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The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a massive increase in citizenship application fees as the Trump administration’s latest move to upend legal immigration. 

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed a rule Monday that would raise the fee for a paper citizenship application by 75 percent from $760 to $1,330, and the fee for an online application by 80 percent from $710 to $1,280, according to Newsweek. 

The proposed rule would also make it more expensive to seek a hearing challenging a denied naturalization. If adopted, the rule would raise the fee for an appeal from $830 to $1,475 by paper, and $780 to $1,425 online. 

Under the proposed rule, the government would scrap fee waivers and a reduced fee option for individuals experiencing financial hardship. The changes would present a significant financial hurdle for lower-income immigrants, further transforming legal immigration into a privilege for the extremely wealthy and a money-making scheme for the federal government. 

This proposed rule is yet another way the Trump administration is attempting to curb legal immigration. The government has already stacked the deck with immigration judges bent on denying asylum claims, curbed the refugee program, and imposed steep price increases on H-1B visas.   

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By Anna Maria Barry-Jester for ProPublica After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely. But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so.

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A federal judge has blocked an attempt by the Trump administration to subpoena Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials, calling it an effort to “harass and retaliate against them.” In a ruling unsealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz found the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil…

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FEATURE Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least. If it weren’t for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based (“Postgres” was shorthand for “Post-Ingres”). The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month, he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term "open source" was even uttered. In a sense, “Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn't belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation,” Stonebraker said. Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker’s revolutionary extensible architecture. Three decades later, this stubbornly-independent database has become the bedrock of modern cloud infrastructure. Data should be relational When it comes to relational database systems, British computer scientist and then-IBM employee Ted Codd got the ball rolling in 1970. A database is where you store your data so it can be queried in a predictable way. A database system is the software that manages the database (don’t confuse the two). That year, Codd decreed that all data should be stored in tables and accessed using a high-level query language. IBM implemented Codd’s idea in System R, and created SQL as the query language. The results were eventually rolled into IBM's DB2. Stonebraker, then an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, also implemented Codd’s ideas. Stonebraker and his team of grad students created not only a working prototype, but a full-scale implementation – he later cofounded a startup, Relational Technology, to sell Ingres commercially. Ingres did not use SQL, but instead employed another query language, QUEL (Query Language), although the fundamentals were similar. A relatively primitive version of Ingres was even released gratis for academic research. But by the early 1980s, Stonebraker had “pushed the code off a cliff” and started building something new. Thus, Postgres was born. Beyond Ingres: Postgres At the time, Stonebraker explained, the business world was pushing for databases to hold additional data types beyond the integers, floats, and character strings required for basic business accounting. There was complicated CAD data and GIS data, with multiple data points that needed to be stored and reasoned against. It was clear to Stonebraker and his colleagues that the ideal database system needed to be extended with more data types, user-defined data types, user-defined operators, and user-defined functions. Adding more data types and such might seem simple enough, but the “devil is in the details,” he noted. “You need to be able to teach the query optimizer about new types, and that's not exactly easy.” Commutative rules had to be worked out, and they had to be optimized. This led to what was probably Postgres’ most successful feature: support for abstract data types (ADTs). Stonebraker had other ambitions for Postgres as well. He also wanted to incorporate new work from Chris Date on referential integrity, which brought “semantic consistency between foreign keys and primary keys” to the relational model. He wanted to add in a rules engine, which would continually monitor for changes and make decisions based on those changes. Also, he wanted crash recovery. The crash recovery and the rules engine never quite worked out, but the ADTs took root, and now most database systems support this extensibility, pretty much exactly like they were devised by Stonebraker and Co. in 1983. “We pretty much got it right,” he said. In fact, he reckons that his work on ADTs was probably the major reason he landed the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2014 A.M. Turing Award. Stonebraker and his mates were eager to make money from their creation. So they rolled Postgres into a start-up, Illustra, which was eventually purchased by Informix, which promptly digested the technology into its own database server. But they also maintained an open source version…barely. It wasn’t even called open source (which wasn’t a formal term until 1998). It was considered freely available academic software, something for fellow researchers to tinker with. And it was based on the very-permissive BSD license. The architecture that refused to die In 1995, two Berkeley graduate students, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen, resurrected Postgres from the last 4.2 academic release. They jettisoned the poorly-running rules engine and disaster recovery features, and, most importantly, swapped out QUEL for the then industry standard of SQL, releasing the software as Postgre95 (and later PostgreSQL). “I didn't know any of these people,” Stonebraker said of this all-volunteer development crew. They were “a collection of super programmers who picked up this open source project and started shepherding it forward, and they've been shepherding it for the last 30 years.” This sovereignty made Postgres safe for anyone to use and modify. Postgres’ wire interface has been widely used as the base for building other database systems, including CockroachDB, YugoByteDB, and TimeScale. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each have their own database-as-a-service built on Postgres. Chief selling point? Each is fully Postgres compatible. “The elephants have basically bet the ranch on Postgres,” he said. Even AWS’ graph database service is built on Postgres (“the relational implementation of [a graph database] is almost always faster, usually substantially faster, than doing it natively,” Stonebraker quipped.) Top of the heap These days, Postgres sits near the top of the DB-Engines ranking of the world’s most popular database systems, just below Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Unlike those rivals however, Postgres continues to steadfastly gain market share. Tom Kincaid helped organize the PGDay meetup – and is a vice president of EDB, a Postgres service company. He offered several reasons why Postgres made such a big impact, despite its initial lack of support from any of the IT giants (unlike the fellow open source MySQL, now managed by Oracle, which many open sourcerers distrust for that reason alone). Extensibility was a major help in adoption, especially as the role of databases expanded beyond basic business accounting. ADTs gave the database system an easy entry into an expanding geospatial market, and later, document databases. “Postgres was quickly able to provide developers exactly what they needed for storing, retrieving and searching JSON documents,” Kincaid told The Register. “The fact that you could combine SQL with many different data types allowed it to thrive with every new trend in application development.” Also helping was the quality of the codebase (“It is held to the highest standard of review,” Kincaid said) which attracted top developers, as did the quality of the optimizer. The permissive licensing also helped, allowing start-ups and project leaders to build derivative products without fear of legal repercussions. Why Postgres still doesn’t have file-level encryption Despite all the love from the open source community, Postgres is still missing features that it might need to maintain parity with commercial database systems. This was the focus of another illuminating PGDay talk by long-time Postgres contributor (and always dapper) Bruce Momjian. He ran down a long list of missing features, most of which the development team are currently grappling with. The database system could use 64-bit transaction IDs to accommodate very large databases. It could also use support for columnar storage, which is all the rage for large-scale data analysis. Global indexing, server-threading, internal connection pooling and sharding are also features in various stages of assembly. The major feature Postgres currently lacks, however, is file-level encryption, or “transparent data encryption,” as it is called in the industry. TDE is supported by all commercial database vendors, and it is required by the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS) specifications for storing financial transaction data. Currently, Postgres lets the operating system handle the encryption. Current development on Postgres file-level encryption is stalled “in many ways,” Momjian said. “The code changes became too heavy for the value of the feature,” he said. Not only would the functions touching the data files themselves need modification, but all the other functions scattered through the system that write temporary files must be altered as well. This would be a “monstrous” job, he said. Still, missing features allow commercial entities to fill in the gaps. Percona, for instance, offers the feature as part of its own Postgres commercial distribution. Commercial database companies are very sensitive to customer requirements, whether those requirements are truly necessary in a practical or technical sense, or if they are merely external or regulatory in nature. It’s the latter set of requirements that don’t make it to the top of the Postgres to-do list as quickly, Momjian said. “We don't want to add a feature unless it really has technical value,” he said. Momjian pointed out that the PCI mandate itself also has questionable value purely from a technical view. Once the contents are copied into the server’s memory, the encryption protection vanishes. If an attacker can bypass a system’s file system permissions, they can probably read the raw working memory and get the encryption key. “If we're trying to lock down the file system, we'd also have to lock down memory. We don't know how to do that,” he said. But the missing TDE may not even be a bug at all, but an actual feature of Postgres's fundamental philosophy. “While proprietary databases target the workloads of their largest customers, Postgres targets the workloads of general users,” he said. And that may be the best kind of success for an open source project. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Valve has announced a massive new piece of hardware, with the Steam Machine coming in 2026, a PC/console hybrid 6x faster than Steam Deck.
• The Steam Machine will cost between $1,049.00 and $1,428.00, making it more expensive than other consoles.
• Nerdist Take: The Steam Machine could bridge the gap between console gaming and PC gaming.

With Microsoft effectively ceding the console wars to Sony and Nintendo, giving the competition access to once-proprietary Xbox games like Halo, it seemed like it’s a two-horse race. Will it be PlayStation or Nintendo Switch that reigns supreme? Well, don’t count Valve out of that battle. The company behind Steam has announced a massive new piece of hardware. (Via IGN.) And now, we officially have pricing for this next-gen Steam Machine and Steam Controller, as well as its specs and size. According to Valve, the console/PC hybrid will have six times (that’s 6x!) more powerful than Steam Deck. And it will cost…

Valve How Much Will the Steam Machine Cost?

In all, the Steam Machine will cost between $1,049.00 and $1,428.00, making it more expensive than most other consoles out there. However, the Steam Machine is also a full gaming PC, so it is more than just a console.

The pricing breakdown is more specifically:

• Steam Machine 512GB costs $1,049.00
• Steam Machine 512GB with Controller costs $1,128.00
• Steam Machine 2TB costs $1,349.00
• Steam Machine 2TB with Controller costs $1,428.00

What Are the Features of the Steam Machine?

The memory for the Steam Machine is pretty huge. As mentioned, two models will be available in 2026. One will be 512GB and the other 2TB. It will ship both alone and in a bundle with Steam Controller. The Steam Machine, a follow-up to the previous 2015 version, will feature a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T CPU, a semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 GPU, and supports 4K gaming at 60 frames per second with FSR. Valve described the new Steam Machine as six times more powerful than Steam Deck, with 16GB DDR5 and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM.

In more technical terms, here are the exact specs of the Steam Machine 512GB.

• Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
• Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
• 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
• 512GB NVMe SSD, microSD card slot
• Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Gigabit ethernet
• Integrated Steam Controller wireless adapter
• Small form factor, ~6 inch cube
• SteamOS 3

And the exact specs of the Steam Machine 2TB:

• Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
• Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
• 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
• 2TB NVMe SSD, microSD card slot
• Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Gigabit ethernet
• Integrated Steam Controller wireless adapter
• Small form factor, ~6 inch cube
• SteamOS 3
• Extra faceplates – red fabric and solid walnut

When Will the Steam Machine Release? And How Can You Buy It? Valve

To get your hands on a Steam Machine, you’ll have to first sign up for a reservation to be able to buy the Steam Machine. You can sign up for your reservation any time before Thursday, June 25th, at 10 a.m. Pacific. After that:

We will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation and waitlist order.

Based on the reservation order, you will receive an email on June 25th indicating one of two things:

• You’ve been added to the reservation queue and a Steam Machine has been reserved in your name. As units become available for shipment, people in the reservation queue will receive an email with the option to purchase.
  • We’ll send the first batch of those starting Monday June 29th, and will continue to go through the reservation queue as units become available. 
• You’ve been added to the waitlist and we’ll let you know when more units become available.

What Games Will the Steam Machine Play?

The Steam Machine will play “your whole Steam library, including your favorite AAA titles. Just sign in with your Steam account and your entire library is there.”

Nerdist Take: The Steam Machine Could Bridge the Gap Between Console and PC Gaming Valve

Console gaming versus PC gaming has long been the dividing line, and if this is legitimately both, that really makes the next-gen Steam Machine an intriguing proposition for all parties. As a pure console player, I’ve missed out on a lot of PC-only titles. I’m sure it’s the same the other way for PC gamers. The versatility of such a powerful device will bring a lot of interest from either side. It will, of course, be dependent on the price. My guess? Quite high.

Gabe Newell, the head honcho of Valve, said the following: “We’ve been super happy with the success of Steam Deck, and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play all the great titles in their Steam libraries. Our work over the years on other hardware and even more importantly on SteamOS has enabled Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame to do just that.”

If you’d like more info on particular specs, you can visit the Steam site.

Originally published November 12, 2025.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

Originally published on June 5, 2026.

The post Steam Machine Gets Pricing and Release Date appeared first on Nerdist.

Amazon is planning to increase the footprint of its new conversational AI assistant Alexa+ to India and is inviting users in the country to test out a Hindi-language version.

President Donald Trump has struck out nine times in court in his quest to obtain voter registration data from states, reports Democracy Docket.

On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter data from Maryland.

“This Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that an [statewide voter registration list] is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States under the CRA,” District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote in the ruling.

The DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data as part of its immigration crackdown has not been going too well. So far, it has not prevailed in a single case: The suits have been dismissed in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, and now Maryland.

And these dismissals aren’t just coming from Democratic-appointed judges. Five of the nine judges were appointed or renominated by Trump, including Gallagher.

The DOJ could still see a victory: It has sued 31 states and Washington, D.C. Outside of lawsuits, the DOJ has sent letters to all states asking for their voter rolls. At least 16 Republican-led states have complied, according to Democracy Docket.

The administration’s quest for complete, uncensored voter data is chilling—especially because they won’t provide a legitimate reason for this federal overreach, although some reporting hints at their plans. Over the course of the Maryland lawsuit, DOJ officials refused to answer the judge’s questions about what the agency planned to do with the data.

Russia’s equipment losses in Ukraine are about to become the world’s gain, as Kyiv has decided to hand out its intel on seized Russian battlefield assets to its international partners. And it has launched a new site to do so. Announced on Friday by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the TrophyLab is being billed as a place for Ukraine and its allies to analyze Russian military technology for the benefit of both Kyiv’s government in its current fight against Moscow, and for anyone else that might face off against Russian gear in the near future. “From now on, the entire democratic world will have access to the secrets of Russian weapons and equipment,” the Defense Ministry said in a press release. International partners also have the opportunity to obtain samples of war trophies for their own research efforts via the program. As for how much equipment is in the database so far, the Defense Ministry said that TrophyLab currently contains samples from more than 115 war trophies divided into 79 categories, including bombs and missiles, aircraft, drones, electronic warfare equipment, tanks, and even small arms. More than 225 prior studies of the seized equipment are also included in the TrophyLab dataset, and that’s just the beginning, with Ukrainian defense forces, the Main Intelligence Directorate, and the country’s Security Service all continually providing data for the program. The included total so far is likely just a fraction of the data Ukraine could share with its international partners, as Russia’s losses since its 2022 invasion of its southwestern neighbor have been extensive. One estimate last year by the US Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that Russia lost more than a thousand armored fighting vehicles, at least 3,000 infantry fighting vehicles, 300 self-propelled artillery units, and nearly 2,000 tanks. That only includes losses sustained between January 2024 and June 2025 when the report was published, mind you, meaning the actual total may be far greater. Russia’s gains in Ukraine have been largely erased outside of the Russian-annexed but contested Crimean peninsula, where it has focused most of its energy of late. Even then, it hasn’t had a successful run of things, with Ukrainian forces continuing to bomb its soldiers, forward bases, and logistical routes using long-range drones. Speaking of long-range Ukrainian drones, international media has been filled with images lately of Moscow being bombarded by suicide drones that have flooded Russian airspace and repeatedly struck a major oil refinery despite being shot down by the hundreds, according to Russian state media. Ukraine has captured some Russian territory, but like Russia's gains in Ukraine, many of those advances have been pushed back, leading to a prolonged stalemate between Russian forces and Ukrainian troops. Ukrainian scientific organizations, military units, and defense sector firms are all eligible for access to TrophyLab, as are the governments and defense departments of Ukraine’s allies and defense contractors in partner nations. That said, access is being tightly controlled. In order to get a peek at the TrophyLab data, applicants need to prove they don’t have any ties to Russia, haven’t been sanctioned by Ukraine, and meet other criteria set by the MoD. “Every missile, drone, and vehicle seized on the battlefield is now a source of knowledge for the free world,” Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said of the new platform in a social media post over the weekend. “What was meant to be the enemy's secret advantage is being dismantled to defend democracy.” ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Warner Bros. Pictures Animation has an animated movie for The Powerpuff Girls in the works.
• A deal has yet to be secured, so there are no further details about it at this time.
• Will the third time be the charm for reviving this beloved animated series?

An adorable mix of sugar, spice, and everything nice—along with some serious crime-fighting skills—is coming to the big screen. The Powerpuff Girls will rise again thanks to an animated movie that’s currently in development with Warner Bros. Pictures Animation. According to Variety, the news surfaced at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France. 

Hanna-Barbera/Warner Bros. Animation

Right now, things are in the very early stages with no official deal in place. Therefore there are no further details about the plot and what we will see in the city of Townsville. All we know is that we better get more Mojo Jojo and HIM on the big screen. Since the animated show’s ending in 2005, attempts to bring the Powerpuff Girls back have not gone well, to say the least. Despite lasting for a couple of years, the 2016 rebooted series was critically panned and widely disliked by fans.

RELATED ARTICLE

The Canceled Live-Action POWERPUFF GIRLS Series Trailer Surfaces and It’s Bizarre

And, well, there was that ill-fated live-action film that thankfully never came to fruition. We all saw the leaked trailer that explained so much about why it ended up never seeing the light of day. So, perhaps the third time is indeed the charm to revive Buttercup, Blossom, and Bubbles. We will keep an eye out and see if we are truly getting a Powerpuff Girls animated movie or if this project will end up falling into the abyss.

The post THE POWERPUFF GIRLS Animated Movie in Development appeared first on Nerdist.

The Trump administration is holding millions of dollars of Homeland Security funds hostage unless states agree to stop using electronic ballots and prove voters are citizens before they vote, CNN reports.

Trump is demanding that states carry out manual election audits at the administration’s direction, use their preferred system to verify citizenship, and promise to gradually end the use of electronic ballots—all things that could lead to actual voter fraud. States that rebuff Trump would lose 20 percent of their grants, which could be millions of dollars in security funds.

These grants help states prevent terrorist attacks, support infrastructure, and ready themselves for natural disasters. DHS has granted this funding to states for years, no questions asked.

But now, as the president approaches a potentially disastrous midterm, this funding is contingent on state governments completely changing their election apparatuses so that Trump can continue to delegitimize factual polling and push his baseless claims of voter fraud. This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has dangled funding above states’ heads to make them capitulate to its agenda, and it likely won’t be the last.

“I expect [the new requirements] will be blocked in the courts,” former Justice Department lawyer David Becker told CNN.

Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month beginning July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia's latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.

It’s the latter half of June, which means everyone is bracing for disaster, thanks to the Supreme Court saving all the big cases for the end of the term. This year, they’ve sat on a lot of them, though they do this so often now that having 17 cases remaining is actually lower than previous years. Two opinions issued last Thursday weren’t ones everyone is waiting on with a mixture of worry…

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What do the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer and greeting cards that play musical jingles have in common? DARPA cites both of them as the inspiration for a project seeking low-resource computing paradigms to be used on future battlefields. DARPA on Friday put out a request for information (RFI) for new low-resource computing (LRC) paradigms and processes that haven't been utilized yet in microscale systems not unlike the tiny chip-and-battery combos found in greeting cards and children's books. Apparently, thinking about those and the 80th anniversary of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) has DARPA wondering why more useful things can't be made in a tiny form factor. "The physical and financial cost of computation has plummeted so far that it is routinely embedded in disposable novelties," the RFI said, pointing to the fact that a greeting card chip has processing speed and memory capacity vastly exceeding those of ENIAC. "The computation itself has become virtually free; the physical resources required to sustain, house, and power it have become the critical bottleneck." DARPA isn't trying to miniaturize a datacenter, in other words. This is specifically about what it said is a "resource paradox" at the low end of the computing spectrum, and it's one the Pentagon's research arm thinks is ripe for exploitation to power battlefield computing needs. To that end, DARPA said it's seeking concepts that address areas like operating with little power and memory, tolerating unreliable components, and requiring little technological sophistication. Regarding the latter, DARPA said it wants systems that can be built using low-precision manufacturing techniques, legacy fabrication processes, and/or "primitive technological ecosystems." Responses need to address at least one of those issues, DARPA said, and ideally (though optionally) one of its defined logistical predicaments as well. By those, DARPA is referring to the sorts of things that would constrain operation in environments where the US military typically operates. Concerns include low-trust environments where data sources and system components may not be trustworthy, operating with the minimum necessary privileges to avoid root access concerns, simple user experiences that even the average grunt can understand, and what may be the most complex issue of them all: self-hosting. We're not talking about soldiers in the field managing their own websites here, though. This is actually about autonomous systems. DARPA wants cheap, tiny, and reliable devices that are still "capable of native, user-directed, autonomous self-programming and self-modification without reliance on external cross-compilation toolchains or host machines," as well as "architectures that allow the system to adapt, recompile, or generate its own operational code entirely on device." That's quite the ask for microscale, low-end hardware, but hey – it's not like DARPA hasn't been the proving ground for a bunch of technology we all use on a regular basis. Someday soon even your average electronic greeting card might host a mini AI if this program proves successful. ®

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | What do inflation and Iran have in common? Trump screwing up.

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Widow’s Bay crept its way into quickly fueling obsessive fandom discourse, converting viewers with its genre-bending, darkly comedic first season. With a finale that both satisfied its captive audience and rewarded them with a calculatedly chilling turn of events for Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) and his cabinet of close compatriots, there are now more questions than answers left to unearth beneath the ground of the cursed island shores.

⚡ Quick Take

• Widow’s Bay gave us a finale with a lot of intriguing and unsolved mysteries.
• The series will return for season two, and we hope we get answers to the following 8 mysteries.

Considering that the island is hungry for more tourism than Loftis could have imagined, the season ends with a bell tolling and eight lives left to feed the entity that requires human sacrifices. So with that, here are eight intriguing mysteries that are still unsolved that we hope to see play out in the future. Thankfully, Widow’s Bay scored a season two renewal, so there’s a chance. (And we want more sunset cocktails with Patricia!)

1. Which Deaths Count to Satisfy the Island on Widow’s Bay?

At the start of the season, the death knell of the bell tolls nine times. But even after the events in the episodes that followed, we don’t get a hint of what counts until the season finale. The storm and island threat were assuaged only after Evan and his friends left Kenny to be fed to the entity. Which means that as the sacrifice protocol reveals itself to Dale, the island’s hunger requires that its human meals be in a pure state of fear and in its proximity to pounce on them.

RELATED ARTICLE

Apple TV Greenlights WIDOW’S BAY Season 2

Despite sailor Shep’s deadly outburst, the priest’s suicide, and the drug dealer getting sucked into the island’s supernatural tornado, those deaths did not count. Tom and Evan hear the bell sound eight times in the finale, meaning that the island is a little less mad. Now, the mayor must face the reality that it might fall on him to keep the island satiated in future seasons.

2. Was the Boogeyman Collecting Teen Souls for the Island?

Widow’s Bay does a great job at hinting to the audience that the mayor is supposed to be the one inclined to search for sacrifices. Loftis’ strange obsession with getting more tourists on the island could speak to that being an instinct that the environment he’s in encourages. But what happens if the mayor refuses? Mayor Howard the Coward is referenced in the season around the time that punk PJ traps Kevin in the room with the chair. If Loftis refuses, could PJ continue in this tradition?

Take the Boogeyman, whose sudden teen killing spree might have been compelled by the island. He could not be stopped and made sure his victims were in a deep state of fear. If he were somehow a possessed conduit of the island’s evil, that fed it until he was locked away before claiming Patricia. That connection likely made the killer indestructible, like Warren in the coffin for all those years before he was freed by someone. Thankfully, Patricia, in all her glory, made sure the Boogeyman was ashes that could not regenerate, giving her the best final girl ascension.

3. Is Loftis Hiding More About What Really Happened to Evan’s Mom?

It’s strange for a man who weaponizes his incompetence beneath a guise of bumbling nincompoopery to have a chest of secrets and more beneath the house. Thanks to Tom, Evan thought his mom died in childbirth, but she lived as a shell of a person in a hospital. Loftis knew that trying to get her off the island almost killed her, and he clearly is doing everything he can to stop that fate from befalling his son. It all makes Loftis’ identity as well-meaning hit some snags, even if he’s operating to make the island a better cage to keep his son safe and alive in.

But where is she? Once we find out she lived and was committed to an asylum, that leaves room for the possibility that it’s connected to the mystery of the hospital that no one is supposed to stop at. We’re tired of dead moms, so we hope Lauren gets some sort of unexpected role in the show’s future.

Apple TV

Take the Boogeyman, whose sudden teen killing spree might have been compelled by the island. Think about it. He could not be stopped and made sure his victims were in a deep state of fear, and if he were somehow a possessed conduit of the island’s evil, it made it easy to keep it fed until he was locked away before claiming Patricia. That connection likely gave the killer extra lives that could not be extinguished for those years in between before he was freed by someone on the island. Thankfully Patricia in all her glory made sure the Boogeyman was ashes that could not regenerate in the best final girl scene committed to television in a long time. 

4. Does Widow’s Bay Have Cryptids Like Werewolves? (The answer better be yes.)

When Ruth regales Loftis with her pull on the island, starting off with her first love, she begins dropping her deepest of lore. “He got bit by an animal and became that animal” became an instantly iconic line delivery from actress K. Callan.

Earlier in the season, Loftis flips through a calendar that’s just wolves, so we sure as hell hope this means werewolves will show up on Widow’s Bay. Really, any other cryptids, for that matter, like the sea hag that tried to eat Tom before Wyck saved him. It’d also be really cool to see Wyck get a round two with his sea beast, but if he’s inspired by Quint from Jaws, we fear for his fate.

5. Are Warren’s Descendants Purposefully Alluring to Keep the Bloodline Going?

In the flashback episode, we’re introduced to the origins of the suspicions about Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater) making a deal with the devil of sorts when his second wife, Sarah (Betty Gilpin), sees him more interested in getting rid of bodies the island is presumably being fed instead of lying in bed with her. Then, of course, thinking that burying him alive would mean the horrors would end, but alas, not since his youngest daughter made it back ashore. This daughter will be wed off to her very much older savior as soon as she is of age.

The curse clearly wants to keep the Warren bloodline going. Ruth’s long list of people who made a pass at her, hilarious as it was, resulted in her giving in to a married man and getting pregnant with Lauren.

Apple TV

The pull-out method, not working, as a joke set up by Tom, is echoed by Ruth, which makes his concern for Evan valid. It does make us wonder, however, what would happen if Evan got his tourist fling pregnant? Tom’s mom got pregnant by a Widow’s Bay local, but he was born on the mainland. Yet he was made to visit his dad every summer, which led to his meeting Lauren and having Evan. Would the Boston girl be seduced back onto the island somehow?

6. Did Bechir and His Wife Make It Off the Island?

It is never revealed if Bechir’s wife went into labor after all. Once the storm cleared up and it was safe to get out of there, we can imagine that the chief could have just been done and gotten himself and his wife off the island. Tom could have encouraged him to just leave him to worry about the last Warren, eliminating and pushing out an imminent threat to his son’s life.

7. Did Ruth Survive the Gunshot?

From the looks of the moment, she could have gotten her ear grazed. So if she’s alive and holds this secret too, it would make Bechir’s departure more pressing. Evan needs to connect with her as his grandmother since his mom wrote to him about her secret second mother. In retrospect, that letter now seems less like the ravings of a madwoman and makes sense. Also, we want to see Ruth reunite with her were-animal beau.

8. Was Warren’s Deal Actually Good for Widow’s Bay?

It would not be surprising if, as long as a Warren lived on the island, Richard’s deal, which he vehemently defended even after being buried alive, still stood. That only a certain number of sacrifices, enough to sustain the evil, would be required to allow the people of Widow’s Bay to live out their lives on the island. No one let Warren discuss the alternative, which could very well be that if not for the pact he made in desperation to allow his colony to thrive, it might actually be for the greater good. All things considered, the deal with the island is the trolley problem that every mayor has had to face.

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And when they don’t, it appears someone gets compelled to be the shepherd leading the lambs to slaughter, whether it’s their leader or a boogeyman. Sure, Evans’ death would break the pact allowing people to leave, but would that really be a good thing? With that occurring, would the curse the show hinges on be revealed as a blessing in disguise that they turn on and, in return, allow the evil to consume Widows Bay unchecked? Evan’s life just might be the only thing standing between Widow’s Bay and a far worse fate if the evil is allowed to go unchecked.

The post 8 Mysteries That WIDOW’S BAY Must Solve Next Season appeared first on Nerdist.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard may have been taking orders on political decisions from Chris Butler, the leader of a group many former members have called a cult, according to a new investigation from The Washington Post.

So far, Gabbard’s allies in the Trump administration have been largely silent about the report that the person they placed in charge of the CIA, FBI, and NSA may have been taking directives from a man many former followers view as a cult leader.

As Gabbard is no longer a part of the Trump administration, perhaps her former colleagues feel no pressure to weigh in. But conservative commentator Meghan McCain defended Gabbard on X Sunday afternoon.

“What absolute unpatriotic vile trash this attack on @TulsiGabbard is. They wont cover her releases on Fauci or bio labs—both things that threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people, but spend time and space vomiting this washed up nonsense anti-Hindu bigoted crap,” McCain wrote, referring to Gabbard’s release of documents “exposing” Dr. Anthony Fauci for supposed actions taken during the Covid-19 pandemic on Friday, her last day on the job.

Reporter Jon Swaine gained access to a trove of emails that appeared to show memos from someone within the Science of Identity Foundation, or SIF, directing Gabbard during her time in Congress. When Swaine compared the directives to Tulsi’s voting record, legislative proposals, and media statements, he found “unmistakable parallels.”

Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism known as Hare Krishna, and his politics when he founded SIF did not belong squarely in one political camp: “He inveighed against Muslims, homosexuality, gun control and public schools, but also promoted environmentalism and anti-capitalism,” the Post reported.

After two months with no answers from Gabbard’s office, Swaine informed Gabbard that he would be proceeding with the story. Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard would be stepping down from her position as director of national intelligence.

On her last days in office, a spokesperson gave a statement: “The attacks on Director Gabbard’s faith and loyalty are not only false—they are a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry.”

Anyone caught tampering with Donald Trump’s Washington-area restoration projects could be on the hook for significant prison time.

The president warned against vandalizing the monuments and statues that his administration has been trying to clean ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. In a Truth Social post, Trump pledged that anyone caught will face up to 10 years in prison.

“Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote Monday.

Federal law already stipulates that damage to federal property exceeding $1,000 is classified as a felony. As such, the penalties are steep, possibly including a significant fine, a prison sentence of up to 10 years, or both. Those charged with damaging federal property to the tune of less than $1,000 could face a misdemeanor and a one-year prison sentence.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In the same message, Trump claimed that the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had suffered a “300 foot long gash”—an inexplicable jump from the 250-foot-long damage he described Saturday.

He added that “chemicals have been illegally placed in the water” and complained about the “8647” etched into the National Mall. He further suggested that the damage was “probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey,” who was indicted by a federal grand jury in April for sharing a photo of seashells to his Instagram account that similarly spelled out “8647,” a tagline that Trump and his allies have claimed insinuates a desire for Trump’s death.

The global memory crisis has developed a new twist as buyers turn to "legacy" products such as DDR2 and DDR3 to meet demand, according to market watcher TrendForce. The Taiwanese firm says DRAM buyers are turning to older products to secure larger supply allocations, driving up prices for components including DDR2 and DDR3. As Reg readers will be well aware by now, the AI craze has led to memory chipmakers prioritizing production of more profitable HBM and server DRAM silicon to power AI infrastructure, leaving a shortage of the mainstream memory types needed for PCs, smartphones, and other devices. As a result, prices have risen for DDR4 and DDR5 modules – if you can even find them – resulting in hikes in the cost of kit such as PCs, which are up by double figures, according to some estimates. Continued shortages of everyday DRAM components and rapidly rising contract prices have prompted some hardware makers to downgrade memory specifications to control system costs, TrendForce claims. In some cases, DDR4 designs are being replaced with DDR3 solutions, while certain DDR3-based products are being redesigned to use DDR2. We find it hard to believe that PC makers would ship systems with memory types so old or that modern processors would support them, so it is likely this applies to other kinds of device. Now the market intelligence operation estimates that DDR2 contract prices will rise by approximately 55 to 60 percent for the second quarter of 2026, followed by a further 35 to 40 percent increase in the third quarter. This is happening because customers are desperate to secure more reliable supplies, adopting lower capacity configurations or turning to older memory generations. Consequently, the supply shortages are now rippling through the memory market and starting to affect even legacy DRAM products. Key suppliers of DDR2 components include Winbond and Elite Semiconductor Microelectronics Technology (ESMT), based in TrendForce's home turf of Taiwan. However, Winbond is gradually winding down DDR2 production and reallocating capacity toward more high-margin products such as DDR3, DDR4, and LPDDR4, it says. But ESMT plans to maximize DDR2 production within its existing allocation at wafer maker PSMC. The firm is understood to be concentrating resources on this segment to enhance profitability and help offset the supply gap created by Winbond’s withdrawal from the DDR2 market. Some of the big memory makers are planning to increase capacity, but only slowly. Korean giant SK hynix aims to double silicon wafer output capacity over the next five years, while US biz Micron expects "meaningful new capacity" at its new Virginia fabrication plant in 2027 and 2028. ®