In this Apple TV+series he co-createdwhich also features Catherine OHara, Bryan Cranston and a host of celebrity cameosthe actor stars as the head of a legendary Hollywood studio.

The new album from Dan Bejars long-running indie-rock project offers wryly observed lyrics set to clever, subversive arrangements.

Under siege RFK Jr. claws back $11.4B in CDC funding amid wave of top-level departures The funding went to state health departments for COVID-19 responses. Beth Mole Mar 25, 2025 5:55 pm | 6 Credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images Credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreMore heavy blows are landing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to reports Tuesday that reveal a wave of high-level departures from the country's beleaguered health agency. The agency is also losing $11.4 billion in funding for responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was largely doled out to chronically underfunded state health departments.This afternoon, the Associated Press reported that five high-level leaders are departing the agency, which was announced today during a senior staff meeting. The departures, which were described as retirements, follow three other high-level departures in recent weeks. Given that the CDC has two dozen centers and offices, the recent departures reflect a loss of about a third of the agency's top management.The departures announced today include: Leslie Ann Dauphin, who oversees the Public Health Infrastructure Center, "which serves as the connection point between the agency and state, local, and territorial jurisdictions, tribes. and CDC's public health partners," according to the CDC. Karen Remley, who heads the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, is also departing, as is Sam Posner, who heads the Office of Science, which provides scientific expertise across the agency and publishes the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Debra Lubar, who is the CDC's Chief Operating Officer and runs the Office of Policy, Performance and Evaluation, and Leandris Liburd, head of the Office of Health Equity, are also leaving.Those departures follow Kevin Griffis, head of the CDCs office of communications, who left last week; Robin Bailey, the agencys chief operating officer, left late last month; and Nirav Shah, a former CDC principal deputy director.Pulled fundingMeanwhile, NBC News reported this afternoon that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is pulling back $11.4 billion in funding from the agency, which it allocated to state and local health departments as well as partners.NBC reported that the funds were largely used for COVID-19 testing and vaccination, and to support community health workers and initiatives that address pandemic health disparities among high-risk and underserved populations, such as rural communities and minority populations. The funds also supported global COVID-19 projects."The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago," HHS Director of Communications Andrew Nixon said in a statement. "HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trumps mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again."State health departments told NBC News that they're still evaluating the impact of the withdrawn funding. On Monday, some grantees received notices that read: "Now that the pandemic is over, the grants and cooperative agreements are no longer necessary as their limited purpose has run out."Since the public health emergency for COVID-19 was declared over in the US on May 11, 2023, over 92,000 Americans died from the pandemic virus, according to CDC data. In total, the pandemic killed over 1.2 million in the US.Beth MoleSenior Health ReporterBeth MoleSenior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technicas Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 6 Comments

The Great Flood Devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries AI bots hungry for data are taking down sites by accident, but humans are fighting back. Benj Edwards Mar 25, 2025 5:36 pm | 9 Credit: Henrik Sorensen via Getty Images Credit: Henrik Sorensen via Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreSoftware developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measuresadjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious trafficIaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project's sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso's "Anubis" system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE's GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat.While Anubis has proven effective at filtering out bot traffic, it comes with drawbacks for legitimate users. When many people access the same link simultaneouslysuch as when a GitLab link is shared in a chat roomsite visitors can face significant delays. Some mobile users have reported waiting up to two minutes for the proof-of-work challenge to complete, according to the news outlet.The situation isn't exactly new. In December, Dennis Schubert, who maintains infrastructure for the Diaspora social network, described the situation as "literally a DDoS on the entire internet" after discovering that AI companies accounted for 70 percent of all web requests to their services.The costs are both technical and financial. The Read the Docs project reported that blocking AI crawlers immediately decreased their traffic by 75 percent, going from 800GB per day to 200GB per day. This change saved the project approximately $1,500 per month in bandwidth costs, according to their blog post "AI crawlers need to be more respectful."A disproportionate burden on open sourceThe situation has created a tough challenge for open source projects, which rely on public collaboration and typically operate with limited resources compared to commercial entities. Many maintainers have reported that AI crawlers deliberately circumvent standard blocking measures, ignoring robots.txt directives, spoofing user agents, and rotating IP addresses to avoid detection.As LibreNews reported, Martin Owens from the Inkscape project noted on Mastodon that their problems weren't just from "the usual Chinese DDoS from last year, but from a pile of companies that started ignoring our spider conf and started spoofing their browser info." Owens added, "I now have a prodigious block list. If you happen to work for a big company doing AI, you may not get our website anymore."On Hacker News, commenters in threads about the LibreNews post last week and a post on Iaso's battles in January expressed deep frustration with what they view as AI companies' predatory behavior toward open source infrastructure. While these comments come from forum posts rather than official statements, they represent a common sentiment among developers.As one Hacker News user put it, AI firms are operating from a position that "goodwill is irrelevant" with their "$100bn pile of capital." The discussions depict a battle between smaller AI startups that have worked collaboratively with affected projects and larger corporations that have been unresponsive despite allegedly forcing thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs on open source project maintainers.Beyond consuming bandwidth, the crawlers often hit expensive endpoints, like git blame and log pages, placing additional strain on already limited resources. Drew DeVault, founder of SourceHut, reported on his blog that the crawlers access "every page of every git log, and every commit in your repository," making the attacks particularly burdensome for code repositories.The problem extends beyond infrastructure strain. As LibreNews points out, some open source projects began receiving AI-generated bug reports as early as December 2023, first reported by Daniel Stenberg of the Curl project on his blog in a post from January 2024. These reports appear legitimate at first glance but contain fabricated vulnerabilities, wasting valuable developer time.Who is responsible, and why are they doing this?AI companies have a history of taking without asking. Before the mainstream breakout of AI image generators and ChatGPT attracted attention to the practice in 2022, the machine learning field regularly compiled datasets with little regard to ownership.While many AI companies engage in web crawling, the sources suggest varying levels of responsibility and impact. Dennis Schubert's analysis of Diaspora's traffic logs showed that approximately one-fourth of its web traffic came from bots with an OpenAI user agent, while Amazon accounted for 15 percent and Anthropic for 4.3 percent.The crawlers' behavior suggests different possible motivations. Some may be collecting training data to build or refine large language models, while others could be executing real-time searches when users ask AI assistants for information.The frequency of these crawls is particularly telling. Schubert observed that AI crawlers "don't just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not." This pattern suggests ongoing data collection rather than one-time training exercises, potentially indicating that companies are using these crawls to keep their models' knowledge current.Some companies appear more aggressive than others. KDE's sysadmin team reported that crawlers from Alibaba IP ranges were responsible for temporarily knocking their GitLab offline. Meanwhile, Iaso's troubles came from Amazon's crawler. A member of KDE's sysadmin team told LibreNews that Western LLM operators like OpenAI and Anthropic were at least setting proper user agent strings (which theoretically allows websites to block them), while some Chinese AI companies were reportedly more deceptive in their approaches.It remains unclear why these companies don't adopt more collaborative approaches and, at a minimum, rate-limit their data harvesting runs so they don't overwhelm source websites. Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but we will update this piece if they reply.Tarpits and labyrinths: The growing resistanceIn response to these attacks, new defensive tools have emerged to protect websites from unwanted AI crawlers. As Ars reported in January, an anonymous creator identified only as "Aaron" designed a tool called "Nepenthes" to trap crawlers in endless mazes of fake content. Aaron explicitly describes it as "aggressive malware" intended to waste AI companies' resources and potentially poison their training data."Any time one of these crawlers pulls from my tarpit, it's resources they've consumed and will have to pay hard cash for," Aaron explained to Ars. "It effectively raises their costs. And seeing how none of them have turned a profit yet, that's a big problem for them."On Friday, Cloudflare announced "AI Labyrinth," a similar but more commercially polished approach. Unlike Nepenthes, which is designed as an offensive weapon against AI companies, Cloudflare positions its tool as a legitimate security feature to protect website owners from unauthorized scraping, as we reported at the time."When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them," Cloudflare explained in its announcement. The company reported that AI crawlers generate over 50 billion requests to their network daily, accounting for nearly 1 percent of all web traffic they process.The community is also developing collaborative tools to help protect against these crawlers. The "ai.robots.txt" project offers an open list of web crawlers associated with AI companies and provides premade robots.txt files that implement the Robots Exclusion Protocol, as well as .htaccess files that return error pages when detecting AI crawler requests.As it currently stands, both the rapid growth of AI-generated content overwhelming online spaces and aggressive web-crawling practices by AI firms threaten the sustainability of essential online resources. The current approach taken by some large AI companiesextracting vast amounts of data from open-source projects without clear consent or compensationrisks severely damaging the very digital ecosystem on which these AI models depend.Responsible data collection may be achievable if AI firms collaborate directly with the affected communities. However, prominent industry players have shown little incentive to adopt more cooperative practices. Without meaningful regulation or self-restraint by AI firms, the arms race between data-hungry bots and those attempting to defend open source infrastructure seems likely to escalate further, potentially deepening the crisis for the digital ecosystem that underpins the modern Internet.Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 9 Comments

The ARC-AGI-2 benchmark is designed to be a difficult test for AI modelsJust_Super/Getty ImagesThe most sophisticated AI models in existence today have scored poorly on a new benchmark designed to measure their progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) and brute-force computing power wont be enough to improve, as evaluators are now taking into account the cost of running the model.There are many competing definitions of AGI, but it is generally taken to refer to an AI that can perform any cognitive task that humans can do. To measure this, the ARC Prize Foundation previously launched a test of reasoning abilities called ARC-AGI-1. Last December, OpenAI announced that its o3 model had scored highly on the test, leading some to ask if the company was close to achieving AGI. AdvertisementBut now a new test, ARC-AGI-2, has raised the bar. It is difficult enough that no current AI system on the market can achieve more than a single-digit score out of 100 on the test, while every question has been solved by at least two humans in fewer than two attempts.In a blog post announcing ARC-AGI-2, ARC president Greg Kamradt said the new benchmark was required to test different skills from the previous iteration. To beat it, you must demonstrate both a high level of adaptability and high efficiency, he wrote.The ARC-AGI-2 benchmark differs from other AI benchmark tests in that it focuses on AI models abilities to complete simplistic tasks such as replicating changes in a new image based on past examples of symbolic interpretation rather than their ability to match world-leading PhD performances. Current models are good at deep learning, which ARC-AGI-1 measured, but are not as good at the seemingly simpler tasks, which require more challenging thinking and interaction, in ARC-AGI-2. OpenAIs o3-low model, for instance, scores 75.7 per cent on ARC-AGI-1, but just 4 per cent on ARC-AGI-2.The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterThe benchmark also adds a new dimension to measuring an AIs capabilities, by looking at its efficiency in problem-solving, as measured by the cost required to complete a task. For example, while ARC paid its human testers $17 per task, it estimates that o3-low costs OpenAI $200 in fees for the same work.I think the new iteration of ARC-AGI now focusing on balancing performance with efficiency is a big step towards a more realistic evaluation of AI models, says Joseph Imperial at the University of Bath, UK. This is a sign that were moving from one-dimensional evaluation tests solely focusing on performance but also considering less compute power.Any model that is able to pass ARC-AGI-2 would need to not just be highly competent, but also smaller and lightweight, says Imperial with the efficiency of the model being a key component of the new benchmark. This could help address concerns that AI models are becoming more energy-intensive sometimes to the point of wastefulness to achieve ever-greater results.However, not everyone is convinced that the new measure is beneficial. The whole framing of this as it testing intelligence is not the right framing, says Catherine Flick at the University of Staffordshire, UK. Instead, she says these benchmarks merely assess an AIs ability to complete a single task or set of tasks well, which is then extrapolated to mean general capabilities across a series of tasks.Performing well on these benchmarks should not be seen as a major moment towards AGI, says Flick: You see the media pick up that these models are passing these human-level intelligence tests, where actually theyre not; what they are doing is really just responding to a particular prompt accurately.And exactly what happens if or when ARC-AGI-2 is passed is another question will we need yet another benchmark? If they were to develop ARC-AGI-3, Im guessing they would add another axis in the graph denoting [the] minimum number of humans whether expert or not it would take to solve the tasks, in addition to performance and efficiency, says Imperial. In other words, the debate over AGI is unlikely to be settled soon.Topics:ChatGPT

Two-thirds of the products that received consumer safety warnings in 2024 came to the US from Chinese companies, according to the Public Interest Research Group. Associated Press 2025-03-25T22:03:49Z SaveSaved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.Have an account? US consumer safety watchdogs are issuing a rapidly growing number of product warnings.Warnings are issued when companies don't voluntarily comply with recalls for products deemed hazardous.A US official told the Public Interest Research Group the surge boils down to one word: China.The explosion of international e-commerce brands is leading to a sharp rise in product safety warnings.Warnings issued by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission reached a record high of 63 last year, according to a new analysis from the Public Interest Research Group Education Fund.The US Consumer Product Safety Commission issues warnings when companies don't voluntarily comply with recalls for hazardous it deems hazardous.Last year's figure is up dramatically from 38 in 2023 and 12 in 2022, according to the PIRG analysis. There were fewer than 10 warnings combined from 2015 to 2021, it added.So, what's contributing to the rise?"In a word, China," acting CPSC's chairman, Peter Feldman, told PIRG.Two-thirds of the products that received warnings in 2024 came to the US from Chinese companies, the PIRG report found."The United States is facing a flood of Chinese consumer products that violate US safety laws," Feldman said. "When CPSC identifies illegal Chinese goods, the manufacturer is, more often than not, unreachable, unfindable, or uncooperative."In other words, a warning is an indication that safety officials are not able to make progress with a company concerning a recall.Some of the hazardous products included a foldable step stool that could collapse or tip over, a line of e-bike batteries prone to overheating or catching fire, infant loungers that posed a risk of suffocation or entrapment, and bike helmets that didn't meet US safety standards.Many of the products that received warnings were sold by third parties on Amazon's and Walmart's marketplaces. In at least one instance each, both retailers agreed to contact customers about affected products.An Amazon spokesperson told BI that all products offered on its site are required to comply with applicable laws and regulations. The company also notifies customers of product updates through a dedicated page in page in their Amazon accounts called "Your Recalls and Product Safety Alerts."The PIRG analysis also found two items with warnings that were sold on Shein's website.Among the recalled products, the report found that those sold exclusively online were twice as likely to violate a US safety standard than those sold in physical stores.Interestingly, while eight products were recalled that were exclusively sold on Temu, the PIRG report also noted that no Temu items received warnings last year because all companies involved cooperated with the recall procedure.

Ben Affleck at the world premiere of "The Accountant 2" at SXSW. Marcus Ingram / Getty Images 2025-03-25T22:00:07Z SaveSaved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.Have an account? Ben Affleck told GQ that he made his Hollywood career a 9-to-5 job to spend more time with his children."I was really missing time I could never get back," he said.Affleck shares three children with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner.Ben Affleck said he adapted his filmmaking career into a 9-to-5 job so that he could spend more time with his three teenage children.In a new GQ interview, Affleck said he realized that being present as a parent was important to him, so he wanted to avoid spending multiple days on sets away from his children."I was really missing time I could never get back. My kids were 8, 11, and 14, and I felt like: I don't want to miss any of this time at all," Affleck said. "And so I thought, well, Let me figure out a way to work at home and have the kind of job where I can actually be here and build my schedule around that."Affleck co-parents three children with his ex-wife, Jennifer Garner: Violet Anne Affleck, 19, Seraphina Rose Elizabeth Affleck, 16, and Samuel Affleck, 13.Affleck told GQ he developed a better work-life balance while working at Artists Equity, a production company he co-founded with his longtime friend and collaborator Matt Damon and investing partner Gerry Cardinale. Since the company's founding in 2022, they have produced the critically acclaimed sports movie "Air" and the upcoming action sequel, "The Accountant 2," among others."Part of what's great about this Artists Equity job, part of why I love it, is because I'm in LA," Affleck said. "When we're done at 2:30, I'm going to go, and I'll be home at 3:45 when my kids get off the bus. And I'm able to construct a life that does that. And that means more to me than any of it. That makes me happier." Matt Damon and Ben Affleck at SXSW festival to promote Artists Equity's latest film, "The Accountant 2." Michael Buckner/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images Affleck also told GQ that he now avoids directing more films because they can be time-consuming."The one regret I have about all the movies that I've directed is the amount of time it's taken me away from my kids," he said. "I love making art. I loved making 'The Town.' But I was away from my kids for long periods of time. There's little chunks that I missed, and that doesn't feel good."Other celebrities, such as Kieran Culkin and Eva Mendes, have also opened up about how they balance their careers with raising children.Mendes told the "Today" show in 2024 that she took a hiatus from acting to pursue other projects, like writing a children's book and raising her two children with Ryan Gosling."I still work. I just didn't act because acting takes you on locations. It takes you away," Mendes said.Meanwhile, Culkin, who won his first Oscar earlier this month, told the Guardian in 2024 that he has a rule to not spend more than 8 days on set away from his children.

The biggest story in America is, and should remain, the Trump administrations accidental inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal group chat about planning airstrikes in Yemen.This is not only colossally incompetent, but a scandal of the first proportion: Top officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, discussing the most sensitive information on a commercially available app that is both easy for foreign adversaries to penetrate and seemingly designed to circumvent the public records laws that allow for scrutiny of their policy communications.But this is more than just incompetent and scandalous: its revelatory. The chat logs give us an unusually unvarnished look into key players worldview, the kind of thing historians usually have to wait decades to access. And what was said points to the incoherence of the Trump foreign policy project: a worldview that cannot decide on what it means to put America first. The Trump team, taking its cue from the president, is trying to pursue two contradictory visions at the same time to maintain Americas status as the worlds leading power while also trying to scale down its international commitments. They want to simultaneously dominate the world and withdraw from it.These contradicting views of what America First means America as first among nations, or America scaling back to put its internal affairs first were visible even before the new administration took office. The text logs confirm, in dramatic fashion, that the contradictions are shaping policy, producing an internal debate over war and peace that proceeds on bizarre and incoherent terms.All of this suggests there is no coherent Trump foreign policy doctrine. And there likely never will be.The ideological incoherence exposed by the chat logsWaltz created the Signal group to discuss implementing the presidents directive to take a harder line on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militant group in Yemen. Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, the Houthis have been firing missiles at ships near Yemen in order to attack international shipping. Specifically, they have targeted a commercially vital route that runs through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait off Yemens coast to the Suez Canal and then, from there, into the Mediterranean and Europe.At its peak, the Houthi campaign was doing meaningful damage to the global economy. But the pace of attacks had slowed dramatically over the past year thanks to a combination of the shipping industry changing routes, a multilateral military campaign weakening Houthi capabilities, and the Houthis declaring a pause during the Gaza ceasefire. The Houthis, in short, simply arent the threat to global commerce they used to be.So why bomb them at all?This was the subject of the most substantive exchange Goldberg revealed, one initiated by Vice President JD Vance. The administration, Vance suggested, was making a mistake by launching the airstrikes at this moment. In his view, the Houthis are not really an American problem.3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesnt understand this or why its necessary, he writes. I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. Theres a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices.Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, agrees with Vance on Europe: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. Its pathetic. However, he argued, restoring Freedom of Navigation is a core national interest and only the United States had the military capabilities to do meaningful damage to the Houthis.These short comments reveal two very distinct underlying assumptions about the world.Vance seems to think the United States should narrowly focus only on things that immediately affect it, and do virtually nothing that benefits other nations more even if theyre American allies. Hegseth, by contrast, believes that the United States has truly global interests that America benefits from maintaining freedom of navigation, and thus it can and should fight to keep global trade flows unobstructed.There is, in theory, nothing wrong with members of the White House team disagreeing ideologically. In fact, it can be healthy.But when these disagreements are this irreconcilable, the president needs to step in and make a decision as to which one will define policy going forward. And this president cant.For nearly a decade now, Trump himself has long advanced both a transactional view of American foreign policy the Vance whats in it for me? approach to world affairs while insisting that America remain the dominant global power, one whose might sets the term for world affairs. The fact that these approaches counsel fundamentally different approaches on different issues like Yemen never appears to cross his mind.You can see this on display in the chat logs when Stephen Miller, one of Trumps most trusted advisers, intervenes in the Vance-Hegseth debate.As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement, Miller writes. If Europe doesnt remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.Miller, seemingly speaking on behalf of the president, is trying to have it both ways. Yes, the United States should be policing the worlds shipping lanes, but it also should be providing an itemized bill to countries that benefit and figuring out how to extract payments if they wont cough up.Yet the entire argument for why the United States should be protecting global shipping is that its a genuinely global concern. When the Houthi attacks were at their peak last year, the disruption to the shipping industry affected prices and supply chains everywhere. Thats how things work in a global economy.You can argue, coherently, that these disruptions are not significant enough to warrant the use of deadly force. Thats a reasonable position, if one I might not necessarily agree with.But what you cant argue is that the shipping disruption is a problem worth killing for and that America should be charging the Europeans for it as if theyre the only people that benefit. The Miller-Trump position isnt just mafia-esque: its incoherent.Its an incoherence born out of a deep refusal by everyone involved to recognize that Trumps belief in America being great and awesome is at odds with his belief that being deeply involved in foreign affairs is a mugs game that allows our allies to take advantage of us.Once you start to see this contradiction, its visible across Trumps foreign policy. Its part of why, for example, his rationales for imposing tariffs on Canada are constantly shifting and mutually contradictory. And its why there never will be a coherent Trump doctrine: because the man who would create one has no interest in doing even a cursory examination of the tensions in his own ideas.See More:

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Its been three years since the release of S.S. Rajamoulis RRR, the Telugu-language epic historical fantasy starring Jr. NTR and Ram Charan that swept the globe. Based on an idea from Rajamoulis father, the film was a bonkers re-imagining of Indian revolutionaries Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju taking on English colonizers led by Governor Scott Buxton (played brilliantly by the late Ray Stevenson). The three hour-plus cinematic event was an exciting blend of genres: action-adventure, old Hollywood musical, romantic comedy, buddy comedy, animal rampage, and fantasy. Thankfully there was an intermission to recover from its rollercoaster first half and to help you brace yourself for the second half of non-stop action. It was a wild ride so audacious it worked, opening with the kidnapping of a young girl from a village to be an ornament in the colonizers estate. Unlucky for the rich governor, the villages warrior Bheem (Jr. NTR) is a one-man search and rescue team whose particular set of skills include being a wild animal whisperer. The build-up to seeing these skills in action is framed as more of an infiltration to get in close with the enemy and their guards; it also involves Bheem finding himself in a meet-cute with a nice English lady. Superstardom is still huge in India and Jr. NTR is one of its biggest talents, as is his co-star Ram Charan. RRR crossed over two major movie star fandoms in roles that gave each actor equal amounts of epic screen time; we could talk about so many standout scenes among the ones they shared. My personal favorite is the Naatu Naatu musical number which is like Bridgertons Diamond Ball on steroids, though not exactly genre despite the dancing being almost superhuman. But the moment that changes everything in the film as far as genre-hopping goes is when Bheem attempts to rescue the girl in the most unbelievable way ever committed to the screen. Its something thats teased in the trailer, which depicts the moment Bheem is running through the jungle and squares off with a tigerits what got me to want to see the movie off a recommendation from my childhood film bestie. The pay-off from that moment in the first act, to the reason why it happens, is incredible.Heres the opening to that moment which I hope will get you to watch RRR on Netflix (watch the Telegu version with English subtitles): Yes, in order to save the little girl he rolls up with a damn zoo army to take on the guards and cause a big enough distraction. You cant look away and at that point are so invested you cant help but root for Bheem, who then gets a huge shock about just who they have ready for him to face off against. Spoiler alert: its his new best friend Ram, who is revealed to have been an Imperial Officer all along. Its heartbreaking and badass at the same time as they fight so hard you cant pick whose side to be on. It makes Captain America: Civil War look like paint drying. But its the moment the animals escape the truck and start ripping into the rich where even CG animals look good and work better here than in Mufasa. RRR serves as a reminder that while Western cinema often plays it too safe, film is thriving worldwide with creators like Rajamouli who advance the art. It may have released three years, and talk of a sequel is still just making rounds in the rumor mill, but there has yet to be anything like it. In a summer where we have a Jurassic World film opening, its a shame its not being headlined by the likes of Jr. NTR or Ram Charan, who wed like to see command dinos toobut they are too famous worldwide to be locked down by Hollywood as mere side players. And you know what? Good for them. Maybe at least someday well get Rajamouli to do a Star Wars project, but only if Lucasfilm lets him do his signature genre-mashing blockbuster spectacle. One can only dream. Until then, well just pop on RRR to see real cinema still lives, at least in Tollywood. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.