The horror prequel starring Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest is now streaming on Paramount+.

A Downdetector map showing where Verizon outages are reported. Wireless customers of Verizon and AT&T have found that they cannot make calls, send or receive text messages, or download any mobile data. As of this article's publication, it appears the problem has yet to be resolved. Users took to social media throughout the morning to complain that their phones were showing "SOS" mode, which allows emergency calls but nothing else. This is what phones sometimes offer when the user has no SIM registered on the device. Resetting the device and other common solutions do not resolve the issue. For much of the morning, Verizon offered no response to the reports. Within hours, more than 100,000 users reported problems on the website Downdetector. The problem does not appear isolated to any particular part of the country; users in California reported problems, and so did users on the East Coast and in Chicago, among other places.

The Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant is set to shut down for good today. On Monday, the UK will see the closure of its last operational coal power plant, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been operating since 1968. The closure of the plant, which had a capacity of 2,000 megawatts, will bring an end to the history of the country's coal use, which started with the opening of the first coal-fired power station in 1882. Coal played a central part in the UK's power system in the interim, in some years providing over 90 percent of its total electricity. But a number of factors combined to place coal in a long-term decline: the growth of natural gas-powered plants and renewables, pollution controls, carbon pricing, and a government goal to hit net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It's difficult to overstate the importance of coal to the UK grid. It was providing over 90 percent of the UK's electricity as recently as 1956. The total amount of power generated continued to climb well after that, reaching a peak of 212 terawatt hours of production by 1980. And the construction of new coal plants was under consideration as recently as the late 2000s. According to the organization Carbon Brief's excellent timeline of coal use in the UK, continuing the use of coal with carbon capture was given consideration.

The Menendez brothers, Lyle, now 56, and Erik, now 53, probably never had an incestuous relationship. There has never been any evidence presented anywhere that they did, and in court, both have vehemently denied a sexual relationship. None of this stops Monsters, the new Ryan Murphy-helmed Netflix drama about the brothers — who were convicted of murdering their powerful Hollywood parents, José and Kitty Menendez, in 1989 — from suggesting that they did.  The show is a spin-off of Monster, Murphy’s wildly popular series about Jeffrey Dahmer, another notorious killer whose trial in the 1990s scandalized Americans.  That series drew significant backlash from survivors for heavily fictionalizing the crimes committed by Dahmer. And any true crime fans who wanted Monsters to take steps forward from that controversy must be recoiling in disbelief at the direction Murphy has chosen to go instead — not only fictionalizing details, but almost certainly fabricating a relationship between the brothers. This portrait rests atop a depiction of the pair as greedy, entitled fortune hunters who coveted the $14 million estate of their father, a producer at RCA Records. Along the way, the drama suggests not only that Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) was a sociopath who used his brother’s affection to manipulate him, but that Erik (Cooper Koch) was a confused, closeted gay man — though, again, there is no evidence anywhere to suggest this. The show does gain some complexity as Murphy and his longtime collaborator Ian Brennan (who also co-wrote Monster) begin to peel back years of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse the brothers say they endured from their father and mother. The brothers have maintained for over three decades that abuse underpinned their crime.  But Monsters, with its slick, oversaturated ’80s filter, seedy tone, and obsession with wealth, mostly undermines the nuances of the notorious case at nearly every turn. It ultimately suggests that the pair made the whole thing up for sympathy — despite recently uncovered compelling evidence that suggests they were telling the truth all along. At the time of their convictions, the brothers and their defense were entirely culturally dismissed; it would have been hard to find anyone in the ’90s and early 2000s who didn’t believe the Menendez brothers were guilty. Rather than turn those assumptions on their head, Murphy’s approach in Monsters is to give them a new platform. It’s a tremendous, infuriating shame, because this case, and the way Americans understand and treat abuse victims at trial, particularly male abuse victims, is undergoing a slow public reckoning. Numerous other documentaries and articles have offered a different, extremely belated, and revelatory take: What if they had been telling the truth?   To understand how much Monsters overlooks, and how much it distorts, it’s helpful to examine the facts of the Menendez brothers’ story.  Media outlets have called Monsters “irresponsible” and suggested that steamy scenes between the brothers “blurs the lines between what’s ‘hot’ and what is absolutely inappropriate.” It’s also drawn scathing criticism from both brothers, and provoked defenses from nearly every member of the main cast. In a statement shared on X by his wife, Erik Menendez called Monsters a “vile and appalling character portrayals of Lyle and me” — particularly of Lyle, who was the target of a “caricature” that was “rooted in blatant lies.”  Murphy, for his part, rebutted this in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, arguing that Erik had “issued a statement without having seen the show,” and that “60 to 65 percent of our show in the scripts and in the film … center around the abuse and what they claim happened to them.”  Many of the show’s depictions of the brothers are rooted in the actual coverage of the case from the 1990s. In a famous 1996 interview with both brothers, for example, Barbara Walters downplayed the pair’s allegations of abuse and instead grilled Erik about whether he was gay. Erik firmly denied it.  “The prosecutor brought that up because I was sexually molested,” Erik replied, “and he felt in his own thinking that if I was sodomized by my father that I must have enjoyed it, and therefore I must be gay, and the people that are gay out there must be sexually molested or they wouldn’t be [gay].”  It was a trenchant summing-up of the prevailing cultural assumptions of the broadly anti-LGBTQ decade.  In fact, corroboration that there was abuse in the Menendez home has come from at least three family members, all of whom took the stand in the brothers’ first trials. One of them, a cousin, witnessed José repeatedly physically abuse the brothers, and claimed he saw José go to shower with the boys; two others claimed that Erik and Lyle separately told them about the abuse as a child. They each still stand by these claims and believe the brothers today. In 2023, lawyers for the brothers announced the recent discovery of a letter written by Erik Menendez eight months before the murders — a letter to a cousin in which he goes into harrowing detail about the ongoing abuse: “I’ve been trying to avoid dad,” Erik writes in the letter. “It’s still happening Andy but it’s worse for me now. … Every night, I stay up thinking he might come in. … I’m afraid … He’s crazy. He’s warned me a hundred times about telling anyone, especially Lyle.” In their interview in the mid-1990s, Walters, apparently barely holding back an eye roll, called the brothers out on the “abuse excuse,” a phrase coined by lawyer Alan Dershowitz in a 1994 book and applied to this case by the prosecution in the Menendez brothers’ second trial. When she challenged Erik on why he was comfortable confessing to the murders to his therapist but not to the alleged years of sexual abuse, Erik explained, “Unless you’ve been molested, you can’t realize how hard it is to tell.” “Because of shame?” Walters asked skeptically.  “Because of shame,” Erik confirmed. Arguably because of the compelling nature of the brothers’ abuse claims, their first trials — the two were initially tried separately — each ended in deadlocked juries.  One of the main stumbling blocks in the first round of trials was whether or not to convict the pair of manslaughter or murder; in Lyle’s trial, the decision was split by gender, with female jurors voting for the lesser charge and male jurors voting for murder. For the second trial, in which the brothers were tried together, however, a number of things changed. Judge Stanley Weisberg disallowed nearly all defense evidence related to the brothers’ abuse claims, including mental health experts and medical experts, as well as the “minutiae” of evidence testifying to the abuse the brothers suffered in their daily lives, which wiped out a vast majority of the testimony on José’s controlling, temperamental, and physically violent behavior.  Both defense attorneys for the duo have since stated that given what we now know about the impact of long-term abuse on children, a manslaughter conviction, which would have carried a much lighter sentence, would have been more appropriate for both Lyle and Erik.  Instead, the brothers were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. Now attorneys for the duo are hoping to use the new facts in the case to win their clients’ retrials. Monsters could well bring about another tidal shift against the brothers and their quest for a cultural reframing. Murphy has returned the Menendez brothers’ narrative to “an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women,” Erik Menendez wrote in the statement shared on X. “How demoralizing to know that one man with power can undermine decades of progress in shedding light on childhood trauma.” Erik Menendez is right. Ryan Murphy has compellingly depicted the trauma and repression of the queer closet in his musical film The Prom as well as in Dahmer and an American Crime Story installment, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which he executive produced. His ability to accurately depict the impact of lifelong abusive situations on the innocent, and even the guilty, isn’t in doubt. Murphy has claimed that Monsters attempts a “Rashomon kind of approach,” referring to Akira Kurosawa’s famous film in which the story of a sexual assault is depicted from multiple conflicting points of view. He further argued that he had an obligation to the “storytellers” to include their perspectives.  That’s an incredibly disingenuous framing of the show Murphy made. It chooses to further victimize the Menendez brothers with a shocking and unfounded accusation, building the sibling incest narrative over the course of its nine episodes despite compelling evidence of extreme abuse at the hands of a parent.  It’s not just an extremely irresponsible take on an extremely complicated case — it’s the most backward, regressive, and confounding approach Murphy could possibly have taken. “[V]iolence against a child creates a hundred horrendous and silent crime scenes darkly shadowed behind glitter and glamor,” Erik wrote.  He could easily have been describing Monsters itself.

The Apple Park campus in Cupertino, California. A few weeks back, it was reported that Apple was exploring investing in OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, the GPT model, and other popular generative AI products. Now, a new report from The Wall Street Journal claims that Apple has abandoned those plans. The article simply says Apple "fell out of the talks to join the round." The round is expected to close in a week or so and may raise as much as $6.5 billion for the growing Silicon Valley company. Had Apple gone through with the move, it would have been a rare event—though not completely unprecedented—for Apple to invest in another company that size. OpenAI is still expected to raise the funds it seeks from other sources. The report claims Microsoft is expected to invest around $1 billion in this round. Microsoft has already invested substantial sums in OpenAI, whose GPT models power Microsoft AI tools like Copilot and Bing chat.

Wizards of the Coast would really like you to remember that it has Baldur's Gate 3 content, now that developer Larian Studios is largely moving on from Faerun.

Power up your fall with the Portable Power Station Delta 2 — down to just $489 at Amazon for early prime day!

Waves roll ashore along Lake Michigan in Whiting, Indiana. This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here.  The aquifer from which Joliet, Illinois, sources its drinking water is likely going to run too dry to support the city by 2030—a problem more and more communities are facing as the climate changes and groundwater declines. So Joliet eyed a huge water source 30 miles to the northeast: Lake Michigan. It’s the second-largest of the Great Lakes, which together provide drinking water to about 10 percent of the US population, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office for Coastal Management.

The broadcasting industry landscape has changed significantly since the two satellite providers first tried to merge in 2002 and were blocked by federal regulators.

io9 chatted with the Vox Machina cast to discuss the upcoming third season and the team's various approaches to adapting their own work.

Installing the Epic Games Store on Galaxy phones is impossible with the "Auto Blocker" feature turned on. . Epic's lawsuit takes a particular exception to the fact that Samsung doesn't provide any way for a company like Epic to qualify as an "authorized source" that has been judged as safe under the Auto Blocker. "While Samsung half-heartedly claims Auto Blocker is a security feature, its operation is to block all competing stores, regardless of how safe and secure they may be—and without any assessment of their safety or security or any path for other stores to achieve 'authorization,'" the suit argues.

Google’s first leak of the fall is here, with new renders of its upcoming Pixel 9A posted online for the world to see. As with the Pixel 8A leak earlier this year, Android Headlines has yet again acquired images of Google’s next budget A-series release, this time by way of OnLeaks, which was responsible for spoiling the recent Pixel 9 lineup. The big change coming on the Pixel 9A, according to the leak, is that it won’t feature Google’s now-signature visor look for its camera housing. Instead, it seems like there are two cameras in a pill-shaped module that sits almost flush with the rear of the phone. A camera flash is set to the right, making it look like the rear of an iPhone 7 Plus but magnified. The rest of the body looks similar to...