The US wants to ban any Chinese or Russian software installed in cars, purportedly over security concerns. If the proposed rule is finalized, don’t expect to see a China-made EV stateside any time soon.

More than 450 people were killed and 1,500 injured in Israeli airstrikes targeting southern and eastern Lebanon, as well as the country’s capital, Beirut, on Monday. The airstrikes mark a significant and threatening escalation of hostilities following an apparent Israeli attack that used explosive pagers (and other electronic devices) to kill members of the Shia militant and political group Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon. Israel and Hezbollah have regularly traded rocket fire over Lebanon’s southern border with Israel for years. However, since Israel launched its war in Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s attacks in Israel on October 7, Hezbollah — a Hamas ally — has increased the tempo of rocket launches, and has hit targets deeper within Israel. Israel has increased its attacks as well, and as a result, more than 110,000 Lebanese and about 60,000 Israelis are internally displaced. Last week, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was entering a “new phase” of its ongoing war on Gaza and Hamas, one that would put greater focus on its conflict with Hezbollah. “The center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources, and energy toward the north,” Gallant told members of Israel’s air force on September 18, referring to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon.  Concerns that the conflict in Gaza would spark a full war between Israel, Hezbollah, and their allies have existed for the entirety of the nearly year-long conflict. But the latest rounds of Israeli attacks are a provocative escalation that could threaten the fragile balance of more measured tit-for-tat missile strikes that had become fairly routine for Israel and Hezbollah. Still, the unknowns are many: whether Hezbollah can or will respond in an escalatory fashion; whether Israel is prepared to launch a ground invasion into Lebanon, as it has done before to disastrous effect; and whether the US will — or can — constrain Israel and force them to pull back. Hezbollah has been in conflict with Israel for decades. The group is both a militia and a political party that holds seats in Lebanon’s parliament and provides services for the country’s impoverished Shia community. Formed in the wake of Israel’s disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Hezbollah has fought against Israel multiple times, most recently in 2000 and 2006.  The latter war was particularly devastating, killing more than 1,000 people, and leading to an estimated $2.8 billion in damage across Lebanon. The country has never quite recovered from that war; a government collapse, Covid-19, and the Beirut port explosion of 2020 have pushed the country even further into crisis. The country can ill afford a full-scale war, and those in Lebanon not aligned with Hezbollah would like to avoid a conflict like the one in 2006.  Whether that is possible remains to be seen. Israel has staged a number of attacks on Hezbollah, including the reported assassination of senior Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr in July. The coordinated attack that used pagers and walkie-talkies to decimate Hezbollah’s communications system believed to have been conducted by Israel injured more than 3,000 and killed at least 32, including children and the elderly, according to Lebanon’s health minister Dr. Firass Abiad. (Israel does not claim responsibility for assassinations or attacks like last week’s; Hezbollah has blamed Israel for the attack.) Israel began bombing targets in southern Lebanon Friday, including the suburbs and interior of Beirut, and a Hezbollah commander who had been part of the organization since the beginning was killed as he met with other Hezbollah fighters. Monday, September 23, has reportedly been the deadliest Israeli attack on Lebanon since the 2006 war. There’s the distinct possibility that these continued attacks will spiral out of control; Israel has already shown willingness to cross the Biden administration’s “red line” in their war in Gaza by invading the city of Rafah in Gaza.  Hezbollah, meanwhile, must walk a fine line if it chooses to retaliate — which is not a given, despite leader Hassan Nasrallah’s promise that Israel would “face just retribution and a bitter reckoning.” Hezbollah has reportedly fired 8,000 rockets into Israeli territory since October 7, some targeting the Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael and the Ramat David air base, both near the city of Haifa.  Hezbollah has emphasized its solidarity with Hamas since the start of the war in Gaza, and has promised to continue attacks on Israel until there is a ceasefire. Both Hezbollah and Hamas benefit from Iranian financial and tactical assistance, but Hezbollah is much more closely aligned with Iran’s foreign policy objectives than Hamas is.  That has led to concerns about Iran becoming involved in a regional war should Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah escalate. Even if Iran doesn’t enter the conflict, a Hezbollah-Israel war could be incredibly bloody: Hezbollah is larger and better armed than Hamas; if Israel does launch a ground invasion into southern Lebanon, there’s a large chance that they will face even fiercer resistance than in Gaza.  Still, there are reasons to believe Hezbollah may choose to de-escalate the conflict, including the fact that any war would almost certainly be horrifically destructive to Lebanon, a country already struggling with a dysfunctional government and an economic crash. “Hezbollah has several concerns,” when it comes to deciding its next steps, Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox. “One is maintaining Iranian support, and [staying] aligned with Iran’s assessments and regional strategy. And the other is, 85 percent of Lebanese are now below the poverty line. The country’s been reeling economically, and if Hezbollah seems to invite a devastating Israeli assault on Lebanon, then some number of Lebanese would consider that reckless and damaging.” A diplomatic solution, perhaps one in which Hezbollah agrees to remove its positions close to Lebanon’s southern border, is certainly possible. That would allow Israelis to move back to their homes in the north. Whatever the outcome, however, Israel will likely not be able to eliminate Hezbollah, just as it has failed at eliminating Hamas. And continued aggression could lead to more extreme outcomes in the future. 

The Sarmat missile silo seen before last week's launch attempt. [credit: Maxar Technologies ] Late last week, Russia's military planned to launch a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on a test flight from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Imagery captured over the weekend from commercial satellites suggests the missile exploded before or during launch. This is at least the second time an RS-28 Sarmat missile has failed in less than two years, dealing a blow to the country's nuclear forces days after the head of the Russian legislature issued a veiled threat to use the missile against Europe if Western allies approved Ukraine's use of long-range weapons against Russia. Commercial satellite imagery collected by Maxar and Planet show before-and-after views of the Sarmat missile silo at Plesetsk, a military base about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow. The view from one of Maxar's imaging satellites Saturday revealed unmistakable damage at the launch site, with a large crater centered on the opening to the underground silo.

ExxonMobil has misled consumers for years by perpetuating a “myth” about plastic recycling, according to a new lawsuit filed by the state of California. ExxonMobil is the world’s leading producer of single-use plastics that become waste, according to the state attorney general’s office. To encourage people to buy products made with single-use plastics, the suit alleges, ExxonMobil “deceived Californians for almost half a century by promising that recycling could and would solve the ever-growing plastic waste crisis.” Plastic is quite difficult to reuse, which is why very little of it is ever recycled. Promoting recycling as a cure-all for plastic waste can actually lead to more of it becoming...

Marvel's next team-up movie is bringing together a rowdy collection of supporting characters from prior films and shows, and some new faces from the comics.

Amazon Prime Day is one of the biggest shopping events of the year outside of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with this year’s autumnal incarnation (once again dubbed Prime Big Deal Days) running from October 8th through the 9th. The two-day shopping affair will likely grant Prime members access to some of the best prices of the year on Amazon devices, as well as products from Sony, Sonos, Peloton, Withings, and other well-known brands. This applies to items spanning a range of categories, including gaming peripherals, laptops, 4K TVs, phones, PC accessories, and more. As always, you can count on us to publish only the best deals during Prime Big Deal Days — as well as any worthwhile ones featured at Walmart, Best Buy, and other...

The excellent Delta emulator for iOS is going to get even better: sometime soon, the app will get support for online multiplayer in Nintendo DS games, according to Delta developer Riley Testut. Testut’s post about the feature includes a video of a Mario Kart DS race between two people being played on the emulator, and it immediately transported me back to playing the game on my own DS many years ago. Nintendo shut down the DS’s online services way back in 2014, so we asked Testut how the online services will work. “It’s based on melonDS’ online support, which connects to 3rd-party Nintendo [Wi-Fi Connection] servers (such as Kaeru, Wimmfi, AltWFC, etc),” Testut tells The Verge. “This means all 10 million+ Delta users will be able to...

Donald Trump wanted Nebraska Republicans to change the state’s electoral vote rules — in a way that would likely flip one electoral vote from Kamala Harris to him. But he may not have the votes to get it done — a key state senator confirmed Monday that he was still opposed to the rules change. Nebraska currently has an unusual way of distributing its five electoral votes. Rather than giving them all to the statewide winner — as 48 other states do — it awards two votes to the statewide winner, and the rest go to the winner in each of Nebraska’s three congressional districts.  Nebraska is a deep red state that Trump won by a 19-point margin in 2020. However, Joe Biden walked away with one of its electoral votes, because he won in Nebraska’s Second District, which includes the city of Omaha. Trump wants to switch this to a winner-take-all system, to lock down that vote. The stakes are enormous: the single electoral vote from Nebraska’s Second District really could determine whether Trump or Harris wins in 2024. If Harris wins Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, while Trump wins Nevada, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, and no other outcomes change from 2020, then Harris would need Nebraska’s Second District vote to win. If she doesn’t get it, the electoral vote would be a 269-269 tie. The new House of Representatives would break the tie with each state delegation getting one vote, and since Republicans will almost surely control more state delegations, that means a tie likely goes to Trump. An earlier Trump push to change Nebraska’s rules failed to get the votes back in April. And if it had succeeded, Democrats had an obvious option for a response: changing the rules in Maine. Maine is the only other state that splits its vote by congressional district, but there, the current rule benefits Trump — it delivered him one elector in a state Biden won. Democrats could, in theory, have changed Maine’s rules and cancel out any advantage gained by Trump. But Trump’s allies suddenly revived the Nebraska rules change effort last week, and that timing may not have been a coincidence: It is now too late for Maine to change its rules, since bills take 90 days after they are passed to become law in the state. Democrats cried foul across the country, characterizing this as a dirty trick — an attempt to steal the 2024 election. But on Monday, state Sen. Mike McDonnell — who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party earlier this year — said he was still opposed to the change. And if he holds firm, Republicans won’t have the votes. Beyond the angling for partisan advantage, it is true that Nebraska’s and Maine’s rules are kind of odd — quirky historical accidents that arguably should be brought in line with the way the other 48 states do it. The fair way to do it would be for both to change their rules in the same cycle, standardizing the winner-take-all rule without handing either candidate an advantage. The history of the Electoral College system is a bizarre one, but the modern norm of how it works is: each state holds a statewide vote, and the top candidate in that vote would get all of that state’s electors. That’s the winner-take-all system.  In the nation’s earliest decades, there was more variety. Some states didn’t give voters a direct say at all, letting state legislators simply pick electors. Others did hold a statewide vote, but counted the results in separate districts of the state, awarding electors that way.  The district system could allow regional differences to be represented. But it watered down a state’s impact on the national outcome, as compared to the winner-take-all system where all a state’s votes went to one candidate. And as partisan competition intensified, states flocked to winner-take-all — the district system was gone by the 1830s, and stayed gone for more than a century. Then, in the latter half of the 20th century, it came back. Two states decided to switch to a system where two electoral votes would go to the statewide winner, and one electoral vote to the winner in each congressional district. The first was Maine, in 1969, which adopted a proposal from an idiosyncratic legislator, whose apparent motivation was to help voters with different views be reflected in the Electoral College results. (Maine had used the district system back in the 1820s.) The second was Nebraska, in 1991, where legislators hoped to get presidential candidates to pay more attention to the state rather than writing off all its electoral votes as safely Republican. One might think that proposals like this would move the Electoral College closer to proportional representation — but often, these proposals are just partisan dirty tricks. Republicans in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have batted around the idea, believing gerrymandered congressional maps would guarantee them more than half the electors in swing states that more often lean Democratic. But Maine and Nebraska do not seem to have had partisan motivations — and at first, there was no partisan impact, or indeed, any impact, because the statewide winner kept also winning every congressional district in both states. As urban-rural partisan polarization intensified, that started to change. In 2008, Barack Obama won Nebraska’s Second District. Republicans responded by making the district more conservative in redistricting, but the underlying polarization trends continued and by 2020 Biden won it again. In Maine, the rural Second District swung to Trump in both 2016 and 2020. (Neither district was all that close in 2020 — Biden won NE-2 by 6.5 percentage points, and Trump won ME-2 by 7.5.) So we’ve ended up with a system where 48 states use winner-take-all, and then two states throw a stray electoral vote to someone every so often, which is pretty odd — just one of many ways the US’s method of picking a president is ridiculous. As partisanship and polarization have risen, Nebraska Republicans have attempted to respond. Back in 2016, they tried to switch to a winner-take-all electoral vote system. But there was a problem — the filibuster. Yes, the Cornhusker State is the rare state to have a legislative filibuster with a strong supermajority requirement. In fact, it’s stronger than the US Senate’s — a two-thirds vote, or 33 of 49 legislators, is necessary to overcome a filibuster in Nebraska. And though Republicans have regularly had big majorities, it’s proven maddeningly difficult for them to get over that hump. They fell just one vote short in 2016. This year’s initial push kicked off in April, when conservative activist Charlie Kirk wrote on X about a nightmare scenario for Trump supporters where Nebraska’s Second District could throw this year’s election to then-candidate Biden. He urged Nebraskans to “call their legislators and their governor to demand their state stop pointlessly giving strength to their political enemies.” Just hours later, Gov. Jim Pillen made his announcement that, “in response to a call out for his support,” he supported such a change, and Trump praised him in a Truth Social post. But many doubted that they had the votes. Republicans had 32 seats — one vote short of the 33 seats necessary to beat a filibuster. The plot thickened when a Democratic state senator, McDonnell, announced he was switching parties to the GOP — seemingly providing the necessary vote. Then the plot, er, thinned when McDonnell told Politico’s Elena Schneider that he would still support filibustering the electoral vote change. And when the proposal came to a vote, it wasn’t even close. But last week, Republicans tried again. Gov. Pillen called in state senators and urged them to make the change, and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) traveled to the state with the same ask. Initially, some reports indicated McDonnell was wavering. On Monday, though, McDonnell issued a statement saying he was still against it: “After deep consideration, it is clear to me that right now, 43 days from Election Day, is not the moment to make this change,” he said. Update, September 23, 4:45 pm ET: This article was originally published on April 3 and has been updated to reflect the new GOP effort to change Nebraska’s rules.

Why are two billionaires yelling at each other on X?

Assa Abloy, the major Swedish conglomerate that owns a whole lot of lock and security companies like Kwikset, Level lock, and the non-US version of Yale, is partnering with Boston Dynamics to build a new digital door access system that enables Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots autonomous entry into secured areas. The two intend to make it easier for companies to implement a robot security dog that can patrol buildings unfettered inside and outside. Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot has been equipped with digital access credentials that use Bluetooth to communicate with Assa Abloy’s HID-branded Signo readers, making it easy for the bots to pass through auto-opening doors. No need to tap a paw on the panel. Some companies like Asylon Robotics built...

Brandon Routh stars in the latest film from Joseph Kahn, director of Bodied, Detention, and Torque.

Enlarge Five years ago, researchers made a grim discovery—a legitimate Android app in the Google Play market that was surreptitiously made malicious by a library the developers used to earn advertising revenue. With that, the app was infected with code that caused 100 million infected devices to connect to attacker-controlled servers and download secret payloads. Now, history is repeating itself. Researchers from the same Moscow, Russia-based security firm reported Monday that they found two new apps, downloaded from Play 11 million times, that were infected with the same malware family. The researchers, from Kaspersky, believe a malicious software developer kit for integrating advertising capabilities is once again responsible. Software developer kits, better known as SDKs, are apps that provide developers with frameworks that can greatly speed up the app-creation process by streamlining repetitive tasks. An unverified SDK module incorporated into the apps ostensibly supported the display of ads. Behind the scenes, it provided a host of advanced methods for stealthy communication with malicious servers, where the apps would upload user data and download malicious code that could be executed and updated at any time.

Save nearly 50% on an electric cordless leaf blower with two batteries this Fall.