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Widow’s Bay crept its way into quickly fueling obsessive fandom discourse, converting viewers with its genre-bending, darkly comedic first season. With a finale that both satisfied its captive audience and rewarded them with a calculatedly chilling turn of events for Mayor Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) and his cabinet of close compatriots, there are now more questions than answers left to unearth beneath the ground of the cursed island shores.

⚡ Quick Take

• Widow’s Bay gave us a finale with a lot of intriguing and unsolved mysteries.
• The series will return for season two, and we hope we get answers to the following 8 mysteries.

Considering that the island is hungry for more tourism than Loftis could have imagined, the season ends with a bell tolling and eight lives left to feed the entity that requires human sacrifices. So with that, here are eight intriguing mysteries that are still unsolved that we hope to see play out in the future. Thankfully, Widow’s Bay scored a season two renewal, so there’s a chance. (And we want more sunset cocktails with Patricia!)

1. Which Deaths Count to Satisfy the Island on Widow’s Bay?

At the start of the season, the death knell of the bell tolls nine times. But even after the events in the episodes that followed, we don’t get a hint of what counts until the season finale. The storm and island threat were assuaged only after Evan and his friends left Kenny to be fed to the entity. Which means that as the sacrifice protocol reveals itself to Dale, the island’s hunger requires that its human meals be in a pure state of fear and in its proximity to pounce on them.

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Apple TV Greenlights WIDOW’S BAY Season 2

Despite sailor Shep’s deadly outburst, the priest’s suicide, and the drug dealer getting sucked into the island’s supernatural tornado, those deaths did not count. Tom and Evan hear the bell sound eight times in the finale, meaning that the island is a little less mad. Now, the mayor must face the reality that it might fall on him to keep the island satiated in future seasons.

2. Was the Boogeyman Collecting Teen Souls for the Island?

Widow’s Bay does a great job at hinting to the audience that the mayor is supposed to be the one inclined to search for sacrifices. Loftis’ strange obsession with getting more tourists on the island could speak to that being an instinct that the environment he’s in encourages. But what happens if the mayor refuses? Mayor Howard the Coward is referenced in the season around the time that punk PJ traps Kevin in the room with the chair. If Loftis refuses, could PJ continue in this tradition?

Take the Boogeyman, whose sudden teen killing spree might have been compelled by the island. He could not be stopped and made sure his victims were in a deep state of fear. If he were somehow a possessed conduit of the island’s evil, that fed it until he was locked away before claiming Patricia. That connection likely made the killer indestructible, like Warren in the coffin for all those years before he was freed by someone. Thankfully, Patricia, in all her glory, made sure the Boogeyman was ashes that could not regenerate, giving her the best final girl ascension.

3. Is Loftis Hiding More About What Really Happened to Evan’s Mom?

It’s strange for a man who weaponizes his incompetence beneath a guise of bumbling nincompoopery to have a chest of secrets and more beneath the house. Thanks to Tom, Evan thought his mom died in childbirth, but she lived as a shell of a person in a hospital. Loftis knew that trying to get her off the island almost killed her, and he clearly is doing everything he can to stop that fate from befalling his son. It all makes Loftis’ identity as well-meaning hit some snags, even if he’s operating to make the island a better cage to keep his son safe and alive in.

But where is she? Once we find out she lived and was committed to an asylum, that leaves room for the possibility that it’s connected to the mystery of the hospital that no one is supposed to stop at. We’re tired of dead moms, so we hope Lauren gets some sort of unexpected role in the show’s future.

Apple TV

Take the Boogeyman, whose sudden teen killing spree might have been compelled by the island. Think about it. He could not be stopped and made sure his victims were in a deep state of fear, and if he were somehow a possessed conduit of the island’s evil, it made it easy to keep it fed until he was locked away before claiming Patricia. That connection likely gave the killer extra lives that could not be extinguished for those years in between before he was freed by someone on the island. Thankfully Patricia in all her glory made sure the Boogeyman was ashes that could not regenerate in the best final girl scene committed to television in a long time. 

4. Does Widow’s Bay Have Cryptids Like Werewolves? (The answer better be yes.)

When Ruth regales Loftis with her pull on the island, starting off with her first love, she begins dropping her deepest of lore. “He got bit by an animal and became that animal” became an instantly iconic line delivery from actress K. Callan.

Earlier in the season, Loftis flips through a calendar that’s just wolves, so we sure as hell hope this means werewolves will show up on Widow’s Bay. Really, any other cryptids, for that matter, like the sea hag that tried to eat Tom before Wyck saved him. It’d also be really cool to see Wyck get a round two with his sea beast, but if he’s inspired by Quint from Jaws, we fear for his fate.

5. Are Warren’s Descendants Purposefully Alluring to Keep the Bloodline Going?

In the flashback episode, we’re introduced to the origins of the suspicions about Richard Warren (Hamish Linklater) making a deal with the devil of sorts when his second wife, Sarah (Betty Gilpin), sees him more interested in getting rid of bodies the island is presumably being fed instead of lying in bed with her. Then, of course, thinking that burying him alive would mean the horrors would end, but alas, not since his youngest daughter made it back ashore. This daughter will be wed off to her very much older savior as soon as she is of age.

The curse clearly wants to keep the Warren bloodline going. Ruth’s long list of people who made a pass at her, hilarious as it was, resulted in her giving in to a married man and getting pregnant with Lauren.

Apple TV

The pull-out method, not working, as a joke set up by Tom, is echoed by Ruth, which makes his concern for Evan valid. It does make us wonder, however, what would happen if Evan got his tourist fling pregnant? Tom’s mom got pregnant by a Widow’s Bay local, but he was born on the mainland. Yet he was made to visit his dad every summer, which led to his meeting Lauren and having Evan. Would the Boston girl be seduced back onto the island somehow?

6. Did Bechir and His Wife Make It Off the Island?

It is never revealed if Bechir’s wife went into labor after all. Once the storm cleared up and it was safe to get out of there, we can imagine that the chief could have just been done and gotten himself and his wife off the island. Tom could have encouraged him to just leave him to worry about the last Warren, eliminating and pushing out an imminent threat to his son’s life.

7. Did Ruth Survive the Gunshot?

From the looks of the moment, she could have gotten her ear grazed. So if she’s alive and holds this secret too, it would make Bechir’s departure more pressing. Evan needs to connect with her as his grandmother since his mom wrote to him about her secret second mother. In retrospect, that letter now seems less like the ravings of a madwoman and makes sense. Also, we want to see Ruth reunite with her were-animal beau.

8. Was Warren’s Deal Actually Good for Widow’s Bay?

It would not be surprising if, as long as a Warren lived on the island, Richard’s deal, which he vehemently defended even after being buried alive, still stood. That only a certain number of sacrifices, enough to sustain the evil, would be required to allow the people of Widow’s Bay to live out their lives on the island. No one let Warren discuss the alternative, which could very well be that if not for the pact he made in desperation to allow his colony to thrive, it might actually be for the greater good. All things considered, the deal with the island is the trolley problem that every mayor has had to face.

Apple TV

And when they don’t, it appears someone gets compelled to be the shepherd leading the lambs to slaughter, whether it’s their leader or a boogeyman. Sure, Evans’ death would break the pact allowing people to leave, but would that really be a good thing? With that occurring, would the curse the show hinges on be revealed as a blessing in disguise that they turn on and, in return, allow the evil to consume Widows Bay unchecked? Evan’s life just might be the only thing standing between Widow’s Bay and a far worse fate if the evil is allowed to go unchecked.

The post 8 Mysteries That WIDOW’S BAY Must Solve Next Season appeared first on Nerdist.

Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard may have been taking orders on political decisions from Chris Butler, the leader of a group many former members have called a cult, according to a new investigation from The Washington Post.

So far, Gabbard’s allies in the Trump administration have been largely silent about the report that the person they placed in charge of the CIA, FBI, and NSA may have been taking directives from a man many former followers view as a cult leader.

As Gabbard is no longer a part of the Trump administration, perhaps her former colleagues feel no pressure to weigh in. But conservative commentator Meghan McCain defended Gabbard on X Sunday afternoon.

“What absolute unpatriotic vile trash this attack on @TulsiGabbard is. They wont cover her releases on Fauci or bio labs—both things that threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people, but spend time and space vomiting this washed up nonsense anti-Hindu bigoted crap,” McCain wrote, referring to Gabbard’s release of documents “exposing” Dr. Anthony Fauci for supposed actions taken during the Covid-19 pandemic on Friday, her last day on the job.

Reporter Jon Swaine gained access to a trove of emails that appeared to show memos from someone within the Science of Identity Foundation, or SIF, directing Gabbard during her time in Congress. When Swaine compared the directives to Tulsi’s voting record, legislative proposals, and media statements, he found “unmistakable parallels.”

Butler’s followers practice a form of Hinduism known as Hare Krishna, and his politics when he founded SIF did not belong squarely in one political camp: “He inveighed against Muslims, homosexuality, gun control and public schools, but also promoted environmentalism and anti-capitalism,” the Post reported.

After two months with no answers from Gabbard’s office, Swaine informed Gabbard that he would be proceeding with the story. Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard would be stepping down from her position as director of national intelligence.

On her last days in office, a spokesperson gave a statement: “The attacks on Director Gabbard’s faith and loyalty are not only false—they are a blatant example of anti-Hindu bigotry.”

Anyone caught tampering with Donald Trump’s Washington-area restoration projects could be on the hook for significant prison time.

The president warned against vandalizing the monuments and statues that his administration has been trying to clean ahead of America’s 250th anniversary. In a Truth Social post, Trump pledged that anyone caught will face up to 10 years in prison.

“Please remember that there is a 10 year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things—Which will be fully enforced!” Trump wrote Monday.

Federal law already stipulates that damage to federal property exceeding $1,000 is classified as a felony. As such, the penalties are steep, possibly including a significant fine, a prison sentence of up to 10 years, or both. Those charged with damaging federal property to the tune of less than $1,000 could face a misdemeanor and a one-year prison sentence.

At least five people have been arrested for allegedly vandalizing the pool as of Saturday night, a Trump administration official told CBS News. Five citations were also issued, bringing the grand total of post-renovation citations issued at the site to 14.

In the same message, Trump claimed that the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool had suffered a “300 foot long gash”—an inexplicable jump from the 250-foot-long damage he described Saturday.

He added that “chemicals have been illegally placed in the water” and complained about the “8647” etched into the National Mall. He further suggested that the damage was “probably inspired by Dirty Cop, James Comey,” who was indicted by a federal grand jury in April for sharing a photo of seashells to his Instagram account that similarly spelled out “8647,” a tagline that Trump and his allies have claimed insinuates a desire for Trump’s death.

The global memory crisis has developed a new twist as buyers turn to "legacy" products such as DDR2 and DDR3 to meet demand, according to market watcher TrendForce. The Taiwanese firm says DRAM buyers are turning to older products to secure larger supply allocations, driving up prices for components including DDR2 and DDR3. As Reg readers will be well aware by now, the AI craze has led to memory chipmakers prioritizing production of more profitable HBM and server DRAM silicon to power AI infrastructure, leaving a shortage of the mainstream memory types needed for PCs, smartphones, and other devices. As a result, prices have risen for DDR4 and DDR5 modules – if you can even find them – resulting in hikes in the cost of kit such as PCs, which are up by double figures, according to some estimates. Continued shortages of everyday DRAM components and rapidly rising contract prices have prompted some hardware makers to downgrade memory specifications to control system costs, TrendForce claims. In some cases, DDR4 designs are being replaced with DDR3 solutions, while certain DDR3-based products are being redesigned to use DDR2. We find it hard to believe that PC makers would ship systems with memory types so old or that modern processors would support them, so it is likely this applies to other kinds of device. Now the market intelligence operation estimates that DDR2 contract prices will rise by approximately 55 to 60 percent for the second quarter of 2026, followed by a further 35 to 40 percent increase in the third quarter. This is happening because customers are desperate to secure more reliable supplies, adopting lower capacity configurations or turning to older memory generations. Consequently, the supply shortages are now rippling through the memory market and starting to affect even legacy DRAM products. Key suppliers of DDR2 components include Winbond and Elite Semiconductor Microelectronics Technology (ESMT), based in TrendForce's home turf of Taiwan. However, Winbond is gradually winding down DDR2 production and reallocating capacity toward more high-margin products such as DDR3, DDR4, and LPDDR4, it says. But ESMT plans to maximize DDR2 production within its existing allocation at wafer maker PSMC. The firm is understood to be concentrating resources on this segment to enhance profitability and help offset the supply gap created by Winbond’s withdrawal from the DDR2 market. Some of the big memory makers are planning to increase capacity, but only slowly. Korean giant SK hynix aims to double silicon wafer output capacity over the next five years, while US biz Micron expects "meaningful new capacity" at its new Virginia fabrication plant in 2027 and 2028. ®

Trump’s Treasury Department says that Iran can now sell oil, stripping decades of U.S. sanctions policy in one fell swoop—and it’s not clear that the United States is getting anything in return.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Monday that the U.S. had issued a “temporary 60-day general license authorizing the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil,” in return for the country’s commitments to maintaining “free and open transit” in the Strait of Hormuz and admitting inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The sanctions waiver allows Iran to sell its oil at market rate, after decades of having to sell it at a reduced price to buyers willing to dodge U.S. sanctions. Shockingly, the license also allows U.S. refineries to import Iranian oil—reversing more than 40 years of strict sanctions, and giving Iran’s economy a much-needed boost.

Sanctions relief is a key component in the 14-point memorandum of understanding between the two countries. Iran has yet to actually deliver on any of its promises, however.

Over the weekend, the Iranian military briefly shuttered trade through the Strait of Hormuz, citing Israel’s continued ceasefire violations in Lebanon. While Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced that mediators delivered “major progress” to end the fighting in Lebanon, neither Hezbollah nor Israel are actual signatories to the U.S.-Iran peace deal. It’s still unclear how that conflict will resolve, meaning the future of the entire agreement, and the strait, remains unclear.

As for visits from IAEA inspectors, the memorandum of understanding asserts that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the agency’s supervision, but details on that process have been scarce. Notably, the supposedly major milestone is something the U.S. had already won—and then lost under Trump.

Google Cloud Summit came to London last week, and we took the opportunity to sit down with database execs Sailesh Krishnamurthy (VP engineering) and Yasmeen Ahmad (product executive Agentic Data Cloud). The event was wall-to-wall agentic AI, and true to the theme, Ahmad told us that "we're putting agents at the center ... with the goal that humans are not going to be using data platforms in the next three to five years. It’s going to be humans orchestrating agents, and agents actually doing the work." One of the key AI-driven changes, Krishnamurthy said, is that when retrieving data "it’s not so much about getting the exact results, but getting the best results." For developers skilled in crafting SQL queries that get precise results in the most efficient way, the notion of inexact queries that go through some sort of non-deterministic and compute-expensive parsing may seem like a step backwards. "If you have exact questions, you need to be able to provide exact answers," Krishnamurthy told us. "But I think inexact questions are what people are also going to expect. When you think about agentic workloads and operational databases, you want to be able to ask more flexible questions." An example might be a natural language query that takes into account context, such as previous interactions. Krishnamurthy described "AI native infrastructure," including vector indexing, text indexing, and graph technology where "you combine structured and unstructured data, you have to be operating in terms of inexact results and data quality." The company is also investing in the "knowledge catalog," formerly called Dataplex, which is enterprise search now also treated as context for LLMs (large language models). Knowledge catalog aggregates organization data across multiple sources including structured and unstructured sources. Krishnamurthy said that exact SQL queries are not going away, and that sometimes a "fuzzy question in natural language" might generate an SQL query with exact results. How do you verify that AI-generated SQL is producing the results you want? “The answer is the same, not just about SQL, but about many AI-related things," said Krishnamurthy. “The answer is a set of evals you have to maintain ... you might start with something where some results work well and some don’t. And then you have to keep iterating on your blueprints and other pieces of context until your eval set is 100 percent working well." By eval set, Krishnamurthy means "a set of questions that are representative tests that users may have, and what is the right query that is generated associated with it, and then a determination of is this query, is this answer correct or not?" Google SQL as used in its distributed Spanner database, PostgreSQL-compatible AlloyDB, and in the BigQuery data warehouse engine now has AI functions such as AI.IF, which evaluates a condition described in natural language and returns true or false. The prompt value is evaluated using a Gemini LLM; and could return an error or null if the model fails such as when unavailable or out of quota. The inefficiency of functions like AI.IF is a problem, but there are possible solutions. One is the idea of proxy models, which Krishnamurthy described as "a tiny model in the database." A proxy model is trained on the fly, based on a small sample of the data. The query engine evaluates the results from the proxy model, and if good enough, uses it for inference in place of a call to the LLM. According to a paper on the subject proxy models "consume about 400x less tokens, and the latency goes down by 30x-100x." We asked Ahmad why she believes humans will soon not interact directly with Google’s data platform. The answer, she said, is based on the idea of intent-driven engineering. "Three years ago everyone was doing prompt training classes. Really, these models were co-pilots or assistants. Now these models are doing multi-step execution, parallel execution, handling complexity. So you can define an intent, a goal, an outcome, and the model will figure out the steps to get there." According to Ahmad, humans will act as orchestrators, thinking about business outcomes, and models will do "the hard graft of figuring out the low-level data wrangling." She said that today’s staff need to be skilled not so much in prompt engineering, but rather using AI for spec-driven development. "The focus for the human is getting to the right plan and iterating with the model on what is the right way to think about the problem." In business intelligence, she said, companies will move away from dashboards because they only "serve the first layer of predictable questions." In their place will be "conversational analytics for business users." She believes that unwelcome aspects of generative AI, such as hallucinations and prompt injections, are mitigated by improved context, such as from Knowledge Catalog. "I have customers who have got 90 percent plus accuracy with conversational analytics, but that was not the case 18 months ago when the models would get one out of every two questions wrong because they would not have that context." A problem here is that even over 90 percent accuracy is not good enough if you are, for example, a customer of a company with heavy AI adoption confronted with a blocked transaction or other rejection because of an inaccurate response. Another issue is that injecting AI into every interaction means paying for tokens on top of the base compute and storage resources traditionally consumed by cloud database platforms. Higher productivity and reduced staff costs may more than compensate, but this cannot be taken for granted, particularly as reducing the skill barrier with features like conversational analytics also tends to increase usage. Giant cloud providers like Google though have plenty to gain. AI, Krishamurthy told us, is driving growth in data storage as well as token usage. He described "a huge overall growth in the business because everyone needs data … Anthropic, for example, rely on BigTable to store all their prompt information. They have other workloads too which are not public." Two metrics he is permitted to talk to us about, he said, are that Spanner "now runs 7 ½ billion queries per second at the peak … a year back Spanner might have been 5 billion queries per second." Spanner, he said, "has about 23 exabytes of data. It’s the same with BigTable, roughly 7 billion queries per second and double-digit exabytes." Models make more queries, he said. "Instead of taking the user request and just sending one query, one pattern I’ve seen is a model will send five different queries … it’s hard to say exactly what is happening because the models are trying different things."®

WhatsApp gets a new boss, as Will Cathcart moves to a new role at Meta, while Shah steps down as CEO of Indian fintech giant CRED to replace Cathcart.

Outbound Senator John Cornyn is getting candid about Donald Trump.

The former GOP whip described the instability fueled by the White House in a Semafor interview published Monday, lamenting about how talking with the president isn’t “particularly useful” because “he can and will” flip his opinion depending on whoever he last spoke to.

“The president seems to revel in chaos, which is so different from any other leader that I’ve ever seen. I don’t know about you, but I like to minimize the chaos in my life,” Cornyn told Semafor. “He just seems to revel in it. We’ve seen even recent evidence of it on the [Director of National Intelligence].”

Cornyn was referring to Trump’s sudden cancellation of a Senate confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton—the president’s pick to run the Office of National Intelligence—via a Truth Social post mere hours before the hearing was set to take place last week.

Trump tapped Clayton earlier this month as DNI in place of acting Director Bill Pulte.

Pulte’s leadership had sparked a maelstrom in Congress. Democrats refused to renew FISA Section 702, a federal spy bill, until Pulte was replaced by someone with legitimate national security experience, as the position requires by law.

Clayton, unfortunately, does not satisfy that requirement either. The former law professor and corporate crisis management counsel has no national security experience to bring to the role.

Yet rather than quell the furor, Trump opted to make the stalemate even more difficult for his congressional allies by tacking his dead-in-the-water voter ID bill, the Save America Act, onto negotiations over the lapsed spy statute.

Cornyn has become a more vocal critic of the president since he lost his primary runoff last month to Trump’s preferred candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Cornyn’s race was a gamble and a loss for the GOP: One of the party’s most prolific fundraisers, Cornyn had done much to support other Republican candidates over the course of his 24-year legislative career, bringing in more than $400 million for auxiliary races. The lost cash flow, paired with Trump’s waning popularity and dismal economic offerings, could bode poorly for the Republican Party come November.

The United States drifted further toward becoming a fascist state over the weekend, when at least five people were arrested at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, in Washington, D.C., on dubious vandalism charges. The arrests came after President Donald Trump said the problems with the Reflecting Pool, including a massive algae bloom and its peeling blue paint, were the fault of vandals…

Source

JD Vance blamed Iran’s “trash talk” for nearly torpedoing peace talks on Sunday, after aggressive comments from President Trump caused Iran to pause negotiations.

“What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us millennials might call ‘trash talk,’ you can’t expect the president of the United States not to respond, and not to correct the record,” Vance said on Newsmax Monday morning.

JD Vance: "What we told the Iranians yesterday is that when you guys engage in what us millennials might call trash talk, you can't expect the president of the United States not to respond and not to correct the record." (Trump threatened to assassinate Iran's negotiators… pic.twitter.com/33ruf7JNZt

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 22, 2026

As Vance met with Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and other Iranian officials in Switzerland, the president was firing off insults from miles away.

“Iran must immediately stop their highly paid PROXIES in Lebanon from causing trouble. If they don’t, we’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday.

The comments were seemingly triggered by Iran’s threats to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israel’s continued bombing of Lebanon, which Iran claims is a violation of the 60-day ceasefire deal.

Trump told Fox News journalist Trey Yingst Sunday morning that he spoke with Iranian officials over the phone about the closure, telling them, “You close it and you won’t have a country … you won’t even make it back to your f—ing country.”

"We'll take over the rest of your country ... I'll blow the shit out of them" -- here is Trey Yingst's entire segment about the bonkers phone call he says he had with Trump this morning that apparently included threats to assassinate Iran's leadership, impose draconian US tolls… pic.twitter.com/RLi9bos14Q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 21, 2026

In response to these comments, Iranian state media declared the talks had been paused.

“They would do better to be careful about their statements,” Qalibaf said after Trump’s comments, according to PBS. “Our armed forces are prepared to respond to them in a different manner. They may keep talking, it is we who act.”

Ultimately, Iranian negotiators did not walk away, and the talks were able to continue. Vance said the talks resulted in “a lot of good progress,” and had laid the groundwork for a final deal. But rather than acknowledge that this progress happened despite Trump’s comments, Vance blamed the Iranians for the holdup. “There was a little bit of threatening, there was a little bit of whining, but at the end of the day the talks continued and we made great progress,” he said.

Vice President JD Vance announced Monday that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors would be allowed back into Iran in a “major milestone and a first step in permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.” There’s just one problem.

Speaking at a brief press conference about the “great progress” made in negotiations in Switzerland over the weekend, Vance offered few details about the plan for inspections of nuclear sites.

The vice president did not offer specifics on what kind of access IAEA inspectors would be granted, or how frequently their inspections would take place. He simply said that IAEA inspectors could visit Iran “this week, maybe as soon as today.” Iran has yet to confirm, according to Axios.

The 14-point memorandum of understanding doesn’t add much clarity: The agreement asserts that Iran can not produce or acquire a nuclear weapon, and that Iran will commit to “down-blending” its enriched nuclear material under the supervision of IAEA inspectors.

Vance’s supposedly major milestone is already something the U.S. had already won—then lost under Trump.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action included the “most comprehensive and intrusive IAEA weapons inspection system ever negotiated,” according to the Center for International Policy. Trump withdrew the United States from the deal in 2018, allowing Iran to resume its enrichment program. In January 2020, Iran announced it would no longer place limits on uranium enrichment after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani at Trump’s direction.

Following the U.S. and Israel’s military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, the Iranian parliament passed a law suspending its cooperation with the IAEA altogether. In September, Iran agreed to allow the agency’s inspectors back into the country. Inspectors had previously visited Iran as recently as December 2025, but received limited access to the country’s nuclear sites.

It’s not even clear that Vance’s announcement was the product of the weekend’s negotiations.

Last week, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly told U.S. lawmakers that in agreeing to the MOU, Tehran had drafted a letter inviting IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi to bring inspectors into the country.

Alan Greenspan, the jazz-playing U.S. Federal Reserve chair who was celebrated for engineering a decade of prosperity but later shared the blame for a devastating financial crisis, died Monday. He was 100. Greenspan died died from complications of Parkinson’s disease, said his wife of 29 years, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell. “To me he was my husband, who shaped my life from our…

Source

Multiple images mocking President Trump and his cabinet have been projected onto walls and sidewalks in Washington, D.C., as the nation’s capital continues to reject the leadership on Pennsylvania Avenue ahead of the president’s Independence Day celebrations.

One projection near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool depicts Senator Mitch McConnell as a turtle and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a crocodile crawling around in a swamp. Another shows White House adviser Stephen Miller as a bat hanging from the ceiling of the Lincoln Memorial. There’s Senator Ted Cruz depicted as a sex worker wearing “Trump” underwear, Vice President JD Vance as some kind of worm, and old footage of Trump and sex predator Jeffrey Epstein together at an event.

At the Kennedy Center, a two-minute video was projected showing a mugshot of Epstein with the words “No one bends the knee like the GOP,” followed by images of Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and former Attorney General Pam Bondi labeled “guardians of pedophiles.” Another Kennedy Center projection showed the letters “Donald” being rearranged into the word “pedo.”

Did you guys see this?? There are projected images popping all over D.C. adding to the swamp theme. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/jypEeszT7y

— ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ (@LePapillonBlu2) June 22, 2026

The guerilla art collective VJayBombs, who posted footage of the projections to its Instagram page, is said to be behind the display. The group gained attention earlier this year during Trump’s State of the Union address, when it projected a looped video satirizing the speech onto the Los Angeles Downtown Medical Center.

This isn’t the first time this term that D.C. has seen anti-Trump political art in its public spaces. The anonymous group Secret Handshake placed at least four statues around the city depicting Trump and Epstein together, and someone tried to cut “8647” into the grass on the National Mall last week.

A Canadian power utility says customer data may have walked out the door during a security incident, but isn't yet saying whether the intruders got anywhere near the systems responsible for keeping the lights on. London Hydro, which distributes electricity to more than 160,000 customers in and around London, Ontario, said on Saturday that it is investigating a data security incident that "may have impacted a portion of personal information on some accounts" and has started notifying affected customers. The utility said the potentially exposed information includes names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, account and billing numbers, service addresses, pricing plans, contract start dates, and meter information. The good news, according to London Hydro, is that the incident did not involve banking information, payment card details, dates of birth, government-issued identification numbers, or other sensitive financial data. The less good news is that the company has disclosed little else. Its statement focuses on customer information and contains no indication that operational technology or grid systems were affected. London Hydro has yet to explain what systems were compromised, how the incident occurred, whether data was stolen or merely accessed, or how many customers may have been caught up in the incident. The haul may not include bank details, but it contains enough account information to make a fake utility bill, payment demand, or customer service call look considerably more believable. London Hydro is warning customers to watch for suspicious communications, unexpected bills, unfamiliar account activity, or requests to change payment arrangements. The company also reminded customers that it does not ask for banking details by email, phone, or SMS. The Register asked London Hydro when it discovered the intrusion, whether information was exfiltrated, how many customers were affected, whether ransomware or extortion was involved, whether any third-party systems were implicated, and whether operational or grid-related systems were touched during the incident. At the time of writing, London Hydro had not responded. The company has drawn a fairly clear boundary around the customer information that may have been exposed. Where the attackers went and what else they may have touched remains unclear. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Prime Video has announced a season two renewal of Bloodaxe before the premiere of its first episode.

Prime Video has just announced that its upcoming series, Bloodaxe, has been renewed for a second season. This news comes before even the show’s first episode drops in 2027. This is certainly a bold move from the studio, but Prime has been on a renewal kick with Invincible and the Critical Role animated series doing well.

The History Channel

Bloodaxe‘s first season won’t come out until early next year, but nonetheless, Season 2 will start filming in August in Dublin, Ireland.

Bloodaxe chronicles the rise of one of history’s most famous Norse raiders, Erik Bloodaxe, and his formidable wife Gunnhild, Mother of Kings. As they fight for the throne of Norway, the land is torn apart by fierce rivals, shifting loyalties, and bloody betrayals.

Vikings was a 6-series historical drama. Hirst, its creator, was also behind Real Vikings, a one-series documentary, and Netflix’s Vikings: Valhalla, which ran from 2022 to 2024. Unsurprisingly then, Hirst is also the creator of Bloodaxe alongside his son Horatio Hirst.

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Considering the lengthy runs of Hirst’s other popular shows, the early renewal hardly comes as a surprise. It would make sense for Bloodaxe to have 4-6 seasons.

Despite being based on a true story, Hirst says the show is going to introduce elements of magical realism.

“I’ve always loved magical realism. King Arthur, the Bible – that’s magical realism, too. You have to be very careful how you use it, though, and the audience needs to be aware that you’re emphasizing something real.”

This is another theme Hirst has experience working with after Camelot. His 2011 show followed Arthurian legend, from the wizard Merlin to Arthur’s round table. Bloodaxe promises a good mix of all of the storytelling experience Hirst has gained through his years in television. The first season will come out sometime early next year, with season two also on the horizon.

The post BLOODAXE Renewed for Season 2 Ahead of 2027 Premiere appeared first on Nerdist.

Instagram is coming for streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video as it sets its ambitions for living room viewing.

With more than 12.7 million members across some 46,000 churches, the Southern Baptist Convention is massive. As easily the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, it’s also one of the loudest voices in American religious life—it also runs six of the nation’s 10 largest theological seminaries, which train future pastors. As Bob Smietana, a veteran religion reporter with Religion News Service, told me last week, the SBC’s sheer size “gives them some kind of clout that other people don’t have.”

Or as William Wolfe, the president of the Center for Baptist Leadership, a group that aspires to make the SBC more conservative, put it to me in a phone call this weekend, “When the Southern Baptist Convention sneezes, the whole country says, ‘Excuse me.'”

Because of the SBC’s size, it’s also extremely influential politically—which is where the Center for Baptist Leadership, which Wolfe created with a handful of fellow SBC members, comes in. “The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks,” he says. “We don’t want to let them do that.”

“The left wants to subvert or fracture southern Baptists as a political conservative voting blocks. We don’t want to let them do that.”

There are signs that Wolfe and his allies are succeeding. Earlier this month, when tens of thousands of representatives from SBC churches met in Orlando for the annual conference, the group voted in favor of codifying an official ban on women pastors (though most SBC churches already allow only male pastors), affirmed robust immigration enforcement, and acknowledged the United States’ history of “sins such as slavery, racism, abortion, injustice, and sexual immorality.”

The group also elected a new president, Florida pastor Willy Rice, who is theologically and politically conservative, and has railed against critical race theory and decried the “woke riptide” in the denomination. The Center for Baptist Leadership endorsed Rice for SBC president; Rice has appeared on Center for Baptist Leadership podcasts and at events hosted by the group. Shortly after the meeting, on the Center for Baptist Leadership’s podcast, the group’s president, William Wolfe, hailed Rice’s victory as “the end of the SBC being steered by weaponized empathy.”

Indeed, the SBC appears to be making a significant course correction in the form of a sharp rightward tack—a major victory for Wolfe and his small but vocal group of right-wing leaders within the SBC, some of whom have ties to an ascendant movement of self-proclaimed Christian nationalists.

Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, submits a motion regarding women pastors during the Southern Baptist Convention on June 9 in Orlando.Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

The Center for Baptist Leadership emerged in early 2024 from what Wolfe and his colleagues see as a dangerous departure in the SBC from the conservative values—traditional family structures, clearly defined gender roles, a belief in the infallibility of the Bible—that have grounded the denomination since its founding. Over the last decade, the SBC moved toward the center, influenced by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and the movement to expose sexual abuse and harassment.

Wolfe and his colleagues oppose SBC leaders whom they see as “caught up in the spirit of the worldly ‘MeToo’ movement, DEI ideology, and social justice signaling,” according to the group’s website. Those misguided aims, the Center for Baptist Leadership claims, have led to a scourge of problems, including women pastors, financial secrecy, and an obsession with blaming the SBC as a whole for the sex abuse scandals in individual churches, thereby bringing “perverse, anti-Christian standards of justice to judge claims of abuse.”

But it isn’t just church matters that the SBC seeks to influence—it’s also national politics, a goal that Wolfe is well qualified to achieve. As I wrote two years ago:

Wolfe served in the first Trump administration both as the deputy assistant secretary of defense and as director of House affairs at the Department of State. He is also an alumnus of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, the arch-conservative think tank behind Project 2025, whose chief architect, Russell Vought, posted on X that he was “proud to work with @William_E_Wolfe on scoping out a sound Christian Nationalism.” A few months later, the Bucks County Beacon uncovered a lengthy online manifesto on the goals of Christian nationalists. The document, which listed Wolfe and Joel Webbon as contributing editors and Oklahoma Sen. Dusty Deevers as a co-author, called for “civil magistrates” to usher in “the establishment of the Ten Commandments as the foundational law of the nation.”

Wolfe told me he believes that SBC members would largely agree with those sentiments. “It’s something Baptists historically believe, that we should be involved in politics and we should be unashamed about bringing our Christian beliefs and presuppositions into the political square,” he said. He said he could imagine a version of a Christian America where people of other faiths held office, though he noted that some Baptist founders “thought that only Christians should be able to hold elected office.” On the issue of women voting, he declined to weigh in, stating only, “I think that the 19th amendment was duly enacted and is the law of the land.”

On X, where he has 96,000 followers, Wolfe is a firebrand, regularly arguing against religious tolerance and multiculturalism: “The idea that ‘all religions deserve equal respect’ is one of the most disastrous lies of the modern age,” he fumed last week. On the same day, in another tweet, he wrote, “Mass migration is biological warfare waged by secular globalist elites against the native Christian peoples of the West.”

In our phone call, Wolfe stressed that his tweets don’t necessarily reflect the work of the Center for Baptist Leadership. But he also reaffirmed his social media statements, calling religious pluralism a “recipe for disaster” and arguing that “there are people who want to see native Christian Western populations diminished and negatively impacted by third-world migration.” He said he saw Hungary as an example of a country that has successfully handled immigration. “Hungary is a spiritually dead country in many ways, but it’s preserved its Christian heritage,” he said. “It’s preserved its people—they’ve not allowed their people to be replaced by millions of migrants.”

Last year, the extremism watchdog group Right Wing Watch posted a video of Wolfe quoting a scripture passage. There are times when “even the God of peace proclaims by his providence, ‘to arms!’” he says. “If we have ever lived in a point of time in American history since then that we could argue that now is a time ‘to arms’ again, I think we are getting close.”

When I asked Wolfe what he meant by the statement about Christians being called to arms, he said it was more general than specific. “It was just sort of a basic point of Christians have been in that situation before many times throughout the centuries,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find ourselves in a position like that again.”

Wolfe isn’t the Center for Baptist Leadership’s only powerful connection to the Christian right. The fiscal sponsor of the group is American Reformer, an online magazine founded by Josh Abbotoy, an entrepreneur who also runs a venture capital firm that aims to build a Christian techno-utopian community in rural Appalachia. Abbotoy, who also serves as a visiting scholar at the Center for Baptist Leadership, told me via email that he sees the recent votes at SBC as indicative of a sea change in how Christians are beginning to relate to the broader culture. “I think we are starting to see a shift toward a cultural insurgency model,” he wrote to me, “in which evangelical leaders strategically adjust to the reality that broader society has become less amenable to Christian values.”

Michael Clary, a Kentucky pastor and Christian nationalist who serves on the advisory board of the Center for Baptist Leadership, also sees the SBC as needing a more muscular faith. In an email to me, he bemoaned a modern, excessively passive Christian culture, in thrall to a “loser theology” that demanded that the church “retreat into pietistic ghettos while we watch the world burn.” Instead, he wrote, Christians “should bring their convictions into public life, including their votes, their advocacy, and their cultural engagement.”

And there are signs that the SBC’s ties to Christian nationalists extend beyond the Center for Baptist Leadership. Consider Al Mohler, a prominent SBC leader who has served as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky since 1993. He has witnessed decades of social change, but put forth this year’s amendment to ban women pastors. He appeared last week on the podcast of Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist pastor—though not a member of the SBC—who presides over a small fiefdom in Moscow, Idaho. Mohler expressed frustration with what he considered a misconception that Baptist forefathers were “some kind of strict separationist when it came to Christian morality and the society.” Baptists, he said, actually had a lot in common with Christian nationalists like Wilson. “I have been calling for maximum Christian influence in the public square my whole life,” he said.

Smietana, the religion reporter, noted that the Center for Baptist Leadership’s contingent at the annual meeting, “didn’t have huge numbers.” The group’s budget isn’t publicly available because they exist under the financial umbrella of American Reformer, though Wolfe told me the organization is run “on a shoestring.” Still, Smietana said, “the group has really influenced the narrative and the public relations,” he said, through its social media presence, podcasts, and relationships its leaders have built with influential SBC members. The election of Rice and the other conservative victories, he said, “are a real win for them,” and a signal that the broader SBC may be open to their agenda.

Nathan Finn, a religion professor who leads the Institute for Faith and Culture at North Greenville University, a Baptist college in South Carolina, was careful not to overstate the Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence on the SBC. But he did acknowledge that it reflected a growing movement within the larger denomination toward a “populist distrust of institutions and elites.” 

The amendment that Mohler proposed to officially ban women pastors hasn’t been adopted yet; SBC leaders will hold the final vote at next year’s convention in Indianapolis. For Wolfe, this year’s meeting was confirmation of Center for Baptist Leadership’s influence—and a sign to continue the crusade. “Conservative reformers in the SBC aren’t the fringe,” he tweeted. “We are the representatives of what the broad base of grassroots Southern Baptists think & want. We are the center. Time to assume it and act accordingly.”

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Microsoft has issued a stark warning for Windows users everywhere: "Get ready for Windows 11, version 26H2." Unless, of course, you're running Windows 11 26H1, in which case 26H2 will not be offered and you'll have to wait for a later upgrade path. 26H2, due for general availability in the coming months, uses the same Windows core as Windows 11 25H2 and Windows 24H2. As such, it will be delivered via an enablement package that switches on the new features and updates the versioning. 26H1 is an altogether different beast, aimed at devices based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Series processors and other new hardware platforms. Other than the version number change, users will be hard-pressed to notice much difference between 25H2 and 26H2, which, frankly, is no bad thing. A bit of stability wouldn't be a problem for Windows users, even if the monthly updates, where most new features are delivered these days, can be somewhat hit-and-miss in terms of quality and reliability. Windows Insiders can take a look at the new release now – the brave souls in the Experimental channel will see their versioning updated to 26H2, and there are also paths from the Dev and Beta channels. Also lurking in the previews is an update to Windows Search that will bring a sigh of relief to many users. In an Experimental Insider release just over a week ago, Microsoft wrote: "Finding apps is more forgiving. Search is better at handling typos, dropped letters, extra letters, and partial words for apps. Queries like 'utlook' can still find Outlook. "Settings results are improving. We've made ranking improvements to help more relevant settings appear higher in results." All well and good. Search has been infamously awful in Windows for years. However, March Rogers, partner director of product design for Windows at Microsoft, later clarified: "Local files are prioritized in the new search updates. Also, if you want, you can turn off web suggestions entirely." Tweaking Search to ditch web suggestions has been possible for a while, if a user knows where to look, but bringing the setting front and center (according to Rogers, it can be turned off in Settings > Privacy & Security > Search) is a welcome move. Otherwise, 26H2 should be a straightforward release, with little in it to alarm users and administrators – Microsoft saves those for monthly updates. Support for Windows 11 24H2 will end on October 13, 2026, for Home and Pro users (Enterprise and Education users get another year – until October 13, 2027). Microsoft's support lifecycle means 26H2 will get 24 months of support from its release for Home and Pro, and 36 months for Enterprise and Education. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• A Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series is officially happening at Peacock. Seth MacFarlane, Chris Yoast, and author Matt Dinniman to helm.

Dungeon Crawler Carl has crawled its way into becoming a true phenomenon. And the next place Carl and the ever-beloved Princess Donut (his ex’s cat) are heading is to our screens. Yes, Peacock has officially green-lit a live-action TV series version of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and it’s coming from writer Chris Yost and executive producer Seth MacFarlane. Although fans envisioned an animated series for this fantastical intergalactic adventure, author Matt Dinniman has promised that live-action will be a great way to bring this LitRPG to life.

Dinniman himself celebrated the official greenlight for a straight-to-series order for a Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series. He noted that he will do a panel at this year’s SDCC and likely release more details about what fans can expect next.

Conversations about a live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series have been circulating for some time. But fans will surely feel glad that Peacock has finally made a firm move. Still, it feels like it will still be some time before we see Dungeon Crawler Carl level up into its new form. Variety reports that the TV series is “now officially in development.” But we still live in early days.

Amazon

For those who don’t know too much about this title, here is the logline of the Dungeon Crawler Carl TV series, “An alien invasion has wiped out most of humanity and any survivors are forced to fight for their lives on a sadistic intergalactic game show. Sounds bad, right? Now try doing it with bare feet and a stuck-up, self-centered, tiara-wearing talking cat as your partner. Welcome to Dungeon Crawler World: Earth, where the apocalypse will be televised … and Coast Guard vet Carl finds himself stuck with his ex-girlfriend’s award-winning show cat, Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk, as they try to survive the end of the world, fighting monsters, aliens, an insane A.I. and even other survivors … all for the sake of good TV. Survival is optional. Entertainment is not.”

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The book series is a LitRPG, which means it uses video game mechanics, such as leveling up, experience points, and character stats, to tell its story in text. To be clear, the audience does not make any decisions in LitRPG books, but they do get to experience this interesting style of storytelling. Currently, there are seven Dungeon Crawler Carl books in the world, with plans for 10 in total. The eighth Dungeon Crawler Carl book will release on May 12, making this a great time to announce the TV series.

Amazon

Dinniman had this to say to fans wary of a live-action Dungeon Crawler Carl series, “[We’re] not going to do it if it’s gonna look like absolute shit. And they will do CGI testing on Princess Donut and stuff like that. And that’s all I can say, I think. It’s all gonna hinge on what it looks like. But Fuzzy Door, specifically, if you watch ‘Ted’ or ‘The Orville,’ you’ll see that they know what they’re doing when it comes to this.”

We’ll absolutely be watching to see what Dinniman, Yost, and Seth MacFarlane create using this fun world.

Originally published April 2, 2026.

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