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In the wee hours of Friday morning, Senate Republicans passed a $70 billion immigration enforcement funding bill on a strictly party line vote, handing President Donald Trump’s masked goons billions to continue his violent, inhumane, politically and economically damaging deportation agenda. What wasn’t included in the funding, however, was any language to limit the nearly $1.8…

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Operations on the International Space Station may have returned to normal on Friday, but concerns over a persistent air leak in the Russian segment of the station remain unresolved. NASA spokesperson Bethany Stevens confirmed on Friday that NASA had instructed crew members sheltering in a docked Dragon spacecraft to resume normal operations aboard the International Space Station after Roscosmos paused repair work in the Zvezda service module's transfer tunnel, known as PrK. Reuters reported that concerns over air leaks in the Russian module prompted NASA to order astronaut Chris Williams and the four-member SpaceX Crew-12 team into the Dragon spacecraft as part of a precautionary safe-haven procedure on Friday. The crew entered the spacecraft wearing spacesuits, per Reuters. Stevens did not specify exactly when the crew was instructed to shelter in place. The Roscosmos crew was planning to conduct repairs on the transfer tunnel on Friday, but Stevens said that the plan was paused in order to further assess “measurements and data” regarding the new leaks. “Given this development, NASA has instructed the crew members inside the Dragon spacecraft to end the safe haven procedures and return to planned operations aboard the International Space Station,” Stevens said. What’s life in space without some risks? Just how big is this crack, exactly? We’ve known about problems with Zvezda leaks for some time now, as Stevens noted. “The cracks have always been a concern that NASA watches very closely,” the NASA mouthpiece said in Friday’s X post about the leak. “NASA and Roscosmos have been working to determine the root cause of the cracks, and Roscosmos manages the issue through operational mitigation measures and periodic partial-repair efforts.” The Register has been reporting on leaks in the Russian segment of the orbital lab since they were first identified in 2020. Multiple repair efforts over the past few years have failed to stop the leaks entirely, and newly identified cracks suggest the problem is continuing. Reuters, citing an unnamed NASA official, said that leaks in the Russian section of the station escalated this week from around a pound of air a day to two pounds. A source The Register spoke with said that the latest discoveries were the longest cracks in the module they’d seen, though we’re still not clear on how large the cracks actually are. Russian news wire Interfax reported that cosmonauts identified two potential air leaks in the transfer chamber, one of which was sealed on Friday with a layer of Germetall-1 two-component sealant, but the second hasn’t been addressed yet. “Efforts are underway to prepare it for hermetic sealing,” Roscosmos said in a statement. We’ll update this story if we hear anything new from NASA, including whether the continued leaks, with cause unknown, could lead to an early retirement for the station. ®

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

There has justifiably been much attention paid to Donald Trump’s personal corruption: cutting sleazy crypto deals, trading stocks in companies affected by his administration’s decisions, doling out pardons to fraudsters who make hefty donations to his political organizations, and so much more. But what’s even more significant is how Trump is perverting the federal government to allow wealthy individuals and corporations engaged in crooked conduct to escape scrutiny, prosecution, and punishment. Corporate scumbags and felonious plutocrats have never had it so good.

The Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues.

At the Securities and Exchange Commission, enforcement actions have fallen precipitously, and the commission ended several high-profile cryptocurrency inquires that involved Binance, Coinbase, and other firms. The workforce for the SEC’s enforcement division was cut by a fifth last year, with many experienced attorneys and accountants given the boot. The IRS, too, has been hammered by layoffs, and the number of audits of people with $10 million or more in income dropped by two-thirds from 6,786 in 2025 to 2,264 in 2026. With new priorities established at the Justice Department—such as essentially shutting down the pursuit of cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—the number of white-collar prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in at least 40 years, according to the Financial Times.

But beyond this, the Trump administration has taken steps to make sure that the United States is a safe space for money launderers, drug cartels, and international financial rogues. Who says so? The US Government Accountability Office. It recently released a report assessing Trump’s decision to loosen reporting requirements for shell companies. These are corporations that can have legitimate uses but are also set up so people or entitites can evade taxes, launder money, hide assets, and obscure the true beneficiaries of financial transactions. For instance, a sanctioned Russian oligarch might be able to use a shell company—or a string of them—to buy real estate in the United States and keep secret his ownership of the property.

The Corporate Transparency Act, a bipartisan bill passed in 2021, required most US firms to disclose to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) their “beneficial owners”—that is, the real people who control or own them. (In many instances, shell companies do not have to reveal their true owners and are registered in the name of others.) The aim of the legislation was to create a registry of owners and impede illegal financial activities, such as money laundering. An estimated 32 million businesses would have to register and note their real owners. (Several categories of business were exempted because disclosure requirements already applied to them—such as banks, credit unions, and securities dealers.)

But one month into Trump’s second term, his administration essentially eviscerated this reporting requirement, when FinCEN issued rules exempting domestic companies and Americans from this disclosure. As the GAO put it, this new exemption applied “to over 99 percent of entities that were previously targeted.”

The GAO report—in exceedingly dry language—notes this exemption is a boon for assorted malfeasants:

U.S.-based shell companies, often structured as LLCs or corporations, can pose significant risks of illicit finance activity. Treasury’s 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment identified several cases in which shell companies were used to facilitate financial crimes, including laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, cybercrime, and fraud, among others, indicating the continued risk posed by shell companies. The 2025 domestic reporting company exemption may perpetuate these risks.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, quickly jumped on the GAO report and cited it as evidence Trump is on the side of the bad guys:

The Trump Administration continues to put cartels and criminals ahead of law enforcement, opening the door for them to move millions of dollars through our financial system. Today’s GAO report confirms that Treasury gutted a bipartisan law designed to crack down on the abuse of shell companies, exempted 99 percent of the entities previously required to report, and has failed to address the “significant risks” this rollback created. Law enforcement groups have warned that it will be harder to go after drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and major criminal enterprises.

Warren noted that one of the main forces behind passage of the Corporate Transparency Act was a former senator named Marco Rubio. In 2020, he tweeted, “My ‘Corporate Transparency Act’ [is] the most significant anti-corruption and money-laundering legislation in decades [and] forces anonymous shell companies to disclose their true owners.”

“There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

Republican and Democratic senators have opposed the Trump administration’s wipeout of the Corporate Transparency Act, as have law enforcement organizations, business groups, and national security–minded think tanks of the right and left. The hawkish and neocon-ish Foundation for Defense of Democracies issued a statement last year that said, “Anonymous U.S. shell companies are not a theoretical vulnerability—they are a proven vehicle for illicit finance, sanctions evasion, corruption, terrorism, and transnational crime…FinCEN’s decision to exempt domestic entities would allow these practices to continue unchecked.”

Last year, Warren, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and other Democratic senators wrote the Treasury to complain about the weakening of this requirement, noting, “There is growing evidence that [Chinese money laundering networks] are taking advantage of shell companies to help cartels move billions through the U.S. financial system.”

The Trump administration claims this disclosure obligation was too onerous for businesses, but it entailed minimal effort for the corporations compelled to register. So why kill this requirement? Warren and other legislators suspect Elon Musk had something to do with this. In a separate letter sent to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in April 2025, she and 18 other congressional Democrats asserted the Trump administration’s decision to neuter the Corporate Transparency Act was “seemingly triggered by a single Elon Musk social media comment.”

They pointed out that Musk, who at that time was a key adviser to Trump and engaged in a reckless dismantling of various government agencies, might have been “benefiting from foreign investments made through legal entities designed to hide the identities of the foreign investors.” They cited the Financial Times: “Wealthy Chinese investors are quietly funneling tens of millions of dollars into private companies controlled by Elon Musk” through “opaque structures” and “an arrangement that shields their identities from public view.”

During the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Responding to the recent GAO report, Warren asserted that this disclosure requirement would be beneficial for efforts to combat transnational crime, drug trafficking (including fentanyl smuggling), sex trafficking, the evasion of sanctions imposed on Iran, the theft of US technology by China and others, and fraud that targets US government programs. (The criminals that stole federal funds in Minnesota relied on shell companies.)

This may well be a personal issue for Trump. His Trump Organization is a collection of hundreds of shell companies. (Such entities are commonly used for real estate transactions.) And during the 2020 presidential race, Trump’s campaign, according to the Campaign Legal Center, deployed an LLC to launder “$170 million in spending to conceal payments to people close to the Trump family and campaign.”

Corporate reporting rules may seem like a wonkish topic. It certainly is not as visceral as Trump selling pardons or pocketing billions in crypto grift. But it may be more important, for Trump’s decision to protect the secrecy of shell companies—perhaps at the urging of Musk—has more far-ranging consequences than his own sticky-fingers corruption. It’s another way Trump is making America great for plutocrats, oligarchs, fraudsters, and scoundrels.

Supabase, an example of an open source project becoming a fast-growing company, has greatly benefited from AI tools like Claude, Codex, and other vibe-coding platforms.

⚡ Quick Take

• u003cliu003eThe Odyssey’s website allows you to watch the film’s trailer in several formats, including IMAX 70mm and Dolby Vision.u003c/liu003e

The Odyssey is coming to theaters in various formats, like IMAX 70mm and Dolby Vision. So it is only right that you’d be able to explore the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming summer film in those same formats, right? The Odyssey’s website allows you to do just that, with all of the film’s different formats available to experience this trailer in the accompanying aspect ratio. 

Universal Pictures

For those who are not filmmakers like Nolan or nerds about the process, each one has a written description about what it entails. And there are videos of several cast members who also break down the format for each version of The Odyssey trailer.

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It’s quite cool to dive into and see exactly why people love IMAX or Dolby Vision. The Odyssey arrives in theaters on July 17.

The post Watch THE ODYSSEY Trailer in All of Its Theater Formats appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• Kristen Bell is taking a break from the kingdom of Arendelle and joining the cast of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 as Amy Rose.

The fourth Sonic the Hedgehog movie is gearing up to enter production, and they’ve just added a very notable name to the voice cast. Princess Anna from Frozen herself, Kristen Bell, has joined the cast of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 as the voice of Amy Rose. Fans of the classic Sega game will remember Amy Rose as the pink hedgehog who is Sonic’s girlfriend. Well, she thinks of herself as his girlfriend, anyway. Sonic star Ben Schwartz posted a photo of himself and Kristen Bell holding toys of their respective characters on social media, formally announcing her arrival in the upcoming Sonic sequel.

WE HAVE OUR AMY ROSE!!! And I could not be more excited!!! Please welcome the incredible Kristen Bell to the @SonicMovie family!!! 💙 pic.twitter.com/jcFLLoplqC

— Ben Schwartz (@rejectedjokes) February 18, 2026

The mid-credits scene of the previous Sonic movie introduced Amy Rose as she saved Sonic from the bad guys in Sonic the Hedgehog 3‘s last moments. However, that little tease didn’t feature a voice actor. It was just to let the fans know she was coming. The mid-credits teases of the Sonic the Hedgehog movies have each set up a new character from the games that will play a big role in the next movie. Idris Elba, who voices Knuckles, joined the franchise in Sonic the Hedgehog 2. And Keanu Reeves joined the cast of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as Shadow. With each sequel, the voice cast gets more and more stacked with iconic names. And now, Kristen Bell will be joining Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Bell shared an Instagram photo of her in the booth, and she’s so incredibly joyful.

Sega created Amy Rose for the Sonic games when the company’s licensing division wanted a female counterpart to the Sonic character. A “Minnie to his Mickey,” essentially. Although it seems she’s more the Ms. Pac-Man to his Pac-Man if you ask us. Sega decided that having Sonic have a traditional girlfriend would go against his personality.

NBC Universal/Paramount Pictures

The company then made Amy Rose a hedgehog with a one-sided crush and oodles of bubbly energy. Yup, this Sonic the Hedgehog 4 role sounds ideal for Kristen Bell. Sonic the Hedgehog 4 is once again directed by Jeff Fowler, who directed the previous three installments. Paramount will release Sonic 4 in theaters on December 22, 2027.

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The post Kristen Bell Joins SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 4 Cast as Amy Rose appeared first on Nerdist.

Cybercriminals, part of a gang known as Silent Ransom Group, have sent people pretending to be IT support employees to law firms' offices, where the criminals have stolen data using USB drives or remote access tools.

The Trump Administration is using Cold War-era rules to authorize up to $500 million in funding to keep 13 coal-fired power plants going and build a coal export terminal in California. America's Department of Energy (DoE) says it is securing the funding via the Defense Production Act (DPA), which grants the president authority to use federal financial incentives to stimulate private domestic industry deemed critical to national defense. At the same time, the DoE announced that one of the advanced nuclear reactor projects it has been sponsoring has achieved criticality ahead of a July 4 deadline set by President Trump. That DPA funding includes up to $425 million for 12 projects to "expand and reinvigorate" the aging US coal power fleet, plus up to $75 million for the West Gateway Terminal Project in Oakland, California. This will be an export terminal reached by rail, capable of handling more than 10 million tons annually, which the government hopes to export to nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The pretext for authorizing funding via the DPA is that the DoE is ensuring the US maintains the industrial capacity and energy resources it needs to strengthen national security. Those projects chosen are intended to keep domestic coal mining alive and support reliable baseload power generation to boost the resilience of critical energy infrastructure, the DoE said. The coal industry in America has been declining for decades. It delivered 578 million tons in 2023, less than half the amount produced in 2008 when coal production peaked, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration. And according to a report from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), it was largely due to natural gas becoming cheaper, rather than green energy rules or clean air legislation, while solar and wind have also proved a competitive threat to coal. But the recent AI-driven datacenter build boom has pushed electricity demand upwards after years of stagnation, prompting coal-fired plants to stay online rather than retire. A group of environmental nonprofit organizations warned earlier this year that coal plants in America emit pollutants such as sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), both threatening human health, in addition to the greenhouse gases belched out. The DoE is at least pushing ahead with new nuclear reactor technology. One of its advanced reactor designs, the Mark-0 from Antares Nuclear, has successfully completed what the agency calls a zero-power fueled criticality demonstration at the Idaho National Laboratory. This is basically a test running a controlled, self-sustaining chain reaction, but with no electricity generation involved, simply to show that the reactor can operate safely. Perhaps the reason for the announcement is that Energy Secretary Chris Wright promised in an interview with Bloomberg last year that at least one small nuclear reactor project would be online by July 2026. Sustaining a test chain reaction doesn’t really count as online in our book, but we’ll let that pass. The DoE said the Mark-0 is the first of multiple advanced reactors anticipated to go critical by July 4, the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence. “It is fitting that on the eve of our nation’s 250th anniversary, we are witnessing a historic moment for American energy,” Secretary Wright commented. “For the first time in more than four decades, a new privately developed non-light-water reactor has reached criticality in the United States.” The DoE announced the Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program last June, and in August disclosed a list of ten companies it has accepted to take part, including Antares Nuclear. In other news, the department also trumpeted that Japan is officially joining the Trump Administration’s Genesis Mission, billed as a national effort to use AI to drive scientific discoveries. Japan's RIKEN scientific research institute and Fujitsu began working with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Nvidia to build the compute infrastructure for Genesis back in January, but now the DoE says that Japan and the US are both contributing $500 million each to the project. The move makes Japan the first, and so far only, international partner on Genesis. ®

ZTE Corporation today showcased its pioneering achievements in digital transformation and AI-driven project management at the 14th IPMA Research Conference in Bogotá, Colombia. During the conference, Wang Yuzhu, Managing Director of Engineering Services at ZTE Colombia, and Jose Perez, Senior Expert in Engineering Delivery Management at ZTE, delivered a keynote speech themed "The Digital and Intelligent Future of Project Management", highlighting ZTE's practical experiences and innovative achievements in global project delivery. To address the evolving challenges of global project delivery, ZTE has developed a digital project management system tailored for complex international scenarios. Built on the "One Team, One System, One Mechanism" tripartite architecture, this system, powered by ZTE’s iEPMS (Intelligent Engineering Project Management System), enables comprehensive management across the entire project lifecycle—spanning planning, cost control, quality assurance, risk mitigation, and resource allocation. Through digital, automated, and intelligent management approaches, the system significantly enhances project management efficiency and precision. On the intelligence front, ZTE is driving the deep integration of AI with project management. By deploying Optical Character Recognition (OCR), AI Agents, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for knowledge enhancement, ZTE has automated key workflows such as quality reviews, design generation, risk analysis, and reporting. These innovations have yielded outstanding operational benefits: the accuracy of AI-powered quality reviews has reached 98%, and the time required to generate project reports has plummeted from 180 minutes to just 5 minutes, significantly improving delivery efficiency and governance capabilities. ZTE’s digital delivery achievements are backed by its extensive global footprint and rich network service expertise. Globally, ZTE has delivered over 240,000 projects, deployed over 7 million base stations and over 240,000 kilometers of optical cables, while managing and maintaining over 510,000 kilometers of network cabling. By continuously automating processes and building an intelligent tool ecosystem, ZTE has achieved a 65% reduction in acceptance costs, an 85% drop in site re-entry rates, and a 2.5-fold improvement in network activation efficiency, creating tangible value for global customers. ZTE also showcased several global benchmark case studies at the conference. In Ecuador’s RAN network project, ZTE integrated its intelligent platform with over 50 Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to achieve a seamless, "zero-user-perception" migration during network handovers. Additionally, ZTE’s digital project management solutions have been widely deployed in Colombia across diverse projects, including lithium battery installations, solar energy, microwave, FTTH, and DWDM networks. Centered on the theme "Project Management Practice in a Disruptive Era: Integrating Technology, Innovation, and Sustainability", this landmark event gathered experts from over 50 countries. Across key thematic tracks including AI & innovation, project manager 5.0, and sustainability & purposeful management, attendees explored how disruptive technologies are reshaping human leadership and project frameworks in the digital era. Looking ahead, ZTE will continue to act as a "Driver of Digital Economy", deepening the integration of AI, big data, and project management to upgrade global delivery models. ZTE remains committed to collaborating with global ecosystem partners to advance both research and practical innovation, contributing to an open, intelligent, and sustainable global project management ecosystem. Contributed by ZTE.

Looks like the Trump administration has finally nabbed a high-profile criminal conviction. Sure, it’s a plea deal. And sure, it’s a Republican. And sure, it’s one of President Donald Trump’s own first-term Cabinet members. But hey, gotta take those vindictive prosecution wins where you can. Former national security adviser John Bolton is reportedly going to plead guilty to one count of…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | ’60 Minutes’ insiders call out CBS heads for destroying iconic show…

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ZTE has joined forces with China Mobile Jiangsu under the guidance of China Mobile's Network Division to pioneer the implementation of core network complaint agent capabilities, marking a significant step forward in accelerating intelligent network operations and maintenance (O&M) transformation. Both parties innovatively introduce the multi-modal signaling model and agent technology to reconstruct the complaint handling process, implement automatic signaling analysis, and efficiently locate customer complaints. This solution sets a new benchmark for digital and intelligent O&M in the industry. At present, the complexity of service signaling interaction in mobile communication networks increases dramatically. Manual analysis of original signaling to locate problems has a high technical threshold, which relies on expert experience. In 2024, the Network Division of China Mobile Communications Group proposed a planning framework for intelligent agent-based complaint handling, leveraging agent and large model architectures to intelligently process complaint work orders. China Mobile Jiangsu and ZTE innovatively launched the complaint agent solution, and implemented it in 2025, breaking through the bottleneck of the industry through three core technologies. Modal Signaling Large Model: Learn massive raw signaling rules to train a core network multi-modal signaling large model, achieving end-to-end automatic signaling parsing and anomaly detection. The system inherits signaling expert knowledge to significantly enhance signaling interpretation efficiency. In customer complaint scenarios, the complaint agent automatically orchestrates the analysis workflow by integrating the signaling analysis large model and core network configuration data. It enables precise localization of issues in complex scenarios such as international roaming. Knowledge-based Complaint Handling: Intelligently recommend complaint handling suggestions based on complaint localization results to assist operations personnel in making rapid decisions. It can drive the transformation of complaint handling from "experience-driven" to "knowledge-driven" and close the loop on complaint resolution tickets. In the future, China Mobile Jiangsu and ZTE will continue to focus on digital and intelligent transformation, driven by value-oriented scenarios, to extend coverage to all scenarios and processes of core network operations and maintenance. It will continuously produce core network operations and maintenance agents and large models tailored to diverse maintenance scenarios, forming an agent cluster to enhance analytical capabilities in complex scenarios and empower industrial digital transformation. Through in-depth integration of AI and communications technologies, ZTE has created a new O&M mode to improve user experience and satisfaction. Contributed by ZTE.

"The whole conversation shifted from tokenmaxxing and 'go fast' to 'we need guardrails, how do we control this?'"

The space agency says Roscosmos has discovered new leaks in the Russian service module that it is trying to repair.

The U.S. eavesdropping agency is reportedly preparing Anthropic's Mythos for use in cyberattacks, despite a federal ban on using the AI model maker.

Three-quarters of enterprise leaders say they're adopting agentic AI, but only a small minority have managed to move beyond pilots and into meaningful production deployments, according to Forrester. That won't stop vendors from slapping "agentic" onto every product brochure they can find, but the analyst's assessment is that most organizations remain stuck somewhere between experimentation and actual business value. Agentic AI has reached an important milestone in 2026, says Forrester: "long-horizon agents are no longer off on the horizon." In plain English, the bots are no longer clocking on for a five-minute task and calling it a day. Vendors have demonstrated agents capable of operating for days, weeks, or even months, with examples ranging from software development to research workflows. The trouble starts when those demos collide with the realities of enterprise. Forrester says companies are expanding their agentic ambitions while largely failing to scale them. Governance remains immature, platform strategies remain fuzzy, and many organizations are struggling to demonstrate a return on investment substantial enough to justify broader deployment. Forrester's argument is that companies aren't struggling because they have too many AI agents, but rather they're struggling because managing them gets messy fast. What works as a handful of experimental projects can become much harder to control once agents start operating across multiple systems and teams. Many organizations are building agents in isolation, the report says, without a clear way to track them, manage them, or coordinate how they work together. That may be fine for a pilot, but it becomes more of a problem when dozens of agents are making decisions, calling tools, and passing information around an enterprise environment. The report warns that, as projects grow, companies often end up with overlapping systems, duplicated work, and agents behaving in ways that become increasingly difficult to predict. Forrester is equally skeptical that governance policies alone will solve the problem. The firm notes that more than half of enterprises still experience what it calls "agentic sprawl" despite adopting governance frameworks and formal policies. Its conclusion is that writing rules down is one thing; enforcing them is another. Companies are increasingly finding that autonomous systems need automated guardrails that can track what agents are doing and restrict what they're allowed to do in real time. For now, the industry's biggest challenge may not be building AI agents. It's finding useful work for them that survives contact with the enterprise. Or, as Forrester puts it: "Until companies tie agent autonomy to measurable changes in how work gets done, agentic AI will remain stuck in proof-of-concept purgatory." ®

The new Scary Movie is now in theaters and, while some critics are not digging its crude humor, fans will surely love to see characters like Shorty, Ray, Brenda, and Cindy return. The franchise is now back in the hands of Shawn and Marlon Wayans, with the latter recently starring in the Jordan Peele-produced horror film HIM. Scary Movie takes aim at Peele’s infamous Get Out film; however, when Marlon Wayans asked the director to be in this satire film, he declined taking a role. 

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Wayans told The Hollywood Reporter that he doesn’t ask for permission from directors like Peele and Ryan Coogler to parody their films. He just does it and hopes that they like what they see. It remains to be seen if Peele will appreciate the references to Get Out in Scary Movie, but he was apparently cool with the parody but didn’t want to be a part of it. Of course, Wayans wasn’t offended, jokingly saying the decline was “not cool.” 

Paramount Pictures

It is not clear why Peele didn’t want to be in Scary Movie. Honestly, it’s more than likely because he is plenty busy as a director, writer, and running Monkeypaw Productions. He does have an untitled horror thriller in the works, after all. Maybe he doesn’t want to act at all at this point in time, even if it were just a cameo as himself. Who knows. Either way, Scary Movie is in theaters and poking a lot of fun at some pretty famous films, to varying degrees of success.

The post Jordan Peele Turned Down Role in SCARY MOVIE appeared first on Nerdist.

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 7:01 a.m.

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

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 7 a.m. on June 5

• 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.
   
• South Highway 1 at Park Avenue in Capitola is facing closures for roadway excavation. The closure is expected to end on Aug. 19.
   
• 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.
   
• A lane on Highway 17 at Beulah Park Drive/La Madrona Drive north of Santa Cruz is closed for utility work (potholing). The closure is expected to end on June 8.
   
• The California Highway Patrol helped Caltrans with maintenance work at 195 Capitola Rd. Extension in Live Oak today as part of the Safety Service Program.
   

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 Friday morning traffic: Highway 9, Highway 1, Highway 17 lane closures for roadwork appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

As we come to the midpoint of 2026, it’s a good time to round up a few of the year’s best books thus far. These are not what you would call feel-good hits of the summer, topic-wise, but they are all highly readable efforts at making sense of the world around us. Lichtblau’s book about the 2018 murder of Blaze Bernstein by a former high school classmate who targeted Bernstein because he…

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Microsoft now lets customers apply existing SQL Server licenses toward SQL Server usage on AWS's managed relational database service (RDS). The move promises to give customers who decided to go with AWS an easier path to consuming their SQL Server systems as a service, rather than in virtual machines. In a blog post, Amazon explained that customers paying with Microsoft’s Software Assurance licensing program could only previously bring their SQL Server licenses to AWS on self-managed Amazon EC2 through the Redmond vendor’s License Mobility program. “If you wanted a fully managed database like Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and you already had SQL Server licenses, you had to pay for licensing a second time through the License Included model,” RDS database engineer Srikanth Katakam said. Amazon's Bring Your Own Media (BYOM) for RDS for SQL Server lets customers use existing SQL Server Enterprise or Standard Edition licenses to cover both installation media and licensing on the managed service, with no additional fees. The process includes three steps, Amazon told The Register: customers submit a License Mobility Verification Form to Microsoft to confirm eligibility; they upload their SQL Server Release to Manufacturing media to Amazon S3; and in the Amazon RDS Console, users should select their SQL Server major version, point to the media file in S3, choose their minor version, and create the database. Customers can track their Microsoft SQL Server license usage with AWS License Manager. Microsoft has declined to comment on why it got involved in the deal. For Amazon, the self-interest is clear: it wants to get the data nearer to its AI tech. “Once that operational data is in the cloud, it sits alongside AWS AI and analytics services — so teams can build agentic AI applications that reason directly over their business data without complex data pipelines or infrastructure constraints,” AWS said in a statement. Microsoft has its own equivalent technology in Fabric, its data lake and analytics environment, which also offers a control console to manage databases. In the absence of any firm statement from Redmond, it seems reasonable to assume that SQL Server is no longer the strategic priority it once was for the Microsoft. It is inviting users to migrate to its database services, Azure SQL and SQL database in Fabric. Like AWS, users can also choose from a bunch of database services, including those running MySQL and PostgreSQL, which Microsoft has been increasingly vocal about SQL Server remains third in the DB-Engines ranking, although its popularity has been on the slide for more than five years, and it looks like it will be overtaken by PostgreSQL in the near future. However that may not be of great concern to Redmond’s accountants. As a database vendor, Microsoft is doing fine. As Adam Ronthal, vice president analyst at Gartner, pointed out: "Of the leading vendors in 2011 (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP), only Microsoft has grown their market share in the last 15 years.” ®