Democrats on the House Oversight Committee moved to subpoena tech billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk at a hearing Wednesday — and one Democrat was conspicuously missing from the vote, Rep. Ro Khanna of California, who represents Silicon Valley and has a longtime relationship with the billionaire.
Khanna said he missed the vote and said he was unaware it was happening — but three Democrats familiar with the run-up to the vote who were granted anonymity to describe what ensued said Democrats were given a heads-up about the maneuver to try to catch Republicans by surprise. Because of that prior notice and the congressman’s ties to Musk, the three Democrats accused Khanna of making an intentional decision to miss the vote.
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The three Democrats familiar with the planning said Khanna’s staff was properly notified about the vote ahead of time. A spokesperson for the California Democrat said “Congressman Khanna and his team had zero knowledge that this vote would be up.”
One senior Democratic aide said there was a member meeting Tuesday evening that Khanna missed to attend a meeting with the Progressive Caucus. Democrats also announced the motion to all staff and his staff was present on that call — and that the top Democrat on Oversight, Gerry Connolly, told the Democratic Caucus about the plan this morning, two people said.
“No staffer from our team was present on a call where this was announced,” the spokesperson for Khanna said.
There’s a lot of talk of cozy games these days, and Civilization is definitely my personal cozy game. It’s relaxing to get lost in a flow state, making “a series of interesting decisions” for “one more turn,” then another, late into the evening.
Change is almost definitionally not cozy, though, and Civilization VII changes quite a lot —especially about the game’s overall structure.
Frankly, I’ve long felt the series peaked with Civilization IV, at least for me. But after playing VII for a couple of dozen hours, there’s a chance it’s at least as good as Civilization V, and it has the potential to even match IV with just a little more refinement.
In this review, we’ll explore all the major changes, assess whether they are worth any trade-offs, and talk about why VII has the potential to be the best Civ game in recent memory.
Table of Contents
A specific kind of Civ player
Civilization is a franchise that caters to a broad range of players, and different people want different things from the games. It makes sense to clarify what kind of Civilization player I am so you know where I’m coming from and what kind of filter to run my take through.
I’ve played at least a few games of Civilization a year since Civilization II came out. All told, I probably have a cumulative 2,000 hours in the franchise. I skipped Civilization III, and I played the most in the Civilization IV era, when I played weekly hotseat games with my friends in college. I frequently played the 1,000 AD scenario solo. I continued to play Civilization V, but a little less than IV. When Civilization VI came out, I wasn’t as big a fan. I’ve played maybe two full games a year after an initial 50 or so hours when it first arrived.
I’ve usually played on low to mid difficulty levels and have enjoyed the inevitable march to victory. I did work my way up through the difficulty levels in V while Steam achievement-hunting, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as taking a relaxed approach.
I’ve spent comparatively little time playing other 4X games. I had a couple of weeks where I got really into Endless Legend, but it didn’t stick long-term. I played a lot of Master of Orion II back in the day, but I’ve only played a couple dozen hours of Stellaris. I did, however, obsessively play Alpha Centauri. I also love The Battle of Polytopia.
If VI was your favorite Civ game, if you always play on Deity, or if you’re a hardcore player who plays 5,000 hours a year, just know that I’m coming at this from a different place than you are. I hope you can still filter through that and find the information you need here, though.
This review is based on two full-length playthroughs of all three ages of Civilization VII, plus a little extra dabbling—a total of about 35 hours. I mostly played on a Windows PC, but I also tested the game briefly on a Steam Deck. The Mac, Linux, and console versions were not made available to me.
Let’s dig in.
The ages of civilization
Civilization VII overhauls the structure of a Civilization game more radically than we’ve ever seen. Whereas previous games had “eras” (Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, Modern, Atomic, Information, and Future in VI) that acted as a soft structure for how the game progressed, VII cuts everything down to just three and names them “ages”—Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern.
(This is not to be confused with the boom/bust system of the dark and golden ages in VI.)
As in earlier titles, exploring with scouts plays a big role in the first age.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
But unlike the eras of yore, VII’s ages are presented and play almost as distinct games. Ages do not just mark the passage of time; transitioning from one to another involves significant changes to the map and objectives in the game, with a summary screen displayed during each transition.
Each age has its own tech and culture trees, buildings and units, and even unique victory conditions and game systems. For example, the system of spreading religions around the globe with missionaries and tracking the religious makeup of cities is exclusive to Exploration, even though there are some more basic applications of religion in Antiquity.
Legacy paths
Each age has its own “legacy paths” corresponding to the different victory types: economic, military, science, and culture. These paths include a sequence of objectives that must be fulfilled to gain points that are tallied at the end of the age to determine rankings and decide which options you have for bonuses to start with if you continue to the next age.
For example, the science legacy path in Exploration involves using specialists (urban population who build up the yields of tiles that have already been developed) to optimize city districts with very high yields, whereas the path in Modern involves using city production to build major flight and spaceflight projects.
All players transition from one age to another at once when enough progress has accumulated (either in just one path or all of them). The final legacy path, for Modern, is the path to the game’s ultimate win conditions.
Legacy paths map to victory conditions and give you a linear series of objectives with which you can gain points that assist you in starting the next age with an advantage.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
You can check how far the various leaders are along each legacy path.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
During the age transition, you can see what bonuses your actions in the previous age will offer you in the upcoming one.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
Legacy points from the previous age can be applied to bonuses as soon as the new age starts.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
Each age has its own civic and tech trees, and there are unique civic trees for each civilization, too.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
As an age nears its end, a “crisis” can happen that affects everyone. In one example, the plague begins to spread around the world toward the end of Exploration. Each crisis has some unique gameplay elements, including “crisis cards,” which force you to pick between some negative effects for your civilization to face as you tackle the problem.
After an age is complete, the crisis ends, a recap screen is shown, and you get to spend “legacy points” (which you accumulated by following the legacy paths) to gain bonuses or choose specializations for your civilization that apply when you start the next age.
You also pick a new civilization for the next age, which brings us to the other major overhaul to the game’s formula.
Leaders and civilizations
As in all prior titles, you select a leader to play as when you start a new game, and that leader has unique bonuses or mechanics that affect how you would optimally play the game.
But whereas leaders were tied to specific civilizations before, now they’re not. You can play as Benjamin Franklin, King of Persia. Those concerned with historical accuracy won’t love this change, though the developer clearly designed the leaders to have some mechanical synergy with historically appropriate civilizations; these pairings are even given special labeling in the civilization-selection screen.
When an age transition happens, though, you have to pick a completely new civilization—but not just any. Several factors contribute to the list of options. The civilization you picked and which things you accomplished in the previous age make up the bulk of those factors. Again, the game nudges you toward civs that make loose sense historically (I went from Isabella leading Rome in Antiquity to Isabella leading Spain in Exploration), but it’s possible in some cases to do something different.
You pick your leader first, and then "historical" civilization choices for each leader are labeled with a special icon.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
This is the screen for picking a civilization when the age switch happens. As you can see, some are locked while others are available.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
This fits a general theme in Civilization VII of modeling the way cultures and cities in our own world are built in layers. For example, London was a Roman city before the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings built their own settlements on top of it.
To that point, you can "overbuild" buildings relevant in later ages to replace ones that were specific to an earlier age, which not-so-coincidentally helps solve the problem from VI of having to work around legacy decisions when working on optimizing your districts.
Does it work, and is it still Civ?
This controversial change to civilizations allows the game’s designers to better fine-tune civilizations’ bonuses, units, and buildings. Since they can be age-specific, they can tie deeply into mechanics that are endemic to a specific age. It also addresses the franchise’s long-standing balance problem of certain civilizations having an advantage in one part of a game’s trajectory but being weak in another.
Likewise, putting strong guardrails around each of the three ages allows the designers to refine and balance certain gameplay systems to interact with each other better. It’s much easier to design a system that only has to be fun in a certain context than it is to produce one that needs to stay relevant and interesting throughout every phase of the game. The modern age ends up feeling less beleaguered with too much stuff to keep track of since some things that are no longer relevant are removed from the field.
It also acts as a catch-up or rubber-banding device. Civilization has long been criticized for the tendency of its games to snowball early. Establishing a lead in the first few eras could sometimes all but guarantee the final outcome, making the back half of the game seem like a pointless exercise to some.
Since the age transitions in VII put all civs on relatively equal footing with regard to tech trees and so on, that’s less of a problem. Of course, there are still the era points to spend to make your successes or failures earlier on more meaningful—they're just not as game-defining. Plus, your settlements and territories from the previous age remain.
There are some downsides besides pedantry about historical accuracy, too. Most notably, the last 15 or so turns of an age can be a bit of a bummer.
That’s because buildings and units late in an age’s tech or culture trees end up being mostly irrelevant as a result of the hard reset that happens so soon after you acquire them. I also found myself incentivized to slow my civilization’s progress to delay age transitions to get things optimally set up for the start of the next one, which feels unnatural and unintended.
RIP busywork
Amid a number of changes to the civilization formula, another one stands out: workers (called builders in VI) are no more. Instead of ordering a unit to build improvements, you do so directly from the city view each time the city grows.
On one hand, this is a simplification at a time when a lot of people want their grand strategy games to get deeper and more complex. But I feel that it’s a good change. Workers always became unwieldy as the scale of your empire grew, and many players just ended up automating them by the later eras.
The change also allows building rural improvements to integrate more neatly with the urban district system introduced in VI and refined here.
Worker units have been replaced by a centralized city management screen.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
As seen in the bottom right, a number of military units have been grouped in with this commander.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
You can level up commanders, and there are multiple talent trees for each, emphasizing different uses.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
There are other refinements that reduce unit-based busywork, too. One of the reasons IV is my favorite game in the series is that it’s the last one with “stacks of death,” where you’d pile multiple military units onto one tile and move them as a group.
When stacks of death were replaced by a one-unit-of-each-type-per-hex approach in V, I felt it made moving armies in the late game an infuriatingly tedious process that wasn’t worth the added tactical complexity.
Firaxis has struck an ideal middle ground in VII. You can now pack up to five units into a single-hex-occupying group with a military commander unit. You then just have to move that one unit to the front line before deploying everyone and commanding them individually in battle.
It’s a great change! (Rivers are also fully navigable by naval units, by the way—another change that makes getting around a lot easier.)
Small town, big city
I mentioned that you now manage hex improvements via the city view. There are some other changes to cities to cover. First off, newly founded settlements start as towns, not cities. Towns can’t produce buildings or units normally, but you can purchase a subset of options with gold.
They grow by similar rules to cities, and they have multiple specialization options that customize how they benefit your wider civilization. You can spend gold to convert them to cities, and it costs less gold to do so the more they grow. There are pros and cons to each classification, and you’ll almost always end up going with a balance, regardless of the age.
There’s a settlement limit that is affected by ages, civics, and technologies. Capturing or founding towns or cities beyond that limit comes with big penalties and is almost never worth it.
City tiles sprawl out across the map. In this case, we have a Los Angeles-like situation where a sort of megalopolis has formed out of several cities growing into each other.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
Towns have specializations that change the role they have in your civilization.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
There's a centralized resource assignment panel for distributing resources (and their bonuses) across all your settlements of all types
Credit:
Samuel Axon
All told, I liked these systems. They’re big changes, but they feel natural. I wouldn’t tweak much about them.
This “towns” classification is also relevant to what used to be known as city-states. Barbarians and city-states have merged into one concept, called independents. These are single-settlement AI civs that are either hostile or friendly. I really enjoyed this system, as it allowed me to gradually befriend independents, convert them into towns I control through diplomacy, and ultimately upgrade them to cities within my civilization. It’s a satisfying progression.
You court independent settlements by spending a new yield called influence, which is the foundation of a significant overhaul of how diplomacy and espionage work in the game.
How to win friends and influence people
I hated the way diplomacy and war weariness worked in VI, especially at launch. I felt that the AI was hyper-focused on baiting me into wars, and if I ever responded in kind, it was too difficult to avoid all the AI leaders turning on me because they didn’t like what I was doing. Often, I would just ignore diplomacy and end up at war with almost everyone rather than engage with the systems the game had in place for managing all that.
VII’s approach is much more straightforward. As noted, there’s a new yield called influence, and it sits alongside gold, science, and so on. It’s produced passively by certain buildings and the like. It has multiple uses, but all of them relate to affecting your relationships with other powers on the map.
You can use it to build favor with independent cities, levy their troops, or ultimately bring them into your civilization. You can use it to offer trade deals to or denounce other rulers. It’s also the resource used for espionage, like stealing technologies or sabotaging space race production.
That’s not where it stops, though. When other leaders offer you a deal of some kind, you’re given the option to spend a small amount of influence to prevent the deal from happening, no influence to accept the deal on terms that are slightly more beneficial for them, or a larger amount of influence to shift the terms of the deal to be significantly better for both of you.
You can spend influence on everything from treaties to espionage.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
Influence is used to build favor with, leverage, and ultimately acquire independent settlements.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
Most critically, it plays a role in a system of war support. When a war occurs between two civilizations, every leader in the game (not just those two) can spend influence to support one side or another. The side with the most support suffers significantly less war weariness and fewer diplomatic consequences for the continuation of the war.
If you have high influence yields and pour it all into supporting a war that’s important to you strategically, you can put yourself in a much better position.
It works extremely well, and it simplifies a lot of disparate systems that have been tried in Civ over the years into one coherent thing that’s much easier to understand and manage than ever before.
Of all the major additions in Civilization VII, this is my favorite. For the first time, I find diplomacy fun instead of a chore.
Grab bag: Steam Deck, minor gripes, and hopes for the future
Those are the big categories of changes in VII, but there are a few things of note that don’t neatly fit into any of these buckets, so let’s rapid-fire through a few.
Steam Deck, consoles, and controller support
Consoles have always been a footnote in the Civilization franchise’s storied history. There was Civilization Revolution, a stripped-down version of the game that came out on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. (It was better than you’d think if you approached it on its own terms, but it wasn’t the desktop PC Civ experience by any stretch.)
Civilization VI got ports for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Switch, but the ports were not very good at all. The game was playable, but the ports were definitely an afterthought.
So it’s interesting that Civilization VII will have PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch versions launching the same day as the PC, Mac, and Linux ones. Along with that, the game is Steam Deck Verified—which wasn’t even a concept when the last Civ game came out.
I wasn’t given access to the console versions during this review period, but I was able to try it out on Steam Deck, which gave me a sense of how it plays with a controller interface.
The left stick moves between tiles to select, while the right stick moves the camera and changes the zone the left stick affects. You tap A to select something and B to back out, while the left and right triggers can be used to zoom in and out. Pressing the right bumper brings up a radial menu that gives you access to everything from the tech tree to different leaders with whom you can engage in diplomacy. The remaining buttons are direct shortcuts to commonly used features, like mini-map options (yields and so on).
<em>Civilization VII</em> running on the Steam Deck.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
It works pretty well! It’s not as natural as using a mouse, of course, but it’s a big improvement on the mess that the console versions of VI presented you.
The game seemed to perform OK most of the time on low settings and the native 1280×800 resolution on the Steam Deck, but the exception was zooming in on large, sprawling cities in the late game. I saw some stutters and framerate chugging in that situation. That’s not a game-breaking problem in a turn-based game, but it's annoying. It's possible that more performance optimization will come later.
The performance is inconsistent enough to give me pause about recommending playing on Steam Deck; you’re probably better off using your laptop to play when you’re traveling. That said, the controller configuration (which is also an option on PC, by the way) is good enough that I’m optimistic about the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S versions. It's hard to imagine the game running well on the Switch, though, given that the much more powerful Steam Deck barely squeaks through.
UI bugs aplenty at launch
I believe the version I’m playing right now is the day-one release version (or close to it), so it’s worth mentioning I’ve run into some annoying UI bugs.
For example:
I have to click several times to get it to register, or sometimes deselect and re-select the unit, to make ranged military units fire on units in other hexes.
In one game, I just could not create trade routes. I'd select the merchant, click on the target city, and nothing would happen. It's possible this was not a bug and that there was instead some reason in the game's mechanics for why I couldn't do it at this stage that I didn't understand, but there was no feedback about why it wasn't working.
There are some instances (like in the religion panel) where mouse wheel scrolling simultaneously scrolled the list in the panel while also zooming the map view behind it.
This is the sort of stuff that will almost surely be fixed quickly, but it’s good to be aware if you’re planning on playing on launch day.
Some of the balance is a little wonky
As is the case for all games like this, there are a few systems that will need some post-launch refinement. Most notably, the balance between building units or buildings with gold versus production feels way off. By around the middle of the Exploration Age, I found myself using gold to purchase things far more than I bothered waiting on production. You just have too much gold in the late game. I imagine Firaxis will rein this in.
Launch content is light
Civilization VII offers arguably the most complexity, depth, and breadth of systems of any Civilization game pre-expansion. That’s great! Yeah, there are some standards missing I imagine might come in expansions later, like the World Congress or nukes. But compared to earlier games, there’s more here on day one than usual.
That said, the actual content is pretty bare-bones. There aren’t a ton of leaders right now—though many more are planned within just a few months, according to Firaxis’ roadmap.
More critically, there are no scenarios at all, and there’s no mention of scenarios in the roadmap. Scenarios were always some of my favorite experiences in prior games, so that’s a disappointment. I hope Firaxis announces some plans on this front soon and that we won’t have to wait for a paid expansion to get something that has usually been part of the core of earlier titles.
There are some additions in this iteration that weren't there before to make the game stickier and reward long-term play, though. For example, completing an age with a specific leader levels them up, granting access to modifier cards you can use on future games with that leader. These aren't enough to make them radically more powerful; they're more like small extra tweaks to make it worth revisiting them. There's also a large library of challenges to complete.
You can earn mementos by leveling your leaders up while playing; these can be used to grant modest gameplay modifiers for future games or ages.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
Also, multiplayer is pretty bare-bones feature-wise at launch, but Firaxis says it's planning on addressing that within a few weeks.
You can’t rename your cities
I am afraid to even write this out because it seems like such a glaringly obvious omission that I almost assume I’m just an idiot and haven’t been able to find the right thing to click. But I’ve looked and looked, and I’m pretty sure you can’t rename cities at all. That’s very perplexing.
A new age
Change might not be cozy, but some of these changes have made a meaningful difference in countering Civilization's longest-standing frustrations—late-game fatigue, snowballing, and frustrating diplomacy, among other things.
If you're coming to Civilization with historical accuracy in mind, the divorce between leaders and civilizations will bug you. I will remind you, though, that this is a game infamous for Gandhi warmongering with nuclear weapons, so that's not new. (Notably, Gandhi is not a leader in Civilization VII, though I had an amusingly similar situation with Harriet Tubman taking a violent, scorched-earth approach to diplomacy.)
It's worth it because it expands the strategic depth of the game while also addressing some classic balance problems.
Firaxis has added significantly more structure to Civilization here. The game is not as sandbox-y as previous versions, as objectives within ages are much more clearly articulated. Fortunately, it drops the arbitrary objectives that dominated VI in that game's eureka and dark/golden age systems, so I feel it's a happier medium.
It was always going to be a challenge to make yet another Civilization game while retaining the guts that have been around for 34 years. Even though the structural changes are arguably radical, I believe they have more justification and upside than the ones we saw in VI, making VII feel like a return to form.
Systems-wise, Civilization VII is the most complete pre-expansion package we've seen in a long time. There are plenty of refinements and additions I'd like to see, but my general impressions are positive. This is still the best recent 4X game out there.
Let's see if future expansions and mod support have the potential to make it the best Civilization yet after it launches on February 11. It's not there yet, but there's ample reason to hope.
The good
The ages system helps to solve many longstanding problems with the overall arc of a Civilization game
Influence yield makes diplomacy better than it's ever been
Tweaks and additions turn building city districts into the full realization of what VI was hinting at but never achieved
The visual presentation is excellent, with sprawling, intricate cities and detailed leaders
Several additions streamline annoying busywork the franchise is known for without curtailing depth
The bad
Content is light even though systems are robust; there are no scenarios at all
The final few turns of an age end up feeling wonky
You can't rename your cities for some reason
The ugly
Some bugs and balance issues might make it worth waiting a few weeks before digging in
Marvel's teaser for The Fantastic Four: First Steps, coming to theaters in July.
We haven't heard much lately about The Fantastic Four: First Steps apart from last year at San Diego Comic-Con, when attendees were treated to an exclusive preview teaser set in a 1960s retro-futuristic New York City, with the foursome blasting off into space for an unspecified mission. But Marvel Studios just dropped a one-minute teaser for the film, which will kick off the MCU's Phase Six this summer.
Marvel Comics' "First Family" hasn't been seen on the big screen since 2015's disastrous reboot of the moderately successful films from the 2000s. Per the official premise:
Set against the vibrant backdrop of a 1960s-inspired, retro-futuristic world, The Fantastic Four: First Steps introduces Marvel’s First Family—Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Sue Storm/Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm/Human Torch, and Ben Grimm/The Thing as they face their most daunting challenge yet. Forced to balance their roles as heroes with the strength of their family bond, they must defend Earth from a ravenous space god called Galactus (Ralph Ineson) and his enigmatic Herald, Silver Surfer (Julia Garner). And if Galactus’ plan to devour the entire planet and everyone on it weren’t bad enough, it suddenly gets very personal.
Pedro Pascal plays Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic; Vanessa Kirby plays Sue Storm/Invisible Woman; Joseph Quinn plays Johnny Storm/Human Torch; and Ebon Moss-Bachrach plays Ben Grimm/The Thing. His Thing appearance is a combination of motion capture and CGI rather than heavy prosthetics, and director Matt Shakman consulted scientists and drew inspiration from desert rocks for the character's design. The cast also includes Paul Walter Hauser, John Malkovich, Natasha Lyonne, and Sarah Niles in as-yet-undisclosed roles, and the character of Mole Man is expected to appear.
There is also a rumored post-credits scene featuring Robert Downey, Jr. as Victor von Doom/Doctor Doom, the primary antagonist for Avengers: Doomsday (2026), with the Russo brothers returning to direct. This will be followed by the Russo-directed Avengers: Secret Wars (2027). The Russo brothers confirmed that the Fantastic Four will also appear in their two Avengers movies.
The teaser mostly introduces us to the four central characters, who are already famous (this doesn't seem to be another origin story), and their specific powers. They're living together in the Baxter Building, where they try to have dinner together at least once a week. In fact, Ben/The Thing shows a knack for the culinary arts as he oversees a robot's (H.E.R.B.I.E.) efforts to create a dish: "I wanna add a couple cloves of garlic not because it's not delicious, I just wanna add a little bit of zip."
The teaser ends with a brief glimpse of Ineson's Galactus, an ominous, shadowy figure looming over Manhattan, as Sue assures Reed, "Whatever life throws at us, we'll face it together... as a family."
Verdict: We like the retro styling and tone of the teaser, which evokes the classic comics. Here's hoping the film as a whole can match it.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps hits theaters on July 25, 2025.
Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali star in Jurassic World Rebirth.
The raptors are back with a host of ravenous friends in the official trailer for Jurassic World Rebirth, the fourth installment in the Jurassic World series and seventh film overall in the franchise spawned by 1993's Jurassic Park.
(Some spoilers for Jurassic World Dominion below.)
The franchise has been lumbering along for over 20 years now with mixed success, but Jurassic World Dominion (2022) at least gave Universal a bona fide box office hit to counter all the negative reviews, grossing just over $1 billion worldwide. (It has a mere 29 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes.) That film ended with dinosaurs and humans figuring out how to co-exist, the establishment of a dino sanctuary by the United Nations, and the evil corporation BioSyn in disgrace.
This time around, Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali step into the leading roles since the film is meant to be a fresh start for the franchise—although it does feature a return to the original research facility. Gareth Edwards—who directed 2014's Godzilla—signed on to direct a script penned by David Koepp, who wrote the scripts for Jurassic Park and The Lost World (1997). (Koepp also directed 1999's Stir of Echoes, one of my longtime faves.)
Per the official premise:
Five years after the events of Jurassic World Dominion, the planet’s ecology has proven largely inhospitable to dinosaurs. Those remaining exist in isolated equatorial environments with climates resembling the one in which they once thrived. The three most colossal creatures across land, sea, and air within that tropical biosphere hold, in their DNA, the key to a drug that will bring miraculous life-saving benefits to humankind.
Johansson plays skilled covert operations expert Zora Bennett, contracted to lead a skilled team on a top-secret mission to secure the genetic material. When Zora’s operation intersects with a civilian family whose boating expedition was capsized by marauding aquatic dinos, they all find themselves stranded on a forbidden island that had once housed an undisclosed research facility for Jurassic Park. There, in a terrain populated by dinosaurs of vastly different species, they come face-to-face with a sinister, shocking discovery that has been hidden from the world for decades.
The cast also includes Rupert Friend as pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs; Jonathan Bailey as paleontologist Henry Loomis; Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Reuben Delgado, whose family is shipwrecked; Luna Blaise as Reuben's older daughter; David Iacano as Reuben's son; Audrina Miranda as Reuben's younger daughter; and Bechir Sylvain as one of Zora's team members. Ed Skrein and Philippine Velge will also appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles.
Jurassic World Rebirth hits theaters on July 2, 2025.
It's been a confusing 24 hours at the US Postal Service (USPS) after the Trump administration imposed new tariffs on China that eliminated a loophole allowing low-value Chinese packages into the US duty-free.
On Tuesday, the USPS abruptly stopped accepting all inbound packages from Hong Kong and China. This briefly halted personal shipments from China, as well as online deliveries from China-based companies. That included blocking orders from online marketplaces increasingly popular with Americans like Alibaba, Temu, and Shein, as well as China-based retailers selling cheap goods on Amazon.
But by Wednesday morning, the USPS reversed the temporary policy, posting an international service notice clarifying that the USPS and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) "are working closely together to implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery."
"Least" is doing a lot of work in that statement, as it remains unclear how many deliveries could still be disrupted by USPS and CBP's inspection process change.
According to Wired, the e-commerce industry was immediately "thrown into chaos" by the USPS changes. One Canadian trucking company owner, identified only as Daniel, told Wired that many trucks were turned away at the US border yesterday, with his own trucks sometimes only passing through if drivers agreed to dump all packages from China.
Sorting through "thousands of small parcels" to find the China shipments was "arduous," Daniel noted, but CBP appeared intent on monitoring every truck.
"They were actually going through the trucks and randomly checking the packages," Daniel told Wired.
Trump has ordered CBP to check shipments for illegal drugs, accusing China and other trade partners of flooding the US with fentanyl. CBP reported that the US was bombarded with more than 1.36 billion low-value shipments last year, making it harder to detect illicit shipments. That's nearly 10 times more packages exploiting the "de minimis" loophole than in 2015. In 2024, Temu and Shein together shipped an estimated 30 percent of packages that entered the US daily, The Washington Post reported.
Previously, platforms paid no extra costs on those shipments if they were valued below $800. But now, Chinese importers will be subject to a regular 16 percent tariff, a 7.5 percent Section 301 duty specifically for goods from China, and the latest 10 percent tariff, Wired noted. And experts have no idea yet how those taxes will impact the prices of Chinese goods shipped to the US.
Everybody caught off guard by sudden USPS change
Americans who love spinning wheels on sites like Temu for deals may be in for a rude awakening, as may shoppers who considered platforms like Temu a cheaper alternative to Amazon.
According to Modern Retail, a media brand tracking the latest trends in the retail industry, part of the problem overwhelming CBP and USPS could even be savvy online shoppers ordering the same item from both Amazon and a rival Chinese platform, trying to get the best of both worlds. Through the reported scheme, shoppers figured out that they can get items faster through Amazon but cheaper through Chinese platforms, so they simply return the item arriving later from the Chinese platform to Amazon, securing a refund at the higher price and enjoying more savings.
As the number of incoming packages continued to spike, officials have increasingly warned that something must be done to stop Chinese platforms like Temu and Alibaba from exploiting the de minimis loophole and "outmaneuvering regulators to grow a dominant US market presence."
Trump's sudden removal of the loophole for China followed through on a Biden administration effort to curb de minimis imports, which the Post noted would have occurred after a weeks-long rule-making process. But Trump's move caught many parties off guard—Chinese platforms, their customers, and US customs officials who weren't prepared to implement new screening processes.
The USPS says it will be working with CBP to screen packages, collect new tariffs, and monitor every inbound package, as Americans will likely continue to order cheap goods from China as long as they remain cheap.
Kate Muth, executive director of the International Mailers Advisory Group, which represents shippers and logistics firms, told the Post that the halt on inbound packages from China triggered an "expectation" that "you’ll be paying more as a consumer, and it may take a little longer to reach you," but until the screening process is finalized, the threat of increased prices and delays seemingly still looms. One financial analyst, Yin Lam, warned in a CNBC report that checking every package "is difficult" and "will take time," posing a "significant challenge" for the USPS and CBP.
If Chinese sellers decide to raise prices to cover the new costs of shipping goods into the US—or if deliveries simply take too long—Americans may stop using any platforms offering the same item at a potentially similar cost that could arrive sooner from Amazon.
Both Temu and Shein have already shifted their business models to keep more inventory in the US, but so far, they have not commented on the potential impacts of new tariffs on their platforms.
China urges Trump to “stop politicizing” trade
China has responded to tariffs by launching investigations into Google, Nvidia, and, reportedly, Apple. Additionally, China has threatened to sue the US through the World Trade Organization. But China seems to already be growing tired of the tit-for-tat in the escalating US-China trade war. Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, promised this week to defend Chinese businesses and urged Trump to "stop politicizing economic and trade issues."
"China will continue to take necessary measures to firmly safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies," he said.
On Tuesday, Rep. Jason T. Smith (R-Mo.), the House Ways and Means Committee chair, issued a statement defending restricting Chinese platforms from exploiting the de minimis rule.
"The Ways and Means Committee has spent significant time investigating the use of de minimis by China and other nations to undermine our trade enforcement tariffs and skirt compliance with US law," Smith said. "The effect of increased abuse of the de minimis privilege has been to deny the US Government collection of billions of dollars in additional revenues while unfairly disadvantaging American manufacturers."
But the top Democrat on Smith's committee, Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.), told the Post that Congress should be driving trade policy to ensure changes aren't rushed without adequate safeguards.
"The one consistency of Trump’s trade war is the lack of foresight," Neal said. "This would be easily avoidable if anyone knew what they were doing and proves yet again why our trade policy must come from the Congress."
Ram Ben Tzion, cofounder and CEO of a digital shipment vetting platform called Publican, told Wired that for the shipping industry watching and waiting to see what happens next, "this is the administration’s version of moving fast and breaking things."
Let's Encrypt has been providing free "wildcard" certificates for websites for nearly seven years, enabling HTTPS connections for millions of domains and doing the whole Internet a real solid.
Now the nonprofit is ending a useful service, but in an exceedingly rare happenstance, it's probably a good thing for everyone. Starting June 4, 2025, Let's Encrypt will no longer notify its subscribers that their certification is about to expire and needs renewal. Some hosting providers automatically obtain and manage certificates from Let's Encrypt, so there's not much for them to do. Everyone else will have to do something, and likely it will still be free and automated.
Let's Encrypt is ending automated emails for four stated reasons, and all of them are pretty sensible. For one thing, lots of customers have been able to automate their certificate renewal. For another, providing the expiration notices costs "tens of thousands of dollars per year" and adds complexity to the nonprofit's infrastructure as they are looking to add new and more useful services.
If those were not enough, there is this particularly notable reason:
Providing expiration notification emails means that we have to retain millions of email addresses connected to issuance records. As an organization that values privacy, removing this requirement is important to us.
Let's Encrypt recommends using Red Sift Certificates Lite to monitor certificate expirations, a service that is free for up to 250 certificates. The service also points to other options, including Datadog SSL monitoring and TrackSSL.
It's pretty hard to fault Let's Encrypt for wanting to streamline and cut costs to focus on its mission, given its proven success at that mission so far. The Internet Security Research Group's signing authority is well on its way to achieving its goal of a 100 percent web encryption rate, having gone from new offering to 1 billion certificates in just over four years. By providing a stable protocol (ACME), free of charge, Let's Encrypt removed the painful paperwork, nominal charges that added up across domains, and web server configuration headaches of encrypting a site.
HTTPS (encrypted) webpage percentage on the web, as measured by Firefox.
Credit:
Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt certificates issued per day, per Let's Encrypt.
Credit:
Let's Encrypt
As seen on its stats page, Let's Encrypt peaked at offering just under 8 million encryption certificates per day in December 2024 and has seen the percentage of HTTPS webpages climb steadily from just under 30 percent in 2014 to more than 80 percent throughout 2024.
Of course, if you're an understimulated home sysadmin and feel the need to roll your own certificate authority, Ars' Lee Hutchinson has a whole guide to doing just that.