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The House Oversight Committee has begun investigating the role of Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev in financing Donald Trump Jr.’s recent nuptials. On Tuesday, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking Democrat on the committee, sent a letter to Don Jr. instructing him to preserve all records, documents and communication referencing his relationship to the oligarch, who is an ally of Russian…

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AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without having to constantly check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more permission was needed. “You don’t send an email and then sit watching the outbox until the reply lands,” the Pizza Bot team wrote. “Pizza Bot is shaped like an email client for the same reason: a thread is a unit of work you come back to rather than a session you have to attend.” Like the modern email services it mimics, Pizza Bot organizes communications with AI agents into message threads. Finished tasks, along with detailed result writeups you’d expect from a colleague you’ve delegated your work to, end up in the Unread category, while anything you need to make a decision on is shunted to the Action category. Asynchronous agent communication is likely to be a godsend for those balancing multiple tasks assigned to digital delegees, as the Pizza Bot team describes it. “Live chat assumes both parties are present, which holds for a quick exchange and breaks the moment a task takes several minutes,” the Pizza Bot maintainers wrote. Just like you don’t want to stare over the shoulder of the poor IT sod you sent off to do a task while you watch YouTube videos, no one wants to sit there and watch an AI agent do web research, or whatever. “Pizza Bot treats an agent the way you’d treat a colleague who has gone off to do the work: it comes back when there’s something to read, or something only you can decide,” the PB team added. Internal tool goes open source Pizza Bot, named for Amazon’s “two-pizza team” model (i.e., small, autonomous teams small enough to be fed by two pizzas), began life inside Amazon as an internal tool for AI agent uses other than software development. According to its developers, non-coding uses they were exploring internally continually had the same requirements, namely working in the background autonomously and only bugging their user when they were done or had a question. “None of those describe how anyone uses a chat window,” the Pizza Bot team explained. “They describe how people already work with each other.” Email, they added, was the perfect design paradigm for internal use, and seeing whether it would work for everyone else meant opening the project to open source contributions. As mentioned, Pizza Bot is open source - you can snag a copy for Windows, macOS, and Linux from its GitHub repo. It runs on-device, stores all its communication threads locally in SQLite files, and doesn’t transmit anything off device unless you grant permission for it to do so. Prompts and attachments are sent to model providers, naturally, but even that’s not necessary: Pizza Bot also supports Ollama, allowing users to run compatible open-weight AI models locally. Pizza Bot doesn’t ship with a lot of capabilities, as its maintainers noted that Amazon-specific skills and MCP servers were left out when they rebuilt it as an open source project for public release. Out of the box, however, it can list, read, write, edit, and search files, delegate tasks to specialist agents, and run a sandboxed JavaScript interpreter. It also ships with a browser automation skill and a guide skill that lets users ask about Pizza Bot’s capabilities. Claude Code-compatible .mcp.json files are supported and can be dropped straight in, as can skills, the team noted. One word of caution to anyone who wants to try it: The devs make clear this is a piece of open source software, not an officially supported AWS product. “There’s no AWS support or service-level agreement behind it,” they note. If you’re gonna bake a pie with this bot, you’ve been warned. ®

A new WhatsApp Business MCP server lets developers use AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Codex, and ChatGPT to handle setup, messaging templates, testing, and troubleshooting.

President Trump called into the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees meeting Tuesday to yell at trustee and Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty.

The call came in before the board voted to close the center indefinitely, ostensibly for repairs, and just after a federal judge blocked Trump from putting his name on the building or sneakily renaming the plaza near the building after himself.

An unnamed board member described Trump’s phone call to CNN as “fucking crazy,” while another source told the news outlet that Trump screamed throughout the call. Beatty, who is part of legal efforts to keep Trump’s name off of the building, told him that his efforts have left the venue underwater with debt.

Trump and the board, made up of mostly his handpicked appointees, insist that the center will collapse, physically and financially, if the president isn’t allowed to take over the center and put his name on it.

Hours after the court decision, Trump declared in a Truth Social post that the building would close “immediately,” but that “Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name.” He also claimed that he has already raised $17 million to put into the center.

Trump has repeatedly been told in federal court that he needs approval from Congress to make his desired changes to the center, which should theoretically be easy with Republicans currently controlling the House and Senate. But he refuses to listen to those rulings and wants to forcibly take over the venue, with intervention from the Supreme Court if necessary, even though his involvement has killed the center’s ticket sales and fundraising while pushing away performers.

Look, President Donald Trump knows how these things work; you grease the wheels by giving your buddy a job they’re not qualified for, and then they owe you. So why can’t his Supreme Court appointees figure out this simple principle? If you haven’t guessed, some of the court’s conservatives crossed the aisle to tell Trump the softest, sweetest version of “no” over his unconstitutional…

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In an oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, FBI Director Kash Patel did little to acknowledge the continuing fallout around the firing of agents for their role in investigating President Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents—even though they were experts in tracking Iranian threats.

Several outlets have reported that at least a dozen fired FBI counterintelligence staffers belonged to a unit that specializes in investigating potential danger from Iran. The firings took place just days before the Trump administration launched its military campaign against the country in February. 

During the hearing, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) referenced those reports in his questioning: “Do you think firing the president’s political opponents is more important than retaining the decades of experience and expertise monitoring intelligence threats from Iran?”

“The individuals you are referring to are not experts [on Iran],” the FBI director responded. “I think what’s most important is [to] not have a weaponized FBI, and I will endeavor every single day to make sure we have no one there that is doing that.” 

Blumenthal pointed out that Patel’s firings in effect politicized and weaponized the FBI against its own employees—despite previous claims that he would not target agents for participating in investigations.

“How can you make those two statements consistent?” the senator asked.

“Simple. If you weaponize law enforcement, you don’t get to work at the FBI,” Patel said—a remark that doesn’t actually address the question.

BLUMENTHAL: They were fired bc they worked on the classified docs case involving Trump. Do you think firing president's political opponents is more important than retraining decades of experience & expertise monitoring threats from Iran?PATEL: What's most important is not having a weaponized FBI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-15T15:08:54.147Z

In a May Senate hearing, Patel also denied, multiple times, the accuracy of reporting that Iran experts were dismissed just before the current war began. Replying to Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Patel added that the situation was the subject of ongoing litigation—three FBI agents who were fired filed a class-action suit in March alleging a retribution campaign for investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—and claimed that he could not discuss it further. He again rejected the validity of the reporting in a March House committee hearing.

Although not firing that group Iran investigators wouldn’t mean the Trump administration would have avoided the current war—which has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, over a dozen US servicemembers, and included several deadly military operations in neighboring countries—or even maintained a ceasefire later on, it does, yet again, suggest that targeting the administration’s opponents remains a greater priority for the White House than ensuring the semblance of government function.

Whether there will be any actual accountability for the FBI’s conduct is another question—one that doesn’t seem to interest Patel.

FBI Director Kash Patel needed a cheat sheet of attacks in order to dodge tough questions from Senator Dick Durbin Tuesday.

It’s no wonder Patel refused to answer Democratic lawmakers’ questions at a Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing—his notes had nothing to do with his role leading the FBI!

A Reuters photographer captured an image of a document Patel referred to during questioning. It was titled “DURBIN INFO” and listed a series of bullet points containing opposition research on Durbin and his wife.

It’s a little ironic that Patel was planning to make things so personal, considering that the FBI director repeatedly refused to answer any questions involving his use of government resources on his 26-year-old girlfriend.

It appears that Patel didn’t get a chance to use his opposition research on the Illinois Democrat—instead, he offered a series of obstinate nonanswers.

Patel refused to provide information in response to Durbin’s questions about the FBI’s failure to investigate potential civil rights violations committed by federal agents during the Department of Homeland Security’s “Midway Blitz” operation in Chicago, Illinois. Patel also denied making false statements following the horrific shooting of Marimar Martinez.

“I can tell you that she’s never been charged with a crime after being shot five times—” Durbin said.

“You want her to be charged for being shot?” Patel asked incredulously.

Patel responded incoherently to Durbin’s questions about lowering the standards for applicants at the FBI, claiming he’d done so in order to, among other things, protect the human “victims” of bestiality. He also dodged questions about dragging his feet to release documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, and refused to weigh in on the allegations of corruption against Corey Lewandowski.

There was once a time when government officials preparing to testify before the Senate might’ve brought notes on their work—but not any more. In the Trump administration, officials mostly just prep tips on how to get at Democratic lawmakers. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi tried the same thing and, well, we all know how that went.

Quick Take

• It seems that the MCU X-Men team will be the original five members, but will the other announced mutants be part of a rival mutant school?
• In the comics, Emma Frost ran a rival school to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, the Massachusetts Academy, with students called the Hellions.
• Nerdist’s take: We could see Emma Frost starting out the new MCU X-Men film as a villain, with her students as adversaries of the X-Men who ultimately join the team.

Rumors have been running rampant that the upcoming MCU X-Men film will feature the original five X-Men from 1963, together on screen (as a team) for the first time. The fact that we have three of the five founders – Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Angel – all now cast, with reports of Beast soon to be cast as well, it seems that the original five, or “O5,” as X-Men fans call them, will be the MCU’s “First Class.”

Marvel Comics

But what about announced X-Men in the cast like Storm, Rogue, and Emma Frost? Actually, we think the movie is going to set up a rival institution of learning to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. And the reason we believe this all comes down to Samara Weaving’s role as Emma Frost.

Xavier’s School Had a Rival in the Comics — The Massachusetts Academy Marvel Comics

In the early ‘80s, Uncanny X-Men writer Chris Claremont had introduced the Hellfire Club as one of the X-Men’s primary foes. This elite and decadent society, run by an Inner Circle of powerful mutants, first made itself known during The Dark Phoenix Saga. One of the Hellfire Club’s leaders, psychic Emma Frost, was the Club’s White Queen. In 1981, Claremont introduced the Hellfire Club’s Massachusetts Academy, an elite school for mutants. This school is where Emma Frost taught her students to be more aggressive and that they were innately superior to baseline humans. These students earned the nickname “the Hellions.”

The Hellions Were A Thorn in the Side of Xavier’s Class of New Mutants Marvel Comics

The Hellions had a lot of drama with the X-Men. Emma Frost even tried to recruit Kitty Pryde into the Hellions. Later on, the New Mutants had a very “Gryffindor vs. Slytherin” rivalry with them. In the ’90s, the Hellions were all killed in a Sentinel attack, leaving Emma Frost in a coma for years. When she awoke, she realized her aggressive ways of teaching led to the death of her students. She then changed her ways (somewhat) and joined Xavier’s faculty. And we think the MCU may adapt all of this, only with a few different characters.

Emma Frost Could Teach at Her Own School in the MCU Marvel Comics

We predict the O5 make up the main X-Men for the bulk of the film. We could then see Emma as headmistress of a rival school, just as in the ‘80s comics. Rogue, who began her comics existence as a villain, might be one of her students. Storm could be the same, even if she has no history of being villainous in the comics. The movie X-Men: Apocalypse did have her start her journey as a misguided mutant who switches sides by the end. So we could see the MCU doing this as well with Ororo Munroe. These more well-known mutants could replace the more obscure Hellions.

Marvel Comics

With Adam Driver as Mister Sinister in the film, we could see his character bankroll this darker school for mutants. We could also see the Hellions specifically trying to recruit the immensely powerful Jean Grey into the fold. And we suspect that by the film’s end, characters like Emma, Rogue, and Storm switch sides, and join the X-Men. This way, the movie starts with the O5, in keeping with Marvel Comics canon, but ends with characters from more popular eras of X-Men comics on the roster. It’s a win-win for longtime fans. And hopefully, the rival school has some more mutants who eventually switch sides. We know we’d love to see Colossus and Nightcrawler specifically. We’ll see if our predictions are correct when Marvel Studios’ X-Men arrives in July, 2028.

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

The post Will the MCU X-MEN Reboot Feature Rival Mutant Schools? appeared first on Nerdist.

If your employees are visiting Chinese-language gambling or adult sites, they may not just be wasting time and money, but potentially encountering serious malware hidden behind domains that look like mostly harmless entertainment at first glance. A report from Infoblox urges the security community to pay closer attention to these websites, because some double as command-and-control (C2) infrastructure for espionage and malware distribution. Zach Edwards, staff threat researcher at Infoblox, suggests security researchers and the media have ignored these sites because the story is complicated and confusing. Infoblox says it tracks about 1.7 million Chinese-language casino websites that facilitate illegal gambling. These support North Korean money laundering and tax avoidance, among other dubious activities. And these casino sites can be difficult to distinguish from one another. They tend to use variations of common templates in terms of design and function. Many operate like a legal casino would, just relying on the advantage of house odds to profit. While these sites provide illegal gambling and adult entertainment for online visitors from China and Asia, some rely on US cloud providers for computing infrastructure. "Major US hosting companies (Amazon, Microsoft, Cloudflare, and Google) continue to host infrastructure associated with these domains," the Infoblox report explains. "One likely explanation is account theft at those providers, a practice documented previously as 'infrastructure laundering.'" That refers to hosting companies like Funnull that have reportedly rented IP addresses from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft and made those resources available to clients carrying out illegal activities. According to a July 2026 report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), disparate crime syndicates increasingly use common infrastructure for cybercrime, while online scams resulted in estimated losses of between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion in 2025 across East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. A subset of casino sites offer scam gambling, or "scambling." Visitors place bets but can't get their money out if they win. And then there's a subset of sites used by China-aligned threat groups. "China-aligned APT groups have been running the PeckBirdy framework since 2023, hiding their malware C2 domains inside low-quality Chinese-language casino websites," Infoblox said. PeckBirdy, as noted by Trend Micro researchers in January, is a script-based framework that attackers can load through compromised websites. In one campaign, attackers injected scripts into gambling sites that loaded PeckBirdy and displayed fake software update pages designed to entice victims to download malware. The problem is that each of these three types of sites, though they change frequently, looks similar. Infoblox notes that just over 3 percent of its enterprise customers resolved at least one PeckBirdy C2 domain. "The most important thing for defenders to do is stop ignoring casino domains," Infoblox argues. "An alert on a Chinese-language casino or adult domain that gets closed as an employee browsing violation is precisely the outcome the PeckBirdy operators are counting on. The decoy works because the dismissal is reasonable – these domains genuinely are, most of the time, exactly what they appear to be." Security analysts who review suspicious network contacts are advised to check whether these casino domains include malicious payloads before closing the review ticket. ®

As Cabrillo College enters a third year of managing a moderate structural budget deficit, its president says she’s “cautiously optimistic” about their strategy to stabilize the school’s finances. 

Cabrillo President Jenn Capps told Lookout this week that despite the unstable higher education environment for federal funding, enrollment fluctuations and the region’s affordability challenges, she doesn’t think the budget is in a “horrible position.” She said the college roughly estimates a $2 million structural deficit this fiscal year.  

FBI Director Kash Patel appeared in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Tuesday, where ranking Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin asked about a recent report saying the bureau had lifted standards that automatically disqualified applicants with criminal histories. Those histories included things such as soliciting prostitution and engaging in bestiality. “What we did was—we…

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With his characteristic deregulatory zeal, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin announced before an audience of G20 energy ministers in oil-rich Houston, Texas, that his agency would eliminate climate pollution standards for fossil fuel-fired power plants. “For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy,” Zeldin said in an EPA press statement issued during the Houston meeting. “The Trump Administration has come in to protect American energy and to make sure you can afford to keep the lights on.” 

This announcement was yet another example of the Trump administration’s eagerness to reinforce what Republicans have long considered a priority: freedom from government intrusion or regulation. But only a few days before Zeldin reassured energy executives that the government would no longer prioritize protecting public health, the EPA announced a new study that would test the country’s water supply for abortion medication, contraception, and hormones used in gender-affirming care, along with over 1,000 other medications and chemicals. “We have heard loud and clear that Americans are concerned about potential unknown pollutants lurking in their drinking water,” Zeldin wrote in the study press release.

“The Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The testing of abortion medication has been championed by anti-abortion groups for years, especially by Kristan Hawkins, the leader of Students for Life, who tweeted a video of herself receiving the news that the study was made public. In her post, she wrote: 

“BREAKING: The EPA will now test water for abortion pill pollution!! The FDA has recklessly, negligently allowed chemical abortion pills on the market and deregulated them. They’ve killed millions of babies, harmed mothers, and polluted our water for 26 years. For the last year, we’ve been calling on President Trump’s EPA to find out what’s in our water. After more than three years of innovative water testing, a peer-reviewed research paper, and the introduction of legislation in states, the Pro-Life Generation is finally being heard!”

The EPA’s unrelated but tandem announcements reveal an agency that has fundamentally overhauled its policies toward environmental and human health in pursuit of the Trump administration’s “energy dominance” and “Make America Healthy Again” agendas. Rolling back power plant pollution standards will lead to higher emissions of the greenhouse gases driving Earth’s warming to deadlier levels, as well as increased levels of smog, mercury, and lead contamination, which can cause health problems. 

Coal and natural gas-fueled power plants are the second-largest carbon polluter in the United States behind the transportation sector. Under the Biden administration, carbon pollution rules for power plant emissions standards would have reduced carbon emissions by 1.38 billion metric tons by 2047. The recently announced plan will repeal these Biden-era regulations and could prevent future administrations from curbing carbon emissions. First reported by Bloomberg News, the EPA’s latest move caps off a year and a half of the agency’s overhaul of federal climate policy. In February, the EPA rescinded similar climate vehicle standards and the 2009 endangerment finding, the landmark ruling that asserted greenhouse gases threaten human health.

Much to the dismay of anti-abortion activists, the number of abortions in the United States has actually increased since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. One reason for this has been access to abortion medication, the two-drug regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol that act to terminate pregnancies. This has activated the anti-abortion movement to find new approaches to ending the procedure, and one of them has been environmental: focusing on the alleged presence of these medications in the water supply.

After Republican lawmakers urged the EPA to take up the water study in June, Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The 19th that, compared to other pharmaceuticals, mifepristone is taken as a one-time dose by a small portion of the population. “There are legitimate water quality threats that we need to attack and rectify in a regulatory manner,” Donley said. “And then there are things that are out in left field that just distract people.” 

Meanwhile, monitoring the water supply—which Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote will “give Americans the truth about what is in their water”—may actually co-opt environmental policy to pursue anti-abortion policy. “I am deeply concerned,” Betsy Southerland, a former career scientist in EPA’s Office of Water, told Politico. “If there is any detectable level of mifepristone or its metabolites, the anti-abortion groups will scream that we are unknowingly aborting fetuses by drinking public tap water.” 

According to Politico, the EPA insists the study will only determine if a chemical is present in the water supply, not its concentration. But pro-choice activists caution that the study could still pave the way for abortion access restrictions. “If the test finds any trace of abortion pills, conservatives will use it to legitimize their new legal front in the war on reproductive rights,” wrote activist and writer Jessica Valenti on her Substack, Abortion, Every Day. “The cruelty really is the point here, not science or health.” 

As for the EPA’s other effort? Environmental groups are already planning their legal challenges to the EPA’s latest climate policy rollback. “The Trump administration is handing the fossil fuel industry a license to keep polluting,” Holly Bender, chief program officer for the Sierra Club, told The Guardian. “This is full-throated climate denial while the climate crisis happens in real time and a shocking betrayal of the American public.”

Outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie on Tuesday introduced eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for “high crimes and misdemeanors” regarding his handling of the Trump administration’s war on Iran—calling it “unlawful at its inception.”

Massie attacked Hegseth for “waging the Iran war despite no declaration of war, statutory authorization, attack on the United States, or imminent threat,” and continuing to attack Iran after the war powers resolution expired. The articles of impeachment also cite Hegseth’s suppression of Democratic Senator Mark Kelly’s right to free speech, initiating an unlawful war in Yemen (remember Signalgate?), and “ignoring laws that minimize civilian casualties.”

Massie specifically noted Hegseth’s bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, in February—a brutal attack that killed 120 schoolchildren and 36 other civilians.

“By directing the Department of Defense in a manner that foreseeably dismantled the safeguards necessary to distinguish civilian objects from military objects, Secretary Hegseth thereby affected the murder of civilians, and abused the trust of men and women under his command by requiring them to conduct military operations within a targeted and legal review system that he had deliberately degraded,” Massie said during a Tuesday House session.

Massie reading impeachment resolution: Hegseth directed the Department of Defense in a manner that resulted in the death or injury of more than 200 civilians as at Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary school in Minab in Iran.

Secretary Hegseth thereby effectually effected the murder of… pic.twitter.com/igDS9VwZM8

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 15, 2026

Massie made his resolution privileged, meaning the House must vote on it in two days—if Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t send everyone home early.

The California Arts Council has recognized five local artists with its Central Coast Individual Artists Fellowship, which gives creatives across the region unrestricted funding to support their artistic practices. 

The recipients include 14 artists from the Central Coast, including Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, Ventura, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties. This is the first year the council has specifically recognized a Central Coast cohort. 

Ellen Bass and Consuelo Alba-Speyer were awarded the Legacy Fellowship. Bass founded the Santa Cruz Poetry Project and the poetry program at the Salinas Valley State Prison, both of which offer weekly workshops to incarcerated people. She has received the Lambda Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and five Pushcart Prizes for her poetry.

Alba-Speyer co-founded and serves as the executive director for the Watsonville Film Festival, amplifying Latine and Indigenous voices through film and cultural programs. She also directed four short documentaries, including “The Long Labor” and “Las Mismas Manos,” which premiered at the 2026 New York Latino Film Festival. 

“This recognition is an affirmation not only of my work, but of the artists, storytellers and communities who have trusted me and inspired me along the way,” Alba-Speyer said in a news release. “I feel incredibly honored and grateful, and more inspired than ever to keep creating, opening doors for others and building spaces where our creativity, our culture and our humanity can be seen and celebrated.”

Akua Naru received the Established Artist Fellowship, celebrating her current work, “Longing To Tell: A Blues Opera.” Her work, which spans poetry, theater, music and archive, is rooted in Black feminism and theorizes hip-hop as “a site of undoing, testimony, and past/future-making.” She is an assistant professor of hip hop at UC Santa Cruz. 

Alexandra Rocha-Alvarez and Hossein Zarrat Shoaiee were recognized as Emerging Fellows. Rocha-Alvarez leads Palabra Campesina, an arts initiative uplifting farmworker communities in the Pájaro Valley through oral histories. 

Shoaiee highlights the Iranian diaspora across the Central Coast and San Francisco Bay Area through filmmaking. He is currently working on a screenplay for an animated film confronting questions of belonging and self-discovery. 

The Central Coast Fellowship was partly administered by Arts Council Santa Cruz County, providing local outreach and connecting artists with the fellowship. 

“This fellowship recognizes that artists deserve investment and trust,” said Sally Green, the deputy director of Arts Council Santa Cruz County, in a news release. “Bringing this opportunity to artists throughout the region and celebrating the remarkable range of creative practices shaping our communities is an honor.”

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

MORE LOCAL COVERAGE

The post Five Santa Cruz County artists receive California Arts Council fellowship appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Quick Take

• The final trailer for Other Mommy gives us more scary, smiling Jessica Chastain.
• The movie, based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House, will come out October 9.
• Nerdist‘s Take: The movie has changed several elements from the book, but hopefully enough of it will remain to give the same level of childhood chills.

Certain stories hit at primal emotions, deep-seated fears within humanity. Make those childhood emotions and fears, you have yourself something special. I’m really hoping that’s what we’re getting from Rob Savage’s Other Mommy. Jessica Chastain plays dual roles as both a mother and the supernatural evil entity who looks like her trying to steal her daughter away. The first trailer a few months ago was really freaky. This final trailer for the movie—which comes out October 9—certainly isn’t any less so. Take a look.

The film follows an eight-year-old girl named Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) whose Mommy (Chastain) and Daddo (Jay Duplass) have marital problems. Bela gets an, it seems, imaginary friend in the form of Other Mommy, who looks exactly like her real mother. But gradually Other Mommy begins to ask to go into Bela’s heart. It may not sound all that bad…but it’s the way she asks it. Malevolence and horror abounds.

Other cast members include Dichen Lachman (Severance), Arian Moayed (Wonder Man), and Karen Allen (Indiana Jones).

Photo Credit: Bernard Walsh/Universal Pictures

Other Mommy is based on Josh Malerman’s novel Incidents Around the House. I just recently read this book and found it very upsetting and impactful. A few interesting observations about the movie—having only seen these trailers—come up. First, the book is entirely from Bela’s point of view, narrated by her in present tense. It really makes the reader empathize with her and the way she sees a horrifying reality. Second, the Other Mommy in the book doesn’t necessarily look like Mommy. It’s a sort of unknowable, misshapen thing with hair on its back and arms and a massive mouth. Much harder to dramatize.

And the final interesting thing about the book is that Mommy and Daddo, and others too, believe Bela about Other Mommy pretty early on, because they see her too. I really hope that carries over to the movie. One of my least favorite things in horror fiction is adults not believing children. It’s so much more interesting than spending half the movie with the grown-ups thinking their children have lost their minds.

At any rate, I’m very excited to see how Other Mommy shakes out when it hits theaters October 9.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post OTHER MOMMY Final Trailer Continues Uncanny Jessica Chastain appeared first on Nerdist.

From Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI to OpenAI's messy 'super app' launch, here's a look at the AI projects that shut down or missed expectations.

Senator Chuck Grassley had an explosive outburst at Senator Cory Booker Tuesday, after the Democratic lawmaker grilled FBI Director Kash Patel over his incompetence.

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on FBI oversight, Patel faced tough questions from Democratic lawmakers—especially Booker—and by the end, Grassley couldn’t handle it anymore.

Grassley provided enormous cover to Patel after he refused to answer Booker’s questions about the FBI’s efforts to investigate Elizabeth Williamson, the New York Times journalist who reported on the SWAT team assigned as Patel’s 26-year-old girlfriend’s security detail. Booker accused Patel of lying before a grand jury that no journalist was under investigation.

“Mr. Chairman—Chairman, I’m asking yes or no questions about activities of the FBI, that as a matter of oversight I have the right to do,” Booker said to Grassley.

“I’m not going to—normally I would say, but this seems to be a personal thing to him,” Grassley replied. Booker continued to outline Patel’s efforts to attack the press and subpoena reporters, and accused him of stonewalling the committee.

When Booker asked about Patel’s promise to investigate Donald Trump’s crude birthday card to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Grassley interjected to grant Patel extra time to respond. As the FBI director proceeded to ramble about hunting down leakers of classified information, Booker tried to steer Patel back on topic, and Grassley informed the Democrat that his time was up.

As a frustrated Booker proceeded to give his closing remarks, Grassley continued to interrupt, even banging his gavel.

“We don’t have an FBI director, we have a lackey here. Who’s using govern—and frankly, he’s not even a good lackey, he’s an incompetent lackey. He’s like an 18-year-old kid who wants to join a fraternity that he could never be a member of. Doing keg stands and chugging with friends,” Booker said. “He’s an embarrassment to the agency and wouldn’t qualify, even, to be an FBI agent.

“What is bad is not just that we have a rogue FBI agent intimidating reporters, what’s bad is that we have Republicans in the Senate enabling him to go without any objective oversight or transparency or accountability!” Booker added.

Grassley accused Booker of expecting to receive special treatment. “You don’t show much respect for your chairman,” he said. “Yeah, you’ve gone on now for three minutes—”

“I have utter respect for you, in fact I have love for you,” Booker said. “This is why I know this is not who you are. You are not holding this witness in an objective way to answer the questions that are given to him by Democratic senators, yet he insults them time and time again.”

Booker criticized Patel for speaking disrespectfully to Vermont Senator Peter Welch, and insisted he had a right to ask about how the FBI director was spending money on his girlfriend. As Grassley attempted to pass questioning to Senator Darline Graham, a protester appeared, spurring Booker and Patel to continue to exchange barbs.

Again, Grassley reserved his admonishments for his Democratic colleague. “Are you going to interfere with Senator Graham asking her questions too? Too, as well? Or are you done now?” the Iowa Republican shouted. “Are you ready to shut up?!”

Grassley yelling at Booker: ARE YOU READY TO SHUT UP!?!? pic.twitter.com/KIN9Xah9yR

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 15, 2026

President Donald Trump’s pathetic midterm convention is now in the rearview, and he’s already pushing lies about the two-day event being a rousing success. “The Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas was a solidly sold out winner for Republicans. Also, great Views and Ratings. Should have a big impact on November 3rd,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. But the data tells a completely…

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The AI frenzy could push U.S. data centers to become one of the largest consumers of natural gas in the world.

Donald Trump is convinced that the Kennedy Center is doomed to fail without his name front and center on its facade.

The president lamented the state of the famed arts institution in a lengthy post on Truth Social Tuesday, claiming that the property is in a “in a virtual state of collapse” and that he alone can save it.

“Remember, The Kennedy Center was losing Hundreds of Millions of Dollars when I took over. It was failing badly! It had nothing to do with me, I am only there to help,” Trump wrote. “I just got there to reveal the facts, but especially those concerning Building Safety.”

The rant came hours after a federal judge ruled that the performing arts space could not be renamed to include “Donald J. Trump” on its exterior, noting that Congress singularly arbitrates the name of the Kennedy Center, which was erected to memorialize the assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Judge Christopher R. Cooper also barred the Kennedy Center board from renaming the surrounding campus as the “President Donald J. ​Trump Plaza.”

“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Cooper wrote. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

That decision did not sit well with the Kennedy Center board, which is composed of Trump as its president and a batch of Trump appointees, who promptly voted to shut the center down.

The board had previously asserted that adding Trump’s name to the building was the only way to maintain his promised funding and ensure the arts space could avoid “certain fiscal collapse.”

Programming at the Kennedy Center was initially projected to end in July to make way for a two-year renovation period. Trump announced the plan in February, at which point he said, “Financing is completed and fully in place.”

Long before Trump’s meddling, the Kennedy Center was widely considered a premier arts institution. But since the White House became directly involved in its operations and programming, its normally star-studded lineup has fallen apart.

In December, the president suddenly decided to rename the venerated cultural institution “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” in a flagrant rejection of the laws that created the center in the first place.

The judge’s decision was the third major legal loss that Trump has suffered in less than 24 hours. On Monday, a federal judge blocked the administration’s efforts to limit visa stays for foreign students and journalists, effectively upending a pillar of Trump’s anti-immigration efforts. And later that night, the Supreme Court ruled against the president’s mail-in voting scheme. The news sent Trump into a tirade, during which he lashed out at his judicial appointees, claiming they were “not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”