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GOP lawmakers who defied President Donald Trump to push for the release of the Epstein files are nearing extinction. Three House Republicans who joined Democrats to push for the files to be released have seen their political careers go up in flames as GOP primary voters rejected their candidacies. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) joined the list on Tuesday when she lost a Republican primary for…

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Australia was the first country to issue a ban in late 2025, aiming to reduce the pressures and risks that young users may face on social media, including cyberbullying, social media addiction, and exposure to predators.

It won't be making smartphones great again. The long-awaited Trump-branded smartphone has finally arrived, and it appears to be exactly what many suspected: an existing handset in gold drag. Repair biz iFixit got its hands on the Trump Mobile T1 after the device became available in May, and its teardown found the model is essentially an HTC U24 Pro with cosmetic tweaks and a Trump-friendly gold finish. It was almost exactly a year ago that the Trump Organization unveiled the Trump Mobile cellular service and heralded the coming of the T1 Phone, described as "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States." Few expected the gilt gadget to live up to that promise, as there are effectively no mass-market smartphones built in the US, with the possible exception of Purism's Liberty Phone, which is priced at a challenging $1,999 for those who absolutely must have a smartphone made outside China. Despite accepting $100 deposits to pre-order the coveted handwarmer, Trump Mobile failed to deliver the device by August last year, as promised, and many started to believe it would never show up. But it arrived this May amid claims that the Trump Mobile website was leaking customer data to anyone who sent an HTTP POST request. The nerds at iFixit passed the Trump Phone through a CT scanner alongside an HTC U24 Pro to confirm that the internals of the two devices are almost an exact match. They even went so far as swapping the main board of the T1 for that of the HTC phone, and showed that it not only fits, but the phone still works. One difference iFixit noted is that the multichip package housing the 12 GB of LPDDR5 memory and 512 GB of storage is from Micron, whereas the corresponding package in HTC's phone is supplied by SK hynix. The HTC U24 Pro is a mid-range smartphone that was launched almost exactly two years ago in June 2024. It is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 platform, has a 6.8-inch display, and came with Android 14 at launch, whereas the Trump phone features Android 15. In other words, it's a fairly unremarkable smartphone, sprayed gold and marketed to Trump fans for a promotional price of $499. To be fair, as iFixit makes clear, this is not a bad price for a device like this, so aureate wannabes are not being overcharged here. But as iFixit also makes clear, the device may be assembled in Florida, but it was designed in China and the vast majority of its parts have been sourced from and made in China as well. ®

Gas prices could climb even higher in the coming months.

Industry officials have already warned the White House that the prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

Since the beginning of the Iran war, commercial and government inventories have supplemented gas consumption across the U.S. The reserves have allowed prices to hover around $4.50 per gallon for the last four months—but that could change very quickly, according to oil and gas executives, who are often loath to make such alarming predictions.

“We’re sounding the alarm on these inventories going to record lows,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told Fox Business. “We have to solve this problem in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Some inventories could be wiped out in a matter of weeks, according to the Post—just in time for summer holidays.

“I have absolutely no doubt the White House—from the president on down—is fully aware of the nearly universal alarm among oil companies and analysts about the direction of travel for oil prices this summer,” Bob McNally, a former Bush administration energy adviser, told the Post.

Yet Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the rising costs. With inflation at a three-year high, Trump stunned reporters, lawmakers, and voters alike on Wednesday with just four words: “I love the inflation,” he said.

“I love it,” he insisted, pledging that oil prices will drop “like a rock” when the war ends.

But the end of the war seems to be nowhere in sight. U.S. forces bombed Iran through two nights this week, part of the White House’s latest strategy to force Tehran to make a deal, despite the obvious risks of escalation.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday. “We will strike them hard tonight and hopefully Iran makes a good decision.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies aren’t so sure that their political movement will weather the brewing economic storm. The far-right populist rode the 2024 campaign on vehement promises of affordability; through his presidency, he swore that Americans would see lower utility bills, cheaper groceries, and more American-based jobs. But that hasn’t been the case.

Instead, as millions of Americans struggle with the rising cost of living and companies contend with rattled supply chains, the president’s inner circle fear that it might be too late to fix the problem for Trump’s midterm-dependent acolytes.

“Whether it’s peak inflation or not, it doesn’t matter,” one former Trump administration official told Politico. “The die has been cast in terms of how people are looking at the economy.”

Online chat platform VRChat says a recent cyberattack compromised the data belonging to nearly 2.5 million users. It confirmed the “data security incident” in a report filed with Maine’s attorney general, but has not disclosed it via public channels. The company’s report confirmed that its cloud environment was accessed between May 10-12, with the unauthorized intruder making off with information concerning 2,436,782 users. This included VRChat usernames, email addresses, whether a user was a VRChat+ subscriber, login histories (including device, hardware identifiers, and IP addresses), and Steam or Meta user IDs. It does not believe passwords, credit cards or other payment information, or government IDs used for age verification were affected. “VRChat sincerely regrets that this security incident occurred,” the company stated in its disclosure. “We understand that trust between our platform and its community is earned through consistent action, and we take full responsibility for the concern this event has caused. “The security and privacy of our players' information remain our highest priority, and we are committed to doing everything within our power to protect it.” VRChat said that after it was made aware of the intrusion, it contained the threat and implemented additional security controls, as well as engaging outside security experts. And in an unusual move for US breaches, the San Francisco-based company did not offer identity theft or credit monitoring services. Offering these kinds of services is not a legal requirement, but doing so is highly common, especially regarding attacks that affect so many individuals. VRChat does not publish the total number of registered users that it has on its books, but its documentation states that “the platform has grown to millions of users,” who have collectively published tens of millions of unique pieces of content for it since its first release in 2014. The part game, part chat platform is an online, open-world chatroom where people walk around interacting with one another via their 3D avatars. It has been compared to Second Life in that users explore other users' worlds, play mini-games, and partake in casual chit-chat, with support for both virtual reality headsets and conventional PCs. You can also think of it as something similar to Meta’s vision for the metaverse, just without all the coworking and KPI meetings, and with way more users. ®

Members of the program, called "Waymo Premier," will have to pony up $29.99 per month.

This article is aimed at bioinformatics platform leads, ML infrastructure engineers, and genomics budget owners who are now running GPU-accelerated workflows in the cloud. It's about a hidden cost problem that almost every genomics infrastructure team is paying for — and very few are actively measuring. The observations here are specific to short-read sequencing workflows, which remain the dominant data type in production genomics environments. Short-read sequencing pipelines, standard in next-generation sequencing (NGS) workflows, used to be CPU-heavy. You'd run them on a cluster, they'd grind through alignment and variant calling over hours, and the bottleneck was CPU throughput. GPU acceleration wasn't the story. That has changed. AI-driven variant calling, GPU-accelerated alignment tools like Parabricks, and deep learning models running on top of sequencing data have all moved toward the GPU, which means teams are managing serious GPU infrastructure for the first time. The cost model that comes with GPU cloud differs sharply from CPU clusters, and people are bringing CPU-era assumptions about pipeline reliability and cost accounting into a GPU environment. That mismatch is costing them. We work with a lot of these teams, and when we ask about infrastructure costs, they almost always lead with the same number: cost per sample. That's what gets reported upward, what sits in the budget. What that number hides is where things get interesting. When pipelines fail A typical short-read germline variant calling pipeline has maybe ten to 15 distinct processing steps. You start with raw FASTQ files off the sequencer, run quality control, alignment, duplicate marking, base quality score recalibration, variant calling, annotation — each step hands off to the next. These pipelines mostly run on workflow managers like Nextflow or Snakemake, which do have built-in mechanisms for resuming failed jobs. Nextflow has a flag designed to let you pick up from step eight of 11 rather than restarting from scratch. In principle, that's exactly the right solution. In practice, the problem is configuration. For that flag to work, Nextflow needs to find its cache directory — the folder that records which steps completed successfully. If the solutions architect set up the compute environment without properly configuring persistent disk space for that cache, the file isn't there when you need it, and the pipeline restarts from step one anyway. That's a setup failure rather than a tool limitation, but the result is the same: you've paid for compute you didn't get output from. When a large task fails mid-execution rather than at a clean step boundary, even proper checkpointing won't save you, because the task has to be rerun in full. A problem difficult to measure Genomics teams working with Nebius consistently report that 15 to 40 percent of their pipeline runs hit at least one failure and restart before completion. Pinning the figure down precisely is hard, and we have no definitive numbers that reflect the reality here. The range is wide because it depends heavily on how mature the infrastructure setup is. Teams with well-configured environments sit at the low end; teams newer to GPU cloud, or running on spot instances with higher interruption rates, sit at the high end. What makes this invisible is that if your metric is cost per completed sample, a failed run that eventually completes still looks like one sample at normal cost. The retry disappears from the number that gets reported. For example, a GPU-accelerated whole genome sequencing pipeline — germline variant calling — takes roughly two GPU-hours on an H200. At current on-demand rates that's about $9 of compute per sample, and that's the visible cost. Now apply a 25 percent failure rate — toward the conservative end of what teams report. For every four samples you complete, one run failed, restarted, and ran from the beginning. Your real cost per completed sample isn't $9 anymore — it's $11.25, a 25 percent hidden markup. Scale that to a team processing 2,000 samples a month: the visible compute bill says $18,000, but the real cost is $22,500. That's $4,500 a month — $54,000 a year — in compute that produced no output. For a mid-size genomics team, that's a meaningful fraction of the cloud budget, and it shows up nowhere as waste. That's before you touch storage. The hidden costs The storage picture is more nuanced than people expect. A standard whole genome generates roughly 200 gigabytes of raw FASTQ data, but that's the uncompressed figure. In practice, almost everything going into cold storage is compressed, typically down to around 30 gigabytes per sample, so the storage cost per sample is quite manageable. Where it gets complicated is retrieval. When you want to reanalyze archived samples — say, running a new cohort through an updated pipeline — you pull those compressed files back, and your infrastructure then needs to decompress them. That 30-gigabyte compressed file expands to 200 gigabytes, which means you need the disk space and memory headroom to handle the expansion. If the environment wasn't sized for it, you get failures or severe slowdowns at the decompression step, which becomes another category of hidden cost that's rarely accounted for up front. In cancer research, the numbers are much larger. Somatic mutation calling runs at 60x to 100x sequencing depth, so 600-gigabyte FASTQ files aren't unusual. Everything I've described scales accordingly. The key point: retrieval from cold storage always has a cost, regardless of where your compute lives relative to your storage. Some platforms charge for data egress between regions on top of that. Either way, the teams that haven't modeled their reanalysis frequency as a real line item are almost always surprised when they do. Tracking, tracking and tracking... Bioinformatics engineers know the failure rates, because they're the ones watching jobs fail at 2am. But by the time the numbers roll up to whoever controls the budget, it's just "cloud costs." There's no line item for "compute we paid for and got no output from." Cloud billing by service and instance type doesn't surface this. You see your GPU compute spend, your storage spend, your egress. You don't see "20% of your GPU spend this month was on runs that didn't complete." That decomposition requires deliberate instrumentation, and most teams haven't built it yet. What teams should measure instead of cost per sample Teams should measure a few things instead. First, completion rate: the percentage of pipeline runs that complete without failure or restart. That's your pipeline reliability score, directly linked to compute waste. Second, cost per attempted sample versus cost per completed sample. If those numbers are meaningfully different, you have a problem worth fixing. Third, storage retrieval frequency and the infrastructure overhead of decompression: how often you're pulling archived data back, and whether you've properly sized the disk and memory headroom for it. This is the gap between what looks cheap in the storage bill and what it costs to use the data. One thing genomics infrastructure teams should do differently starting this week Instrument your pipeline failure rate, right now, before anything else. The number itself doesn't fix anything, but it makes the problem visible. Once you can show that 15 or 25 percent of your compute spend is going toward runs that restart — with real dollar figures attached — the conversation about fixing the underlying infrastructure becomes easy to have. People move fast when they can see the waste. Everything else follows from that — better checkpointing configuration, smarter storage architecture, more stable compute — but you have to see the problem first. Discover the breakthroughs shaping the future of AI in healthcare and life sciences. Visit https://nebius.com/solutions/life-sciences-and-healthcare to learn more and register for the 2026 AI Discovery Awards ceremony: nebius.com/ai-discovery-award. Anastasia Raskolova Anastasia is a senior product manager for healthcare & kife sciences at Nebius, where she focuses on infrastructure product for drug discovery and clinical AI workflows. Before that, she spent her career building ML products across computer vision, recommendation systems, and generative AI — and stays grounded in the clinical reality through volunteering in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital. Contributed by Nebius.

⚡ Quick Take

• LEGO Icons Project Hail Mary Collectible Building Set for Adults will let Ryland Grace and Rocky dock on your bookshelf.

If you were mankind’s one final hope for salvation, would you agree to fly halfway across the galaxy and sacrifice your life? Before you answer, the alternative is spending 30 years on a dying planet building LEGO sets. Tough, right? Well, it just got even tougher, because instead of an intergalactic trip, you can now stay back and build LEGO’s new Project Hail Mary set—and yes, it comes with a little LEGO Rocky.

LEGO

LEGO Icons Project Hail Mary set will let Ryland Grace’s ship dock on your bookshelf. The 830-piece set measures 12-inches high, 9.5-inches long, and 8.5-inches wide. It is a miniature recreation of the interstellar spaceship that provided humanity with one final long-shot chance at survival in the Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel. This LEGO version of the Project Hail Mary ship also comes with a functional display stand, since the only thing it can’t do is actually fly.

Most importantly, it includes LEGO minifigures for both Grace and the best character in the movie, the adorable Eridian Rocky.

LEGO

But this Project Hail Mary set is more than just a cool-looking collectible. It also moves. It comes equipped a crank on the display stand so you can turn it. That will let you “send the crew module into orbit, simulating the spaceship’s centrifugal gravity system.”

LEGO

You can send LEGO Ryland and little plastic brick Rocky to your house for $99.99. Or at least you can when it’s back in stock. Like every other Project Hail Mary collectible it’s a hot item. But we trust it’ll be back available again soon enough. Just as Eve Stratt and Ryland Grace wouldn’t let humanity down, we know LEGO won’t either.

In the meantime, you can still snag Rocky in a plush form or wear a cheeky T-shirt in his honor. Project Hail Mary heads to streaming soon, so you can build and watch at the same time.

Originally published on April 3, 2026.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post Take Rocky Home with LEGO PROJECT HAIL MARY Set appeared first on Nerdist.

The Pentagon had multiple floors locked down and evacuated Thursday over an air quality false alarm.

“Earlier this morning, Pentagon occupants were notified ‌of ⁠a potential air quality issue, prompting immediate precautionary safety measures and evaluation. Subsequent testing confirmed no hazard exists, and normal operations have ​resumed,” ​chief Pentagon ⁠spokesman Sean Parnell said. “We express our sincere appreciation to the first responders ​for their swift actions to ensure ​the ⁠safety of all personnel.”

Parnell had originally reported there was an “air quality issue necessitating precautionary measures.” Floors two through five in corridors four through seven were closed down, and the Arlington Fire Department’s hazmat team was also present.

This story has been updated.

HANDS ON At WWDC this week, Apple introduced container machines, which are persistent virtual machines running Linux, bearing some resemblance to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Microsoft's operating system. Developers using macOS, as with those on Windows, face the problem that most applications are deployed to Linux, creating a mismatch between the development machine and the deployment target. The friction is less for macOS, which, like Linux, is Unix-like, but still exists. Apple's solution builds on the Container project previewed at WWDC last year. Version 1.0 was released at this year's WWDC, complete with the new container machine feature. The project uses standard Open Container Initiative (OCI) containers, and both the containers and container machines run on lightweight virtual machines (VMs), giving strong isolation. The name "container machine" is intended to convey that the feature combines both a container and a VM. The feature uses Apple's native virtualization framework, and the command line interface integrates well with macOS. Once installed, the command container machine run will open a terminal in the default container machine. Another option is to run a command such as container machine run uname -a, which will execute in the default container machine but without leaving the macOS shell. The code is written in Swift and is open source on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. It uses another Swift package called containerization, which is also open source. On Windows, WSL is an important tool for developers. Could container machines have a similar impact for Mac devs? There is potential, but Apple has work to do both on features and documentation, and the project is tucked away on GitHub rather than being presented as part of macOS. We tried a brief hands-on, installing the 1.0 release from the GitHub release package on Tahoe 26.5.1. Only macOS 26 is supported. Once installed, the command container machine create is enabled, though only containers that include the /sbin/init system initialization program will work. Many container images designed for running applications, rather than being used for persistent VMs, do not include this. The solution is to build a custom container image from a Dockerfile, for which the documentation now includes examples. We used the Dockerfile supplied in a tutorial that sets up a container machine based on Ubuntu 24.04 with the Swift SDK included, followed by the steps to develop using Visual Studio Code running on macOS and connecting to the container machine via VS Code remoting. This worked and we were able to build a project on Linux and run it using VS Code and Safari on the Mac side, but debugging breakpoints were not hit. We tried again with a .NET project, for which debugging worked correctly. By default, a container machine mounts the macOS home directory with read-write permissions. This is great for accessing code or other assets from both macOS and the container machine, but not good for security. A rogue package installed on Linux, for example, could easily harvest credentials from a .ssh folder in macOS. This is configurable via the --home-mount argument. Setting access to "none" is more secure. The memory available to a container machine defaults to half the system memory. In our case that is 32 GB, but after launching the VM and starting PostgreSQL, the actual memory used, according to Activity Monitor, was only 1 GB. Additional memory is used on demand, but a limitation described in the technical overview is that memory cannot be released back to the host. In other words, memory usage will increase during use and can only be released by restarting the VM. WSL supports GUI applications via the X11 or Wayland graphic systems. An issue raised by a user about GUI applications in containers was closed on the basis that developers can install XQuartz, a project for running the X windows system on macOS, and then use container-to-host networking to connect, though we did not try this. GUI support appears not to be a goal of the project. Mac developers already have many ways to run Linux containers or VMs, including the mature ecosystem around Docker, Podman, Colima, UTM, VirtualBox, and OrbStack, to mention some contenders, as well as the option of using SSH to connect to a remote Linux VM. That means Apple has some work to do to establish its native container tools, and now container machines, as serious alternatives. On the plus side, the system is lightweight, aside from the inability to release memory, and performed well in our quick hands-on. A WWDC video has further details, alongside the documentation on GitHub. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• You can now bring Project Hail Mary’s lovable alien Rocky home with this replica eight-inch officially licensed plushie doll.
• Rocky is too cute to resist and he costs $39.99.
• Project Hail Mary also has a ton of other cute Rocky merch to enjoy, in case the Rocky plush is sold out.

The best part of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary? Rocky the alien. The best part of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s big screen adaptation of the novel? Also, Rocky the alien. And now, the best collectible from the film? Oh you better believe it’s Rocky the alien. You can bring that wonderful interstellar traveler to your own home here on Earth with this delightful new figure. But unlike Ryland Grace, you’ll be able to get extra cozy with your best bud because this version is a plushie.

Project Hail Mary Store

This officially licensed Rocky Collector Figure from the Project Hail Mary store captures everything that made the character so distinct while also making him huggable. (Huggable without the need for a protective bubble between species). Despite looking like a spot-on replica, this legendary alien isn’t make of stone. Or rock. Or whatever it is Rocky’s actually made of. It’s a plush doll that stands roughly eight inches tall and is made with “soft fabrics and polyester fiber stuffing.” (Specifically velboa fabric, nylex, and TC materials.) It’s also features the same green markings the sported in the film.

You don’t need to spend untold billions in both money and human resources, not do you need to travel halfway across the galaxy like Ryland Grace, to get close to this little guy. You can order yours now for $39.99. It will ship towards the end of April. It officially arrives on the 16th, with an expected (free) arrival date around April 20-22.

Project Hail Mary Store

Give it as a gift and you are sure to “amaze amaze amaze” anyone who knows Rocky has always been and will always be the best part of Project Hail Mary. Rocky will be the perfect plush to clutch as you watch Project Hail Mary at home on streaming.

Update: If the adorable Project Hail Mary Rocky plush is currently sold out, worry not, he may be back at any time. While you wait, you can snag a pretty cute Rocky Plush Backpack Clip or a hilarious t-shirt that shows your true Rocky affinity.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

Originally published March 24, 2026.

The post Bring PROJECT HAIL MARY’s Rocky Home in Adorable Plushie Form appeared first on Nerdist.

The Trump administration is reportedly investigating a critic of the Iran war, threatening to revoke his green card and deport him from the U.S.

Trita Parsi is reportedly being targeted by the White House for his frequent criticisms of the Iran war. Parsi, a Swedish citizen born in Iran who holds U.S. permanent residency, co-founded the National Iranian American Council and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign policy think tank.

To some in the Trump administration, Parsi’s criticisms—and his push for diplomacy with the Iranian government—suggest more than a dissenting opinion. The administration has used immigration law against critics of its foreign policy, notably with college students who protest against U.S. support for Israel in its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Parsi has for years been accused by some Iranian Americans of promoting the Iranian government’s interests, with many Republicans echoing those criticisms. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a lot of influence in the White House, called Parsi “a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime” who pushes “pro-Iranian regime talking points,” in an April X post. In May, Loomer wrote that Parsi’s “days in our country are numbered.”

Loomer may have been involved in getting two Iranian women detained earlier this year after she claimed they were related to deceased Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others may still be taking her advice.

The State Department under Trump has detained other critics, as well, including doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who wrote an op-ed column about Gaza, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate whom the administration is still trying to deport over his role in protests on campus against the war in Gaza.

The Quincy Institute is preparing to “cover the legal costs to prepare for—and if necessary—fight a deportation attack on Trita,” according to a memo obtained by The Free Press. If the administration pursues deportation against him, it would be a chilling attempt to disregard the First Amendment and send the message that anyone less than a full citizen of the U.S. does not have the right to free speech.

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump called in to his allies at Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” and previewed his plans for the purported next phase of war against Iran, detailing ideas that many have described as war crimes. “My preference has always been take Kharg Island,” Trump said, referencing the Iranian island that is used for oil storage. “I don’t know that America has the…

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Pool's new app automatically sorts screenshots into personalized collections, tracks down the original links behind saved content, and helps you rediscover products, recipes, travel ideas, and other things you meant to revisit.

⚡ Quick Take

• Taylor Swift’s big Toy Story 5 countdown turned out to be the announcement that the film will feature a new original song from the pop star.

Taylor Swift frequently sends her global horde of devoted fans into a manic frenzy with nothing more than a vague social media post. Sometimes they tease huge news. Sometimes they lead to nothing but clown shoes. On April 30th there wasn’t much mystery, though. The pop star wasn’t exactly subtle with her new “secret” message. For about ten minutes she posted a countdown that featured the iconic clouds from Andy’s room in Toy Story. Before she quickly took it down it was set to go off on May 2. Turns out we needed to wait an extra month to find out what it’s about. After days of teasing her involvement in the film, Disney and Pixar have finally revealed how Taylor Swift is involved with Toy Story 5.

Toy Story 5 will become “Tay Story” thanks to a new original song from Swift titled “I Knew It, I Knew You.” And yes, obviously, there’s a bunch of merch involved with this announcement. You can listen to it below… but more importantly, watch Taylor Swift perform it live. And, as a special bonus, you can catch her singing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” alongside the icon that is Randy Newman.

From digital billboards, Jessie dancing to “Shake It Off,” and Swift putting her Toy Story timer back up on her own official site with an actual countdown, there wasn’t any mystery over Taylor Swift’s involvement with Toy Story 5. All we needed to know when the clock struck zero at 2 pm Eastern on June 1 was exactly what it meant. Previously, the film’s director, Andrew Stanton, addressed one major fan theory. He shot it down when he said a new song from Swift would not play over the movie’s end credits. But as many noted, he shot down the idea of a new Swift song playing over the end credits, not that one couldn’t play at any point. And that’s what we’re going to get.

Disney-Pixar

Swift’s countdown disappeared to reveal three different double-sided CDs for fans to purchase of her original song for the film. The CDs includes both an acoustic version and a piano one. Each listing said it would be for sale for 48 hours or until they sellout. Considering what we know about her fans we don’t expect them to last 48 minutes.

Taylor Swift

“It’s incredible just how meaningful it’s been having Taylor write and perform this song,” said Stanton in a press release about Taylor Swift and Toy Story 5. “Her connection to Jessie and the immediate way she understood what the character was going through was undeniable. The song is so deeply connected to Toy Story. So much so that on first listen, it instantly felt like it had always belonged there, like a long-lost family member. It was kismet.”

After all that speculation, it turned out to be the most logical theory: a new song. Not that the franchise needed her help, but Taylor Swift’s involvement could help Toy Story 5 become the most successful entry in the franchise yet. Will it? There’s no mystery when we’ll find out. Pixar’s “Tay Story” comes to theaters on June 19.

Originally published on June 1, 2026.

The post Watch Taylor Swift Perform New Song for TOY STORY 5 (And ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’) appeared first on Nerdist.

NASA's sprint to save the Swift observatory has reached another milestone: Katalyst Space's LINK robotic servicing spacecraft is now installed atop its Pegasus XL launcher. The milestone came less than a year after the space agency awarded the rescue contract. The next step will be to attach the Pegasus XL to the Stargazer carrier aircraft (the last airworthy Lockheed L-1011 TriStar), which will carry it from NASA's Wallops facility to the Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean for launch. Launch is expected to occur later this month. The goal is to boost the Swift observatory, whose orbit is decaying faster than expected due to increased solar activity. Swift lacks thrusters to compensate for the problem, so a return to Earth in the coming months is inevitable without intervention. Engineers recently bought the vehicle a little extra time by orienting the spacecraft and reducing the science output, but there is precious little margin in the timelines. The mission is high-risk, and Swift has little to lose. However, if successful, the approach could extend the lifetimes of other craft, including the Hubble Space Telescope, which will also re-enter the atmosphere in the coming years without intervention. Although NASA rejected a proposal by its now administrator Jared Isaacman to reboost the observatory using a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, if the mission to Swift is a success, the agency will have another, far less expensive, option to consider. Like Swift, Hubble's orbit is decaying, and there will come a point in the coming years when managers must decide whether to attempt to extend the life of the veteran observatory, devise a way of performing a controlled re-entry, or let nature take its course. Swift was one of the missions slated for the chopping block under proposed budget cuts, so a successful rescue would mark a remarkable turnaround. Extending spacecraft beyond their primary mission isn't unusual. ESA, for instance, just endorsed extensions for several veteran missions, including Mars Express, XMM-Newton, and SOHO. But a Swift-style orbital rescue is something altogether different, and one that operators of other spacecraft facing decaying orbits will be watching closely. ®

I can’t really say why I decided to cook, or otherwise procure, a dish representing every nation at the World Cup, except that I thought it might be kind of fun, and it seemed like the least I could do. If you have a family, or a roommate, or even a cat, and are planning to spend a significant percentage of your summer on the couch, watching the most important of the least important things, you ought to find some way to pull your weight around the house—or at least, to say in advance that you’re sorry. 

It was a good idea, though. And a doable one: I live in New York, a city where I can obtain just about any ingredient I could possibly need for any kind of cuisine (along with, for some reason, the worst onions you’ve ever imagined). And where, failing that, I can simply ride a few subway stops and procure a critically acclaimed meal representing first-time qualifiers Uzbekistan. Given enough time, I could have knocked this quest off slowly and gracefully.

So that was my first mistake. I neglected to plan for the fact that this men’s World Cup has—for the purposes of squeezing more money out of more people over more games—16 more countries than the last one did. That might have prompted a reconsideration of my mission, but it’s hard to walk away once you’ve announced your plan. People will just keep asking about it, and it becomes increasingly painful to force a smile and say “nope, still working on Curacao.” The burden of expectations, the sense of disappointment…You start to understand, in some small way, what it feels like to play for England.

Everyone has stewed chicken.

But I did it, starting in early March and finishing with one week to spare before Mexico kicks off against South Africa. Even with breaks for work trips, family visits, and emergency mac and cheese—or maybe because so much else kept getting in the way—the three-month odyssey was ultimately more of a burden than a heroic gesture. There were some bangers along the way: the aforementioned Uzbek; a Cape Verdean dish by way of Rhode Island; a West African meal my 3-year-old, somewhat problematically, began referring to as “dad’s chicken.” Spend enough time poking around for recipes—and even more time looking for ones that are vegetable-forward, or are not yet another national version of stewed chicken—and you start to learn a thing or two about tradition, migration, and common bonds. Maybe that was the point. 

So here’s how I made it to 48, by eating, more or less in order, through the 12 groups of four teams who will meet in the tournament’s opening rounds. I want to be clear: I was not attempting to create everyone’s national dish. I did not approach this with academic rigor. I took shortcuts. I made liberal substitutions. I used random blogs and Reddit and, in one instance, TikTok. I am not trying to start anything or offend anyone; I was just a soccer fan trying to make dinner.

Group A

I started inauspiciously with a Cape Malay curry from South Africa. The dish was brought to the area by Malaysians who were enslaved by the Dutch East India Company. My recipe came from The Today Show and called for 3 tablespoons of turmeric, which I should have immediately clocked as an editing error but—in the spirit of cultural exploration—dutifully followed anyway and paid a price. For South Korea I made kalbijim, from Eric Kim’s excellent Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home, and won back a little credibility in my household; you, or at least I, simply cannot mess up braised short ribs and beef-fat croutons. Mexico was ably represented by a large order from Tacos El Bronco, and Czechia by a 1997 red-cabbage-and-apple salad recipe from the New York Times.

Group B

I split a big thing of fondue for Switzerland and wondered why I don’t eat fondue more often. Then I thought about what I had just done. The national dish of Qatar, and several other nearby states, is machboos—meat (in my case chicken) cooked with rice seasoned by an eponymous spice blend. I pulled it from an official government-sponsored cultural program’s website and it was pretty good. But what you come to realize in an eating project like this is that everyone has a national stewed chicken dish and if you aren’t being careful you could make nothing but stewed chicken for a month. For Canada, I made a New York Times recipe for coconut kale from a restaurant in Vancouver, and paired it with some maple-glazed salmon. Bosnia and Herzegovina knocked out Italy in the playoffs with a penalty from a guy who was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m just sharing that so you know. I picked up three huge slices of meat, cheese, and spinach burek from a shop in south Brooklyn, and it kicked ass.

Group C

We used to have a children’s book by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt in which one of the characters refers to herself as “a tagine machine.” It’s stuck with me, long after all the pages were torn out—so I made a chicken tagine for 2022 semi-finalists Morocco and a green-pepper salad with preserved lemon to go with. It was probably too much preserved lemon for one meal, but both were nice on their own. Haiti, back for the first time since 1974, is one of the great stories of this World Cup, and the poul ak nwa I made (another stew-adjacent chicken dish, with cashews) was a worthy entry, for the first several days I ate it. Scotland showed out with rumbledethumps, which, even if you’ve never heard of it before, I feel like you intuitively know is a dish of cabbage, potatoes, and cheese. For Brazil, I baked pão de queijo, little balls of cheesy tapioca bread. They make incredible sliders.

Group D

One of the few major upsides of the Global War on Terror is that New York has a lot of people from Australia, which enabled me to get really tremendous sausage rolls from the NoMad outpost of Bourke Street Bakery in April. On balance, you would not say it was all worth it, but I would eat these every day. I should have just made chipa for Paraguay, but that felt too similar to the pão de queijo I’d just made, so I made chipa guazu instead—a sort of cheese-and-corn souffle (at least that’s how it turned out) that I take full responsibility for. At this point, a month into the project, I was starting to hear rumblings from the loved-ones I was feeding that more vegetables would be in order. Googling “Turkey” and “vegetable dish,” I found karnabahar mucveri, a baked cauliflower recipe from Ozlem Warren. The United States is also in this group; I got Tacos El Bronco again. 

Group E

I had never had döner kebab before, but our entry for Germany immediately slotted itself into the family sandwich rotation. I’ll admit to not having put too much thought into the choice—we have a local döner kebab shop, it has Berlin in its name, that’s good enough for me—but the kebab has become a symbol among members of JD Vance’s beloved German far-white for the kinds of people they don’t like. One of my rules for normal living is to live your life without being triggered by a sandwich. Less controversially, I made keshi yena—ground meat baked in gouda—for World Cup debutantes Curaçao, using a recipe from Oprah.com. It’s a little bit of Holland, a little bit Caribbean, but where it really shined for me was as leftovers, where you could easily repurpose the filling for chopped cheese. For Ecuador, who I rate as dark horses this year, I made llapingachos—potato patties with a bit of achiote—and a nice peanut sauce. But the real winner here might have been Côte d’Ivoire and its maafe, a stew with chicken and ground nuts that’s popular across West Africa. It was a standout in the highly competitive braised poultry category; naturally, I left it on the stovetop overnight and had to toss the rest.

Group F

Many of the Netherlands’ greatest players have roots in Suriname, which in turn has deep ties to Java, so I made goedangan, a cabbage salad with coconut dressing. Japan’s oyakodon, another saucy chicken dish, did a job when it needed to. My wife chipped in (or intervened) to make shakshuka for Tunisia; whenever I have shakshuka, I think: “I should have shakshuka more often.” And then there was Sweden. As a gift this year, I got a copy of The Nordic Cookbook, an absolute doorstop of a treatise by Magnus Nilsson that includes recipes for pilot whale and fermented Greenland shark (definitely read the instructions closely for that one). I opted for the book’s more straightforward weeknight dish of nikkaluokta soppa, a.k.a. cabbage and ground beef soup. Perfect January fare, but I made it in May.

Group G

They do eat Brussels sprouts in Brussels, it turns out. In search of roughage, I opted for “Flemish-style” sprouts, sauteed in lots of butter. I don’t like these as much as I like Belgium’s Tintin jerseys, but they’ll do right by you. For Egypt, I made dukkah, a nuts-and-spices mixture with various interpretations. Mine came from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food: The Classic Cookbook, Expanded and Updated, with New Recipes and Contemporary Variations on Old Themes—an essential volume for Roden heads. I was unduly confident about making Samin Nosrat’s kuku sabzi for Iran because the process is similar to that of tortilla española. But there’s always a moment of hesitation, when you’re preparing to flip the puck, when you can envision the whole thing going horribly wrong, eggs and herbs ending up everywhere, a deep clean-up job, tears, apologies, a hasty search for delivery options. It turned out quite nicely, though. We spent a long time talking about making pavlova, because there was a recipe for it in the Bluey cookbook, and further research confirmed that it’s also eaten in New Zealand, but by this point, I was starting to grow wary of ambitious projects, and picked up fish and chips.

Group H

Uruguay has one food everyone talks about and it’s a sandwich called a chivito. I used to get it at a gas station in DC, but you can just make them. And then keep making them, for several days, because assembling the ingredients for even one means you end up with a ton of sliced steak, ham, bacon, and mozzarella. Most of what I know about Cape Verde is that there are lots of Cape Verdeans in southern New England, and lo if you search for the national dish—a hearty stew called cachupa—one of the first recipes comes from the University of Rhode Island. About 10,000 fans showed up to watch the national team play in Hartford in June and I think I made enough for all of them. Saudi Arabia was ably represented by chicken shawarma. For Spain, I made a tortilla española. (See above.) Versatile, filling, does what it says on the tin. 

Group I

If I had to put money on anyone to win this year—and I don’t, and won’t—I guess it would be France. And if I could only have one sandwich for the rest of my life…I’m not sure it would be a jambon-beurre, but I’d be hard-pressed to improve on it. Hot dogs in Norway are often wrapped in a potato flatbread called lefse, but I put them in flour tortillas and topped mine with potato salad, fried onions, and—in lieu of lingonberries—a black cherry jam. Senegal came through with coconut collard greens and butternut squash from Pierre Thiam’s Simply West African cookbook. FIFA may have expanded the tournament to make money, but Iraq’s participation, for the first time since 1986, does feel like one small point in favor of a 48-team tournament. I picked up some lahm bi ajeen—spiced meat and yogurt served on a doughy disc. It came in a pizza box. It’s always nice when something that isn’t pizza comes in a pizza box.

Group J

I made choripan for defending world champions Argentina. It’s a portmanteau of chorizo and pan. I don’t want to insult anyone by saying it “reminds me of what you get outside of Fenway,” because it’s very different—chimichurri, salsa criolla, etc.—but still: grilled sausage with peppers and onion in any variety will transport you to the sporting cathedral of your homeland. It just feels right. We needed vegetables again, so for Jordan, making its World Cup debut, I got fattoush from a Palestinian spot in my neighborhood, and for Algeria I made a nice cucumber salad with green bell peppers and mint. Austria was one of the stars of this gustatory competition, for the simple reason that we went to a restaurant called Werkstatt (fun to say) and got some schnitzel (also fun to say!) and rösti and a giant pretzel with an anchovy-infused cheese sauce. Very nice.

Group K

If the World Cup hadn’t expanded to 48 teams, I’d already have been done. But it did expand, and I was running out of time. So by this point in late May, I was cooking a lot less and getting a lot more takeout. Arguably this entire project was just a ploy to get food for Uzbekistan from Laghman Express, a Central Asian restaurant in south Brooklyn that also has a location in Atlanta. I have already made plans to get it again on Christmas. I picked up egg tarts for Portugal from a place in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, and they tasted like a sweet, eggy cloud. For Colombia I sourced an order of bandeja paisa—a platter with steak, chicharron, rice, and egg—and some papas criollas. The last time Democratic Republic of Congo was in the World Cup it was still called Zaire. I made poulet mayo, which is chicken cooked with mayonnaise, spices, peppers, and onions. It hit the spot.

Group L

I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant that only serves canapés, sort of like a Golden Corral for things you eat at weddings. We would not serve the exact mini empanadas I made for Panama, which were pulled from one of the first recipes that showed up when I searched “Panama + empanadas,” and looked vaguely like what a child might come back with if you asked them to draw the moon. But some other version might work. For Croatia we got burek again from the same place. Burek is shaping up to be a breakout star of this year’s World Cup; don’t mess with a good thing. For England, I got a bag of meat pies and pasties from Myers of Keswick in Greenwich Village. Is it coming home? Talk to me in July. But I’m definitely getting these again. For Ghana, I made kelewele—a dish of roasted plantains with an absolutely tremendous citrus, miso, and peanut butter marinade, topped with fried shallots for good measure. It was the last thing I made, with one day to spare before a family road trip that would take us out of pocket and away from our kitchen until the opening match. It might also have been the best.

⚡ Quick Take

• The Rolling Stones and Marvel have assembled a special collection with five character vinyl covers for the group’s forthcoming album, Foreign Tongues.
• The lineup includes vinyl covers for Spider-Man, Captain America, Wolverine, Thor, and The Hulk.

If you love both The Rolling Stones and Marvel Comics, you’re about to get a whole lot of satisfaction. The two iconic institutions are proving that movie theaters aren’t the only place to have an epic crossover event. The band is releasing five special vinyl versions of its new album, Foreign Tongues. Each The Rolling Stones x Marvel collab album will feature a different Marvel superhero and a matching comic insert.

Henson/Marvel

The Rolling Stones and Marvel have assembled a special collection to promote the iconic group’s forthcoming album Foreign Tongues. U.S. music fans and superhero enthusiasts alike can now pre-order five vinyl variants of the record. Each celebrates one of five Marvel heroes. The lineup includes Spider-Man, Captain America, Wolverine, Thor, and The Hulk. (Star-Lord is going to be FURIOUS when he finds out he didn’t make the cut on a rock-n-roll/Marvel promotion.)

Henson/Marvel

Every special vinyl also comes with a custom comic book insert featuring matching artwork by Marvel illustrators specifically designed for this release.

Henson/Marvel

Each version of the Marvel albums will include the same 14-song record that The Rolling Stones recently announced. Foreign Tongues will arrive on July 10, the same day as these Marvel variant versions. The album features Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ronnie Woo, and some very special guest appearances. In addition to longtime collaborators Darryl Jones, Steve Jordan, and Matt Clifford, you’ll also hear Steve Winwood, Paul McCartney, Robert Smith of The Cure, and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith. Best of all is that the album also includes the band’s longtime drummer, Charlie Watts. The record features music he recorded during what the band says was one of his final studio sessions before his passing in 2021.

The band has already released its first single from the record, “In the Stars.”

Is there any obvious connection between The Rolling Stones and Marvel superheroes? Obviously. Superheroes can live forever, no matter what they do. We’re pretty sure that whole concept is based on Keith Richards.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post The Rolling Stones Release Marvel Comics Vinyl Covers for New Album appeared first on Nerdist.

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 8:01 a.m.

Here’s what’s happening on Santa Cruz County roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents   ▼︎ long-term incidents

Road incidents as of 8 a.m. on June 11

• A 5-foot-wide Comcast communication line fell and blocked both lanes of the road at 1500 Smith Grade in Bonny Doon. The road was completely closed, and fire and utility crews responded. The incident was reported yesterday.
   
• South Highway 1 is facing closures at Park Avenue in Capitola because of road excavation work. The closure is expected to last until Aug. 19.
   
• Highway 9 at Cascade Avenue in Brookdale has one-way traffic due to ongoing work. This closure is expected to last until Aug. 31.
   
• There will be alternating lane closures on Highway 9 at Pool Drive in Boulder Creek because of bridge work. This is scheduled to continue until April 30, 2027.
   
• A lane on westbound Highway 152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville is closed for asphalt paving. The closure is expected to last until July 3.
   
• Lompico Road at 12320 in Felton will be closed to vehicles today during work hours from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. while MGE Underground replaces a crossarm and cutouts.
   
• The California Highway Patrol helped with construction work at the intersection of Highway 9 and Highway 236 in Boulder Creek today.
   

Long-term projects

These have been going on for a while, but are still worth keeping in mind.

• River Road at 618 River Rd. in Boulder Creek will be closed to vehicles on June 11 from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3 p.m. while crews repair a connector and replace a broken crossarm.
   
• Thurber Lane near 4672 Thurber Lane in Santa Cruz will be fully closed from June 8-12 during work hours (8:30 a.m.-4 p.m.) for tree trimming and vegetation management by county crews.
   
• Single lane closures are in place on Soquel Drive between Huntington Drive and Jaunell Road in Aptos from today through June 12, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. while county crews do overhead tree trimming.
   

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

The post Thursday morning traffic: Closures along Highways 1, 9, 152 appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

The White House is corroding from the inside.

The president is reportedly “pissed” and “increasingly frustrated with everyone” surrounding him—though the drama seems to be a mess of his own creation.

The pressing issue started last week, when Donald Trump suddenly appointed Bill Pulte—a real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—to run U.S. national intelligence in place of the outbound Tulsi Gabbard.

Democrats and some Republicans on the Hill immediately opposed Pulte’s appointment and were quick to point out that the PulteGroup heir would come to the job with zero national security experience, a direct violation of the law, which specifically requires a director of national intelligence to have “extensive” national security experience.

Lawmakers have accused Trump of nominating Pulte for his own personal benefit: “The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump’s chosen political enemies,” House Democratic leadership wrote in a statement Thursday.

At risk thanks to Pulte’s nomination is the imminent expiration of FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants. That statute is slated to expire Friday, but Democratic leadership has indicated it won’t vote to renew it “without meaningful reforms,” emphasizing Pulte’s recent promotion in its demands.

Senate Republicans expected Trump to find an off-ramp on the matter—House Speaker Mike Johnson even visited the White House Tuesday to discuss it. But they were wrong.

Trump was irate with “everyone, from his own team to the Senate,” a MAGA-world operative close to the White House told Politico Thursday, highlighting Senate Republicans’ opposition to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, and the general disregard for Trump’s desire to fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she identified procedural problems in the SAVE Act.

“He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative added. “He does not like being put in a box. When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”

The message was received loud and clear. One senior GOP staffer described Trump’s recent moves to Politico as “a middle finger to Congress.”

Trump is also furious that his preferred candidate for Iowa governor, Representative Randy Feenstra, lost his primary last week. “He’s really angry about this Iowa endorsement—like really, really angry,” a White House ally told Politico. “He’s really angry that his consultants and people pushed him to do that.”