This article contains spoilers for the House of the Dragon Season 3 finale.

House of the Dragon is not making a habit out of quiet finales. Viewers who grumbled over the anticlimax of Season 2 must have been pleased with Sunday’s Season 3 finale, which one-upped the previous episode’s Sunfyre resurrection and brûléeing of many soldiers loyal to Rhaenyra with a Battle of Tumbleton that torched the city; left thousands of casualties Black,  Green, and civilian; and ended both Ormund Hightower’s (James Norton) kingmaking ambitions and his life. Major character deaths weren’t even limited to the battlefield: RIP Helaena, for one, too good for Westeros and for her family. I’ll miss Phia Saban’s quietly resolute performance.

You wouldn’t be wrong to place the blame for the battle’s carnage as well as Helaena’s spiky suicide on Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy). It’s she who, after some handwringing, orders Daemon (Matt Smith) to lay siege to Tumbleton and “root out every Hightower and kill them to the last man.” She also has a captive, pregnant, hunger-striking Helaena violently force-fed. Anti-Rhaenyra sentiment is festering, even within the Red Keep. Until this season, she has been Dragon’s default hero, bravely defending her right to succeed her father against a Green faction whose loyalty to Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) basically comes down to misogyny, despite wrenching personal losses. But now that she sits the Iron Throne, the show is making us—like the starving peasants she has yet to materially help—question whether she is truly the great leader she’s convinced she can be. I don’t know that she is, or that anyone could be in similar circumstances. She’s still the hero of this story, though, even if she turns out to be a tragic one.

The finale opens with Rhaenyra waking to the news that Aegon is alive, and that his return—with a still-quite-lethal Sunfyre, no less—after she declared him dead makes him some kind of messiah. Understandably, she panics, cursing the memory of Viserys (Paddy Considine) for putting her in such a terrible situation. “His prophecy has tested me again and again, and I have met its every challenge!” she complains to Daemon. He takes the opportunity to remind her of her Targaryen supremacy. So, how should she wield it? “The only quality the realm understands is strength,” Daemon says. It’s enough to get him dispatched to Tumbleton.

Baela (Bethany Antonia) urges Rhaenyra to have Lord Corlys (Steve Toussaint) rescued from the Hightowers’ clutches while Black forces are in town. He is, after all, the Hand of the Queen, and he’s sacrificed mightily for her cause. Also: “It was your fault” the Sea Snake was captured in the first place, Baela says. When Rhaenyra seems less than enthusiastic about helping him, Baela really goes off on her. “If a person is useful to you, you wield them,” she accuses. “But if not, you abandon them.” This may be true. A few scenes later, Rhaenyra abruptly banishes her paramour Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno)—through a minion, no less. (Mysaria does get a nice severance package.) But doesn’t a responsible sovereign have to be ready to throw her friends and family under the bus in service of what she believes to be the greater good of the kingdom? I mean, wasn’t that the takeaway of six seasons of Matt Smith’s other show, The Crown? Of course, as with Elizabeth’s real-life refusal to let her sister marry a divorced man, the question of whether it’s actually prudent for the monarchy to deprioritize saving Corlys is a different matter.

It isn’t just Baela who rips into Rhaenyra in her own home. Helaena’s force-feeding comes after a heated encounter with the Queen. “You cannot think I would harm you,” says Rhaenyra, who must still see herself as a merciful person. (That she has thugs shoving gruel down Helaena’s throat seconds later suggests an alarming lack of self-awareness.) Helaena’s retort: “Do you think life is nothing more than not being dead? Our father would hate you for this.” She’s right. But Rhaenyra is also correct when she points out to her half-sister that Viserys’ dithering over succession is what put them in this predicament in the first place. Then again, there’s truth to Helaena’s scathing final blow: “All the things you care about are ugly. This place is ugly. You, yourself, are ugly.” 

Helaena is Dragon’s Cassandra; her supernatural prescience and big-picture perspective make her perhaps the wisest character this side of Game of Thrones’ Bran the Broken. (This makes the embroidered portrait of Rhaenyra on a bloody Iron Throne that is, in effect, her suicide note, particularly foreboding.) If you take “the things you care about” and “this place” to mean power and King’s Landing—or Westeros at large—she’s reiterating a core theme of A Song of Ice and Fire. Like anyone vying for a throne, Rhaenyra is playing a brutal, yes, game. Would it be a more just or humane game, though, if she forfeited? Would it have a better long-term outcome? 

Rhaenyra doesn’t think so. And unlike Aegon or Aemond (Ewan Mitchell), whose kingly ambitions don’t seem grounded in anything more than entitlement and will to power, she is actually taking Westeros’ future into consideration when she clings to her birthright. Not only does she ascend the Iron Throne with the intention of helping the small folk, but she also sincerely believes in the Song of Ice and Fire prophecy—a prophecy that Thrones viewers know will, whether self-fulfilling or not, both lead to great destruction and, ultimately, prove instrumental in saving humanity from extinction via White Walker. This is why we see her, in the finale, demand to be anointed by the High Septon (Gary Raymond) and order Alyn (Abubakar Salim) to kill him when he refuses. She isn’t betraying the Seven, exactly, because her fealty is to the prophecy and to her Valyrian ancestors. She believes she’s answering a higher calling. 

Tragedy lies in the gulf between beliefs or intentions and reality. In the Battle of Tumbleton, it’s Daemon rejecting Gwayne (Freddie Fox) and Daeron’s (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) plea for peace, taking offense at Corlys’ further attempts at diplomacy, exhorting his army to avoid excessive casualties because “the Queen’s moral standing must remain absolute”—and then presiding over a grisly mass slaughter against an enemy that makes terrified children cannon fodder. Because he is carrying out her order to decimate the Hightowers, in defiance of Corlys’ plan for victory without bloodshed, Rhaenyra is just as responsible for these atrocities as Daemon. A tragic hero has the most noble aims but, due to some intrinsic character flaw or external factor (a sexist society, say, or misplaced faith) ends up doing the wrong thing for the right reasons. Rhaenyra seems to be heading in this unfortunate direction, but she’s no villain. We’ll find out in the show’s last act whether her heroism proves to be triumphant or tragic.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the House of the Dragon Season 3 finale.

It's been a good six episodes since Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy) at long last seized the Iron Throne and proclaimed herself Queen of the Seven Kingdoms in House of the Dragon Season 3. But it wasn't until Sunday night's finale that we truly got a glimpse into why Westerosi history books dubbed her "Rhaenyra the Cruel."

After learning her half-brother and former king Aegon II (Tom Glynn-Carney) had resurfaced in a literal blaze of glory supplied by his previously presumed dead dragon Sunfyre, Rhaenyra's desperation to assert herself as the realm's rightful ruler was palpable. So, she finally picked a definitive side in the ongoing struggle between Daemon (Matt Smith) and Mysaria (Sonoya Mizuno) to win her trust. Rather than continuing to work to legitimize her rule through support for the common people per Mysaria's counsel, Rhaenyra opted for the show of brute force Daemon has been all too eager to lead the charge on. As he put it, "The only quality the realm understands is strength."

However, Rhaenyra did have one caveat for giving Daemon the go-ahead to attack Ormund Hightower (James Norton) and his forces at Tumbleton: "The realm is watching. Do not make a monster out of me."

Unfortunately, when dragons are involved, all-out carnage seems like more of an inevitable outcome than an active choice. So it shouldn't have really come as a surprise to anyone involved when the assault on Tumbleton quickly spiraled into a fiery onslaught that turned the city's smallfolk into collateral damage.

As for all our major players, here's everyone who lived and who died in the Battle of Tumbleton.

Who lived

Daemon Targaryen

The Rogue Prince lived to fight another day, but not without taking a nearly lethal beatdown at the hands of Ser Jon Roxton (Joplin Sibtain). By the end of the episode, Daemon appeared to be more cowed than we've ever seen him. And if the horrified expression on his face was any indication, he's all too aware of how badly he bungled Rhaneyra's order not to let the battle make her look like an evil tyrant.

Corlys Velaryon

Corlys (Steve Toussaint) may have lost a finger to Ormund, but he managed to largely stay out of the fray at Tumbleton after Gwayne (Freddie Fox) handed him over to Daemon as part of an attempted peace offering. Unfortunately, his son Alyn (Abubakar Salim) seems to have already grown comfortable filling Corlys' role as Hand of the King back at King's Landing.

Gwayne Hightower

That final shot of a somewhat scorched Gwayne crawling through the ruins of Tumbleton in search of Daeron (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) let us know everyone's favorite Hightower had managed to make it through yet another fiery dragon rampage.

Daeron Targaryen

Although we didn't get confirmation Daeron survived the blast of dragonfire that sent him and Gwayne flying through the streets of Tumbleton, we also didn't see him die on screen. In the A Song of Ice and Fire universe, that's pretty much a guarantee he'll be back next season. Plus, we haven't even gotten to see him ride his dragon Tessarion yet.

Hugh Hammer

Hugh (Kieran Bew) survived the violence, but we can't imagine he won't be out for vengeance for the death of his wife, Kat (Ellora Torchia), and the remaining members of her family. Who exactly he'll decide is at fault for their untimely demise is still up in the air, though.

Ulf the White

Ulf (Tom Bennett) may have bad blood with the highborns of both Team Green and Team Black, but his decision to carry out that vendetta by going rogue and raining dragonfire down on Tumbleton directly resulted in a massacre of the city's common folk (likely including some of the very same people with whom he spent the previous night drinking a local tavern dry). At this point, it's pretty clear Ulf could care less about anyone but himself.

Jon Roxton

Considering he almost took down Daemon, Ser Jon is clearly no slouch when it comes to combat. But now that Lord Ormud is dead, he'll have to chart his own path forward.

Oscar Tully

We didn't really get to see the young lord of the Riverlands in action during the battle, but he did quickly pop back up at the end of the episode to prove he was still kicking.

Alysanne Blackwood

Like Oscar (Archie Barnes), Alysanne (Annie Shapero) was slaying Hightowers off-screen for most of the clash. But even if she had died, Alysanne's already made a lasting name for herself as the one who delivered the killing blow to Ser Criston Cole.

Who died

Roderick Dustin

The leader of the Winter Wolves was ordered not to die before Tumbleton's main gate fell. Ser Roderick (Tommy Flanagan) more than accomplished his task, even managing to deliver an incapacitating blow to Ormund before meeting a smiling end engulfed in Silverwing's dragonfire.

Ormund Hightower

After showing his true colors by forcing children to the frontlines of Tumbleton's battlements to serve as human shields, Ormund brought about his own demise with his brutal treatment of a hungover Ulf just as the battle began. In the end, all of Ormund's bluster about the the unworthiness of the Targaryens didn't stop a dragon from killing him.

Kat

It was unclear exactly how Kat actually died since she didn't have any visible wounds or appear to be injured in any way when Hugh found her body. But we're taking Hugh's scream of anguish as a sign that Kat is no longer with us.

Additional deaths

Heleana Targaryen

Heleana (Phia Saban) didn't die at the Battle of Tumbleton, but her death is certainly significant. In a callback (or rather, call-forward) to King Tommen Baratheon throwing himself from a high tower of the Red Keep in Game of Thrones, pregnant Heleana chose to jump to her death out of a very similar window in the castle rather than continue to live as Rhaenyra's prisoner. It's difficult to imagine a world in which Alicent (Olivia Cooke) and Rhaenyra's relationship will come back from this one.

High Septon Eustace

Rather than continue to put up with his refusal to anoint her as Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, Rhaenyra came to the conclusion that her best course of action was to put the High Septon (Simon Chandler) to the sword instead. Unfortunately, we have a feeling that move isn't going to play so well with her many subjects who adhere to the Faith of the Seven.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that his country rejects U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest peace plan for Gaza. 

The 15-point plan, issued by Trump’s Board of Peace, envisioned a phased peace process. Through it, Hamas would gradually cede its weapons and power to a new Palestinian administration, while Israel would withdraw its troops to the “yellow line” established in the ceasefire deal both sides signed in October 2025. 

When it was released by the Board of Peace on July 31, Netanyahu remained silent for multiple days and then acknowledged that the Trump Administration had “sent us a draft.”

“We did not agree,” he continued. “It is not our draft. We sent our comments. This is our position.”

However, Sunday was the first time that he formally declared a refusal to endorse it.

“I want to be precise here: Israel rejects the 15-point document,” Netanyahu said at a cabinet meeting. “The [Israel Defense Forces] will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is disarmed.”

“As long as I am Prime Minister, no Palestinian state will be established—not in Gaza and not in the West Bank,” he continued.

Read More: The Unimaginable Trauma—And Resilience—of the People of Gaza

While discussing the peace roadmap, Trump said that Hamas and “all other armed groups” in Gaza had agreed to disarm, paving the way for a resolution to the conflict that began when the militant group launched a terrorist attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed 1,200 people in Israel. 

Soon after Netanyahu’s comments, Hamas encouraged mediators to continue putting pressure on Israel.

Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official, wrote on X that the group is still “committed to the roadmap reached.”

“We expect the mediators and the American guarantor to press Netanyahu and his government to compel him to adhere to the roadmap and not obstruct the path for internal political and electoral reasons,” he said.

More than 1,250 people have been killed in the Israeli attacks since the original ceasefire in October 2025, most of them civilians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Over 73,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began, the ministry said. Hamas has not disclosed how many of its fighters have been killed.

What Is Netanyahu’s Response to Trump?

Netanyahu has long enjoyed a cordial relationship with the U.S. President, whom he has called “the greatest friend that the state of Israel has ever had in the White House.” However, the relationship has appeared more strained since the countries worked together in strikes against Iran on Feb. 28.

Trump told the New York Post in June that he called Netanyahu “crazy” after being “a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon.” Continued Israeli military operations in Lebanon have complicated U.S. efforts to negotiate an end to hostilities with Iran.

Netanyahu has since joined Trump at the White House, during a trip to the U.S. to attend Sen. Lindsey Graham’s funeral on July 28. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said afterward that the two leaders had a “positive and productive” meeting, and Trump said on Truth Social that “many important subjects were discussed,” though he offered no further details.

“I greatly appreciate Trump,” Netanyahu said at his cabinet meeting Friday. “I greatly appreciate the historical partnership with the U.S. against Iran’s attempts to acquire nuclear weapons.”

And he went on to comment on Jerusalem’s continued cooperation with Washington on Sunday, saying: “Right now, we are talking with the Americans about this issue. They have ideas, some of which are acceptable to us, some of which are unacceptable.”

However, he continued, Israel refuses to accept its 15-point peace plan. “I have heard people say: ‘You didn’t say it.’ So here I am saying it again,” he emphasized.

His firm stance directly contradicts statements from Trump shortly after it was announced. 

“We do have an understanding with Israel,” Trump told reporters at his Cabinet meeting at Camp David on July 31. “Israel is very happy about it. Israel helped us. They’ve been very good.” 

However, the hard-right Prime Minister faces an uphill battle this year in his reelection campaign after an inconclusive war with Iran, and amid ongoing military operations in Lebanon, as well as unfulfilled vows of “total victory” over Hamas. That vow has remained a central point of tension as negotiations continue, adding to strains in relations with the U.S.

The public disagreement represents rare friction between the two allies and underscores the limits of their alignment on key regional issues.

When a mass shooting tears through an American community, we count the dead. That number—26 at Sandy Hook Elementary, 49 at Pulse nightclub, 58 in Las Vegas—becomes the headline, the official measure of the scope of the horror. But anyone who has watched the alerts pile up on their phone, felt their stomach drop, and struggled to focus for the rest of the day knows the damage doesn’t stop at the victims. It ripples outward across the country, affecting in one way or another millions of Americans who were nowhere near the scene.

Intuitively, we can all sense the broader harm, but it is remarkably hard to measure. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say mass shootings are a significant source of stress in their lives. Researchers have found that after these events, antidepressant use rises among teenagers living near a school shooting. Gun purchases made in response to events have been shown, grimly, to lead to still more accidental gun deaths. 

In a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry, we set out to measure another channel through which a mass shooting’s harm could quietly spread: deaths on the road.

At first glance, it might seem like mass shootings and car crashes have little to do with each other. But decades of research show that stress and distraction make drivers more dangerous, and driving is one of the riskiest things most Americans do every day. In the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, fatal crashes rose in part because travelers traded planes for cars—but there was also evidence of an increase in crashes per mile driven, an increase believed to be linked to the fear and stress that spread nationwide. We wondered whether the country’s deadliest shootings might leave a similar mark.

To find out, we used a federal database that logs every fatal crash on U.S. roads combined with FBI data on mass shootings over a 15-year period. We compared the number of traffic deaths in the days just before each shooting with the number the day after the shooting.

Why the day after? Because that’s when the nation pays the most attention. As part of our study, we analyzed Google search traffic data, which showed that the day after a mass shooting is when Google searches for “shooting” peak, and when media coverage floods the news and social media. If a shooting were going to affect how the country drives, the day after is when we’d expect to see it.

Because the timing of a mass shooting is essentially random with respect to the nation’s driving habits, what’s called a “natural experiment” takes place. This lets the calendar stand in for a controlled experiment. The days surrounding each shooting form built-in comparison groups, so any jump on the day after stands out against the typical daily patterns in road deaths.

The result was sobering. On the day after the 10 mass shootings with the most fatalities, traffic deaths rose by an average of 14.3%, about 20 additional deaths nationwide. Put another way, the extra deaths on the road equaled roughly 75% of the number of people killed in the shootings themselves.

Any surprising result invites an obvious question: Could it be a coincidence? To find out, we repeated the analysis 10,000 times, substituting fake, random dates for the dates of mass shootings. A spike as large as the one we observed arose only once in 10,000 iterations, making it clear that our findings were highly unlikely to have occurred by chance. The increase held across nearly every kind of driver, region, and weather condition, and it persisted even in states far from the shooting, which argues against local explanations like road closures or emergency response. And when we examined active-shooter incidents with no fatalities—events that drew much less public attention—we observed no rise in traffic deaths.

Our study, however, cannot tell us exactly why this happens, and it cannot trace any single crash to any single driver’s state of mind. Grief, anxiety, a phone lighting up with notifications, or distraction behind the wheel could all play a role; some mix is likely at work, and we cannot fully untangle them. But the larger lesson here does not hinge on the mechanism. The toll of a mass shooting is bigger than the number in the headline, and much of it remains invisible until we go looking for it in unexpected places.

That is the hard part of studying a national tragedy. The stress and distraction that a shooting spreads across the whole country cannot be seen the way we can see a wound. But we can see its footprints in the form of antidepressant prescriptions filled, in accidental gun deaths, and, as we now show, in lives lost on the road. Each study captures only a sliver of the whole, which may be larger yet.

Of course, none of this diminishes the core tragedy of a mass shooting. But it should change how we picture its scale. When we count only those killed at the scene, we undercount, and what we choose to count shapes what we choose to do about it. 

Seeing the fuller toll and how quickly these tragedies move through a highly interconnected country might help us respond more thoughtfully, whether in the media, on Capitol Hill, or in our homes and communities.

Former President Joe Biden’s cancer has spread “further,” his son Hunter Biden told the BBC on Friday.

In an interview on Newsnight, Hunter Biden described how difficult it was to see his 83-year-old father battling the disease, which was first shared with the public in May 2025.

“The cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,” he said. “It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating in many respects.”

Hunter Biden did not elaborate on where else the cancer had spread, and the former President’s office has not publicly disclosed additional details about the extent of the disease.

Joe Biden had surgery to remove skin cancer lesions in September last year and completed a round of radiation therapy for prostate cancer in October. 

As his wife, Jill Biden, told Kelly Ripa last week on the podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa, their family understands that the disease will be part of his life for the rest of his life.

“He will live forever with cancer,” she told Ripa. “It’s daily. And I think it’s challenging.”

Read More: Joe and Jill Biden: We're Changing How We Fight Cancer

Hunter Biden also acknowledged to host Paddy O’Connell that his father’s well-being may have been affected by the strain that his struggles with addiction, and their consequences, brought.

“Maybe you shouldn't have allowed your dad to run,” O’Connell said, suggesting that these serious concerns might have been a distraction from the demands of the office.

“The idea that I allow my father to do anything, to this very day, is laughable to me,” Hunter Biden said, while insisting that he fully supports his father, knowing that he always made his decisions with their family and the American public in mind. “There is no taking the keys away from a President.”

“Where were you when your father failed to complete a sentence on prime-time television,” O’Connell said, alluding to Biden’s widely criticized debate with Donald Trump, which set the stage for him stepping down as the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024.

Hunter Biden said that he was watching and that he found the moment “shocking,” adding: “I also know that he obviously had cancer. Whether it was impacting him or not, nine months later he was diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer and Stage 4 metastatic bone cancer—none of which we knew.”

According to a statement issued at the time, Joe Biden was diagnosed “with prostate cancer, with a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.” Despite the aggressive diagnosis, the former President’s office also said that the cancer “appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management.” 

Jill Biden said in an interview with CBS’s Sunday Morning in May 2026 that the diagnosis had come as a surprise, explaining that men over 70 are not routinely screened for prostate cancer since it’s usually a “slow-growing cancer” and the harms of repeat screenings can outweigh the good. She added, "I do feel we had amazing care in the White House, but somehow that was missed."

Hunter Biden insisted that, despite leaving the Oval Office, his father’s work is not yet done.

Joe Biden remains “out there,” speaking publicly about the issues that are important to him, his son insisted.

“He’s still doing his thing,” he said. “He so believes in this country.”

That included appearing as a keynote speaker at the Maryland Democratic Party Gala in June.

“As long as he’s alive,” his son said, “I promise you, he is going to continue to fight.”

Hunter Biden’s convictions and presidential pardon

In June 2024, while his father began in earnest to pursue a second term, Hunter Biden was convicted of three felonies related to purchasing and possessing a firearm while addicted to a controlled substance. He also pleaded guilty to nine federal tax charges, including failure to pay $1.4 million from 2016 to 2019.

Weeks before leaving office and following repeated assurances on the campaign trail that he would not do so, then-President Joe Biden made the controversial choice to pardon his son for what he considered unfair and politically motivated persecution.

“From the day I took office, I said I would not interfere with the Justice Department’s decision-making, and I kept my word even as I have watched my son being selectively and unfairly prosecuted,” Biden wrote on Dec. 1, 2024, in announcing his change of heart. 

He granted Hunter Biden a “full and unconditional pardon” for any criminal acts committed or alleged going back 10 years. On his final day in office, he also preemptively pardoned several family members, including his brother, James Biden, citing fear of retaliation against his family from the incoming Trump Administration.

The decision drew substantial criticism from both sides of the aisle, which Hunter Biden acknowledged to O’Connell.

“Was it good for our Constitution? Was it good for the American people? Was it good for my dad’s legacy? No, on all counts,” he said. “It’s something that is easily criticized, and for good reason, and I can’t pretend otherwise.”

However, he added that his father’s concerns about the incoming President were likely well-founded.

“I think that Donald Trump has proven to be exactly who my dad thought he was going to be, as it relates to the revenge and retribution that he would seek on his political enemies,” he said.

The Biden family’s history with cancer

The Bidens have long advocated for comprehensive cancer research. Joe Biden’s eldest son, Beau, whom he had with his first wife Neilia Hunter Biden, died of glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, in 2015.

“Cancer uses every tool at its disposal — it hides from the immune system, builds its own blood supply, uses viruses to spread, engineers a friendly cellular environment to support its survival and growth, and knows how to spread through the body by using pathways and mutations we do not understand fully,” the 46th President and his wife, Jill, wrote in an article for TIME in 2017, sharing their reasons for launching the Biden Cancer Initiative. “Cancer never gives up; it never surrenders.”

The Biden Cancer Initiative built on Joe Biden’s commitment during his Vice Presidency to work on a “national commitment to end cancer as we know it,” which became the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, announced in a State of the Union by then-President Barack Obama in 2016.

Joe Biden will release his memoir, “Promise Me, America,” on Nov. 17.

The U.S. Army said Friday that it is opening five military test ranges to private companies developing missiles, drones, and other weapons, in an effort to cut months—and potentially years—from the time it takes to test new systems and get them into the acquisition pipeline. But officials say the initiative is not a response to concerns about dwindling munitions stockpiles.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll announced the initiative at a military testing range in Michigan, telling reporters that this effort would cut down months of red tape that military contractors must go through before launching new technology.

He explained that it takes 12 to 18 months for a company to test a product “that can make a soldier’s life better, that can increase their lethality, and that can keep them safer.”

“That is not sufficient,” he said. 

Read More: The U.S. is Facing an Ammunition Shortage Due to the Iran War. Here’s What That Means

Before acquiring weapons, the military requires multiple rounds of rigorous testing to ensure that the weapons are battle-ready. That can result in potential producers facing long wait times in order to demonstrate proof of concept.
To shorten that timeframe, the Army launched an online portal that allows munitions manufacturers to request access to a range. An Army “concierge” then helps them confirm availability and book a time. Driscoll said this process ensures that these companies, which do not need to have existing contracts but might one day become vendors to the government, will have access to a test range within 30 days of requesting it. 

The four domestic ranges that will become immediately accessible are at Camp Grayling in Michigan, Camp Shelby in Mississippi, and the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, in addition to a range that had previously gone unused at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. 

There is also an overseas site: Covenant Industries was the first to use the new scheduling system and tested its Anthem missile at the Multidomain Training Area in Morocco on Thursday. Executive Abby Denburg told reporters that the company would begin delivering “production-ready assets for our manufacturing line” at the start of 2027. 

Driscoll said that more sites could be added in the future.

“By bringing in more facilities, you don't have to schedule something and wait six months until you get an opening,” Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), tells TIME. He says that this effort is a “natural step” toward addressing the production pipeline bottleneck.

Is the initiative a response to the munitions shortage?

The Army’s new scheduling system was announced just days after the Washington Post reported that President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had clashed over a munitions shortage caused by the ongoing war with Iran. Sources who witnessed the spat at Camp David indicated that the President felt misled about the extent of the war’s impact on stockpiles, according to the Post. 

Trump has repeatedly denied that there are munitions shortages, and he threatened jail time for officials who share information about the military’s reserves.

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump said Thursday on Truth Social, without clarifying the kind of weapon he was referring to. He also claimed that “large amounts” were being manufactured and shipped.

But CNN reported Wednesday that the U.S. had used up close to 80% of its interceptors for the THAAD anti-ballistic missile defense system, which cost over $15 million each, and approximately 50% of its Patriot interceptors, which cost around $4 million each. 

The reports echoed warnings from Sen. Mark Kelly in May that munitions stores had been heavily depleted by the war, citing a briefing from the Department of Defense (DoD). After these comments, which were made on CBS’s Face the Nation, experts told TIME that it could take three to four years for production to replenish the nation’s stockpiles.

When questioned about it on Friday, Driscoll said simply: “We have a larger arsenal than any nation in the history of the world, and we will have an even larger arsenal with new and different and layered defenses.”

Yet the military’s own acquisition efforts acknowledge limits to existing inventories. In describing its Ground-Based Affordable Mass (G-BAM) Challenge, which launched in July, the Defense Innovation Unit said future conflicts would require the military to generate affordable long-range firepower at “a scale, cost, and pace that current inventories alone cannot support.” 

Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), tells TIME that the DoD is more concerned with testing new technology than replenishing existing items.

“The U.S. has very good existing weapons—like the ones being used against Iran—but it takes years to produce these sophisticated missiles,” she says. “It is quite apparent that it needs simpler—‘good enough’—missiles that it can afford to buy in larger quantities and, equally importantly, that can be produced more quickly.”

Speeding up weapons testing is only part of the solution

Cancian says the new test range scheduling system is likely an attempt to address two issues.
“One is the desire to expand munitions production—particularly to bring on new kinds of munitions—and the second is Hegseth's push to accelerate the acquisition process,” Cancian says. “This is one way you can do it: by making more test facilities available, and therefore speed up the testing.”

Driscoll acknowledged that he was inspired, in part, by Ukraine’s rapid response to diminished support from its allies, leading to a rapid expansion of missile and drone manufacturing startups.

“If you look at what Ukraine has done so incredibly well, it’s this innovation through necessity, and it’s innovation at the speed that is near or close to matching the commercial sector,” Driscoll said. “So what we, the Army, are trying to do is break down every single barrier that we have put up over the last 20 or 30 years.”

Read More: Chalk One Up for Ukraine

Major aerospace players such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, as well as arms-makers like General Dynamics, have long been the country’s go-to for defense contracts. But Hegseth’s DoD has more recently strived to increase production by incentivizing smaller companies and startups to build cheap-yet-effective weapons.

For its G-BAM Challenge, the Pentagon said it is seeking long-range precision-strike systems that can be demonstrated within 60 to 90 days and scaled into production within 12 to 18 months. Its website stated that weapons must have a target cost of less than $250,000 apiece at scale.

Such efforts have already had an impact on the market, with venture-backed defense technology startups increasingly winning large contracts with the military. Many of the newcomers are software-centric and fast-moving, which helps distinguish them from traditional defense contractors. 

With access to test ranges, startups will have even more opportunities to compete with major producers, which in turn gives the United States a wider array of options in terms of cost and timeline. 

But Pettyjohn says that the new initiative will only go so far when it comes to improving the nation’s munitions pipeline. Other areas of the pipeline remain bottlenecked, she explains. For example, she says that the military also needs to “cut down the timelines for new suppliers to get certified.” The process can take up to two years, involving registration, facility certification, cybersecurity compliance, and other critical steps to qualify for defense contracts.

As additional steps are taken to address bottlenecks throughout the acquisition pipeline, Pettyjohn indicates that the most important thing will be a continued emphasis on quality.

The DoD’s current standards “emphasize safety and performance above all else,” she says, explaining that it's critical amid periods of growth to ensure standards are not being lowered just “so that weapons can be produced more quickly.”

Water bombers, the air cavalry of wildfire fighting, buzz the treetops like air show stunt pilots as they save the day with surgical drops of water or orange retardant. 

But what happens when those drops have no effect? When, as a pilot working the massive Gironde Fire just west of Bordeaux, France, described it, “The environment above the fire is so hot that my payload of 10,000 liters of water evaporates in the air.”? Mathieu Jomain, a commander and 26-year veteran in Gironde’s fire service, compared the fire’s intensity to “a meteorological nuclear bomb.”

This is the new reality of wildfires in the 21st Century: they hit different. And, too often now, the water doesn’t hit at all. 

From America to Algeria, dangerous blazes are occurring around the world, giving us a glimpse into an age ablaze. We should all be asking the question: What will this age entail? 

A world on fire

In Spain, where several massive fires recently began burning with comparable ferocity, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska declared, “We are facing the most significant and aggressive fire in Spain’s history.” Spain is more than 500 years old.

Across France and Spain alone, approximately a third of a million people have been displaced, the largest evacuations since World War II, but that is just the one among many examples. This summer, evacuations are ongoing across Europe, from Portugal to Turkey. Earlier this summer in Germany, evacuations were ordered in record-breaking heat after a wildfire triggered explosions in a nature reserve strewn with leftover ordnance from World War II. 

Between drought, heat, and wildfire, much of the world is summering in record-breaking territory. The U.K., its iconic green landscape now parched to desert brown, is suffering one of its worst droughts since record-keeping began. Eight time zones away, Spokane, Washington, endures similarly outlandish temperatures as it continues to battle the most destructive wildfire the city and state has ever seen. With no relief in sight, there is, according to the city’s mayor, Lisa Brown, a years-long recovery already baked in. British Columbia, which has suffered several of the worst fire seasons in its history over the past decade, is bracing itself for the worst one yet. In Utah, fire officials are saying the same thing. In Russia this month, temperatures broke 90°F. at two different weather stations at the Arctic Circle, nearly 3,000 miles north of Miami, where such temperatures are the norm for this time of year.

Fire phnonemon  

We are witnessing, live and in person, a terrible convergence of prolonged drought and record-breaking temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere. It is a convergence expressed most emphatically by unfightable fires racing across tinder-dry landscapes, fanned by high winds that are, increasingly, generated by the fires themselves. Just as warm waters fuel hurricanes, hot landscapes alive with roaring fire energize a wildfire’s chimney-like central column by burning all available fuel—grassland, forests, and neighborhoods alike—with explosive speed, and irrepressible ferocity that can produce flames higher than a thirty-story building and radiant heat approaching 1,000°F.

The ultimate expression of such a fire (so far) is the pyrocumulonimbus fire cloud or pyroCb, a colossal fireborne weather system that rotates like a hurricane, can shroud a major city in choking smoke, and puncture the stratosphere, allowing its mushroom cloud to achieve altitudes normally reserved for intercontinental jets. In order to oxygenate themselves, these massive systems inhale huge volumes of fresh air from the surrounding area, much as a hurricane does, and with similar effects on windspeed. 

These massive fire weather systems, once an anomaly only seen over volcanoes, did not enter the vocabulary of fire scientists until the late 1990s, when atmospheric CO2 reached 370 parts per million (ppm)—about 30% higher than pre-industrial levels. It was only in the 2000s that wildfires, formerly seasonal events for which there was a well-rehearsed response, became able to generate these self-perpetuating and uncontainable firestorm clouds on a regular basis. Since 2016, they have become a feature of major fires across the North American West, but until the past year or two, they were virtually unknown in Europe. Matchstick-dry pine plantations in Gironde, France generated what is believed to be that country’s first-ever pyroCb just last week. Today, atmospheric CO2 is pushing 430 ppm, more than 50% higher than pre-industrial levels.

This matters to all of us because once a fire generates a pyrocumulonumbus cloud, it can perpetuate itself almost indefinitely by creating its own fiery weather, including ember blizzards and lightning strikes able to ignite fuels well beyond the current perimeter of the fire. Nothing and no one can stop a pyroCb save for a regional change in the weather, or an ocean-sized body of water. 

With infernos burning so hot that water evaporates before even reaching the flames, firefighting operations are devolving, increasingly, into lifesaving operations. Whether you’re in the suburbs of Athens, Bordeaux, or Spokane, evacuation is often the only viable option. Over the past decade, millions of unsuspecting people have found themselves in the path of these hyper-scaling flames and, from Valparaiso, Chile to Fort McMurray, Alberta, victims are astonished by the speeds at which these fires move—speeds which photos and even video clips can fail to adequately convey.

How our climate changed the world

This is climate breakdown, and its expressions are manifold. We can now expect everything from yellow and orange air and failed crops to buckling railways and the forced shutdowns of nuclear plants due to low water. When temperatures exceed 110°F, passenger planes must consider lightening their loads. At 120 degrees (an increasingly common summer temperature across the Middle East and the American Southwest), flights are often canceled altogether. Such temperatures also ground firefighting aircraft, leaving cities, towns and forests even more vulnerable to a wildfire’s whims. 

Bearing the brunt of our new climate reality, of course, is the simmering countryside, desert dry and ready to ignite from the first mechanical spark, hot muffler, or flying ember. In many parts of the world—such as southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East—many charred and desiccated landscapes are no longer able to support the agriculture they have nurtured for thousands of years. As a result, for instance, wine production is decreasing globally, not just because of changing tastes but because heat, drought, and increasingly unstable weather are disrupting this ancient crop and craft. 

However, there is another, slower and more insidious evacuation taking place, and that is the steady migration from rural areas all around the world to burgeoning cities, which now host more than half the world’s population. Left behind, landscapes previously managed by seasonal harvesting, pruning, burning, and grazing have gone feral: overtaken by scrub brush and weeds, they are terrifically flammable under current, much hotter weather conditions. Exacerbating this situation in regions like southern Europe and California is what’s being called “weather whiplash.” That is, heavy winter rains and snowfalls that encourage abundant spring growth, only to be dried to tinder by the now-successive heatwaves baking southern Europe and the American Southwest. 

With this brutal heat comes another 21st-century chimera: the “flash drought,” a combination of searing, triple-digit temperatures and high wind that can turn a green field brown in the space of a workday.  

A destabilized climate poses an existential threat to human civilization, pushing agrarian populations off their traditional lands into contact—and, often, conflict—with their neighbors. Take the recent war in Syria. The conflict had deep political roots, but it was exacerbated by internal migrations driven by failed harvests and drought. 

Both Europe and North America are now beginning to see similar situations without—as yet—the armed conflict. In addition to already stressful and divisive cross-border migration, we are experiencing a second wave of internal migration in the form of mass evacuations due to fire. More than 800 homes have been destroyed and more than 60,000 people displaced thus far by the fires in and around Spokane, Washington. In Utah, thousands more evacuations have been ordered as that state faces record-breaking heat, high winds, and the worst fire season in its history. North of the border, in British Columbia, hundreds more homes were lost this week, and 15,000 people are currently under evacuation, with extreme fire weather conditions predicted to worsen in the coming days. 

Fire prone regions such as these are already seeing an exodus of so-called “climate refugees.” As fires grow more frequent and destructive, we are going to see more people leave—driven out, because they can’t rebuild, or opting out because the price and risk of staying feels too high. 

The role humans play 

I wish I could say this summer was an anomaly or an outlier, but it clearly isn’t, and there’s more on the way. Our world is changing rapidly, and we are torn between adaptation, and clinging to the status quo. 

In fairness, it’s hard to know where to look, and what we should be reacting to. Often ignored in discussions about drought, fire, and climate change in general, are the world’s oceans, which are warming just as the air is. Significant marine heatwaves have been recorded this year in the North Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and in the Mediterranean. It is ocean temperatures in the Pacific that generate the El Niño effect, and the next one, due this fall, is expected to break all previous records. Consider this summer a preview. But how did we get here?

Fossil fuels enabled modern civilization and got us where we are today. Had we never moved beyond wood-fueled steam power, there might scarcely be a tree left standing. Had we relied solely on coal, the air in our cities and towns would likely be as toxic as Pittsburgh’s in the 1940’s. Oil and gas has enriched and expanded our lives in such profound and far-reaching ways that renowned energy historian Daniel Yergin coined a new name for our species: Hydrocarbon man. From road paving to running shoes, lingerie to jet fuel, petroleum products are integral to our society—ubiquitous, affordable, and very well represented in Washington. 

But the immeasurable gains fossil fuels have given us over the past century are now being taken away in real time, hundreds of houses, thousands of evacuations, and billions of dollars at a time, leaving behind mass trauma, ravaged landscapes, impoverished communities, and a tattered social fabric. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) summed up this dilemma more succinctly than anyone: “It’s not complicated,” he said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing in 2024. “Climate risk makes things un-insurable. No insurance makes things un-mortgageable. No mortgages crashes the property markets. Crashed property markets trash the economy.”

When will the oil and gas industry’s eye-watering profits be outweighed by all the losses their emissions incur? 

Cumulatively, they already have. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, who speaks with hard-won authority on this matter, put a finer point on it: “Climate change kills: it kills people, as we’ve seen; it kills our ecosystem, our biodiversity, and it destroys the things we as a society hold dear—our houses, our businesses, our livestock.”

If there is a glimmer of hope in the smoke, it can be found in the relatively low mortality rates for these recent urban fires, and their largely successful evacuations, which demonstrate real social cohesion and admirable courage and civic spirit. 

On the energy front, there is real and tangible good news, but neither the White House nor the CEOs of oil majors and their army of lobbyists are keen to share it: the energy transition to reliable, affordable renewable energy is underway and irreversible. Deploying renewables paired with intelligent energy conservation and grid management, individuals, businesses, municipalities, and entire countries are earnestly curbing their CO2 emissions. Arguably, the biggest hurdle will be curbing the appetites of the wealthiest 10%, not just at the extremes—vanity rockets, super yachts, and spurious wars—but two-day shipping, budget jet travel, F-150s, and the most casual wish granted with the click of a button. 

As long as we burn fossil fuels without limits, wildfires will do the same in our forests, cities, and towns. But we are not passive bystanders, and these genuine “trials by fire” are Nature’s stern invitation to mature as a society, to confront with intelligence and courage the daunting energies we’ve unleashed with our own. 

Fire is, at its core, an ambitious, energy-burning appetite. But so are we. Our future depends on whether this ambition is used to reinforce a now-maladaptive status quo, or to evolve, adapt, and conserve as so many among us are already doing.

The morning my brother Harry was airlifted from I-81 to the trauma center, I drove toward the hospital barely able to breathe. At a stoplight I noticed the people in their cars around me—a man checking his hair in the rearview mirror, a child kicking his legs in his car seat. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. Which is when it hit me that this was not a dream. I’d seen Harry the day before. Whole, alive, himself. It was the last time I’d see him that way.

When I got to the ICU, the doctor offered reassurances: “It’s still very early,” and “We’re doing everything we can”—the kinds of things doctors say to families in shock. I know this because I’ve said these things to patients myself. But I took one look at my baby brother—intubated, sedated, badly banged up—and I knew this was it.

I’m a primary care physician. Mortality, even if distant or hypothetical, is implicit in every patient encounter. What else is a doctor’s job if not to forestall death and improve life while it’s being lived? For 25 years I’ve helped people live, and I’ve also helped them die. Before I entered that ICU, I thought I understood that nothing is permanent. But there’s a difference between knowing a thing in your head and feeling it in your body.

For the three days Harry was on life support, my family took turns at his bedside as our phones exploded with messages. My world contracted to the size of his hospital room. I could hear my mother’s voice, then my father’s. I could hear the rhythm of the ventilator. But nothing else. At some point I walked down to the hospital cafeteria for coffee and wondered why it was so quiet. When I looked around, the room was bustling with people. But all I could hear was my own breath. It was as if my mind had carved out a tiny oasis of attention where only the things I needed to hear were allowed in.

I suspect my body was conserving energy for what came next. But at the time it didn’t feel like bracing. It felt strangely like presence, the kind I attempt but often fail to manufacture for myself. Perhaps, before death showed up, I had been striving too hard, with meditation or with yoga, racing into class, always a little late, hoping to find peace while knowing the parking meter outside had run out. 

It turns out presence isn’t something you achieve. It’s what’s left when everything else falls away.

Lexi, the young ICU nurse, helped me get there.. Alone with Harry at his bedside, I interrupted her quiet, steady focus on the monitors and asked her, “How do you do this work, day in and day out?” It’s a question ICU nurses get all the time from people who aren’t in health care. But I know what it’s like to shepherd families through loss. I wanted her to know I saw her—just like she saw me. She paused and shifted her gaze from the machines to me and said, “I try not to get too attached. But sometimes it feels impossible.” Our eyes locked and I knew she understood my pain.

On July 16, two and a half days after his accident, Harry died in the ICU. He was 45. He was surrounded by family, twelve sets of hands holding his lifeless body, sending him onward with heartache and love and stunned disbelief. Lexi stepped out. The machines were turned off. People gathered their things. When it was time to leave, I handled the logistics. The paperwork seemed extensive for someone who wasn’t coming back. But that was the easy part. Watching my parents walk out of the hospital together, heads bowed, carrying Harry’s things, was the worst thing I will ever see.

For months after Harry died, nothing else seemed to matter. In my grief, I didn’t care about the parking ticket I got outside the post office. I didn’t care that my inbox overflowed with messages. Time had slowed down. What was the hurry? Then sometimes the cyclone in my body would churn and twist, taking my breath away. Is this what dying feels like? I wondered. Will this feeling last forever?

It didn’t. Nothing does. Losing Harry is forever, but the fear that I can’t survive this loss is not. Impermanence turns out to be the cruelest fact and the most merciful one at once. 

As a doctor, I’ve been teaching this to my patients. Anxiety ebbs and flows. The pain softens with time. You’ll get through this. And I believed those words the way I believe what I read in biology class. It’s the truth. But it took losing my brother to feel impermanence like I feel gravity; I can’t see it, but I know it’s there.

So what do we have left to grab onto, if nothing truly holds? The day before the accident, Harry and I talked about mundane things: the heat wave, what my kids were up to. There was no way to know it was the last time I’d see him that way. I learned that the only honest response to impermanence is paying attention to whoever is in front of you, to the ordinary moments. 

I still fail at this daily. I mindlessly scroll through Instagram. I feverishly plan my schedule weeks in advance. But something in me got recalibrated the week Harry left us. Grief showed me what quiet presence feels like. It reminded me that nothing is forever. Even love itself shifts its shape; it deepens after loss. Sometimes I lose my breath looking into the sky, wondering where Harry is and what he is doing. But my breath comes back when the clouds shift and I remember he’s been there with me all along.

In the opening episode of Netflix Korean drama Our Sticky Love, Go Eun-sae (Ha Young) wakes up in a rural hospital with no memory of how she got there or what her prior life was like. When local boxing coach Jang Tae-ha (Jung Hae-in) shows up at the hospital claiming to be her devoted boyfriend, she is immediately suspicious. Tae-ha is much scruffier and less professionally ambitious than Eun-sae thinks her ideal type might be, but she doesn’t have much choice but to go with him to the taffy-making village he claims they both call home. 

Is Tae-ha telling Eun-sae the truth? And, if he is lying—as Eun-sae suspects—to what end? By the end of Our Sticky Love’s 12-episode run, all is revealed. Here’s everything that goes down in the Overboard-esque Netflix K-drama that combines smalltown romance and crime drama for a satisfying tale of love against all odds. 

Is Tae-ha really Eun-sae’s boyfriend?

Eun-sae’s instincts are good. Though Tae-ha and Eun-sae do share a past, he was not her boyfriend prior to the accident that caused Eun-sae’s amnesia. Eun-sae is actually a successful prosecutor who works in Seoul’s anti-corruption office. In the months before the action of the show, Eun-sae had been investigating a case of bribery and murder involving crime boss and company chairman Baek Sang-gil (Heo Sung-tae) and the Seoul mayor. When she records damning evidence of their crimes, Sang-il orders her killed. His goons start the job, but Sang-il sends in one of his best men, Jang Tae-ha, to finish the job.

Tae-ha’s gangster past

While Tae-ha may have a heart of gold, he has spent the past 14 years working as a violent yes man for Baek Sang-gil’s criminal enterprise. As a teenager and young adult, Tae-ha had a bright future as one of South Korea’s best young boxers. He was on track to go to the Olympics for his country, but when his grandmother fell sick, he chose to leave it all behind. In order to earn enough money for his grandmother’s cancer treatments, Tae-ha accepted a job with Sang-gil. 

For his final job as one of Sang-gil’s most trusted men, he is tasked with killing Eun-sae and disposing of the body. He accepts the job, eager to get back to life with his grandmother and his friends and neighbors in Taffy Village, where he grew up. However, when he realizes the identity of his target, he can’t go through with it. Instead, he risks everything by staging Eun-sae’s fake death and whisking her away to the small town he calls home. 

What caused Go Eun-sae’s amnesia?

Prior to Tae-ha’s arrival, Eun-sae was tortured by Sang-gil and his men. They burned off her fingerprints to make her body unidentifiable and beat her badly. The injuries lead to Eun-sae’s amnesia. The amnesia is inconvenient for Tae-ha, who feels he cannot risk telling Eun-sae the truth about the danger she is in. He fears that, rather than lay low in Taffy Village, Eun-sae will go back to Seoul in an effort to corroborate Tae-ha’s story. While Tae-ha waits for Eun-sae’s memory to return, he solicits the help of everyone in Taffy Village to go along with the story that they are a happy couple and have been living together in town since their move from Seoul two months ago. Meanwhile, Tae-ha uses his own contacts to arrange a boat to Japan for Eun-sae a month later. In the meantime, he must convince a confused and suspicious Eun-sae that they have been dating for two years.

Why does Tae-ha save Eun-sae?

Tae-ha’s task is made easier by the fact that he has real feelings for Eun-sae. He first met Eun-sae in 2010, when the first-year college student and aspiring prosecutor exposed Tae-ha’s boxing opponent for cheating. Years later, Eun-sae saves Tae-ha from a yakuza attack while she happens to be on vacation in Japan. Tae-ha, who is in Japan on business for Sang-gil, is ambushed by a bunch of men. Eun-sae, who has heard Tae-ha speaking Korean, speeds up on her motorbike to whisk Tae-ha away from danger. Tae-ha instantly recognizes Eun-sae as his “first love,” aka the girl who helped him win a boxing medal, but Eun-sae does not recognize him.

Still, the two spend the night together, walking the streets of the city and falling asleep on the beach together. Eun-sae asks for Tae-ha’s number so they can stay in contact, but Tae-ha declines to give it to her. He doesn’t want to reveal his gangster status to prosecutor Eun-sae, and he knows a relationship between them could never work. When Tae-ha sees an unconscious Eun-sae years later, he knows exactly who she is. After 14 years of loyal service to Sang-gil, he disobeys a direct order and saves Eun-sae. 

Why does Eun-sae also go by Ji-won?

When Eun-sae wakes up and Tae-ha informs the hospital and Eun-sae herself of her name, it is different from the one she has been going by as a prosecutor: Go Ji-won. However, Tae-ha isn’t lying. When they bonded in Japan, Eun-sae told Tae-ha that Eun-sae was the name her mother gave her before she left her at an orphanage as a baby. However, it was only after the orphanage registered her birth as Go Ji-won that the original name was discovered. Years later, Eun-sae tells Tae-ha that she prefers to go by the beautiful name her mother gave her rather than her legal name. 

Does Eun-sae recover her memories?

Eun-sae recovers her memories at the end of Episode 8, after she has been rushed onto the boat to Japan by Tae-ha’s colleague Kaito. She watches from afar as Tae-ha faces off against Sang-gil and his goons. When Tae-ha starts a fire that erupts into an explosion, a horrified Eun-sae begins to remember her life before amnesia.

Our Sticky Love’s ending explained

Through much of Our Sticky Love, Tae-ha is the one protecting Eun-sae from Sang-gil. However, with her memories recovered, Eun-sae springs into action to bring Sang-gil down herself, and save Tae-ha from his former boss’ revenge. Though the trick watch that recorded Sang-gil’s incriminating meeting with the mayor has been destroyed, Eun-sae backed up the footage. She uses it to arrest both powerful men, seeking 15 years in prison for the mayor and life in prison for Sang-gil, who has murdered multiple people in his efforts to secure a lucrative construction project for his company.

However, before Sang-gil can be properly sentenced, he escapes from his transport. He immediately travels to the Taffy Village and takes Tae-ha’s grandmother hostage. He plans to kill Tae-ha for his betrayal, but is thrown for a loop when he sees baby pictures of Tae-ha with his mom. 

Tae-ha’s young mother was taken in by Go Yeong-hong, the woman we know as Tae-ha’s grandmother, when Tae-ha was just a baby. She died shortly after, and Go Yeong-hong decided to raise Tae-ha herself, despite not having a biological relation to him. As we learn through flashbacks, Sang-gil is Tae-ha’s biological father. Tae-ha’s mom left him after Sang-gil, who was also a boxer prior to becoming a thug, cheated in a match. When Sang-gil realizes that he is a father, he wants nothing to do with Tae-ha’s mom or baby Tae-ha, but he does offer them money. Tae-ha’s mom refuses, saying that she does not want to raise her son with dirty money.

Sang-gil has spent 14 years with Tae-ha as a right-hand man, never once guessing that he is his biological son. He only realizes the connection when he sees the baby pictures in Tae-ha’s grandmother’s house. When Tae-ha comes to save his grandmother, Sang-gil is still processing the reveal. He runs from the house, with Tae-ha hot on his heels. Tae-ha tackles Sang-gil, and takes his gun, pointing it at the man he doesn’t know is his father. 

When Eun-sae and the police show up, Sang-gil realizes that Tae-ha might actually kill him, which would ruin his life. Rather than letting this happen to Tae-ha, Sang-gil wrestles the weapon from his son’s grip and uses it on himself instead. He dies in front of a shocked Tae-ha, who will never know the truth about the man who caused him so much pain.

Does Our Sticky Love have a happy ending?

Yes, Our Sticky Love ends with protagonists Eun-sae and Tae-ha together. Though Eun-sae is initially angry with Tae-ha for lying to her, she has fallen in love with him during their time together. The two marry in Taffy Village, amongst the family they have found there.

In some ways, Sacramento has Washington D.C. vibes. California’s state capital runs on government, lobbying, and the sense that politics is the local industry. My hotel room when I traveled there this week for conversations about the future of energy and climate policy was decorated with political cartoons; the elevator featured political quotes. But in 2026 perhaps nothing could be more different than how the two respective governments are approaching climate policy. Across a range of climate related issues, California has leaned in where the federal government steps back. 

It goes without saying that California can’t replace the federal government. But as the largest and most economically prosperous state in the country, its position is consequential. As companies try to parse the signal from the noise and determine the future of climate policy and demand for clean technologies, the federal government is just one indicator. Leaders now need to interpret a range of signals from governments moving in different directions. And California makes the case better than any other state that climate policy will continue in the U.S.

“You have a federal government that’s really trying to send market signals away from this,” Wade Crowfoot, California Natural Resources Secretary, told me last fall. “But you also have the rest of the world moving in this direction, as well as a bunch of American states.”

There was never any question from the outset of the second Trump Administration that it would take a hostile approach to states with aggressive climate policy. Almost immediately, the administration pulled back climate funding that had been directed to states. And it successfully pursued a reversal of the federal waivers that allowed California to enforce its own vehicle emissions standard. 

The effect has also been that some blue states have chosen to slow down local efforts. In May, New York weakened its landmark climate law amid affordability concerns. And Kathy Hochul, the state’s governor, eventually approved a new natural gas pipeline in a reported exchange for the administration allowing an offshore wind project to continue. (Hochul denied a quid-pro-quo deal). And in January, Massachusetts delayed new rules designed to make heating more climate friendly. 

But nowhere has the pushback been stronger than in California. Before Trump even took office, California Governor Gavin Newsom promised to offer its own policies to incentivize electric vehicle adoption if Trump nixed the tax credit passed under his predecessor—a policy that the state finalized late last month. California has also continued to push through a range of other climate related regulations. And the state says it will sue the federal government over its deals to pay energy companies for stopping their offshore wind development. (In some areas, like the state’s cap-and-trade program, California has softened its approach to account for affordability concerns while leaving the core of the policy intact).  

This tug of war between states and the federal government has real consequences, not just for the companies but also for the broader U.S. economy. For an administration that likes to tout its support for American industry and beating China, there’s a certain irony to all of this: Rapidly changing and divergent regulatory regimes cost companies money. 

For an executive tasked with anticipating and responding to climate policy, the regulatory patchwork within the United States has created a tiny needle to thread. Companies will continue to build products for the California market while also satisfying the current administration. But California continues to incentivize the development of new products and, perhaps, offers a better long-term signal than vacillations at the federal level. 

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Europe is getting its first total solar eclipse in 27 years, with some territories set to witness a full obscuration of the sun on Aug. 12.

While residents in parts of Greenland, Spain, northern Russia, Iceland, and a small corner of Portugal will benefit from being in the path of totality, people in the U.K. and Ireland will experience a slightly more diluted version of the rare celestial event.

The moon is set to cover around 90-96% of the sun in the U.K. and Ireland—the most coverage visible in the region since the total eclipse of 1999, the Royal Museums Greenwich tells TIME.

As the U.K. and Ireland will have to wait until September 2090 to experience a total solar eclipse, it’s more than worth embracing the partial solar eclipse this month.

Here’s everything to know about the rare spectacle, and how you can safely view it:

What is a solar eclipse?

A solar eclipse is when the moon, from the perspective of Earth, passes in front of the face of the sun, blocking out some—or all—of its light.

During the moon’s orbit of Earth, it goes through a 29.5-day cycle, during which a “new moon” appears. At this stage, there is an opportunity for a solar eclipse to occur if the path of the new moon crosses in front of the sun’s path, Catherine Muller, an astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich, tells TIME.

While a solar eclipse only occurs during a new moon phase, it is not guaranteed.

Given the tilt of the moon’s orbit, and the constant movement of Earth, eclipses are therefore a rare and relatively short occasion.

“The moon is always moving, the Earth is always moving, so there's never a long period of time where the two are able to cross paths exactly, but periodically it does happen, and that's why you end up with this eclipse,” says Muller.

Earth is ideally placed in relation to the moon and the sun in order for the two to completely overlap during a total eclipse. “It just so happens that our moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, and also 400 times closer to us than the sun,” says Muller.

Will the solar eclipse be visible from the U.K. and Ireland?

Yes, not in totality, but people will be treated to a spectacular partial eclipse.

In fact, this is set to be the best solar eclipse visible from the U.K. and Ireland so far this century, according to Royal Museums Greenwich.

It will “almost look like there's a crescent of the sun left behind, the rest will be blocked by the moon,” says Muller.

After the eclipse, there is also an opportunity to observe the Perseid meteor shower on the same night. As the peak of the meteor shower occurs during a new moon, conditions are ideal for seeing the peak, notes Royal Museums Greenwich.

Muller suggests the best time to watch the celestial event is after midnight, but advises heading to an area with low light pollution. 

“The best way to observe it is to lie on the ground or get in a comfy chair and fill your view with as much of the sky as possible,” she says. 

What time is it happening and where are the best places to view the partial eclipse?

For both the U.K. and Ireland, the further south-west you go, the more coverage you will see.

“The best way to guarantee that you'll be able to see it, no matter where you are in the U.K. or Ireland, is to make sure you're somewhere with a clear western horizon,” advises Muller.

Due to the eclipse taking place close to sunset, it is also important to avoid obstructions such as trees, hills, or buildings, as the sun will be lower on the horizon.

Anyone able to visit the south-western tip of Ireland stands a chance of seeing almost 97.5% coverage, meaning people in the counties of Cork and Kerry may strike lucky.

In the U.K., coverage will be best in Cornwall, in the southwest of England, with around 95% obscuration expected. Neighbouring Devon should also encounter a high percentage of coverage, while people in Pembrokeshire, Wales, are set to see up to 94% of the sun eclipsed.

Timings for when the partial eclipse will start, reach its peak, and end, all vary slightly, depending on location. 

As a general guide, the “first contact” between the moon and sun will begin at around 6:12 p.m., local time, in Galway and Dublin in Ireland. The maximum eclipse will occur at 7:10 p.m., with it coming to a complete end at 8:05 p.m.

In Truro, Cornwall, the timings for each of these three events are 6:18 p.m., 7:16 p.m., and 8:10 p.m.

Viewers in London will get slightly less coverage, but they should still be able to enjoy a substantial 90% partial eclipse. Timings here are similar: A start time of 6:17 p.m., the peak to follow at 7:12 p.m. and the conclusion coming in at 8:06 p.m.

How can you watch the eclipse safely?

Experts strongly recommend wearing the appropriate eye protection when observing the eclipse, in an effort to avoid any damage to your vision.

Muller recommends purchasing eclipse glasses, or if you already have a pair, ensuring they are not damaged and ready for use.

According to NASA, if your glasses are less than 10 years old, aren’t punctured or loose from the frame, and have been tested to the international standard of ISO 12312-2, they are safe for use.

“Don't look at the sun with [regular] sunglasses on, with two pairs of sunglasses on, or 3D glasses on,” Muller warns, advising against short-cuts. “Even limited exposure to direct sunlight can damage your eyes.”

The U.K. Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has offered similar guidance, referencing the cautionary tale of people who were ill-equipped when viewing the Aug. 11, 1999 eclipse.

Citing a report from the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, the government said that at least 70 people reported visual loss in the days after the eclipse due to having looked directly up at the sun without appropriate protection. The visual loss was temporary, with none of those affected reporting any issues beyond six months after the eclipse. 

“The reduced brightness can override the body's natural reflex to look away, allowing intense sunlight to reach and damage the retina,” according to the UKHSA. 

Holding up a colander and looking at its shadow is an alternative way to view the phenomenon, the UKHSA suggests, but people must still avoid any direct eye contact with the sun.

“If you hold a colander up in the direction of the sun, the light from the sun will travel through the holes in it and project little prints of the sun on the floor,” says Muller. “As the eclipse happens, you'll end up seeing lots of little crescents as the moon passes in front of it instead.”

What would you do if you were stuck in your house? The COVID pandemic forced many people to confront that question when faced with monthslong quarantines. But in Netflix’s The Last House, directed by Louis Leterrier and written by Matthew Robinson, that thought is taken to new and literal extremes. 

On a random day, the Delgado family, consisting of father Jason (Wagner Moura), mother Riley (Greta Lee) and their two children, find themselves unable to leave their home. The windows and doors have all been tightly sealed during a mysterious and endless rainfall. They’re not the only ones: everyone in their neighborhood is trapped inside their homes, too. It’s unclear how widespread this lockdown is, or how long it will last, but the family has no choice but to come together and try to survive against the unknown threat for as long as possible.

From the synopsis, it may sound like the movie is directly responding to COVID lockdowns,  but the idea actually came to Robinson two years ago, when he was cleaning up the toys in his young son’s bedroom. “I picked up these plastic toy binoculars,” says Robinson. “I had this thought: what if one day I needed these binoculars to survive?” From there, the rest of the movie fell into place, a story of what it would be like to try and survive only with what you already have. 

Despite the unknowns confining the Delgado family to their house, Robinson says The Last House is at its heart an optimistic movie. 

“I don’t think I can tell a story about four people who love each other trapped together without that—it would get so bleak and dark if there wasn’t hope at the core of it all,” he says. “It was really important that this was a story of the power of togetherness.”

Something The Last House leaves audiences wondering: what exactly are the creatures that have locked people inside their homes? It’s suggested they come from the ocean, given their abilities and powers come from water and the film’s opening quote from Arthur C. Clarke, “How inappropriate to call this planet ‘Earth,’ when clearly it is ‘Ocean.’” “We always referred to them as the creatures,” explains Robinson. “I think it’s important to stay in the perspective of the family. They don’t have a name for them. They’re just trying to understand and glean whatever they can from the clues they’re given throughout. It’s fun to have people be as confused as they are.”

Having said that, Robinson is open to theories, and he has one where the creatures do come from the ocean depths. “I’ve always loved the idea that so much of our Earth is completely unexplored,” he says. “Why bother going to Mars when we barely know what’s at the bottom of our own sea?”

Time weighs heavily on the family. The first days go by fairly smoothly, but weeks, and then months later, things get more and more difficult. Luckily, Jason has an engineering background, and once they run out of food, he’s able to create an elaborate trap out of the chimney to bring in a fairly steady supply of meat. And under their floorboards, they plant soil for vegetables. They develop a well-oiled machine that carries the family through e for an astonishing five years. The bizarre creatures that roam outside leave them in relative peace—until, one day, they decide to come inside. 

At the end of The Last House, the creatures come into the Delgado home. They’ve stayed outside all these years, so why now? “Nobody should have survived,” says Robinson. “How is it possible that they’ve made it this far? I think it could be seen as a curiosity. They want to understand how this family made it. Or,” Robinson pivots, “it could be seen as ‘we thought we wiped everyone out. We didn’t finish the job—let’s finish it.”

A creature releases the seal on the house and makes its way inside. But the Delgado family is prepared, and Jason’s skills as an engineer once again prove fruitful, as they’ve fashioned weapons from everyday objects. What they’re not prepared for is the creature flooding the house, which almost kills them. But Jason uses his harpoon to trap the creature. They have the opportunity to kill it, but instead they opt for a humane approach, freeing the creature from its restraints. It leaves the house, but leaves it unsealed, meaning that for the first time in five years, the family is free to go outside.

This leads to another surprise. The creature appears to be speaking to the others, and suddenly, the rain stops. The house finally collapses (the foundation has been sinking since before the rain began) and the creatures jump into the hole left by the house, never to be seen again. The Delgado’s get a boat just like Jason used to have before he had family, name it after their beloved family dog, Cassidy, who passed during the lockdown, and sail away into the unknown, perhaps hoping to connect with other survivors as they send a radio message out into the world. “Day 1” appears on the screen, signalling a new chance; a new life, for the Delgado family. Someone responds to their message: we hear a “Hello?” and the film cuts to black.

Why did the creatures decide to leave? While Robinson prefers to leave things open to interpretation, he has some ideas.

“By the Delgados granting them peace and understanding, I think they wanted to reciprocate that,” he says. “It’s two afraid species thinking the other one is out to destroy them, and in a moment of empathy, they realize they aren’t that different. They can’t understand each other, but they’ve seen how hard each other has struggled to survive. They’re going to give them their lives back, in hopes that they’ll do the same for them. Maybe we do deserve a life on this planet. But the family doesn’t know that—maybe as soon as the credits roll, they wipe them out on the boat.”

And what is it that the Delgado family is feeling at the end? “I always try and put myself in the kid’s perspective because I can only imagine how traumatic it would have been to spend five years trapped in your house, having lost all your friends and connections,” says Robinson. “But they did escape. It took all of them. They’re all necessary components of this machine, this family they’re a part of. They had to show up fully and trust each other, so I think because they have that, there’s a sense of peace and calm. Knowing that peace with your loved ones, that even if scary things are happening, the fact they’re in this together is all they need to survive.”

Adds Robinson: “The future is completely unknown. They don’t know what’s over the next wave, but they’re together and they’re going to find a way.”

It’s a rite of summer: enjoying time outdoors and all that nature has to offer. But that can come with dangers, and ticks, which can transmit Lyme disease, top the list.

Not every tick carries Lyme, however—and there's no way to know whether the one that's bitten you does, unless you send it out to get tested.

Until now, that meant finding a lab that conducts the test and waiting days for the results. Soon, you''ll be able to do it yourself at home. LymeAlert is the first at-home test for ticks that can detect whether they carry the bacterium Borrelia berdorferi that causes Lyme. To test your tick, you place it in the kit's container, drop in the included solution, put on the lid, crush the tick by twisting the top and grinding it up, and insert a test strip. Within 30 minutes, the strip tells you whether it detected any Lyme-causing bacteria in your tick. The kit is available for $49.99 to pre-order on the company’s website and will ship at the end of August.

Dawicki, co-founder and CEO of LymeAlert and a physician assistant in Boston, came up with the idea after spending years fielding questions and requests from patients who had been bitten by ticks: Can you test me for Lyme? Can you test the tick for Lyme? How do I know if I have Lyme? "I thought, 'Why not test ticks at home?' That way, patients know when to see a health care professional," she says.

Knowing which people are at higher risk for Lyme disease and therefore need confirmatory testing is important, since testing people is a bit complicated. Blood-based Lyme tests pick up antibodies that the body makes against the bacteria, so they may not read positive for several days after a tick bite, and depending on when people get tested, they may lead to false negatives. Knowing whether a tick that was attached to someone carries the Lyme bacterium, however, could provide more context for those results.

Testing ticks is also problematic. About half or more of people who get bitten by ticks aren’t even aware they’ve been bitten, says Dawicki, so the tick isn't always available to test. Even when it is, doctors and health facilities do not generally perform tests on ticks. You have to pay to send the tick to a commercial testing company or find your state’s health department and send the tick to their labs. Results can take days.

No commercial or at-home tick test, including LymeAlert, needs to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because these tests do not diagnose Lyme disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend getting ticks tested for several reasons. Commercial labs vary in the standards they use, which could affect the accuracy of their results. And even if a tick carries the Lyme-causing bacteria, depending on how long the tick fed, it may not have transmitted it to you. Finally, negative results don’t necessarily mean you’re in the clear, since you might have been bitten by another tick that you didn’t find.

Those concerns still apply if you test a tick at home. But Dawicki says there's value in knowing a tick's Lyme status right away, including getting antibiotics sooner if they're recommended and avoiding them if they're not. “Putting people on antibiotics just in case is not great health care,” she says, which is the current practice that many health care providers follow when someone is bitten by a tick.

Though LymeAlert does not diagnose Lyme disease in people, it can tell you whether a tick carries Lyme-causing bacteria, Dawicki says. “Nobody knows how much bacteria needs to be transmitted to guarantee an infection,” says Dawicki. “Animal studies from the 1990s and 2000s showed that you would need about 1,000 units of bacteria. We detect down to 400 units.”

If the test is positive, you should inform your doctor and discuss whether you need a course of antibiotics. Dawicki hopes the test will reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics, and slow the current march toward antibiotic resistance that has already rendered several antibiotics ineffective.

Dawicki and her team are also collecting data on climate, humidity, and migration patterns that affect tick populations to build an AI-based model for predicting where different ticks are likely to spread and what their chances are of carrying the Borrelia bacteria. Such hotspot maps could become a useful source of information for the public to help determine their risk for Lyme disease, and also provide deeper insight into where ticks move and how that affects the incidence of Lyme. The company hopes to develop additional tests for other disease-causing pathogens carried by ticks, like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, as well for molecules like alpha gal, which in some people can lead to an allergic reaction known as alpha-gal syndrome. “We are working on multiplex test strips for next summer so multiple pathogens can be detected in a single test strip,” she says.

President Donald Trump is claiming that voters are angry with Republicans—but not with him.

In an interview with Punchbowl News released on Friday, the President asserted that he gets “a tremendous vote,” while expressing concerns about support for his party.

“If I don’t run, will those people go out and vote?” Trump said.

“The question is, will they vote? Because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you,” he continued. “They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.”

According to a New York Times/Siena poll conducted in May, about 64% of registered voters are dissatisfied with the Republican Party, including 23% of Republicans. The poll also found that, while the President is generally popular among voters in his party, there are many who want the GOP to move away from Trump: about 55% of potential Republican supporters said that they want the party’s next presidential candidate to follow in Trump’s footsteps, whereas 37% said that they want the next candidate to shift away from him.

And despite Trump’s claim that voters aren’t angry with him, his approval stands at just 33%, according to AP-NORC polling from July, a drop of 4 percentage points from June and far below where it was when he returned to the Oval Office for a second term last January. Support for Trump among Republicans remains high, though, with 73% approving of how he’s handling the job and just 27% disapproving.

The President has brushed off his low polling numbers as having been “made up by the Fake News Media.”

“My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Monday. “Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll Numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”

Recent surveys have indicated that Democrats are leading over Republicans on generic ballots, with just a few months before the pivotal November midterm elections. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found that 42% of registered voters said they would cast their ballot for a Democratic congressional candidate if the midterms were held that day, while 37% would back a Republican congressional candidate. 

A recent CNN/SSRS poll also suggested that support is higher for Democrats than it is for Republicans: when asked which party’s congressional candidate they would vote for if an election were taking place that day, 47% of registered voters said they would back the Democrat, compared to just 39% who said they would cast their ballot for the Republican. That 8-point difference is up from a 5-point gap between the two parties that was marked by CNN in January.

Read More: Democrats Lead Republicans in Polls Three Months Ahead of Midterms

While Republicans have historically won over some voters on their economic policies, that advantage over Democrats appears to have diminished in recent months, partly as a result of the economic consequences of Trump’s tariffs and his war in Iran. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week revealed that, for the first time in years, more U.S. adults said that Democrats have a better strategy for the economy than those who said that Republicans do. And the majority of U.S. adults—64%—say they think that the war in the Middle East has not been worthwhile, including 37% of Republicans, according to an AP-NORC poll released in July.

Some Republicans in the Senate have expressed concerns that Trump could be a liability to the party in the midterms. There has been simmering tension between the President and members of his own party over several issues during his second term—Trump has publicly shared his frustrations with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for instance, over the fact that the restrictive voter ID bill that the President has aggressively championed has stalled in the upper chamber.

Still, in his interview with Punchbowl News, Trump indicated that he would have his super PAC roll out funds to his party in the upcoming midterms.

“I’m going to help Republicans,” he said.

A teenage boy in Thailand shot and killed at least seven people and wounded more than 20 others on Friday before taking his own life in the country’s deadliest mass shooting in nearly four years. 

The 14-year-old suspect, whose name authorities have not released because he was a minor, fatally shot his grandparents, with whom he lived, before going to his high school, the Debsirin Nonthaburi School outside of the capital of Bangkok, and opening fire, resulting in the deaths of at least five teachers and staff, according to Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who spoke before reporters Friday evening. No students were killed in the shooting.

More than 20 people were wounded and nine remained in critical condition following the shooting. 

Video from inside the school shows students seeking shelter beneath tables in a classroom, tables overturned and stacked, and bullet shells on the floor. Other footage taken outside the school show people embracing next to a fleet of medical personnel and police on site. 

One student told the BBC that she was standing in front of one teacher when the teacher was shot. “She was talking to me when [the gunman] showed up and shot her," the student recalled.

Anutin warned that the shooting could have been much worse, noting that the suspect had more than 30 rounds of ammunition remaining when he turned the gun on himself. 

The Prime Minister said that the suspect appeared to have been stressed over his studies 

“We have learned from interviews with one of his close friends that he had been under stress and had complained about pressure over his studies,” Anutin told reporters. “His grandmother was a teacher and wanted him to do well academically, so she was reportedly quite strict with him.”

Anutin added that the suspect had a “clear course of action and specific targets.”

Police said that the suspect had also searched for websites on mass shootings before the attack and that the gun belonged to his grandfather and had been registered. 

The suspect's father told CNN that he does not know why his son might have carried out the shooting. 

“My son was guilty … he hurt people,” the father told the network. “I have nothing more to say. But I still don’t know why he did that.” He added that he had not witnessed “any sign of violence” from his son. “I still don’t know why he had to kill his own grandfather and grandmother,” he said.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Thai officials are moving to implement new safety measures.

Anutin said that a “new law will only allow government officials on duty to carry guns.” He did not provide further details.

The Thai Ministry of Education said in a statement that “following this incident, security measures at schools will be significantly strengthened.” It added that “enhanced school security and measures to protect students” would be discussed, and announced financial assistance including 20,000 Thai Baht ($600) for families of the deceased victims, and 5,000 Thai Baht ($150) for the people who were injured.

Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Yodchanan Wongsawat also said on Friday that a mental health action plan would be announced to support teachers and students. 

Thailand has one of the highest civilian gun ownership rates in Southeast Asia and has had several mass shootings in recent years, prompting calls for stricter firearm controls.

In 2022, a former police officer killed more than 30 people, most of them children, using guns and a knife in northeast Thailand at a children’s daycare center. A year later in 2023, a teenager fatally shot two people at a shopping mall in downtown Bangkok. 

Every generation seems to find a new approach to fix American education. Today, it's artificial intelligence.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, investor Marc Andreessen, and a growing number of policymakers argue that generative AI will democratize education by giving every student a personalized tutor, writing coach, research assistant, and study partner available around the clock. If every child has access to individualized instruction, they suggest, longstanding achievement gaps will begin to narrow.

It's an appealing vision. It is also a familiar one.

As a historian of education and former public school teacher, I have spent more than 35 years watching education reforms arrive with extraordinary fanfare and confidence. Each was promised to transform opportunities for disadvantaged students. Each produced some genuine benefits. Yet none fundamentally changed the inequalities that shape educational achievement in the U.S.

That is because Americans have long asked schools to solve problems that originate far beyond the classroom.

The belief itself is almost as old as public education. In 1848, Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, called schools "the great equalizer of the conditions of men." He believed education could prepare informed citizens while expanding opportunity for all. Nearly two centuries later, that ideal still shapes how Americans think about solving inequality. 

When gaps in achievement persist, we rarely ask whether schools alone can overcome them. Instead, we look for the next educational breakthrough.

During the 1990s and 2000s, that breakthrough was charter schools. Advocates argued that competition and innovation would dramatically improve outcomes for students in poor and underserved communities. Some charter schools did. Many did not. A 2023 Stanford University study found modest academic gains overall, but nothing approaching the transformation supporters had promised.

Around the same time, Teach For America offered another solution. By recruiting graduates from elite universities to teach in under-resourced schools, it hoped elite, young teachers could overcome educational disadvantage. Many participants became talented educators. But high turnover limited the program's reach, and no teaching corps—however committed—could erase the effects of poverty, housing instability, or unequal access to opportunity.

Then came No Child Left Behind. Signed into law in 2002, it promised that standards, testing, and accountability would finally close gaps in student achievement across race and class. The law succeeded in exposing disparities, but it also encouraged teaching to the test and narrowed what many schools taught. The gaps it sought to eliminate largely remained.

Now AI has become the latest reform wrapped in transformational promises. Its advocates are right about some of its potential in education. Generative AI can help explain difficult concepts, provide immediate feedback, translate instructional materials, and make individualized support more accessible than ever before. Teachers can use it to differentiate instruction and reduce routine administrative work. Used well, AI will almost certainly improve teaching and learning in many classrooms.

But what occurs in classrooms has never been the primary obstacle to educational equality. Students do not arrive at school with equal access to stable housing, nutritious food, quality health care, reliable internet, experienced teachers, safe neighborhoods, or family resources. These inequalities accumulate long before a child enters kindergarten and continue long after the school day ends. Chatbots, no matter how well-designed, will not erase them.

This is not an argument against AI, though we must pay close attention to both its real benefits and its real drawbacks, such as interfering with students' ability to think critically, which is no small thing. Schools should experiment with new technologies that genuinely help students learn.  As teachers have always adapted to new tools, from calculators to the internet, AI will almost certainly become another part of that evolution.

The problem arises when technological innovation is mistaken for social policy.

History suggests that educational reforms often aim to improve instruction without transforming the conditions that produce educational inequality in the first place. These reforms can make some schools better, some teachers more effective, and some students more successful. What they can’t do is eliminate the economic and social disparities that shape children's lives before they ever enter a classroom. Generative AI is unlikely to be different.

Americans continue to embrace Horace Mann's vision that public education expands opportunity. It goes without saying that schools matter enormously. They can ignite curiosity, inspire life goals, support critical relationships, and open doors to opportunities that might otherwise remain closed.

But schools have never been able to overcome inequality by themselves.

If we really want to narrow opportunity gaps, we must stop expecting educational innovations—whether charter schools, standardized testing, or artificial intelligence—to accomplish what only broader economic and social reforms can achieve.

AI may transform how students learn.

It will not, by itself, transform the unequal society that shapes students' lives and in which they learn.

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana announced Friday he'll vote in favor of confirming Todd Blanche for Attorney General, offering a lifeline to President Donald Trump’s nominee.

In an address on the Senate floor, Cassidy acknowledged Blanche "is not perfect," but argued no one is, and suggested another nominee may not fare any better. 

Cassidy lost his re-election primary in May to a Trump-backed candidate, but he emphasized his personal relationship with the President was irrelevant.

"This process should be about Mr. Blanche and how he will go forward in a difficult job, and how the American people can be best served," he said. "I have a history with Mr. Trump, but that history does not matter one bit."

Admitting he still has some concerns regarding Blanche, Cassidy said the nominee "showed poor judgment in approving the anti-weaponization slush fund and exempting the President from IRS audits."

Blanche needed Cassidy’s support for his pending Senate confirmation after two prominent Republican Senators publicly declared they were unwilling to back him. The path toward confirmation for the acting Attorney General looked increasingly difficult in a Senate where Republicans hold a slim 53-47 majority.

The Republican margin was further complicated by the weeks-long absence of Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who remains away from public duties as he recovers from a hospital stay prompted by a fall.

In the hours before Cassidy's statement, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced her intention to vote against the confirmation of Blanche, who formerly served as Trump's personal attorney.

Despite several “constructive meetings” with Blanche, Murkowski determined she could not support the nomination, stating that while the “politicization—even weaponization—of the [Justice] Department” did not start with the Trump Administration, it has “accelerated” during it.

“I take issue with the handling of the release of the Epstein files; the sweeping immunity protections granted to the President, his family, and their businesses; the statements that have been made to anti-abortion groups; and the repeated targeting of individuals ranging from former Administration staff to sitting U.S. Senators,” Murkowski said.

The Alaska lawmaker also factored in Trump’s planned “anti-weaponization” fund, citing she was aware it is “only off the table because this nomination is pending and the Senate has leverage.”

The fund has been a point of contention across party aisles due to concerns the payouts to those who the Trump Administration claims were unfairly persecuted by the government could extend to people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots.

Blanche on Aug. 2 persuaded former GOP holdouts Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina to support his confirmation by assuring them, in writing, that the “anti-weaponization” fund had been rescinded.

But for Murkowski, it was not enough to sway her vote.

“I will oppose his nomination,” she said. “The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this Administration. I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that, if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, in an emailed statement to TIME, referred to Murkowski's decision as "disappointing" and said Blanche is "exceptionally qualified and should be confirmed as the next Attorney General of the United States, so the Administration can continue to keep America safe."

GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine announced her own opposing vote on Tuesday, saying that while she views Blanche as a “capable lawyer,” she is concerned the DOJ “has become increasingly political” and believes Blanche himself has “taken several actions that have further eroded the Department’s independence.”

Murkowski and Collins, who is facing a tough re-election race in the November midterms, have often broken ranks with the President. In recent weeks, they have voted to limit Trump’s ability to continue the Iran war without congressional authorization.

Trump publicly criticized Murkoswki just a day before she announced her decision on Blanche.

“I am against Murkowski,” he said in an interview, when asked about the possibility of the lawmaker opposing his nominee. “I do more for Alaska than any President in history. No President has done for Alaska what I've done. She's not good.”

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Thursday voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress following a contentious hearing in which the infectious disease expert declined to answer lawmakers’ questions over 100 times.

Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a hearing last week, where Republican senators probed him over the U.S. government’s response to the COVID pandemic and the disputed origins of the virus. Fauci has long been a target of GOP attacks and investigations over his role in leading the pandemic response.

Read More: What It Means to Plead the Fifth Amendment

During his opening statement, Fauci accused Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the chair of the panel and one of his most persistent critics, of having an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.”

"The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars,'" Fauci said.

His decision to plead the Fifth drew ire from GOP lawmakers. Paul pressed for Fauci to be held in contempt over his refusal to answer questions, arguing that he was not entitled to invoke his right against self-incrimination because he is protected from criminal prosecution over his past actions during the pandemic by a pardon granted by former President Joe Biden.

But as Biden’s pardon was retroactive, Republicans had said that any false statements Fauci made under oath during the hearing could still expose him to perjury charges. Fauci’s lawyer, David Schertler, said following the hearing that “We are completely confident that Dr. Fauci has a valid Fifth Amendment privilege here and is on solid legal ground in asserting it.”

On Thursday, the Republican-led committee voted 8-7 along party lines to advance the contempt resolution.

Here’s what to know about what that vote means, and what might come next for Fauci. 

What does it mean to be held in contempt of Congress?

Contempt of Congress is a federal misdemeanor in which an individual willfully disobeys or impedes a congressional investigation. 

A contempt of Congress charge may be levied against someone if they fail to appear before a committee after being subpoenaed, refuse to produce required documents, or refuse to answer questions related to an investigation. 

Congress does not hold the power to prosecute or convict someone of the crime; instead, the House or Senate can vote to approve a resolution finding a person in contempt and refer the matter to the executive branch for prosecution.  

What comes next after the Senate committee vote?

Under Senate procedure, following a panel vote to approve a contempt resolution like the one on Thursday, the measure then heads to the full chamber for a vote. If it passes there, the case is certified and sent to the Department of Justice (DOJ). 

As Democratic support would be needed to reach the 60-vote threshold required to end a filibuster in the current narrowly divided Senate, the resolution to hold Fauci in contempt has little chance of passing the upper chamber.

“The vote is largely symbolic, because the full Senate would have to approve to hold Fauci in contempt,” Barbara McQuade, a former Obama-appointed U.S. attorney and expert in criminal procedure who is currently a professor at the University of Michigan law school, tells TIME in a statement. “It seems unlikely they will muster the 60 votes needed to get past a filibuster.” 

Following the panel vote on Thursday, Paul said he would bypass the Senate vote and hand-deliver the resolution to the DOJ. 

“This way we don’t sit a month waiting to determine whether or not to bring it to the Senate floor,” he told reporters on Thursday. “It will immediately be referred over and I think it's important for them to look at.”

Paul is within his right to submit a referral to the DOJ to investigate Fauci. But Donald K Sherman, a former Biden-era official who previously served as senior counsel for the ranking member on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, says that within the procedural context of the contempt resolution, the Kentucky senator’s promises to go straight to the department are “silly theater.”

“It has absolutely no legal effect,” he tells TIME, adding that “any procedural defect in the contempt resolution undermines the Department of Justice's ability to prosecute it.”

Jonathan David Shaub, a former Biden-era White House attorney and Obama-era DOJ adviser and current professor of law at the University of Kentucky, notes that precedent is already in place that protects the procedure of certifying a contempt resolution by the Senate to the DOJ. 

He warns, however, that if the DOJ acts on Paul’s referral, it could set “a pretty striking precedent for allowing what is in essence a sort of single chairman to sort of engage in this kind of harassment of a single person, private person.” 

What penalties could Fauci face?

If Fauci is found guilty of contempt of Congress in court, he could face a fine of up to $100,000 and a prison sentence of up to one year. 

Prosecutors would first need to prove that Fauci was willfully in contempt of Congress, however, something Sherman says is “a not insignificant burden on the government to prove.” 

Paul has argued that Fauci did not have the right to plead the Fifth during the hearing due toBiden’s pardon, which shields Fauci for prosecution over any federal offenses he might have committed from January 1, 2014, through Jan. 19, 2025.

“We are voting on whether a witness who has received the benefit of a sweeping federal pardon can be ordered by this committee to answer questions and then defy that order without consequence,” Paul said on Thursday ahead of the committee vote. 

McQuade believes Fauci would have a “bulletproof motion to dismiss on Fifth Amendment grounds” if charges were brought against him.

“The pardon Biden gave to Fauci applies only to any crimes Fauci ‘may’ have committed before January 20, 2025,” she tells TIME. “Therefore, he has a reasonable fear that his testimony could be used against him in a criminal prosecution, and his invocation of the Fifth Amendment was proper, and cannot be used as a basis to hold him in contempt.”

Fauci’s case is unique, though, with little legal precedent for a prosecution or defense to draw from. 

“All of this is relatively unexplored, the effect of a pardon on your ability to assert the Fifth Amendment doesn't seem to have really been settled,” Shaub says.

What can Fauci do?

There is little Fauci can do to stop Congress from seeking to hold him in contempt at this stage. 

“There's a speech and debate clause in the Constitution that immunizes members of Congress for their actions,” Shaub points out. “So there's nothing he can do to stop whatever is going to happen, except for make his arguments to the Department of Justice.”

The legal road ahead may be a long one. “This could play out over a very long time period,” Shaub says. 

But he adds that such prolonged proceedings could work to Fauci’s advantage.

“Should it go on for a while, and a Democratic president wins the next election, and his appeal is still pending, then they could drop the case,” Shaub says. “Which would likely be his best strategy should he get prosecuted.”

More expansive than the island of Manhattan, Thacker Pass in northern Nevada is the biggest U.S. lithium-mining project developed in decades. And it’s been one of the country’s most visible flash points in the race to build new critical-mineral mines. While at first spurred by the clean-energy transition, the demand for critical minerals is now driven by their role as essential ingredients for AI data centers.

But local communities aren’t so sure. In northern Nevada, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe has protested Thacker Pass, saying it would destroy sacred Indigenous sites; the tribe negotiated a community-benefits agreement in 2022, but some members have continued to dispute the deal. Meanwhile climate advocates have tried to thread the needle between its potential to produce lithium, a key component of some rechargeable-battery technology needed to manufacture electric vehicles, and mining’s risks to the local environment. Today, Thacker Pass is grinding ahead alongside dozens of other projects in the U.S. facing similar concerns. 

Much of the world’s critical-mineral supply chain currently runs through China, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to geopolitical wrangling. The success of the ongoing American mining renaissance will shape whether the U.S. and other allies can insulate themselves from such challenges—not to mention power the transition to renewable energy. “It is the most important emerging energy-security question,” says Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency.

Across political parties and ideological camps, policymakers agree the U.S. must bring some mining and processing capacity home. But many environmentalists and local communities remain concerned about how it’s happening, with 40 mining projects listed as part of a federal fast-track program and projects moving quickly. Today’s rapid development, captured in these up-close images of the new mining boom, will set new precedents for what companies must do—or could get away with—when they want to build megamines. There are no easy answers.

Carmen Lucas is a 90-year-old from the Kwaaymii tribe in California and has been fighting mining developments for over two decades. Her list of grievances is long. Development creates local pollution that harms children’s health and can damage the cultural heritage of Indigenous sites. More than anything, she criticizes developers for treating the land as if it’s empty. “Washington is looking at the Imperial Valley and saying that’s just a desert, that’s just wasteland,” she says. Today, she is championing opposition to a project to tap into a lithium reserve beneath the southern end of California’s Salton Sea, where reserves are worth more than $500 billion. “It has been mandated by the United States government and the state of California to annihilate the California Indians since the Gold Rush,” she says. “And I’m still watching it today.”

Lucas and the Kwaaymii tribe are far from alone. Globally, more than half of the minerals needed for the energy transition are on or near the land of Indigenous or other land-connected peoples, according to research published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Historically, these communities have been displaced, or suffered from polluted air and water as a result—even long after the mines close. At the former site of the Tar Creek mine in Oklahoma, which stopped operating in the 1970s, for example, generations have suffered from the mining remnants that have seeped into the soil and ground-water, leading to neurological damage and stunting development in local children. 

In the U.S., community buy-in is often the biggest factor determining whether a project will receive the necessary permits. “You have to embrace social license to operate and say it’s not just a real thing, it’s as important, if not more, than the permit,” says Pat Risner, the president of mining company South32’s zinc and manganese Hermosa Project in Arizona. (Getting and maintaining social license to operate remains difficult for any mining company, given the array of community concerns.)

The context at the federal level has also changed. While the Biden Administration touted the need to boost domestic critical-mineral production, action came relatively slowly. But when Beijing countered President Trump’s massive tariffs by threatening U.S. supplies of critical minerals, his Administration found incentive to accelerate permitting and put up federal dollars to buy into companies. Given the stakes, critical-minerals advocates want to avoid the issue becoming partisan, politics being yet another needle for minders to thread. To many of the people on the front lines, though, none of this matters too much. They just want to ensure that this mining revival doesn’t harm their communities.

Thacker Pass Lithium Mine Project

Humboldt County, Northern Nevada

An 18,000-acre project site with billions of dollars of lithium underground, Thacker Pass is the flagship U.S. lithium project. With bipartisan federal support, it broke ground in 2023 after clearing a range of permitting hurdles. And yet a bitter taste remains for some community members who say that Thacker Pass will damage historic sites sacred to the Paiute, Shoshone, and Washoe tribes. Others have spoken out in support thanks to the promise of economic development beyond the 1,000 people who work on the site. The project, a priority for the Trump Administration, has also received attention for its unique financing structure. The Department of Energy took a 5% equity stake in both the project and the company developing it.

Black Hills Mines

Southwestern South Dakota

Demand for gold has skyrocketed thanks to geopolitical tensions and supply-chain disruptions. The mines in the Black Hills area of South Dakota, which date back to the 19th century, are now seeing a modern-day gold rush. Even as gold production has dwindled, revenues have soared thanks to higher prices driven by gold’s role as a safe-haven asset as well as its role in advanced electronics and aerospace. Mining companies want to produce more. 

But the mining revival extends beyond gold. The Dewey Burdock Uranium Project, also in Black Hills, is being fast-tracked by the federal government to serve the growing demand for nuclear power. Tribes are fighting back mine by mine, citing everything from threats to sacred land to water contamination. Indeed, the nearby history carries warnings. Past uranium mining contaminated local water systems.

Hell's Kitchen Lithium Project

Imperial Valley, California

The Hell’s Kitchen megaproject on the shore of California’s Salton Sea is a $1.8 billion bet on a massive, first-of-its-kind geothermal power and lithium-extraction facility. Developers aim to start up the facility’s new geothermal power production first, with lithium mining to follow. While the county and Controlled Thermal Resources, the mine’s owner, last year defeated a lawsuit that attempted to halt operations there, community opposition remains strong and opponents are appealing. The project sits in a low-income, heavily Latino, environmentally over-burdened valley with some of the worst air quality in the country. Tensions are also rife over the mine’s water consumption and the terms of its community-benefit agreement. Meanwhile, as demand for lithium for EV batteries has softened, the company has emphasized that both its geothermal energy and minerals can serve the AI-driven data-center boom. 

South32 Hermosa

Patagonia, Arizona

South32 Hermosa is emerging as the next big case study for the future of U.S. mining. The $2 billion zinc and manganese project was the first mining project to receive expedited federal permitting under a streamlined process earlier this year. Unlike most mining mega-projects, which require huge open pits, the Hermosa project is underground, minimizing the visible footprint. “We will mine for up to 70 years at this site, and only disturb 750 acres in total,” says Pat Risner, the project’s president. 

Still, many community tensions remain unresolved. The project sits in a biodiversity hot spot, home to jaguars and Mexican spotted owls, and locals are concerned that mining operations may pollute the groundwater they rely on for household use. Negotiations over a community-benefits agreement remain ongoing.

Stibnite Mine

Valley County, Idaho

In central Idaho, developers are bringing an abandoned World War II–era mining district back to life to produce gold and antimony, a mineral used to harden other metals and as a fire retardant. U.S. government officials say the mine is the only one in the U.S. capable of producing enough antimony to meet growing defense needs, for everything from ammunition to infrared sensors. Critics point to company documents showing the site contains only enough to supply the U.S. for two years. Indeed, the vast majority of the project’s revenue will come from gold. After a nine-year process, it received its final permit in May 2025 and broke ground in October. But lawsuits remain ongoing. The Nez Perce Tribe opposes the project in its entirety, saying the permitting decision violates treaty rights and environmental law. And new mining threatens to upend millions spent by the tribe on restoring the local salmon population harmed by mining decades ago. Conservation groups are suing too, because of potential harm to local wildlife. Developers contend that their work will actually remediate the area, since the site was left abandoned in poor condition.

— With reporting by Kaya Lee Berne

The writing in this story is supported by a partnership with Outrider Foundation and Journalism Funding Partners. TIME is solely responsible for the content.

Correction, Aug. 7

The original version of this story mischaracterized the relationship between Thacker Pass and the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe. Current protests against the project are on behalf of individual tribal members, not the tribal government, though the tribe has previously protested. This story has also been updated to reflect the current status of Becky and John Ball's agreement with South32.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Cape Fear finale.

Dusk is easing into dark on the Cape Fear River when Max Cady (Javier Bardem) steps out of his car near Bluff’s Point. Aboard the houseboat ahead, his half-sister Crystal Cady (Juliette Lewis) sees him coming, and dread crosses her face before she can even speak. Their father, Robert “Bob” Cady (Ron Perlman), and a young man named Luke (Max Mattern) are still arguing inside when Crystal warns them that Max has arrived. Max knocks on the door, a strange formality for a man about to burn the boat down to the waterline.

This scene arrives at the climax of Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear adaptation, which sees Max walking free after 17 years in prison for allegedly murdering his wife Melissa. Newly exonerated, he's treated in some corners as a folk hero. What Max actually wants is for Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), the public defender who represented him at that original trial, to answer for choices that shaped his fate more than she ever admitted. Across the 10-episode season, Max stalked the Bowden family—Anna's husband, Tom (Patrick Wilson), and their teenagers, Zack (Joe Anders) and Natalie (Lily Collias)—and shattered their trust in one another, all while demanding to be seen as a man wronged by the world. But every step toward revenge transformed him into the very threat he insists he is not. The finale’s real tragedy is that Max, in his own warped pursuit of justice, destroys everyone around him before being forced to see his entire crusade differently. By then, it’s too late for redemption. 

Antosca shaped the season around sustained pressure, as a family’s small cracks split open under the weight of a man determined to make them suffer the way he once did. “This show is an experiment in dread and pressure on a family,” Antosca says. “I wanted to see the family come together to fight in a primal way for their survival.” The finale delivers on that promise, but it lets Max nearly destroy everyone else first. 

Max’s family meets a violent end

“Where is she?” Max asks Crystal on the houseboat, referring to Anna. Crystal tells him Anna escaped, jumping into the river hours earlier. Max’s gaze drifts toward the water, and his face closes like a fist. When Luke tells him, meekly, not to touch Crystal, Max only wants to know who the young man is. The audience doesn’t know yet, either. 

Crystal, the child their father favored while Max lived in a cage, offers a fragile truce, remembering how she also used to trail behind him along the river: “I’ll forgive you if you forgive me.” Max shoots her without hesitation, then shoots Luke when he lunges to intervene. “When you die, don't forget this face,” Max tells her. “Don't forget the face of the little boy you tormented.”

When Bob calls him a devil for shooting his own blood, Max doesn't flinch. “If I’m the devil, what are you?” he asks. He pistol-whips his father, traps Luke and Crystal below deck, and douses the boat in gasoline, saving the last of it for Bob, now in a cage. Crouching beside him, Max speaks in Spanish, the language of the Spanish mother who raised him until her suicide when he was 13, and the one his American father then caged him for using: the equivalent of “bad dog.” He strikes a flame, cuts the mooring line, and disappears into the dark as the boat catches fire.

Lewis’s casting carries its own echo: in Martin Scorsese’s 1991 film version, she played the Bowden daughter Cady preyed on. Here she’s a Cady, and Max kills her in the finale’s opening minutes. Bardem describes Max entering this hour “at the peak of his patience,” a man who spent years engineering this exact convergence. “Now it’s time to really create the situation and create the final step of his own goal of revenge,” he says. “That also includes fixing his family problems in a Max Cady way.”

Anna, meanwhile, has stumbled off the riverbank and flagged down a family to drive her back to her car. Tom is still sitting in Chatham County Jail on a murder charge Max framed him for.

Anna turns the tables on Max

Max is opening a restaurant, Melissa & Adam, named for the wife he was convicted of murdering and the son she was carrying when she died. At the grand opening, with supporters wearing shirts that read “Max was a victim,” Anna walks to the front holding a paper bag that could, for one long beat, contain anything. It turns out to hold a Bluetooth speaker.

She plays an audio recording of Max’s daughter, Nevaeh Valentine (Malia Pyles), detailing his instructions: break into the Bowden home, spike the family’s tea, seduce Zack, push him to bite off his own toe, and kill Natalie. Anna’s colleague Noa Toussaint (CCH Pounder) follows with a video of Max coercing his mistress into suicide, shattering the narrative that bought his freedom.

“This is who he is!” Anna shouts to the crowd. Max wraps both hands around her throat before a guard tackles him. Cuffed and seeing visions of his dead wife and imagined son, he looks at Anna with pure hate as her expression mirrors his. The moment is a deliberate callback to the premiere, when Max seized a microphone at a fundraiser and humiliated Anna in public. “She had to have an opportunity to come and confront him in the same way at the end of the season, before we get to that primal fight in the house,” Antosca says.

Adams reads it as the turn where Anna finally matches Max on his terms. “She’s so physically and emotionally exhausted that I think she's acting without any barriers,” Adams says. If dying is what it takes to save her family and reveal who Max is, she adds, Anna is willing.

What Anna gains, Max loses. It is the first time, Bardem says, that Max sees her in complete control, and that public reversal triggers everything that follows. Once Max understands that “now everybody’s playing his game,” Bardem says, he moves to “close the deal.” From there, his psychological games give way to physical violence.

The calm before the storm

Tom enters this stretch of the finale about as low as a person can go. “For a guy that's in total control for most of his life, he's now completely out of sorts, to say the least. He's frayed,” Wilson says. He's released on bail after a night in jail spent beside a makeshift noose—an image Wilson says was designed to leave viewers wondering whether Tom had reached the point of taking his own life or someone else’s—then goes straight to Anna at the hospital. “Those are very important questions that we just wanted to propose, versus giving answers,” he says.

Natalie, meanwhile, finds Zack wandering back toward the house, unharmed, having simply walked out of rehab. At the hospital, Anna and Tom’s conversation turns quiet. She is glad he finally knows the truth, she tells him: that Max may have taken advantage of her during blackouts around his original trial 17 years earlier.

The conversation is also where Anna might finally let herself be fully loved, Adams suggests. “For her, it’s never being truly able to accept the love of her husband, the love of her children, the life that she's built, because she knows it was built on so many secrets and so much uncertainty,” Adams says. “Now, with everything being revealed, I think she can start from a place of more authenticity.”

Anna tells Tom she loves him. Neither answers the real question between them—what happens now?—before the hospital loudspeaker announces an evacuation. A hurricane is coming for Savannah, Georgia. 

By the time the family reconvenes at the house, the room exhales. Tom sits Zack down and explains what really happened to his brother, who died by suicide when Tom was 14, not in the accident Tom had always described. “For a long time, I didn’t want to see how bad things were with you,” Tom tells his son. “It was easier for me to just tell myself you would get better. But sometimes things just suck, and we can't pretend otherwise—just get through it together.”

Then Detective Grayson Park (Paul Schneider) arrives with several officers and reports that Max assaulted a cop and escaped custody. As the Bowdens light candles for the storm, Anna gets a text from Noa: a photo of a homebirth certificate connecting Crystal to a boy named Luke, a detail that means little to her yet. Upstairs, done running, Tom pulls a shotgun from the safe. He wants Max gone for good.

The police search the property, find nothing, and leave. Then the camera pulls back to reveal Max standing on the Bowdens’ roof, unbothered by the storm breaking around him. Zack, packing a bag, hears him first. He opens his window just as lightning catches Max's grin, and Max drops through it onto him.

Max puts the Bowdens on trial 

Anna finds Max holding a knife to her son’s throat on the staircase; Tom raises his shotgun. Max tells him to put it down, releasing Zack in exchange, then picks up the gun himself, herds all four Bowdens into the kitchen, and makes Natalie bind her parents' wrists with plastic restraints. He injects Zack with scopolamine, leaving him docile, and refuses to let the children go. He doesn’t want hostages so much as a jury.

What follows is the hour’s centerpiece: Max staging a trial of his own devising, as judge, prosecutor, and executioner at once. “Max has lost faith in all institutions: institutions of law, institutions of religion, the financial system,” Antosca says, drawing on guidance from a wrongful-conviction attorney the production consulted. “So Max becomes that institution for himself.” In its simplest form, Antosca says, the scene signals: “I was on trial. Now you’re on trial.”

Max asks Tom whether he owns a Bible—he means to swear his witnesses in—and strikes him across the face when Tom’s only answer is a baffled “What?” When Anna and Tom hesitate, Max turns to Zack, still glassy from the drug, and suggests the boy bite off his own tongue. Blood runs down Zack’s chin before his parents swear to tell the truth. Anna admits she secured Max a plea deal that took the death penalty off the table 17 years earlier. Max strikes Tom with the shotgun and keeps pushing.

The real confession arrives in pieces. Anna admits she learned through a leak that the jury at Max’s trial was deadlocked, and that fear—not conscience—decided what she did next. She could have used that leverage to secure Max a lighter sentence. Instead, she let the jury put him away for good.

Max smiles, imagining the life he might have had outside prison. “Did you hear that, jury?” he asks Natalie and Zack. “She betrayed her own client.” Then Anna admits the fear underneath the betrayal: Natalie might have been Max’s daughter, and Anna could not bear the thought of her knowing that her father was a monster.

Power flickers as the storm worsens. A window shatters. The lights die and come back. Max raises his arms, a half-lit prophet. “I have carried you in my skin, so that this day would come,” he declares. “Justice. Fire. Thunder and lightning. Today’s the day that you will be judged.”

Max’s restraint finally disappears here. “We haven't seen him like this in the whole show, because he's always been under control,” Bardem says. Now, he adds, Max becomes the “personification of his wildest impulses,” transforming into this “theatrical figure of revenge, this real evil avenger.”

Wilson plays the scene from the opposite instinct, a lawyer discovering the law has nothing left to offer him. “By that point, I’m not thinking about the law,” Wilson says. “I’m thinking about how to get out, how to save my family, and probably how to kill this guy.” Getting there meant stripping Tom’s composure away entirely, an approach Wilson suspects comes from his years working in the horror genre. “You want to paint in primary colors. You want to see a guy that is completely together, and then the complete animal side of him,” he says. While Tom looks for a way to fight, Anna looks for a way through. Adams describes her as switching tactics in what she calls “deep survival,” thinking about her family more than herself.

The trial brings Max to Tom, whom he accuses of sleeping with Anna during the proceedings and building a “life of privilege” out of Max’s ruin. “I’ll say whatever words you want to hear, but we did not sleep together during your trial,” Tom answers, looking toward Anna. “I was falling in love with her, but nothing happened.”

Max staggers and envisions his dead wife and imagined son again before pulling himself back to his closing argument. He asks Natalie for a verdict. She curses at him and sides with her father. Max looks up, as if awaiting a ruling from somewhere higher, then delivers it himself: guilty, with a capital sentence to be carried out immediately.

The truth about Max’s son is revealed

He levels the shotgun at Natalie. That’s when Anna tells him the truth that breaks him: his son didn’t die with Melissa. He was Luke, the young man Max shot on the houseboat without knowing who he was.  

Anna has Max pull up the homebirth certificate Noa sent, then connects it to the scar visible in an old photograph of the baby, the same scar she saw on Luke's side. “Crystal killed Melissa, and she ripped him out of her. Your sister stole your baby, Max,” Anna tells him. “He was alive all this time, until you killed him.”

Max shakes his head, watching the story that drove his entire revenge plot come apart. He sinks to his knees, his hands covering his face. Antosca says the moment is a turning point for Max. “It changes everything, because he can tell himself that he is righteous and everything he's doing is righteous,” Antosca says. “The revelation that Luke was his son, that his son was alive this whole time, makes it feel like his whole campaign of vengeance was misguided.”

For Bardem, the revelation collapses everything that made Max who he was, and it lands where he is least defended. “It was the moment of deep vulnerability that has to hit him  in the weakest side of him, as the father who has committed the worst crime of them all,” he says. What replaces the man who ran the season is something feral: Bardem describes “an out of control, dying beast, wounded animal, that we have not seen before.” The collapse also costs Max the only weapon he ever had. His strength was always his ability “to play, to manipulate, to divert the attention.” Reduced to survival, he can't reach for it, and the pain is so total, Bardem says, that Max no longer knows how to react.

Adams, watching from Anna’s side of the revelation, says Anna is piecing it together at nearly the same moment Max is. Anna is trying to reach him, Adams says, to “apply some amount of logic” and “bring him back into a reasonable place.” “I think she recognizes the tragedy of it as well,” she says.

Natalie has been using a hidden lighter to burn through her restraints. Now free, she runs. Max corners her behind the sofa, and she fires a nail gun repeatedly, driving one nail into his skull. It barely slows him. He pulls it out and gets back up. Natalie reaches for a knife in the kitchen before Max overpowers her. 

Zack, still hazy from the drug, sees himself holding a flapping fish, with Max fishing beside him—the trip Max once promised while feeding the boy the lie that he was his real father. Then Max's face gives way to Tom's: the counterfeit father yielding to the true one. The vision, conjured by the very drug Max used to make him harmless, snaps Zack back just in time to lunge at Max, knocking him off balance and saving Natalie from the shot meant for her. 

Tom and Max fight. Anna drives a kitchen knife into Max's back. He staggers outside, and Tom knocks him into the pool, which glows an unnatural aquamarine beneath the storm. “It's a kill-or-be-killed sort of moment,” Adams says.

In the churning pool, Max grapples with Tom, who locks him in a stranglehold. Anna leaps in, and together they hold him under until his limbs finally go limp.

Moving the climax from the open waters of the Cape Fear River to the family's backyard pool marks a decisive break from previous film adaptations. “We felt for this version of the story that it should end in their home,” Antosca explains. “Bring the storm to them.”

The scene also pays off a detail from Episode 7, when Max told Natalie he’d been baptized in the Cape Fear River as a boy but never learned to swim. “[The pool] is also the place where he’s more vulnerable,” Bardem says.

The pool fight took days to shoot, with rain pouring down and cameras rolling underwater. Staging a brawl in water demands precision from everyone in it. “You’ve got to be so in tune with your dance partner,” Wilson says. It was also a release after months of playing Tom measured. “We all had been so measured for so long … it was nice to let it rip,” he says. For all the scale, the sequence plays as a test the Bowdens narrowly pass. “There’s a killer inside of everybody,” Wilson says, but killing Max at that point would be vengeance, not self-defense. “Tom, at his core, is not someone that would kill out of revenge.”

It is Anna who calls it off. “Let him die in a cage,” she tells Tom. The words land with the weight of everything before them: the dog cage Max was confined to as a boy and the metal cage in which his father died only hours earlier. Tom pulls Max, still breathing, to the edge of the pool. 

Adams frames the choice not to kill Max as Anna snapping back into herself the instant she sees her children watching. “She has to come back to some sense of reason,” Adams says. “She has to return to her moral code. … If they kill him, Max wins.”

The threat has passed, but things will never be the same

Once the storm passes, the episode finds Natalie in her room watching a video of Tabitha (Anna Baryshnikov), the journalist who spent the season chasing Max's story and fell in love with him. Natalie closes the laptop. In her hand is an unopened envelope from a DNA testing company, containing the answer to whether Max was ever really her father. Instead of opening it, she goes downstairs, where Anna is calling everyone to eat.

Downstairs, the scene echoes the premiere's opening barbecue: Tom grilling under the Savannah sun, Anna teasing him. They kiss. Zack finds a smile for his mother at the patio table; Tom glances over his shoulder at nothing before Natalie joins him at the grill. For one elongated moment, it looks almost like the family the show opened on.

Then the camera settles on Anna’s face and stays there long enough to watch her smile give out, a choice Adams says wasn’t necessarily written that way. “We discovered it in filming,” she says. “Things never go back to the way they were. Anna has changed, and I don't know for the better.” While the Bowdens still have each other, so much of Max’s darkness remains, Adams adds, and he’ll “never really go away.” Wilson, playing Tom’s own version of that unease a few beats earlier, needed only the smallest gesture to register it. “We needed a glimmer of fear or doubt in there,” he says.

That unease belongs to the whole family, not just the two of them, and it isn't so much about what they survived as what survival asked them to do: become, over the course of one long night, people capable of ending Max—before stopping just shy of doing so. Antosca always knew the finale would return to the Bowdens’ backyard. “I felt that this family would want to try and recreate their sense of safety and comfort, and they would never quite be able to,” he says.

As Anna glances behind her, the frame turns chromatic, echoing the show’s title sequence, while Neil Young with Crazy Horse's “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” rises over the cut to black. The lyrics long for a home that’s “cool and breezy,” a place to finally stop running and unwind. For the Bowdens, the irony is that they're already home; what they've lost is the ability to rest there. Cape Fear lets them win, but refuses them the relief triumph should bring. 

Antosca wanted that lack of clean resolution to linger with viewers. “I hope that when you’re finished watching the show, you feel like you just went through a really intense nightmare,” he says. Here, they do. The finale, which opens with Max pausing to observe a small courtesy before committing an atrocity on Crystal’s houseboat, closes with the Bowdens reaching for ordinary family life after surviving an atrocity of their own. As Anna’s smile dissolves in the final moments, survival is cold comfort. Nothing that happened that summer washes off, and no amount of time on that sun-drenched Savannah patio will convince her otherwise.

Turn on the television or flip through a newspaper, and you might think that the U.S. desperately needs to train more nurses.

Arizona has nearly 30,000 nursing vacancies, local TV stations there recently reported; Pennsylvania Republicans met in early June to discuss how to fill the state’s nursing shortage. Two schools are even opening new nursing programs in Georgia to meet that state’s projected nursing shortage. “The Nursing Shortage Starts in the Classroom,” a recent Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed. 

Yet more people are going into nursing; 280,308 people passed the NCLEX examination to become a registered nurse (RN) or licensed practical nurse (LPN) in 2025, a 34% increase from 2016, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. And currently 7 million registered nurses and practical nurses hold an active license in at least one state, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.  

But there were only about 3.4 million jobs for registered nurses in 2024, the most recent year for which data are available, and 651,400 jobs for licensed practical and licensed vocational nurses in that year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—meaning that there are substantively more actively licensed nurses than there are nursing jobs. This suggests that well over two million licensed nurses are not currently working as nurses for patients.

This data—and the experience of many nurses across the country—suggest that the U.S. may have less of an actual shortage of licensed nurses than a shortage of nurses who are willing to work in bedside jobs that have become increasingly demanding. Pressure on nursing has not let up since the pandemic, nurses say, because of cost-cutting at hospitals and health systems that ask them to do more work with fewer resources. 

“We’re really putting a lot of money into building a pipeline for nursing, but if nurses are leaving after a year or two of getting into employment, the problem isn’t so much a pipeline problem as a leaking gas tank,” says Karen Lasater, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing who studies what she calls the nursing-retention crisis. 

Why nursing jobs are getting more difficult

Conditions for nurses were bad before the pandemic, got even worse during it, and appear to be deteriorating further a few years out, according to research Lasater and her colleagues recently published. Postpandemic, more than two thirds of hospital nurses reported having too few staff, compared to 57% before the pandemic, according to the paper, which surveyed 50,044 nurses in hospitals across New York and Illinois. From December 2023 to March 2024, about one third of nurses said they were dissatisfied and that they intended to leave their employer—“significantly” higher than pre-pandemic and pandemic levels, according to the paper.

It wasn’t just their imagination that the work seemed like it was getting harder. Among nurses working on medical-surgical units, the average staffing ratio increased to six patients per nurse, up from 5.7 prepandemic, according to the paper. (In California, one of the few states with mandated staffing ratios, ER nurses are staffed at a ratio of four patients per nurse, and labor and delivery nurses are staffed at a ratio of two patients per nurse.)

“I fear that we’re headed to a worse place, because it’s apparent that we didn’t learn much from the COVID-19 pandemic,” Lasater says. 

Ariana Lucio, a 45-year-old nurse in El Paso, Texas, has been a nurse for 14 years and currently works in the medical-surgical unit at Del Sol Medical Center, which is owned by HCA Healthcare, the largest health system in the U.S. HCA operates a network of for-profit hospitals across the country. Her hospital has been cutting back on staffing and embracing technology that makes work harder for nurses, says Lucio. Adequate staffing is a key issue for nurses unions and organizations, and Lucio, who is a member of National Nurses United, has protested staffing conditions at the hospital in the past.

Her unit used to have a unit clerk who would answer the phones, stock supplies, and handle paperwork, but the hospital eliminated the position, she says. Now, she says nurses are running to answer phones, clean the break room, and pick up the tasks the unit clerk used to do. In the past, the charge nurse—often the person managing a specific hospital unit—wasn’t assigned patients, Lucio says. No longer. The added responsibility of patients means the charge nurse can’t as easily help other nurses with difficulties they may encounter. 

The hospital also used to predominantly use “sitters”: hospital employees who stay in a patient’s room for a given amount of time to keep a patient company or ensure that they stay in bed for safety reasons. But Lucio says that the hospital is relying more on virtual sitters: a person on a computer screen who watches and can talk to the patient remotely. If a patient tries to get out of bed and doesn’t listen to the virtual sitter’s instructions to get back in bed, the virtual sitter messages the nurses on duty, who then have to get the patient back in bed, Lucio says. With in-person sitters, the nurse is called less frequently because the in-person sitters can get the patient back in bed. 

“It’s gotten harder, especially after COVID,” says Lucio, who recently became so burned out that she went from working full-time to part-time. “It’s coming not so much from patients but from changes in the administration.” 

HCA, which owns Del Sol Medical Center, referred questions about staffing to a public relations team handling the hospital’s communications. In a statement to TIME responding to these examples of how staffing conditions have changed, Del Sol Medical Center said that its staffing is “safe and appropriate” and that it utilizes technology to “limit administrative tasks so our nurses can spend more time taking care of patients.” 

“Like hospitals across the nation, we are actively recruiting new nurses to join our staff,” the hospital said. “We continue to provide a competitive wage for a hospital system in El Paso, as well as support our colleagues and their families by providing a generous and flexible benefit package with benefits specifically designed to support our colleagues’ families and careers."

A study of nearly 8,000 nurses who left the profession between 2018 and 2021 found that 26% left because of burnout, and 21% cited insufficient staffing. About two-thirds left because of planned retirement, suggesting that many of the others left before retirement age.

Data show that lower staffing ratios lower nurse burnout and improve patient outcomes. In one study of nurses at hospitals across Queensland, Australia, those who worked at hospitals that followed a minimum nurse staffing policy had 24% lower odds of high burnout and 27% lower odds of job dissatisfaction. 

Minimum staffing ratios were good for patients, too; they were linked to lower mortality, a shorter length of stay, and less readmission, according to a separate study. The costs avoided due to fewer readmissions and shorter length of stay were more than twice the cost of the additional nurse staffing, the study found. 

“There’s really substantive cost savings,” Lasater says.  

But hospitals are often reluctant to invest in lowering their nurse-to-patient ratios. Doctors can bill for their services, making it easy for administrators to see that they bring in money, Lasater points out. But it’s harder for administrators to see that nurses have an impact on the balance sheet. Instead, hospitals treat nurses like a labor expense, she says.

Yet nurses can save hospitals money, research suggests. Generally in the U.S., insurance or government payers like Medicare pay hospitals to treat certain conditions in a patient. But if the patient stays longer than most patients with that condition do, the hospital foots the bill for the extra time. So if nurses can reduce patient length of stay and readmission, they can be good for the balance sheet. 

In one study of hospitals in New York state, hospitals with fewer than six patients per nurse, patients were discharged sooner  and readmitted less often than they were at hospitals with seven or more patients per nurse. Had hospitals been staffed at a ratio of four patients per nurse—a ratio proposed most recently in 2025 in legislation that did not pass—an estimated 4,370 lives and $720 million would have been saved over two years, the study projected.

Yet rather than add nurses, many hospitals are paring back, sometimes turning to apps where they can hire nurses as gig workers. Such apps often allow hospitals to avoid paying for benefits for these workers, says Katie Wells, a senior fellow at the AI Now Institute, which has studied gig apps for nursing. “Lean staffing has just become the norm,” Wells says. 

The American Hospital Association argues that the issue is not lean staffing but that instead there are workforce shortages that are projected to continue for more than a decade. 

“The growing complexity and intensity of patient care, along with overly burdensome regulatory requirements and increased administrative demands from corporate insurers, continue to place significant demands on nurses,” the association said in a statement provided to TIME.

Hospitals are also facing increased costs of caring for patients, according to a March 2026 post by Rick Pollack, AHA’s president and CEO. In 2025, he writes, hospital expenses grew 7.5%, more than twice the rate of growth in hospital prices. Hospitals are also caring for patients who are sicker and whose care is more complex than it used to be, he points out. 

Some of the lean staffing can likely be attributed to the wave of private equity takeovers of hospitals in recent years. Hospitals that were acquired by private equity reduced full-time employees staffing by 11.6%, while control hospitals—those that were not taken over—increased staffing in the same time period, according to one 2025 study. The study also found that hospitals acquired by private equity reduced hospital-wide salary expenditures. 

Lean staffing has also been embraced by for-profit hospitals that aren’t owned by private equity, Wells says. About one-quarter of hospitals were for-profit in 2020, but that share is growing. For-profit hospitals had “statistically significant” lower investments in nursing services, higher nurse staffing ratios, worse nurse job outcomes, and worse patient safety outcomes when compared to non-profit hospitals, one 2025 study looking at hospitals in Illinois found. 

A few states have mandated minimum staffing ratios for hospitals. California has had minimum staffing ratios for nurses since 2004; research has shown that hospital nurses there have lower burnout than nurses nationally. (In California, the ratios differ depending on the unit; the medical-surgical unit has a mandated ratio of no more than five patients to one nurse, for instance, while the ICU has a mandated ratio of no more than two patients for one nurse.) Oregon passed mandatory nurse staffing ratios in 2023, which went into effect in June 2026. 

Other states have considered nurse-to-patient ratio legislation but have not passed it, though a few states require hospitals to publicly report their nurse-to-patient ratios. Other states allow hospital nurses to formally decline assignments they believe are unsafe. 

It’s one reason Lasater, the nursing professor, says that the best solution for getting more nurses to stay at hospitals is to mandate nurse-to-patient ratios by legislation. It works, she says.

“Hospitals have always had the opportunity to create better staffing conditions and to create more favorable working conditions,” she says. “They can voluntarily do this, but a large portion of them haven't.”

Correction, August 1

The original version of this story incorrectly described California's nursing mandates. The ratio is four patients per nurse in the ER, two patients per nurse in labor and delivery, five patients per nurse in the medical-surgical unit, and two patients per nurse in the ICU, rather than four nurses per patient, two nurses per patient, five nurses per patient, and two nurses per patient, respectively. 

In July 2025, a judge sentenced criminology graduate student Bryan Kohberger to life in prison after he pleaded guilty to stabbing four college students to death on Nov. 13, 2022, at a house near the University of Idaho’s Moscow, Id., campus. The students were Ethan Chapin, 20, Kaylee Goncalves, 21, Xana Kernodle, 20, and Madison Mogen, 21. 

A year later, Kohberger told the New York Times in a phone call from prison that he’s filed a petition challenging his conviction, arguing that he is innocent and did not mean to confess to the killings. “A lot went wrong in those plea discussions,” he told the Times from a maximum security prison south of Boise. “I really do want that to be heard.”

The comments from Kohberger came days before a new documentary about the case premiered on Netflix. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, out July 29, traces how police found Kohberger’s DNA on a knife sheath left behind at the crime scene, identified his getaway car, and figured out that his cell phone went off-grid around the time he committed the crime. The three-part series features interviews with families and friends of the victims, people who knew Kohberger, and law enforcement officials to examine what we know about the case.

The mystery of the motive

Because Kohberger pleaded guilty a month before he was scheduled to stand trial, it remains unclear why he targeted these four college students.

“Ultimately we never have been able to answer that question that everybody wants answered: ‘Why?’” says Moscow Police Chief Anthony Dahlinger. “We don’t know, ‘Why these four?’ We don’t know, ‘Why this house?’ I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

The documentary's participants suggest that Kohberger may have been studying criminology so he could carry out the perfect crime. The series features Lilly Karaban, who sat next to Kohberger in an undergraduate criminology class on serial killers at DeSales University and said he dominated class discussions and wouldn’t let her get a word in on a group project. She says she didn’t see him socializing outside of class, describing him as being “in his own world.”

Kohberger was doing a PhD in criminology at Washington State University, a 10-minute drive from the University of Idaho, and several female students told authorities that he was unpleasant to be around. In one instance, a female student said he followed her to her car and spoke to her in an aggressive manner, making her feel uncomfortable. The series also highlights a questionnaire that Kohberger posted on Reddit as part of a supposed research project, asking people who had been incarcerated how they chose and approached victims.

In the aftermath of the murders, Karaban says she believes Kohberger “has a thing against women, based on the description of what he did to those three poor girls. People who brutalize women the way Kohberger did dislike them, find them threatening. So they take all that anger out on them.”

Trying to find closure

Families interviewed in the documentary have mixed feelings about the plea deal and had been anticipating a trial. 

As director Skye Borgman says, “If there had been some ask of the perpetrator to—in exchange for this plea deal—give some information as to the why, I think it would have helped the families a lot. They’re angry.”  

Some of the victims’ families are disappointed that he didn’t receive the death penalty, feeling like he got off easy. Kaylee Goncalves’ dad Steve dismissed prison as “daycare.” His daughter Alivea says she felt “hurt” by the plea deal and didn’t think it should have been an option for Kohberger, arguing, “Monsters like that should never-ever ever have options ever again.” 

Moscow Police’s Dahlinger maintains that, in a way, Kohberger received a form of the death penalty: “He is sentenced to die in prison.” 

Xana’s dad Jeff Kernodle says the victims’ families were hoping to hear more from Kohberger, arguing, “He should have to tell them why he did it, tell all of us parents why he did it.” 

On the other hand, Xana’s sister Jazzmin Kernodle says in the series she was dreading a trial that could last months. “I think the plea deal did save us a lot of emotional trauma that we would have dealt with going through a trial,” she says. “I am grateful to get it over with and slowly start to heal.”

Agent Kim Reactivated, a Korean drama broadcast on SBS TV domestically and streamed on Netflix globally, has become one of the summer’s biggest hits. The thrilling action series follows an unassuming bank manager and single dad named Kim (So Ji-sub). When his teen daughter, Min-ji (Seo Su-min), disappears after a fight at school, Kim’s background and skillset as a secret agent is revealed as he stops at nothing to find her. 

Agent Kim is aided by his two friends: taekwondo instructor Sung Han-soo (Choi Dae-hoon) and boisterous military man Park Jin-cheol (Yoon Kyung-ho). Like Agent Kim, Han-soo and Jin-cheol are former spies and current parents. In an effort to rescue Min-ji, the three middle-aged, bespectacled dads face off against criminal organizations and state intelligence entities as what starts as a clash between two teenagers disturbs a decade-long lull in intergovernmental espionage. The 10-episode drama about paternal anxiety and devotion wrapped up over the weekend. Here’s everything that happened in the final episodes of Agent Kim Reactivated.

Does Min-ji die?

The first few episodes of Agent Kim Reactivated imply that Kim’s beloved daughter Min-ji  has died. At the end of Episode 1, Hye-ri (Yoo Ji-an), Min-ji’s classmate and the daughter of Juhak Construction group chairman Ju Gang-chan (Joo Sang-wook), hits Min-ji over the head with a brick. Min-ji loses consciousness, leading Hye-ri and Min-ji’s other bullies to assume she is dead. A panicked Hye-ri convinces local thug Golden Teeth (Jo Bok-rae) to take care of the body. 

However, unbeknownst to both Hye-ri and Golden Teeth, Min-ji has survived the attack. She later wakes up in the cold storage warehouse where Golden Teeth has temporarily stashed her “body”, and escapes. This is just the beginning of Min-ji’s many efforts to get back to her father. Next, she is picked up by Ju Gang-chan while trying to hitchhike. Then, she is “rescued” by South Korea’s Special Missions Directorate (SMD), where director Kang Guk-cheol (Won Hyun-joon) ties her up and questions her for information about her father. It’s a foolish strategy. Agent Kim has kept his daughter in the dark about his dark past.

Agent Kim’s secret past

Agent Kim was born in North Korea, and was trained from a young age to be a special operative for his native government. However, when Kim is captured during a failed mission in South Korea, he has a choice to make: be disappeared by the SMD, or agree to work for them. He chooses the latter, and becomes friends with operatives Han-soo and Jin-cheol through their missions together.

Kim also meets and falls in love with a South Korean woman. When she dies in childbirth, he forces his retirement from the SMD in order to raise his baby. The SMD allows his freedom on one condition: he must lay low. If the North Korean government realizes their former operative is alive in South Korea, it will cause an international incident. 

Kim gladly devotes himself to a quiet life as a father and office worker, and the SMD leaves him alone. But when Min-ji goes missing and Kim starts wreaking havoc across the city looking for her, North Korean Intelligence learns of his continued existence. The SMD and North Korean Intelligence both set out to capture Agent Kim. 

Who is Agent 66?

The pseudonym “Agent 66” is first used by Park Yeong-gwang (TaecYeon), a North Korean spy who trained alongside Agent Kim. When Yeong-gwang dies during his and Agent Kim’s first mission to South Korea, betrayed by the North Korean agency that sent them, Agent Kim takes on the moniker.

When Agent Kim reappears on the North Korean government’s radar after years of being presumed dead, Park Yeong-gwang’s little brother, Gang Seong (Kim Sung-kyu), is sent to kill him. He too uses the name “Agent 66” as his codename. Though killing Kim may be Gang Seong’s orders, the mission is also personal for the new Agent 66, who has been told that Kim is responsible for the death of his big brother. When Kim dispels this lie, revealing that it was North Korean intelligence director Ri Eung-ryeong who betrayed them all, Gang Seong abandons his mission to kill Kim. 

Later, after Ri Eung-ryeong spills his secrets to the South Korean government in exchange for asylum, Agent Kim kidnaps and hands Ri Eung-ryeong over to Gang Seong. Gang Seong brings Ri Eung-ryeong back to North Korea, where he is presumably punished for his defection.

The ending of Agent Kim Reactivated

Heading into the season finale, Agent Kim has managed to evade SMD capture by protecting defector Ri Eung-ryeong during the intergovernmental talks between North Korea and South Korea. With the completion of one final mission for the SMD, Kim has earned his freedom (again) and the promise of a normal life with Min-ji. He just has to stay alive to claim it. And, unfortunately, Ju Gang-chan—the former thug turned Juhak Construction chairman—is still gunning for him. He wants to see Agent Kim, Han-soo, and Jin-cheol suffer for besting him. To do so, Ju Gang-chan kidnaps Han-soo and Jin-cheol’s children. He holds the teens at gunpoint and forces Han-soo and Jin-cheol to fight Agent Kim.

The three friends initially go along with Ju Gang-chan’s orders to kill Agent Kim, but use their years of experience working together to come up with an out. They lure a boasting Ju Gang-chan closer to the fence of the cage in which they are fighting, and manage to knock it down onto the villain. They rescue their children, and hand Ju Gang-chan over to the authorities. Later, he is stabbed multiple times by Golden Teeth while being transported out of the hospital. Hye-ri, the spoiled daughter whose bullying acted as a catalyst for this entire sequence of events, has been sent abroad following the public humiliation of her family.

Agent Kim and Min-ji are reunited

The father-daughter relationship between Agent Kim and Min-ji is at the heart of Agent Kim Reactivated, and it’s at the heart of the finale, too. Following the action of the series, the two have grown closer after being forced apart. Min-ji now understands more about her father’s past and motivations, and no longer sees him as a timid man who would rather bow than fight. 

In the final episode, they are reunited after Agent Kim fakes his death to escape international accountability for his past acts of espionage. The father and daughter start a new life together under new identities, with the help of the SMD. While they leave the identities of Bank Manager Kim and Kim Min-ji behind, they are somehow still in contact with Han-soo and Jin-cheol, who help the Kims move into their new home.

Will there be a Season 2?

It’s likely—the series has been one of the most successful Korean dramas of the year so far on Netflix and on broadcast television in Korea. According to The Chosun Daily, the production team is currently discussing the possibility of a second season.

If Agent Kim Reactivated does get more episodes, the story will most likely revolve around Agent Kim’s new job at Baekho Employment Agency. In the first season finale, Kim makes a deal with Lee Dong-kyu, a new and enigmatic character who agrees to take down Juhak Construction for our protagonist. The cost is implied to be Agent Kim’s employment at Lee’s mysterious company. 

While we don’t learn much about Lee Dong-kyu in the Netflix series, the character is an important element of the webtoon on which Agent Kim Reactivated is based. In the webtoon, the Baekho Employment Agency, aka the White Tiger Job Center, is a mercenary organization founded and led by Tom Lee. The private company takes on high-risk, high-reward jobs--for the right price. If Agent Kim Reactivated continues for a second season, Agent Kim may find himself in even more dangerous scenarios due to his deal with Lee Dong-kyu.

Ever since executive chef Carmen Berzatto attempted to transform the Original Beef of Chicagoland into a Michelin-starred restaurant, the Bear (and, to an extent, The Bear) survived as a chaotic, quixotic idea—a fine-dining mirage built on dysfunction in an arid restaurant landscape. But in the show’s fifth and final season, Carmy, Sydney, Richie, and the rest of their bruised-but-breathing kitchen staff get one last shot at keeping their aspirational vision alive. Which is to say: They bicker, they cook, and they try not to drown during a torrential downpour for a final dinner service that might determine everything. 

This time, though, Carmy isn’t in charge. Season 5 picks up the morning after the Season 4 finale, when Sydney has taken reluctant control alongside Richie and Natalie, attempting to orchestrate an impeccable multi-course meal for the Michelin inspector they’re convinced is arriving that night. All they have is a dwindling supply of ingredients, a flooded building, and staff aware that their jobs are in jeopardy. And yet, in their quest for culinary perfection, and as Carmy evaluates his decision to retire, the group pulls together without resorting to the profane, deafening chaos that characterized their previous work, almost entirely thanks to Sydney’s opposite-in-every-way leadership style. Every dish gets out, every table leaves happy, and the math finally works, even if just barely. 

So, what does that mean for the Bear going forward? In the Season 5 finale, titled “The Original Beef of Chicagoland,” the restaurant’s fate shines brighter than expected. The next morning, Carmy discovers that the Michelin “Star Man” never showed up the previous night. Instead, during a call, he learns the real inspector, Peter Clark, had quietly visited months earlier. His verdict: the food was “exceptional and creative,” the “talent was undeniable,” and the dining room “felt alive without being precious or tryhard.” When Carmy relays the news to Sydney, she can’t help but ask: “Did we get a star?” 

Carmy slowly shakes his head, before breaking into a soft smile. 

“We got two.” 

After processing this enormous badge of honor, Sydney and Carmen eventually share an intimate, meaningful embrace in the dining room (sorry Reddit theorists, no kiss), bathing in the morning sunlight and realizing a dream that sometimes never seemed possible between them. “You did it,” Carmy tells her. 

Over the next week, the rest of the staff sinks into stability, making good on all the sweat, ambition, and belief it took to get there. The restaurant has a real foundation now—it has leadership, vision, a seal of excellence that will guarantee an endless flood of reservations, and a franchised sandwich shop. And, as Luca (Will Poulter) notes, the Bear has something even more difficult to find in a fine dining establishment: family. It’s a sweet, satisfying ending that makes it hard to say goodbye to this tight-knit, trauma-bonded kitchen staff. Here’s where each “family” member stands now that series creator Christopher Storer has closed up shop.

Carmen Berzatto

Carmy leaving the Bear right as the restaurant earns its Michelin stars feels like a bittersweet personal decision—and risky considering that he’s never worked a “real job” in his life. “Do you have any skills outside of this?” Sydney asks him, slightly concerned. “Have you ever had to write down a real resume?” The standout chef has his reasons for quitting. He also hopes to become an architect, or at least, for now, an intern at an architecture firm, where he lands a job interview thanks to an assist from Stevie (John Mulaney). 

During the interview, he shares a moving monologue about his entire existence as a chef. “I didn't want to know my coworkers. I didn’t care to care for them,” he says. “I saw them as tools to help me survive in the kitchen.” The previous night’s service, in which the entire kitchen pulls together under Sydney’s leadership, crystallized his need to move on. As Carmy shares with Jimmy (Oliver Platt) earlier, leaving the Bear is the only way he can end the vicious traumatic cycle that threatened to devour everyone in his life. “Lee was right,” Carmy says of his belligerent uncle. “To break patterns you have to break patterns.” Who knows? Maybe he’ll design the next great restaurant. 

And yes, for those wondering about his love life: Claire Bear shows up to Richie’s daughter’s birthday party in the final scene, offering hope that their relationship is on the road to repair.

Sydney Adamu

It was always clear that Sydney was the brains behind the Bear, thanks to her dexterity and creativity in the kitchen. But even she can’t believe the Michelin stars bestowed upon the restaurant. Never one to take credit, she enjoys a few quiet moments taking in the individual praise and team’s achievements—further validation that staying at the Bear instead of jumping to Adam Shapiro’s new venture last season was the right choice. As revealed by her uber-proud father over breakfast, Sydney’s photo graces a front section of a Chicago newspaper celebrating the Bear’s turnaround. After doubt about her future caused strain in their relationship, it appears Sydney has finally found the place she belongs with the dad she always wanted. 

Richie Jerimovich

This season started out poorly for Richie when his car got T-boned on the way to work in a surprise pre-season episode. Luckily, it ended much better for him—and in an upgraded mode of transportation. Earlier in the day, Natalie informs him that he’s been invited to an international hospitality seminar in Japan, which initially causes a panic attack. Richie has never left the country, let alone flown in a plane. Thanks to some rocky reassurance from Carmy, and full clearance from Sydney to miss a week of work as long as he brings her back stickers and weird snacks, Richie ultimately relents and takes the next big step in his career.

Luckily, Jess (Sarah Ramos) eases his fear of flying and journeys with him, with a few subtle hand touches all but confirming a budding romance that most of the kitchen had already sussed out. Before they go, Richie, now a master of hospitality, throws a surprise birthday party for his daughter Eva (Anabelle Toomey), convening the whole family—including Lee (Bob Odenkirk), Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), Tiffany (Gillian Jacobs ), her husband Frank (Josh Hartnett), and even Claire Bear (Molly Gordon)—in celebratory harmony. 

Natalie Berzatto

While everyone has been fussing in the kitchen and dining room, Natalie a.k.a. Sugar has been quietly managing the books in the back, making sure the lights stay on. That was a near-impossible task with Carmen in charge, especially when her brother demanded that the restaurant’s menu change every night (a mandate that required new, expensive ingredients and made profitability impossible). As she notes in the finale, the rain-soaked dinner service didn’t net them any extra revenue. Still, with Sydney in charge, she seems more optimistic about the restaurant’s future. “Usually, I’m filled with dread with numbers, but today I’m not worried, because we have a captain,” she tells Sydney. And with a healthy baby, a loving husband and doting father (Chris Witaske), and a reformed mother trying to finally be of service, Natalie looks like she’s forging the family and business she’s always wanted. 

Marcus Brooks

Throughout the previous night’s dinner service, Marcus was in a bad headspace spurred on by his estranged father’s solo visit to the Bear. It impacted his mood, his work, and his relationship with Luca, turning a typically even-keeled, good-natured pastry chef into an anxious, defensive liability. But after sharing some meaningful time with his father (which included a special candle-poured dessert) and Sydney (who commiserates with him about losing their respective mothers), Marcus finds some catharsis and begins to make inroads with his dad. As he drops Luca off at the airport for his return to Copenhagen, he admits he plans to spend his off day in the lab, attempting to create another otherworldly confection. It’s the kind of grind that's made him one of the most exciting new chefs in the city. 

Tina Marrero

Tina came dangerously close to jumping ship and pursuing another, more secure chef job, but Sydney convinced her that she’d be her right-hand woman in the kitchen should they make their restaurant a profitable endeavor. It’s a fitting end to Tina’s evolution—from someone who joined the Beef with hardly any skills to middle-aged culinary craftswoman. In the weeks after learning about their Michelin status, Tina fantasizes about her new life as the Chef de cuisine with her husband beside her (played by the actor’s real-life husband David Zayas). “You think I can do it?” she asks him. “I know you can,” he replies. 

Ebraheim

Ebraheim stayed in the margins of the show this season, but it’s clear his prospectus on the sandwich business and its franchising plan will be key to keeping the Bear alive. Despite the fact that Ebra anxiously rehearsed his pitch for hours, Carmy cuts him off and tells him that his plan to franchise the Beef side window into a few suburban locations is a perfect idea, having been tipped off by his Uncle Jimmy. “I want you to do it,” Carmy tells him and the Beef staff. “You guys are the reason this place is what it is.” The next step will be furnishing their “ghost kitchens” and bringing their signature sandwiches to the greater Chicago area. 

Neil Fak (and family)

In what turns out to be the biggest moment in Neil’s young serving career, the handyman and Berzatto family friend keeps his composure and colorfully chats up the diner everyone believed was the Michelin-star inspector. The superb, improvisational interaction only bolstered Neil’s confidence as a server, setting him down a hospitality path he never realized could bring him so much joy. As for his brother Theodore (Ricky Staffieri) and the rest of the extended clan, there’s easy reason to believe that they'll continue to shadow the Berzattos wherever they go. 

Jimmy Kalinowski

It’s hard to count how many times Uncle Jimmy and Computer uttered the words “air rights” this season, but the repetitive phrase should seemingly be useful now that the Bear is a Michelin-certified restaurant. The financial investment into the restaurant has sunk Jimmy’s bank account, but Ebra’s franchise projections give him reason to hope there’s light at the end of this dark, clogged tunnel. (He also has his sights set, romantically, on Deedee, with whom he interacts affectionately at Eva’s shindig.) Then again, the Bear might still work out, too. “This place is going to be OK. She’s the real deal,” Carmen says of Sydney. “How do you know?” Jimmy asks him. Carmy replies matter of factly: “I’ve been in a few of them.”

When the soul of Joseon-era royal concubine Kang Dan-shim (The Glory’s Lim Ji-yeon) is magically transported to modern-day Seoul in Netflix’s My Royal Nemesis, Dan-shim takes the time-slip in stride. Waking up in the body of struggling actress Shin Seo-ri (also played by Lim), she soon finds herself landing bigger roles in the K-drama industry and winning over neighbors at her goshiwon with her bold, no-nonsense personality. 

As she learns the ropes of modern life, Dan-shim catches the eye of Cha Se-gye (When the Phone Rings’ Heo Nam-jun), a lonely chaebol heir with a reputation for cutting corners and screwing over the little guy. But, as Dan-shim gets to know Se-gye, it becomes clear that those rumors are false, the result of an ongoing smear campaign masterminded by Choi Mun-do (Jang Seung-jo), Se-gye’s cousin, who will stop at nothing to be named the next CEO of The Chail Group. 

The 14-episode reincarnation rom-com ups its stakes by not only tying the souls of Dan-shim and Seo-ri together, but also the souls of Se-gye and Yi Heon (a.k.a. Grand Prince Cheongheon) and Mun-do and Yi Jae (a.k.a. King Anjong). Like Dan-shim does with Seo-ri, Se-gye and Mun-do share faces and fates with these men from Joseon. 

In present-day Seoul, Se-gye and Dan-shim fall in love, and plan to stay together forever. But forever may not be very long. The red comet that appeared in the sky of Dan-shim’s Joseon and in the sky of modern-day Seoul is about to move on, and Dan-shim fears her soul will be pulled back into her original body just as mysteriously as it was brought to Se-gye’s time. Will the two be granted a happy ending?

The truth behind Shin Seo-ri and Kang Dan-sim’s soul swap

For most of My Royal Nemesis, our protagonist operates under the assumption that she was born Kang Dan-shim, a Joseon-era peasant who would become a royal concubine. However, when she starts to remember a painful memory from Seo-ri’s past, she realizes that she was born Shin Seo-ri in modern-day Korea. Dan-shim and Seo-ri swapped souls when they were both children, following near-death drownings. They grew up in each other’s times and bodies before switching again as adults when Seo-ri (living as royal concubine Dan-shim) is forced to drink poison by order of King Anjong.   

At first, this major revelation seems to spell a happy ending for Seo-ri and Se-gye. Seo-ri can stay in the body (and time) she was born into without feeling like an imposter. Then, Se-gye is stabbed by one of Mun-do’s hired hands and his life hangs in the balance. Seo-ri’s shaman friend tells Seo-ri that she must go back to the Joseon era if she wants her love to live. For Se-gye to survive in modern-day Seoul, Yi Heon must survive his brother’s murder attempt in the Joseon era.   

Seo-ri does it, willing her soul back to the Joseon era without knowing if she will ever be able to return. She finds Yi Heon, with whom she shared a companionship before traveling to modern times, and helps him escape his brother’s clutches. Seo-ri takes an arrow for Yi Heon, and the two fall from a cliff into a river below. While we don’t see their fate, Se-gye wakes up in the hospital, implying that Yi Heon at least survived and Seo-ri successfully broke one part of the tragic cycle of fate. Se-gye’s relief is short-lived when he realizes that Seo-ri has fallen into a mysterious coma.

Does My Royal Nemesis have a happy ending?

Yes, My Royal Nemesis has a happy ending. At first, Seo-ri’s soul does not return to either body it has inhabited. It is instead stuck in a painless purgatory somewhere between life and death. This liminal space is so painless that Seo-ri cannot remember her love for Se-gye. 

But Se-gye does not give up on her. He visits The Seoul Museum of History, where the Joseon-era portrait Yi Heon once painted of Dan-shim/Seo-ri hangs on display. After seeing the artwork and Yi Heon’s journal, recently returned to Korea by the British Museum, Se-gye remembers Yi Heon’s love for Dan-shim. Though Se-gye had previously only seen Yi Heon’s life through reincarnation dreams, their souls are connected.

The power of the moment allows Se-gye to reach Seo-ri. She hears his voice, asking her to “please come back,” and she remembers her love. Seo-ri chooses to leave the purgatory for a life with Se-gye; even if it will come with its fair share of pain, it will come with joy too. The two reunite and fall into one another’s arms as a summer snow falls from the sky.

Mun-do’s karma comes around too. Se-gye and Seo-ri work with the police to prove Mun-do’s role in the death of a nurse he paid off to poison Se-gye. He ends the series in jail, away from his beloved son and his beloved corporation. Seo-ri visits him to explain that he lost his one chance to redeem himself, implying that he should have prioritized taking care of his son over vying for money and power. 

In the Joseon era, we see that both Yi Heon and Dan-shim survived their fall from a great height. They are now in disguise, but free to live their lives together as nobodies. It’s a bit of a sloppy ending for the two, given that Dan-shim was in Se-ri’s body when Yi Heon met Dan-shim. Presumably, Dan-shim did not meet Yi Heon until she woke up, wet with an arrow wound. However, if we’ve learned anything from My Royal Nemesis, it is that a soul connection can supercede reason.

In Seoul, Seo-ri and Se-gye live happily ever after. With Mun-do in jail, Se-gye is in line to become the next CEO of Chail Group. And Seo-ri is already studying her lines for her next K-drama. Most importantly, the two have promised to stay by one another’s side.