have the best interests of the United States in mind!”  

More recently, Trump promised, also on TruthSocial, that he’d appoint an “AI czar,” writing, “Only High I.Q. individuals need apply! AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful.” And on X, he tried very hard to rebrand AI entirely, putting to his followers a poll about which more flattering term should be used instead. “A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI),” the president wrote, “or Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI).”

The debate took a strange turn last week when The New York Post ran a story warning that some people calling for a slowdown of AI development, including Amodei, are connected with the “effective altruism” movement. Effective altruism is, simply put, a philosophy first put forward by the bioethicist Peter Singer, which purports to use calculation and hard evidence to maximize the impact of charitable donations, and figure out what charitable initiatives will do the most good mathematically. The idea is controversial for all kinds of reasons, and one of its most visible proponents has been imprisoned financial fraudster Sam-Bankman-Fried, which isn’t, itself, a great advertisement. Some people have even likened EA to a cult, and one actual and extremely violent high-control group, the Zizians, had some effective altruist DNA. There’s also an offshoot best described as “effective altruism accelerationism,” promoted by several high-profile Silicon Valley figures, which holds that accelerating technological progress, including by developing AI faster, will promote human survival and consciousness on a galactic level, an idea that has several obvious, universe-sized holes. (Among them: AI data centers already clearly have disastrous environmental and health impacts, which is the opposite of promoting human survival.)

Boiling all of that down to only what might interest or scare their readers, The Post positioned effective altruism as a frightening example of a wealthy “group of woke elitists” trying to engineer the world to their liking. “It’s a group of globalists who believe in open borders, genderless pronoun and promote ‘Effective Altruism’ that believe all the world’s problems can be solved with technology,” the paper elaborated, adding that EA’s “obsessed adherents believe in funneling their wealth toward the goals they view as most important to humanity, including climate change and strict AI regulation.” 

Right-wing commentators were quick to make the connection: that “woke,” feminine, or nonbinary people can’t be trusted in their warnings on AI. “There is no committee or regulatory body with a ‘they/them’ that will make any good decisions,” far-right activist Chris Rufo declared. “Social scientists call this the Iron Law of Genderfluidity, and it’s been replicated in a hundred peer-reviewed journals, so you know it’s true.” (He was attempting to make a joke; there is no such “law.”) 

The Post soon ran a second story about how another prominent AI critic, author and computer scientist Nate Soares, is romantic partners with Aella, a well-known pseudonymous sex writer who has an OnlyFans and goes to sex parties. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. But the Post‘s story barely discussed his work; rather than cast doubt on any of Soares’ specific ideas about AI, it instead painted AI critics as sexually deviant—even if only by association—and thus untrustworthy. Other outlets like Fox News and the Bari Weiss-run The Free Press have followed suit with their own stories about the dangers of the effective altruism movement’s views on AI. 

“America will be AI DOMINANT!

The Defense Department has also gotten involved. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, previously seen posting QAnon memes, has issued a series of posts attacking effective altruism. Emil Michael, who was confirmed to that position in May 2025, is a former businessman who worked at Uber and, before that, Klout, a social media analytics company that assigned users a score assessing their online popularity and influence.

“Americanism, not effective altruism,” one recent tweet from the account declared. “The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!” 

“No dooming,” another declared. “America will be AI DOMINANT! Whoever wins AI, WINS!” 

Michael has also appeared on Fox News to declare effective altruism’s advocacy against AI to be a plot against American interests. “The amount of dollars being spent in DC now, directly and indirectly, by this effective altruist movement,” he said recently in a Fox appearance shared on another Pentagon account, “in the next few years, you’re going to see more dollars poured into this industry from a lobbying standpoint. The promoters of some of these extinction, death-cult-like philosophies are a part of that effort… There’s no doubt this is a coordinated campaign to scare people to make irrational decisions that benefit some of these incumbents.”

Dr. Fred Turner is a Stanford University professor of communication who studies media, technology, and American cultural history. In the early years of the internet, he wrote recently in The Baffler, developers were interested in networking—using tech to create connections between people and imagine a more collaborative and utopian world. Now, he wrote, they’re interested in extraction.

”The social world is no longer something to be interlinked,” Turner told me. Now, he says, “The value comes from monitoring, measuring, mapping, and reselling every bit of our social interaction, including the production of knowledge, stories, and language.” 

AI promises to help companies do just that. Given how often Trump has used the presidency as a vehicle to make money, Turner says it would be natural to assume that Trump’s alliance with the industry has something to do with him seeing the potential for personal profit from its data centers. But it’s also about asserting dominance and control.

“The Trump presidency is a process of protecting Trump’s personal incentives—his own personal reputation—and constantly shifting debates that could be about policy into interpersonal name calling realms where he can assert a kind of machismo,” Turner says. 

The administration, Turner adds, has made asserting a stereotypically menacing masculinity a core part of how the world is meant to see it: “That kind of projection of masculine dominance in a cruel way, as Trump does routinely, has the effect of scaring enemies, recruiting allies, and drawing the craven to your side. They are embracing a masculine style that gives them real material gains.” 

With respect to the Trump administration’s sudden championing of AI broadly and data centers specifically, Turner asks “what would they imagine they gain from reframing a policy about land use, about water use, about electricity use, in terms of sexuality?

“If it were mine to do, I would teach the world a class on separating out policy debate and questions of sexual style and ethics,” Farmer says. “If you tangle them up, you can muddy the water and cause folks to become upset against their own interests. I’d be asking about the profitability for Trump and his crew both in a financial sense, and then other senses: of turning a debate about technology into a debate about who’s got the phallus.” 

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva called out the failure of the United Nations to prevent war, mentioning Israel’s genocide in Gaza and repeatedly criticizing President Trump’s policies during his speech at the U.N. General Assembly in New York Tuesday.

“Generations of Palestinians will carry the pain and trauma left by the genocide of women and children perpetrated by the Netanyahu government in Gaza,” Lula said. He criticized the Trump administration’s sanctioning of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, saying she “must not be silenced for telling the truth.”

“Illegal settlements in the West Bank are making the two-state solution increasingly unviable, essential for Israelis and Palestinians to live in safety,” Lula added.

On the Iran war, Lula said the “Strait of Hormuz has become a battleground when it should be a vital passage for international trade.”

Regarding the Trump administration’s actions to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Lula said that the “Venezuelan people deserve to decide their own destiny.” Addressing the White House’s pressure campaign against the Cuban government, Lula said that “the world watches in horror as collective punishment is imposed on 10 million people by an illegal economic and energy embargo.”

Lula additionally took a shot at the U.S. deployment of warships to Latin America, saying, “We do not need aircraft carriers guarding our waters. We need cooperation to block the flow of weapons and money that feeds organized crime. That’s the spirit of the proposal that I personally handed to the U.S. president.”

The Brazilian president closed his speech by alluding to Trump’s ally, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (currently serving a prison sentence for abuses of power and trying to undermine the country’s 2022 elections).

“We will not allow the enemies of democracy, whether domestic or foreign, to undermine popular will. Brazilian democracy belongs to Brazilians. Brazil continues to be a sovereign country. Nobody, nobody will turn us away from this path,” Lula said.

“We are called to choose between multilateralism or unilateralism, democracy or extremism, sovereignty or subordination.”

Lula is one of the few left-leaning Latin American leaders who have survived the Trump administration’s rightward policies in the region. Since his election in 2024 not only did Trump depose and arrest Maduro, but is pressuring Cuba’s leadership and gave heavy support to Colombia’s right-wing president Abelardo De La Espriella prior to his election earlier this year.

Unlike the U.S., Brazil tried and convicted its corrupt right-wing president, and just like last year, Lula used his U.N. speech to stand up for his principles rather than cower in fear of being sanctioned or worse.

Quick Take

• Matt Reeves’ The Batman – Part II will prowl the streets of Gotham again as a DC Elseworlds movie project. Here’s what we know about the film.

Although it will not belong to the main on-screen DC Universe, we were very happy to hear that The Batman – Part II will continue on in DC’s new world order. Under James Gunn and Peter Safran, The Batman – Part II will belong to DC’s Elseworlds Projects. These projects will take place in TV, movie, or game form but will not factor into the main universe story. Still, they play a critical role in keeping the DC Universe varied and interesting.

Warner Bros.

In celebration of Batman Day, Matt Reeves shared an appropriately dark new image from The Batman – Part II for us to squint at. At least, we suppose that means things are moving along.

Here’s everything we know about The Batman – Part II.

Title Warner Bros.

For now, the sequel to The Batman carries the descriptive title of The Batman – Part II.

The Batman – Part II‘s Plot

We don’t know much yet about The Batman – Part II‘s plot. But we do know that a cinematic universe is building for The Batman. Next up, we’ll see a Penguin series on HBO Max, and that will tie directly into the coming sequel.

Warner Bros.

One thing is clear about The Batman – Part II; its focus will stay on Batman, a.k.a Bruce Wayne. Reeves shares:

To me, the thing that I really feel is that I also believe that Rob [Pattinson] is so special in the role. My goal has always been to do these point-of-view stories that allow the character to always be the emotional center of the story. Because a lot of times what happens is, after you do the first one, then suddenly other Rogues Gallery characters come in, and they kind of take over, and then Batman takes a backseat sort of character-wise, or emotionally.

Warner Bros.

But what is the current state of The Batman – Part II? Unfortunately, the film has been delayed once more. Although The Batman – Part II was originally meant to arrive in 2025, it will now be released on October 1, 2027, after two delays. James Gunn confirmed the news on Threads, revealing, “The only reason for the delay is there isn’t a full script (those of you who follow me here probably know that already). Matt is committed to making the best film he possibly can, and no one can accurately guess exactly how long a script will take to write. Once there is a finished script, there is around two years for pre-production, shooting and post-production on big films.”

But happily, Matt Reeves and co-writer Mattson Tomlin have finally finished The Batman—Part II‘s script. They took to Instagram to celebrate the news. And hey, although the script was delayed, it comes right on schedule, at least according to James Gunn.

Gunn recently shared in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “Listen, we’re supposed to get a script in June. I hope that happens. We feel really good about it. People should get off Matt’s nuts because it’s like, let the guy write the screenplay in the amount of time he needs to write it. That’s just the way it is. He doesn’t owe you something because you like his movie. I mean, you like his movie because of Matt. So let Matt do things the way he does.”

Gunn additionally shared, “I am irritated by people. I mean, it’s just that thing people don’t need to be entitled about. It’s going to come out when he feels good about the screenplay. And Matt’s not going to give me the screenplay until he feels good about the screenplay.” Happily, it seems like that time has finally come. Reeves and co made the June deadline. And, according to Variety sources, “the studio is thrilled with Matt Reeves’ just-submitted screenplay draft for the sequel to The Batman.” Huzzah!

The Batman – Part II‘s Cast Warner Bros.

For now, we know Robert Pattinson will return as our Bruce Wayne/Batman. It just wouldn’t be a The Batman movie without him. In addition, an article in GQ notes that Matt Reeves has confirmed Andy Serkis’ return as Alfred Pennyworth in The Batman – Part II.

A February 21, 2024 interview on Vanity Fair also confirmed Barry Keoghan—who had a brief cameo in the first film as the Joker—will return, presumably in a much bigger role, for The Batman – Part II.

Warner Bros. Behind the Scenes

Matt Reeves is returning to write the sequel to The Batman. But this time, he will find a co-writer in Mattson Tomlin. We assume Reeves will also direct The Batman – Part II.

The Batman – Part II Release Date

The Batman – Part II will release on February 18, 2028. Production on The Batman—Part II officially began in the spring of 2026.

Originally published on February 8, 2023.

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist. She is a great lover of the anti-hero and is always ready for a new ship to set sail. In her work, she likes to combine fandom passion with journalistic sensibilities. Follow her on Instagram.

The post THE BATMAN – PART II Shares Blurry New Image appeared first on Nerdist.

A coalition of law enforcement and private-sector tech companies led by Microsoft have disrupted the EvilTokens phishing service, arresting suspected website admins, taking down more than 50 websites, and notifying victims of compromised email accounts. EvilTokens is a notorious Microsoft device-code phishing kit that emerged in February, and, within months of launching, had been used by criminals to compromise 12,000 email inboxes across more than 10,000 organizations worldwide. Like other similar phishing subscriptions, EvilTokens was sold as-a-service, and allowed buyers to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and silently authenticate as the victim to the organization's Microsoft 365 applications. What made this one especially insidious, however, was its AI use. EvilTokens featured an AI chatbot that could analyze a victim’s inbox, and help criminals identify who to target, which trusted contacts to impersonate, and even which fraud strategies to use to maximize criminals’ paydays. “Since March 15, 2026, we have observed 10 to 15 distinct campaigns launching every 24 hours," Microsoft VP of security research Tanmay Ganacharya told The Register in an earlier interview about the phishing service. Late last week, in a coordinated effort that spanned the US and UK, Microsoft seized 50 websites used to operate the service and disabled more than 150 additional domains tied to its supporting infrastructure. Meanwhile, London’s Metropolitan Police Service on September 18 arrested two men, aged 32 and 38, who allegedly acted as the administrators of the EvilTokens website. Both men have been released on bail while the investigation continues. “Phishing services bring misery to thousands, taking money from everyday people across the world,” Detective Inspector Serena D'Adamo, whose team led the Met's investigation, told The Register in an emailed statement. “The Met remains committed to holding people to account who facilitate criminal enabling functions and think they can remain undetected.” Because healthcare organizations were among those targeted, Health-ISAC, a nonprofit that helps health sector organizations share cyber-threat information, joined Microsoft’s legal action as a co-plaintiff. After receiving authorizations from the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Microsoft and Health-ISAC worked with Cloudflare, Coinbase, OpenAI, Railway, SpyCloud, The Shadowserver Foundation and TRM Labs, took down EvilTokens’ platform, and Microsoft notified affected customers, helping them remediate compromised accounts. This action marks the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit’s (DCU) 40th court-authorized disruption over nearly two decades. According to Steven Masada, associate general counsel and DCU GM, this is also DCU’s first action against an end-to-end AI-enabled cybercrime service. “The infrastructure supporting EvilTokens has been disrupted, but the model it demonstrated will not disappear with it,” he said in a blog shared with The Register ahead of publication. “For organizations, the lesson is: assume that once an inbox is compromised, criminals may understand its contents in minutes, not days. Strong identity protections and monitoring remain essential, but organizations should also independently verify requests to change payment information, redirect funds or approve unusual transactions through a trusted second channel.” ®

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Source

If you were in any doubt that AI agents are capable of complex autonomous work, that skepticism should have faded this summer. In July, news emerged that an autonomous swarm of OpenAI agents running in a sandbox broke out of it, of their own accord. Tasked with solving some challenges on an internal security benchmark, they worked out how to communicate with each other using the JFrog Artifactory package manager. The software then realized that they could use vulnerabilities in that software to gain internet access. Once they were out in the wild, they went into full goblin mode, finding exposed Hugging Face credentials and using them to get code execution access on several of the AI model's servers. Apparently OpenAI's agents have been busier still. While everyone else was on vacation this summer, they were also commandeering a German website and using it as a messaging board. Don't get us wrong; these agents weren't evil. They were just being the kind of employee you'd generally want: a self-starter with initiative. They were using all means at their disposal to accomplish the task they've been given. They just didn't know when to stop. OpenAI has since called the episode a "warning shot" for the industry, highlighting that governance is now a priority for anyone using agentic AI. These test agents were running internally and weren't supposed to have any safeguards. But the average company will want to keep its agents on a leash. What does that look like? The first step to AI governance is visibility A functional AI governance program depends on a full knowledge of what AI you're running, says Deepika Chauhan, chief product officer at DigiCert. She describes the pattern she sees at customer sites. "People may enable Claude or ChatGPT for their organization. They have visibility at that level," she says. "But visibility into how many agents I have? How many models do I have? How many MCP servers?" Not so much. "We haven't even started to attack the governance problem." This problem is growing. Three quarters of the 1,001 IT and cybersecurity decision-makers in DigiCert's 2026 AI Trust Pulse survey had deployed at least four AI-powered systems in the last six months. Around the same number had suffered from an AI-related security incident. Only half could trace AI decisions back to the models and data that produced them. Getting that visibility is the first step, Chauhan says. After that comes the actual management. The key here is to take baby steps. "Identify a small use case," she advises. One example might be to start managing agents that are involved in a particular workload or agents that you have built internally, as opposed to third party models. Why identity built for humans breaks at agent speed Perhaps predictably for a company that built its success on automated verification, DigiCert doesn't see agent management as a manual problem. "The sheer scale we are talking about and the technology required means that you can't have human intervention," Chauhan says. "One customer we were talking to was creating 300 to 400 agents a week. When you're working at that scale, it just doesn't work to have only manual controls." The other issue is that humans are fallible. Misconfiguration is a perennial bugbear in any IT environment, but it becomes particularly dangerous in an agentic AI situation. Other agentic SNAFUs at Meta and Anthropic illustrate the point perfectly. Both saw agents make their way onto the open internet when they shouldn't, and both were due to misconfiguration by a third-party company tasked with testing the agents. Traditional tools meant to manage human identities can't manage non-human identities well, adds Chauhan. Legacy identity and access management applications require people to approve access to different applications. There must still be a human in the loop, even if it's just for people to click an MFA approval button. Human employees might be willing to wait a minute or two for such approval, but agents talk to each other at machine speed. Instead, automated runtime attestation is key, managed by a robust central policy engine. The foundation of AI Trust That attestation relies on credentials and it's something that agents should carry with them, says Chauhan. This is one component in the company's AI Trust initiative. AI Trust is DigiCert's end-to-end governance framework that assigns identity automatically to AI entities, restricting them to safe, permitted actions while making them accountable. It uses cryptographic controls to ensure agent integrity, and the company has integrated it with existing infrastructure. The runtime attestation of AI Trust draws on the international travel metaphor in its approach. "We have a concept of an AI agent passport. There's an identity in the passport, but then that identity is recognized across any checkpoint anywhere in the world," she says, adding that the passport includes not just identity but access credentials (think of them like visas). Federation is key to this idea because, as we've seen already, agent interactions won't stop at the company boundary. "It's essential because you're literally going to have agents from company A talking to company B," she explains. DigiCert's whitepaper describes the concrete artifact: a tamper-evident passport cryptographically bound to a workload identity that encodes approved systems, permitted operations, authorized environments, data-sensitivity classifications, expiration states, and accountable human ownership. The scheme is anchored in DNS, the same mechanism DMARC uses to authenticate email senders, on the reasoning that every agent action begins with a DNS query. Deterministic guardrails around a non-deterministic actor As agents get smarter, won't they be able to subvert these controls by thinking outside the box, Jason Bourne-style? After all, OpenAI's agents were able to break free of their sandbox to wreak havoc elsewhere. OpenAI's own post-mortem states that its models "are now powerful, persistent, and collaborative enough that, absent sufficient safeguards, they can find and exploit security weaknesses across multiple computer systems." Part of the problem here is that because agents are non-deterministic, you can't predict in advance what they're going to do. That problem becomes even more acute with newer frontier models like OpenAI's Astra, which saves tokens by internalizing a lot of its reasoning and not reporting its decision-making process in as much detail as previous models. The outer boundary can still be deterministic, even when the agents inside it aren't, says Chauhan. "You can black box what the agent is 'thinking' about or not thinking about, and what its agendas might be," she says. "But a deterministic boundary that says 'this agent can't access this thing', is your guardrail. That's a hard stop." Who owns the mess Governance isn't just about technical guardrails, though. At some point, the question becomes organizational. When something goes wrong, someone has to put their hand up and own it. But most companies never assigned that ownership, Chauhan warns. She identifies three patterns in DigiCert's customer base. Some organizations put the existing IAM team in charge because they have experience governing service accounts. Others hand it off to the risk and compliance department. Another group will take a more holistic, multidisciplinary approach. This involves creating a 'tiger team' including representatives from network operations, the IAM team, and the security function. All of these executives will have a unique perspective on the issue. The third route seems to be the most productive because agents are going to be everywhere in your business. And a siloed approach runs the risk of being too restrictive. The surface area already touches every department that has dabbled in AI. The systemic view Chauhan's advice on implementing AI Trust - get visibility, pick a small use case for enforcement, and then expand - is the foundation for effective AI governance, she says. That governance is in turn a critical component in fully realizing return on investment. "We must raise the urgency and awareness that this is table stakes for wider AI adoption," she urges. "You want to get all the benefits from AI, but what are organizations going to do if they're nervous about it? They're going to put a stop to some of the projects because of the risk involved." The headlines we're seeing about agentic transgressions are unnerving, but they're also in a unique category because they're research models from frontier providers. It seems unlikely that a regular publicly available agent would be quite so egregious today. However, we have also seen agents happily deleting files and even entire code bases because of internal flaws and humans who just waved their actions through. Organizations should be taking note of these events and laying the groundwork to avoid becoming headlines themselves. Working out who signed off on which agent and what that agent is allowed to do is a foundational skill that we can't afford to overlook. Sponsored by DigiCert.