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It was a bad, bad week for immigrants at the nation’s highest court, a naked display of power and xenophobia where the Supreme Court conservatives started with their—well, President Donald Trump’s—desired result and worked backward. In a brutal series of 6-3 decisions, the conservatives upended settled law in favor of making Trump’s brutal anti-immigrant crackdown the law of the land.

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Yes, there is plenty that Democrats can smash We need Democrats who are willing to dismantle systems that concentrate wealth and power. Trump’s pathetic rally shows just how washed he is Trump held what he expected to be a big rally last night. You probably missed it.

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Trump deflects from Reflecting Pool failure by arresting ‘vandals’…

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⚡ Quick Take

• Texas Chain Saw Massacre is returning to theaters this August in 4K quality.
• The original film was released over 50 years ago, but its fanbase is still alive and well.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the great classics in horror movies, without a doubt. One of the first major slashers of the seventies, even 50 years later, this movie is still terribly disturbing. Now, it is returning to theaters for one night only on August 18.

Bryanston Distributing Company

After last year’s Texas Chain Saw Day, the hosts of the event, Dark Sky Films and Fathom Entertainment, have decided to make the event annual.

Five friends head out to rural Texas to visit the grave of a grandfather. On the way they stumble across what appears to be a deserted house, only to discover something sinister within. Something armed with a chainsaw.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre took heavy inspiration from the story of Ed Gein, a real-life murderer and body snatcher. Gein’s odd family dynamic was very significant to why he turned out the way he did. These themes come through in Texas Chain Saw Massacre, with its main antagonist, Leatherface, living in a house with his cannibal family and taking part in chaotic and terrifying dinner rituals. The gross connections between the two stories continue—Gein used tanned human skin in crafty ways, and Leatherface wears a tanned human face. The house shown in the dinner scene also contains furniture made out of human skin and other parts.

Ed Gein inspired other fictional killers. The Silence of the Lambs‘ Buffalo Bill and Psycho‘s Norman Bates both utilized aspects of Ed Gein’s real story.

In 2022, Netflix produced a remake of TCSM. I am of the personal belief that if it ain’t broke, there’s no reason to fix it. Nonetheless, A24 is also working on a “reimagining” of the franchise, with a movie and television series in the works. Obsession writer-director Curry Barker is attached to the movie.

Fortunately, though, the screening on Texas Chain Saw Day is of the original film. Tickets for the event will be available on July 21, so be sure to check your local theaters for a place to participate.

The post See a Classic Slasher in Theaters on TEXAS CHAIN SAW Day appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• Genndy Tartakovsky will bring a Conan the Barbarian animated series to our screens.
• Tartakovsky is partnering with Prime Video and Cartoon Network Studios.
• Primal and Samurai Jack were heavily influenced by Conan the Barbarian.

Are you ready to return to the Hyborian Age? In one of the most “DUH, of course” announcements in recent memory, The Wrap is reporting the animation legend Genndy Tartakovsky, together with Cartoon Network Studios, is bringing a new Conan the Barbarian series to Prime Video. The announcement happened via video message at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. The creator behind highly stylized action cartoons like Primal, Samurai Jack, and the original Clone Wars, once pitched a Conan series in 2008. But nearly twenty years later, Tartakovsky will finally bring the Cimmerian warrior to animation.

Cartoon Network Studios/Prime Video

Robert E. Howard’s sword and sorcery hero has been the subject of countless adaptations. We’re talking novels, comic books, and even an iconic movie or two, for nearly a century. But it’s been some time since he’s led a high-profile project such as this. According to the official synopsis, “After finding love in the pirate queen, Bêlit, a battle-hardened Conan defies gods, fate, and even death to save her from a dark sorcery that threatens to destroy everything.” The death of Conan’s love, Bêlit was a defining story in Marvel’s seminal Conan the Barbarian run of the 1970s.

It will be some time before we see this new Conan show hit Prime Video, however. Animation takes time. And Tartakovsky said that maybe next year he’d be able to share some animatics at the festival. And maybe the year after that, some rough animation. He may have been overdoing it for comedic effect, but we doubt we’ll see the first episode of Conan the Barbarian before 2028 at this point. But we’re quite certain, given Genndy Tartakovsky’s track record, it will rule. His series Primal was very Conan-coded. So it’s amazing that he gets to do the character who inspired so much of his aesthetic. We have a strong feeling this one will be worth wait.

The post Genndy Tartakovsky Creating CONAN THE BARBARIAN Cartoon appeared first on Nerdist.

Trump was riding high in May after a handful of Republicans he endorsed beat GOP lawmakers whom he deemed to be insufficiently loyal—a sign of the perils of refusing to follow his orders. But in recent weeks, three candidates Trump backed in primaries have lost. And new polls released this week show two other Trump endorsees at risk of meeting that same fate. It’s a tangible sign that…

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A new self-destructing backdoor called Mistic used in intrusions since April appears to be linked to a criminal gang that compromises corporate networks and then sells that access to ransomware groups, according to security researchers. This backdoor, also tracked as MLTBackdoor, was first documented by Zscaler earlier this month, with the security shop suggesting the novel malware is “likely used in ransomware attacks to establish a foothold for lateral movement.” In a Wednesday threat brief, Symantec and Carbon Black threat hunters say the backdoor has been used to access multiple organizations' networks over the past few months, including those in insurance, education, IT, and professional services. Additionally, the security sleuths reported, “Mistic may be linked to the financially motivated initial access broker (IAB) tracked publicly as KongTuke (which we track as Woodgnat) and it was used in one intrusion that also involved the group's ModeloRAT remote access trojan.” KongTuke and other IABs don’t deliver the final payload – such as ransomware – to compromised companies. Rather, they break into company systems, and then sell that foothold to other criminals, like ransomware gangs. Symantec and Carbon Black arrived at their low-confidence attribution after at least one case where Mistic was deployed in close proximity to ModeloRAT, the Python-based remote access trojan KongTuke also developed. KongTuke has previously been linked to attacks from various ransomware crews including Qilin, Interlock, Rhysida, Akira, 8Base, and Black Basta. “Our Threat Hunter Team has separately observed ModeloRAT used in attacks that deployed Qilin ransomware, linking this tool to ransomware deployment,” Symantec and Carbon Black noted. Plus, Zscaler reported Mistic being delivered in a multi-stage ClickFix infection chain, which is another pointer to KongTuke, as the group is known to use that initial access technique. In one case that Symantec and Carbon Black responded to, Mistic was side-loaded through a legitimate file, MpExtMs.exe, and then loaded from a DLL named EndpointDlp.dll, which likely helped the backdoor blend in with legitimate software. Mistic has all the usual backdoor functionality: It can upload, download, move, rename, and delete files. It can also create new folders, and check for additional commands from the attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server. But here’s the stealthy part: it can run remote payloads from C2 directly in memory – so it doesn’t write malicious files to the hard drive – which helps it dodge file-based detection in antivirus and endpoint detection products. When the mission is accomplished, it then terminates and deletes itself. “The fact that Mistic executes in memory and also has a kill switch built in means that it is very stealthy, potentially allowing for long-term, stealthy access for attackers,” the threat hunters wrote. ®

YouTube Shorts is getting a makeover.

ph @rossa_di_sera_caffe

A federal judge on Thursday halted President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, sided with a coalition of nearly two dozen states that challenged the Republican president’s order in granting a summary judgment.

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Earlier this week, the Senate and then the House passed the biggest housing bill in decades by veto-proof margins, and it was set to be signed by President Trump on Wednesday before he abruptly cancelled the ceremony and demanded Congress first pass his voter-suppressing SAVE America Act. But where, literally, is the bill right now? There seems to be some confusion about that—and it has major implications for the bill’s fate.

Michigan Congresswoman Lisa McClain, who chairs the House Republican Conference, said Thursday the bill was on Trump’s desk. If so, that means he has 10 days to sign or uselessly veto it, and if he does neither it could either automatically become law or die by the “pocket veto,” depending on whether Congress is in session on day 10. (I know, it’s confusing.)

“It’s been sent to the president’s desk, [and] it’ll pass in ten days if he doesn’t sign it, is that your understanding?” Leah Vredenbregt of Gray Media asked McClain.

“Yep,” she replied.

But multiple outlets report that the House has not, in fact, sent the bill to Trump.

“House GOP leaders *still* have not sent the housing bill to the White House, I’m told—so the 10-day clock still has not started,” Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller wrote Thursday morning. “Trump and [House Speaker Mike] Johnson are expected to discuss when to send the bill—and start the clock—at their meeting this afternoon, I’m told.”

The same remained true hours later.

“This is not correct,” Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman wrote in reference to McClain’s comments. “The House Republican leadership has not sent the president this bill yet. It is not ‘on his desk.’”

This confusion is as strange as it sounds. Why would McClain claim that it’s on the president’s desk if it isn’t? And if it’s not on his desk, which means the ten-day countdown has not begun, then when is Johnson planning to send it to him? Is he waiting to do so until he knows Congress will be in session on that tenth day, rather than on July 4th recess?

Someone must have the answers, but McClain certainly does not.

A sealed scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius' eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, has finally given up its secrets, thanks to a combination of machine learning and high-resolution CT scans. In 2023, researchers managed to decipher a few words from among the char and ash that make up the bulk of the scrolls. Some of those same prize-winning researchers recovered more passages from one of the scrolls, PHerc.Paris.4, netting them the $700,000 grand prize from the Vesuvius Challenge contest in early 2024. Fast forward two more years, and those grand prize winners are now part of the Vesuvius Challenge team that managed to read the surviving portion of a rolled scroll end-to-end, as the VC team shared in a Thursday announcement and detailed in an accompanying paper [PDF]. According to the research paper, the ability to make out the entirety of the scroll was thanks to high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France - an improved imaging technique over prior methods used to capture prior images that were analyzed in the prize competition. That wasn’t all, though: They say that much of their work succeeded because of a new "workflow" they developed to scan scrolls, detect ink on charred papyrus, virtually "unroll" the scrolls by modeling their deformed surfaces, and preserve those surfaces digitally, allowing machine learning models to identify letters across an entire scroll rather than just isolated patches. "The key transition marked by the present work is therefore from exceptional local recovery to systematic scroll-scale recovery," the team wrote. In other words, provided they can account for the particularities of the hundreds of sealed scrolls recovered from Herculaneum's Villa of the Papyri, the world's only surviving intact library from antiquity, this could mark the beginning of an explosion in new material for historians. So, what did it say? PHerc.Paris.4 wasn’t at the center of this breakthrough either, though they did have some exciting news to share on that front that we’ll get to. Instead, the breakthrough centered on PHerc. 1667, a previously unread rolled scroll whose preserved text was read continuously from end to end for the first time. The work appears to be a treatise on Stoic philosophy focused on ethics - a favorite subject of Zeno, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and their intellectual fellows. “Having certainly strained ourselves to the utmost through research and learning, we will no longer be inferior to them in any respect,” a passage from the latter part of the scroll reads, “accomplishing in like manner the things that befit them and possessing the same practical wisdom as they.” Quite a fitting bit of ancient wisdom to be the first to see the light of the modern world. While the team digitally unrolled the scroll, detected its ink, and transcribed the preserved text from end to end, portions of the original PHerc. 1667 were lost long ago during earlier attempts to physically open the scroll, before archaeologists had access to sophisticated X-ray imaging and AI-assisted analysis. “Earlier attempts to open it by hand — in the nineteenth century, and again in 1969 and the 1980s — destroyed its outer layers,” the Vesuvius Challenge team said, noting that only an 8 cm-high core remains of the original scroll, which originally measured between 19 and 24 cm in height when standing upright. Nonetheless, “it is the first time the preserved text of a rolled Herculaneum scroll has been read continuously, end to end, rather than in isolated words or patches,” the team said. In addition to the full reveal of what’s left of PHerc.1667, the team also managed to pick out some information from a couple of other scrolls using their new workflow. One, PHerc.139, was determined to be a copy of book eight of epicurean philosopher Philodemus’ treatise On Gods, meaning scholars can expect to know what they’re looking at once the scroll is fully digitally unrolled. The second concerns, as mentioned above, PHerc.Paris.4. The new higher-resolution images taken for this latest experiment make the words on the scroll directly visible for the first time, meaning that there’s no need to rely on algorithmic detection of individual words and phrases from CT scans. Most crucially, the new scans of Paris.4 perfectly matched what the grand prize team made out several years ago, providing independent confirmation that the prize went to the right team. There are still challenges to meet in unwrapping and deciphering the rest of the ancient library, with the team calling out geometric challenges in surface prediction that can render an unrolled scan unreadable, and radiometric challenges that make ink identification difficult, as ancient recipes were inconsistent. Still, it’s a massive leap forward and the team believes the X-ray and machine learning workflow they’ve developed is ready to scale. “The thoughts of the ancient world, sealed in darkness for two millennia, are coming back into the light — a whole scroll at a time,” the Vesuvius Challenge team said. I, for one, can’t wait to see what ancient secrets they discover next. ®

Tonight! Bay Area comedian and musician Phil Johnson brings his musical comedy act to Woodhouse Blending & Brewing in Santa Cruz, 7:30pm