John Leguizamo’s performances have a particular electricity — the quick pivots, the moments of full-throated confession, the way a single face or gesture can flip a room from laughter to hush. That energy isn’t accidental. For a performer whose work ranges from one-man Broadway pieces to scene-stealing film turns, a day before taking the stage … Read more
Sean Penn — long a lightning rod in Hollywood for his volatile mix of bravado, activism and blockbuster-worthy performances — is staking a new claim: that the last decade and a half saw him coast, dodge accountability and make choices he now intends to correct. The declaration comes in a widely circulated interview episode this … Read more
Studios keep saying moviegoing is coming back. The data and the calendar suggest something messier: audiences are choosier, platforms fragment attention, and the cost of reaching people has climbed so high that even prestige filmmakers must treat theatrical releases like high-stakes experiments. Warner Bros.’ roll-out of One Battle After Another — Paul Thomas Anderson’s star-studded, … Read more
Beijing’s Ministry of State Security — long an opaque arm of China’s intelligence apparatus — has quietly remade itself into one of the world’s most capable and aggressive cyber-espionage actors. Over the past two decades a mix of patriotic hacking subcultures, military cyber units, public-private recruitment, centralization under Xi Jinping and a permissive industrial policy … Read more
President Donald Trump announced Saturday that he has ordered U.S. troops to Portland to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, saying he was “authorizing full force, if necessary” to stop what he described as attacks by “domestic terrorists.” The declaration — made on social media and in a flurry of White House statements — prompted … Read more
Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a stalwart defender of former President Donald Trump and a face of the MAGA movement, has in recent months taken a string of public positions that mark a sharp departure from the Republican mainstream and, at times, from Trump himself — signaling an emerging split inside the movement she helped popularize. … Read more
With Congress stalled and few concrete instructions coming from agency leadership, thousands of federal employees are quietly preparing for a worst-case scenario: a partial government shutdown that could begin as early as Oct. 1. The lack of clear, centralized guidance is leaving workers to make personal financial and logistical plans with scant information about who … Read more
Mountain View / Washington — Google reacted with alarm and swift internal moves after the Trump administration announced a sweeping change to the H-1B visa program this month — a new $100,000 annual fee and a tighter selection process for new hires — even as company leaders sought to reassure employees that existing staff would … Read more
San Francisco — Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI filed a lawsuit this week in a California federal court accusing OpenAI of orchestrating a campaign to poach employees and steal trade secrets — including source code for xAI’s chatbot Grok and sensitive information about data-center operations — to gain a competitive edge in the fast-moving AI … Read more
Beijing / Los Angeles — A wave of online anger has hit a Chinese distributor after viewers spotted that a same-sex couple in the new body-horror film Together was digitally altered to appear heterosexual for showings in mainland China. Audiences and critics say the change — reportedly made with AI face-replacement tools — erased an … Read more