A bottom may be forming for Bitcoin amid its monthslong rout, K33 analysts said.
Technical indicators have paralleled the collapse of FTX, they wrote.
The market’s defensive posture is “atypical,” K33’s Vetle Lunde said.
Bitcoin has come under significant pressure in recent months, but there are signs that a bottom may be forming for the digital asset despite a backdrop of geopolitical instability, according to analysts at crypto research and brokerage firm K33.
As the U.S.-Israel war on Iran raged on for a fifth day, the analysts wrote in a Wednesday note that Bitcoin is showing signs of relative stability, leading them to determine that the most intense period of selling pressure has likely passed amid Bitcoin’s months-long swoon.
“The worst is behind us; now we wait,” they wrote. “However, bottoming regimes in BTC have typically been slow, and patience has been a necessary virtue.”
Bitcoin recently changed hands around $73,036, a more than 7% increase over the past day, according to CoinGecko. It remained 42% down from its all-time high of $126,000 in October.
K33 Head of Research Vetle Lunde cited technical indicators including Bitcoin’s weekly relative strength index, or RSI, which fell to 26.84 last week, its lowest level since July 2022. The indicator serves as a gauge for Bitcoin’s momentum based on the speed and magnitude of price changes, mirroring oversold conditions that emerged during a series of blowups among crypto lenders that year.
Those failures preceded the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, which marked the bottom for Bitcoin’s route in 2022. As Bitcoin has fallen in recent weeks, Velte noted that Bitcoin posted back-to-back days where trading volumes exceeded 95% of those on record. During bear markets, that has only happened once: when FTX filed for bankruptcy.
Beyond that, Lunde pointed to derivatives, where market participants have been “willing to pay a chunky premium for bearish bets” to protect against further price drops in perpetual futures markets that maintain price alignment with Bitcoin through periodic payments.
With regards to options, Lunde noted that so-called skews—which compare the cost of bearish “puts” versus bullish “calls”—jumped to levels only witnessed during the most catastrophic market collapses of 2022, including the fall of FTX and the Terra crash. Lunde described “extreme impulses of market stress” as an encouraging sign for bottoms to form.
K33’s report acknowledged that no indicator is foolproof, but history suggested “an overwhelming concentration of bets in one direction for BTC tends to be followed by BTC moving in exactly the opposite direction.”
Lunde echoed that sentiment in an interview with Decrypt, but he described the latest sell-off as relatively orderly compared to the chaos that rattled crypto prices years ago. Nonetheless, he viewed the defensive position in the crypto market as “atypical.”
“It is something that, in the past, has been associated with global bottoms,” Lunde told Decrypt. “Bitcoin has a tendency to do the unexpected.”
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Canadian leader also said the US-Israeli attacks on Iran appear to be ‘inconsistent with international law’.
Published On 5 Mar 20265 Mar 2026
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said that he could not rule out his country’s military participation in the escalating war in the Middle East, after earlier saying that the US-Israeli strikes on Iran were “inconsistent with international law”.
Speaking alongside Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Canberra on Thursday, Carney was asked whether there was a situation in which Canada would get involved.
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“One can never categorically rule out participation,” Carney said, noting the question was “hypothetical”.
“We will stand by our allies,” he said, adding that “we will always defend Canadians”.
Carney said earlier that he supported the strikes on Iran “with some regret” as they represented an extreme example of a rupturing world order.
The Canadian prime minister also stressed that his country was not informed in advance of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, in his first remarks since the war was launched on Saturday.
“We were not informed in advance, we were not asked to participate,” Carney told reporters travelling with him in Australia on Wednesday.
“Prima facie, it appears that these actions are inconsistent with international law,” he said.
“The United States and Israel have acted without engaging the United Nations or consulting with allies, including Canada,” he added, according to Australia’s SBS News, while also condemning strikes on civilians in Iran and calling for “all parties … to respect the rules of international engagement”.
Whether the US and Israeli attacks on Iran had broken international law was “a judgement for others to make”, he added.
Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said on Wednesday that efforts were under way to help more than 2,000 Canadians who have requested assistance from the government to leave the Middle East region since the war broke out on Saturday.
Anand said about half of all inquiries for help were from Canadians in the United Arab Emirates, more than 230 from Qatar, at least 160 from Lebanon, more than 90 from Israel and 74 from Iran.
Canada’s Foreign Ministry has been instructed to contract charter flights out of the UAE in the coming days, contingent on approval from the UAE government to use its airspace, the minister said.
Commercial air traffic remains largely absent across much of the region, with major Gulf hubs – including Dubai, the world’s busiest airport for international passengers – largely shut amid the conflict, in the biggest travel disruption since the COVID pandemic.
Repatriation flights chartered by foreign governments, including Britain and France, were due to leave on Wednesday and Thursday, while the UAE opened safe air corridors to allow some citizens to return home.
Under normal circumstances, thousands of commercial flights would depart the region each day.
SPOILER ALERT:This post contains stories from the two-part Season 1 finale of “The Beauty,” now streaming on FX on Hulu and Disney+.
FX’s body-horror odyssey “The Beauty” spent its first season reveling in the gooey, revolting transformations born from taking a drug that can turn a hum-drum existence into a sculpted manifestation of perfection. Average people cocooned in their own veiny skin sacks, rip open a whole new lease on life with chiseled abs, symmetrical faces and enough confidence to take on the world.
Over and over again, the series from co-creators Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson showed why people would want to take The Beauty, side effects be damned. But the Season 1 finale offered up the most compelling reason yet why they shouldn’t. In the first part of the two-episode finale, audiences are introduced to Bella (Emma Halleen), a perfectly normal high school student who watches as The Beauty craze sweeps through her world. Her privileged best friend, coming off an unsatisfying nose job, takes the drug and shows up the next day blonde, tanned and ready for the runway. It makes Emma crave the same instantaneous achievement of supposed perfection, even though her parents refuse to consider it, and they don’t have the money even if they did.
Director Michael Uppendahl says the decision to shift the focus of the series in the eleventh hour to a teenage girl the audience had never met came down to who among us would be the best commentator on a global sensation.
Emma Halleen as Bella, Annabelle Wachtel as Ruthie
Courtesy of FX
“A litmus test for a population at any given time is a 16-year-old girl,” Uppendahl tells Variety. “They’re up on everything. They’re in a major transitional stage in their life. They’re smarter than the boys, especially at that age. I mean, they remain smarter, but I think they are a measure of what any society is experiencing. This is an uncomfortable thing to confront, and that’s why it makes them the best vessel for this story.”
With no other options to get The Beauty, Bella takes matters into her own hands. One of the technicians who injected her friend offers Emma an alternative: pay him what cash she can get from pawning her mother’s jewelry and he will give her The Beauty as a sexually transmitted disease. All season, The Beauty’s dealer, callous billionaire Byron Forst (Ashton Kutcher), has pushed to release the drug while fearing the one thing he can’t control –– this secondhand means of distribution. Bella validates Byron’s fears.
Despite her knight in shining Beauty revealing he took a second shot without knowing the consequences, Bella proceeds not only with losing her virginity, but taking the STD dosage. What she gets is a nightmare scenario, one her mother (Maria Dizzia) unfortunately comes home to discover. In her rebirth, Bella is deformed beyond recognition or repair, a fleshy mass of bleeding orifices, mutated limbs and contorted bone. It’s hard to look at, and that’s exactly what Uppendahl wanted. The team was adamant that Halleen wear Bella’s post-Beauty monstrous suit, and they kept her hidden from Dizzia until the moment she finds her in a closet at the end of a trail of blood and goo.
“Maria is a wonderful actor, so you’ve got to really put it on her to make sure that she’s carrying the audience through it,” he says. “I just tried to think of what would be the worst thing to see. Part of that is anything happening to your child is terrible, but a full compromise of your bodily architecture and skeleton added a whole extra degree of awfulness and horror.”
To achieve the visual anguish and revulsion of Bella’s transformation, they built a set specifically to house the practical suit created by special effects makeup designer David Presto and his team.
“We actually raised the set and then dug it out, so that Emma could be lowered into it, because her spine had been compromised,” Uppendahl says. “She was mostly in a full suit, but there was a team of people in the closet with her. Emma was the root of the performance, and that is her voice, but there were puppeteers — I think we had six — that were manipulating aspects of her. I worked with Emma quite a bit on how to try and make it make sense to us what she was physically, and then the puppeteers augmented the rest in incredible ways.”
Michael Uppendahl
Courtesy of FX
The reason Halleen had to be in the suit came down to one thing. “The eyes were important to me and to Ryan and to Dave Presto. To make sure that the real Emma was in there, and that was the true connection she had with Maria,” Uppendahl says. “They had done such great work as a believable mother and daughter, and to cap it off that way was horrible and wonderful all at once.”
Ultimately, the scene becomes the cautionary cornerstone of a sea change in Byron’s world. In the opening moments of the second episode of the two-part finale, Byron’s wife Franny (Isabella Rossellini) is forcibly given The Beauty by her sons, Tig (Ray Nicholson) and Gunther (Brandon Gillard). She had refused to relinquish the battle scars of her life and age, but she wakes up (as guest star Nicola Peltz Beckham) to learn her sons had decided to overrule that wish against her will. In protest to her transformation, she digs a piece of broken pottery into her neck, attempting to take her life instead of living with unwanted rejuvenation. Now, she’s being kept on life support in a gilded ballroom, once again against her wishes.
The moment causes Byron, a selfish and braggadocious villain, to have a change of heart, stopping shipments of The Beauty and paying off the families ravaged by its gruesome side effects, like Bella’s. His lawyers suggest nearly half a million have suffered severe complications. But given his track record, would Byron really revert course just because his wife denies what he, up to this point, saw as a gift to humanity?
“I think he does change,” Uppendahl says. “I think he truly loves Franny, and who wouldn’t if it’s Isabella Rossellini? She always sees through him, and it was the fuel for really fun banter between them. He loves that tension with her. It’s great that we can finally dig into something really profound between them. This is the only thing that could change a guy like that.”
Or perhaps Byron was just hypnotized by the series’ clever nod to Rossellini’s “Death Becomes Her” character as a temptress offering the elixir of eternal life. Post-transformation, Beckham introduces the new Franny while wearing a barely-there top of strung-together chunky jewels, a clever reproduction of the iconic costume worn by Rossellini in the 1992 film. Uppendahl isn’t even sure Rossellini knew about the fashionable allusion to her role, given she wasn’t in that scene. But he leapt at the chance to pay homage to her.
“It was Ryan’s idea, and as soon as I heard it, I thought it was spectacular,” he says. “Someone recently started making that jeweled top again. It is kind of coming back in fashion, on a very high, rather exclusive level that Franny could afford.”
As the season comes to a close, “The Beauty” tees up plenty of complications for future seasons, although FX hasn’t renewed it yet. Uppendahl says he would like to see Lux Pascal return as Carla, the transgender science technician originally played by Rev Yolanda, who took a dose stolen from Bryon. Carla’s friend Mike (played in Beauty form by Joey Pollari) was already assassinated for lifting their shots, so audiences have good reason to worry for Carla.
“She’s worth fearing for,” Uppendahl says. “Reverend Yolanda was so wonderful, and so was Lux. She didn’t have a lot of screen time, but she was transcendent, and I feel there’s room for her in my ideas for Season 2.”
Jessica Alexander as Jordan Bennett, Hudson Barry as Cooper 2, Anthony Ramos as The Assassin, Jeremy Pope as Jeremy
Courtesy of FX
Coming into the two-episode finale, Evan Peters’ detective Cooper also accepted the drug –– through STD transmission with his partner, Jordan (Jessica Alexander) –– only to learn his perfect self is a 12-year-old boy. Soon, Cooper, Jordan and their reluctant new associates, Byron’s assassins Antonio (Anthony Ramos) and Jeremy (Jeremy Pope), find themselves in the crosshairs of a brewing war within the Forst family. Just because Bryon wants to curb the spread of The Beauty doesn’t mean those reaping the financial benefits, including his son Tig, are similarly eager to throw in the towel. Tig teams up with disgruntled robot designer Dr. Diana Sterling (Ari Graynor) to issue a deal to Cooper, Jordan, Antonio and Jeremy. Sterling has synthesized a cure, albeit an untested one, that could return Cooper to his original form –– or create more issues. Cooper accepts the blind bargain, but the others reject it, having to admit to themselves they prefer their younger, tighter bodies.
“They’ve been given a lot, and they don’t want to give it up,” Uppendahl says. “For different reasons, the idea of going back to what you were when you’ve turned into something you perceive as better is very unattractive to people. It’s not necessarily the smartest move, but it is interesting when faced with the choice that they all decline it. It is a deep question given they know the horrors of this.”
The audience doesn’t yet learn what comes of the so-called cure. Cooper’s dose encases him in yet another cocoon, but the series fades to black before he is reborn again. The season ends on Jordan, Antonio and Jeremy watching him emerge, and Uppendahl says he wanted to make sure he captured a reaction for anything that might spring from that chrysalis, even a few unlikely scenarios.
“When we were shooting the scene, I would be walking them through it and I told the actors that he comes out and he appears as different people to get their reactions,” Uppendahl says. “At one point, I told him it was Shaquille O’Neal. I don’t think that’s probably the case, but you never know!”
Jurors in a New Mexico child safety trial heard testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg today. During pre-recorded testimony, Zuckerberg was repeatedly asked about the company’s understanding of social media addiction and other issues that had been studied by its researchers.
During the deposition, which was recorded last March, Zuckerberg was asked about numerous findings from researchers at Meta who studied how the company’s apps affect users and teens. The CEO downplayed the significance of many of these documents.
Early in the testimony, which was viewed by Engadget on Courtroom View Network, Zuckerberg was questioned about a document on the effect of feedback on Facebook users. The document stated that “contributors on Facebook are likely to learn to associate the act of posting with feedback” which will “lead contributors to seek rewards by visiting the site more often.” Zuckerberg said he wasn’t “sure if that’s actually how it works in practice, but I agree that you’re summarizing what they appear to be saying.”
Later, the CEO was questioned about a document that graphed the proportion of 11 and 12-year-olds who were monthly active users on Instagram. The chart indicated that at the time, around 20 percent of 11-year-olds were monthly users of the service. “I agree that the graph says that, I am not familiar with what methodology we were using to estimate this,” Zuckerberg said. “I assume that if we had direct knowledge that any given person was under the age of 13, that we would have them removed from our services.”
New Mexico’s attorney general sued the company in 2023 for alleged lapses in child safety, including facilitating predators’ access to minors and building features it knew were addictive. In court, Meta’s lawyers and executives have disputed the idea that social media should be considered an “addiction.” In public statements, the company has said that lawsuits have relied on “cherry-picked quotes and snippets of conversations taken out of context” and that it “has consistently put teen safety ahead of growth for over a decade.”
As with his recent testimony in a separate trial over social media addiction in Los Angeles, Zuckerberg repeatedly rejected the “characterization” of questions that were posed to him. And he said that Meta’s goal was to make its apps “useful” rather than to increase the amount of time people spend with them.
Zuckerberg was also questioned about a document written by a company researcher that stated “there is increasing scientific evidence, particularly in the US, … that the average net effect of Facebook on people’s well being is slightly negative.” The CEO said that “my understanding is that the general consensus view is not that.”
It’s not the first time a Meta executive has tried to downplay the significance of internal research. The company used a similar strategy in 2021 after former employee turned whistleblower Frances Haugen disclosed documents showing that Facebook’s researchers had found that Instagram made some teen girls feel worse about themselves.
Zuckerberg’s testimony was played one day after jurors heard recorded testimony from Instagram chief Adam Mosseri. The exec was also asked about Haugen’s disclosures and Meta’s response to them. Some of those disclosures were based on “problematic research,” he said. “Most research is surveys. We run hundreds of surveys every month.”
Share on PinterestWhen 36-year-old Gabby Zappia (pictured above) reported blood in her stool, her doctor attributed it to pregnancy-related hemorrhoids. Months later, a colonoscopy revealed she had stage IV colon cancer. Gabby Zappia
Colorectal cancer in people under 50 is on the rise and is now the leading cause of cancer-related death for younger adults.
Experts say it’s still unclear why cases are rising among people under 50.
Gabby Zappia is sharing her journey navigating diagnosis and treatment after her initial symptoms were misdiagnosed as pregnancy-related.
In 2024, Gabby Zappia was 36 years old and pregnant with her third child when she noticed blood in her stool.
“I brought it up to my OB, and she said it was likely pregnancy-related hemorrhoids. That explanation made sense, and I wanted it to make sense, so I trusted it,” she told Healthline.
After her son was born, her symptoms persisted, and she pushed for answers.
“A colonoscopy changed my life overnight. Instead of finding hemorrhoids, they found a large mass in my colon,” Zappia said.
In December 2024, Zappia was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer that had spread to her liver.
“I was a full-time mom, managing all aspects of my kids’ schedules, and I also had a small part-time job,” she said. “After my diagnosis, I had to stop working to focus on appointments and recovery. My husband took over most of the day-to-day tasks that I had handled, and I had to step back significantly in my role as a mom.”
Zappia immediately had a colon resection and, after recovering, started chemotherapy and immunotherapy in January 2025 at City of Hope.
In April 2025, she took a break from chemotherapy and underwent liver resection surgery and implantation of an HAI pump. Then she resumed chemotherapy after recovery.
“After 15 rounds of chemotherapy, I was declared no evidence of disease and rang the survivor bell in September 2025. A few months later, ctDNA tests showed cancer detection, and a PET scan confirmed activity in my liver,” said Zappia.
She underwent another liver surgery in January 2026. Because her ctDNA remains detectable, she is now exploring clinical trials.
“Colon cancer is no longer just a disease of older adults, and it is on the rise. You know your body better than anyone. If something feels off, ask questions and request additional testing. Push for answers. Ask for the colonoscopy,” Zappia said.
If you’re not being heard, she stressed seeking a second opinion.
“We need more awareness. We need to listen to young patients. I am just one of many young faces of colon cancer, and if sharing my story helps even one person catch their cancer earlier, then sharing this journey has purpose,” said Zappia.
Once considered an older person’s disease, colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer-related death in adults under 50.
According to a January 2026 JAMA study, colorectal cancer has surpassed breast and lung cancer to become the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in U.S. adults under 50.
Physicians at City of Hope, where Zappia received treatment, say they are now treating dozens of patients in their 20s, 30s, and 40s each week, reflecting what’s happening nationwide.
Pashtoon Kasi, MD, MS, Medical Director of GI Medical Oncology at City of Hope Orange County, who treated Gabby, said three out of four people under the age of 50 are diagnosed with advanced disease.
“There are no screening guidelines for somebody below the age of 45. It’s important to reiterate that the age of screening has moved from 50 to 45, [but] we’re frequently seeing individuals in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and because there is no screening test when they’re diagnosed, they’re often advanced or metastatic,” Kasi said.
While genetics can be a factor in a small percentage of early onset colorectal cancer, Kasi said the rise of colorectal cancer in younger people often occurs in people without any risk factors.
Researchers are looking into possible contributing factors, such as antibiotic use, the microbiome, diet, and microplastics, but no single factor explains the rise.
Paying attention to your body and symptoms is the strongest defense right now, said Kasi.
“A lot of our individuals, of course, they are young, so we’ve seen this cancer being diagnosed during or after pregnancy, and often it gets labeled as hemorrhoids or something that is not concerning, but in hindsight, probably should have warranted attention earlier,” he said.
Symptoms like rectal bleeding — which researchers say is a strong indication of early onset colorectal cancer in adults under 50 — changes in bowel habits, unexplained pain, and unintentional weight loss should be taken seriously.
“[The] fact that, at least right now, we don’t have guideline-approved screening tests for these younger individuals, these are symptoms that do warrant more attention,” Kasi said.
According to City of Hope doctors, researchers are working on ways to improve treatments, including an emphasis on improving immunotherapy response, targeted therapies, and conducting clinical trials for rectal cancer that combine chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiosensitizers.
Exploration of cellular and CAR-T therapies in highly refractory cases is also underway.
Ajay Goel, PhD, professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular Diagnostics and Experimental Therapeutics at City of Hope, is working on blood-based tests to detect colorectal cancer in younger patients.
“Over the past decade or so, [we] have developed now a blood-based test, which can find evidence of early onset colon cancers, with fairly high accuracy. So, somewhere in 90% accurate test for finding patients with young-onset colon cancer. So that was quite exciting,” he said.
While the test is not available publicly yet, Goel said it is promising. He envisions the test being given as part of annual labs drawn by primary care doctors starting with patients as young as 18.
“We are continuing to work on this, and we are hoping that we can, at some point, bring this test to the clinic once we can validate it in larger patient populations,” he said.
Today the White House announced that several major players in tech and AI have agreed to steps that will keep electricity costs from rising due to data centers. Under this Ratepayer Protection Pledge, companies are agreeing to practices that are intended to protect residents from seeing higher electricity costs as more and more businesses create power-hungry data centers. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and xAI have all apparently signed on. A few of the participants — Amazon, Google and Meta — had conveniently timed press releases patting themselves on the back for their participation and touting whatever other policies they have for mitigating the negative impacts of data center construction.
The main provisions of the federal pledge have tech companies agreeing to “build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands, paying the full cost of those resources.” It also claims they will pay for any needed power infrastructure upgrades and operate under separate rate structures for power that will see payments made whether or not the business uses that electricity.
The pledge doesn’t appear to be any form of binding agreement and there’s no discussion of enforcement or a penalty for companies that don’t honor the stipulated provisions. It also doesn’t address any of the other impacts data centers and AI development might be having, either on local communities, on other utilities and resources, or on access to critical computing elements like RAM.
Canadian police warned Wednesday that fraudsters are using the Royal Canadian Mounted Police logo in crypto recovery schemes targeting victims who already lost funds in earlier fraud.
The warning follows a case in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where a resident who had already lost money in a crypto job scam was later contacted by someone claiming they could help recover the funds.
The victim first lost about $5,000 CAD ($US3,600) late last year after receiving an unsolicited text message promoting a remote stock-trading job that required depositing crypto via an ATM. Communication with the supposed employer stopped soon after the payment, according to a report from CHEK.
Earlier this year, the same person encountered an online message styled as an RCMP public notice encouraging fraud victims to report similar cases.
After submitting the form, the victim received a call from a man claiming to be a lawyer who said they had identified two crypto accounts linked to the victim and could help retrieve roughly $60,000 in supposed earnings.
Police said the promotion falsely implied RCMP involvement.
“The RCMP does not contact individuals about discovered cryptocurrency accounts, partner with private firms to recover lost funds, or request any form of payment to investigate fraud. Any communication suggesting otherwise is fraudulent,” Reserve Constable Gary O’Brien, media relations officer at the Nanaimo RCMP, said in a statement.
Police said law enforcement does not advertise recovery services or ask for payment to retrieve lost funds. Officers also urged residents to be cautious of unsolicited job offers or online messages involving crypto and to verify the credentials of anyone claiming to be a lawyer or investigator.
The tactic is “increasingly systematic rather than random,” with the pattern known commonly known as a “fake recovery service scam,” Andy Zhou, co-founder and CEO of blockchain security firm BlockSec, told Decrypt.
“These schemes work largely because scammers often have access to information from the original scam,” Zhou said, citing how the FBI has previously warned how “fraud groups deliberately re-target individuals” by “posing as lawyers, recovery agents, or government partners who claim they can retrieve stolen assets.
Using branding from law enforcement is effective “because it exploits a powerful psychological mechanism known as authority bias,” he said. “When victims believe a message comes from police or a regulator, they are far more likely to cooperate or pay so-called “administrative fees” to unlock recovered funds.”
Fraud networks often reuse information gathered during earlier schemes, which can make previous victims easy targets for follow-up scams, Zhou explained. In some cases, organized groups circulate lists of individuals who have already sent money, making those victims “extremely valuable” targets for further fraud.
Attackers also exploit the fact that victims often search online for ways to recover lost funds, Zhou said. Criminals may set up fake recovery services or advertisements claiming victims appear on a government-affiliated list of scam victims whose funds can supposedly be retrieved, with the methods “designed to create urgency and credibility.”
“This tactic can be especially convincing because victims often assume that specialized law-enforcement expertise is required to trace blockchain transactions, making the story appear plausible,” he added.
Canadian police have been training in crypto investigations since 2022, as fraud cases involving digital assets have grown. The training program was introduced to help officers better understand how cryptocurrencies work and how they are used in criminal activity.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is pushing a compromise with the Pentagon after a heated dispute that left the AI company at risk of being blacklisted by the US government.
According to the Financial Times, Amodei has engaged in urgent negotiations with officials, including Emil Michael, under-secretary of defense for research and engineering, to reach an agreement governing military access to Anthropic’s AI models.
A successful outcome would allow the Pentagon to continue deploying the company’s technology and would avert a threatened designation as a supply chain risk that would effectively sever Anthropic from defense contracts and force military contractors to cut ties with the San Francisco-based AI firm.
Following a US operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, reports surfaced that Anthropic employees discovered through Palantir logs that Claude was used during the operation.
The application raises questions about compliance with Anthropic’s Acceptable Use Policy.
Combined with the company’s reluctance to allow its AI to be used for fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, this led to a dramatic breakdown in negotiations with the Pentagon.
The department is seeking broader permission for the AI to be used for any “lawful” purpose, which Anthropic fears could enable surveillance uses it opposes.
After Amodei rejected the government’s ultimatum, President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s technology, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated the firm a national security supply chain risk.
Amodei accused the Pentagon and OpenAI of misrepresenting the issue. He also suggested that Anthropic was being sidelined partly because it has not praised Trump as enthusiastically as its rivals.
Anthropic, alongside OpenAI, Google, and xAI, landed a Pentagon deal worth up to $200 million to advance agentic AI for military use. Losing that foothold would represent a major setback for a company that has positioned itself as a leader in AI safety.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Vivian Nguyen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from The Beauty season one finale, “Beautiful Betrayal”]
For Anthony Ramos and Jeremy Pope, portraying their characters’ growing bond wasn’t much of a stretch. The two have been friends in real life for years, even attending college together at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
Their dynamic in the FX series, however, takes an unexpected turn. The Assassin (Ramos) is initially ordered by Byron — aka The Corporation (Ashton Kutcher) — to kill Jeremy (Pope). But as the season progresses, the pair begin to connect over their shared loneliness. The Assassin opens up about taking “The Beauty” after being severely injured, a decision that forced him to leave his family behind. Jeremy, meanwhile, is a “damaged incel desperate to feel seen and loved,” Pope explains below.
“What’s wild about watching [their relationship] is that, you know how you meet those people in your life where you feel like you’ve known them your whole life — you have that instant thing, right?” Kutcher tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Them having that and the influence it had on your character decisions — the way they masked it and then unveiled it — was a really pretty thing to watch.”
In the season’s later episodes, Dr. Diana (Ari Graynor) reveals her plan to stop Byron from expanding access to “The Beauty.” After realizing Byron doesn’t truly have his back, The Assassin joins her effort. Cooper (Evan Peters) then contracts the drug and transforms into a young boy. And in the finale that released Wednesday night, Diana and Byron’s sons reveal there is a reverse drug, and Cooper agrees to try it. But whether it worked is still to be known, since the episode and the season ends after Jeremy, The Assassin and Jordan (Jessica Alexander) stare in shock at whatever is the result.
Below, Ramos and Pope discuss the season finale cliffhanger and the biggest questions facing their characters in a potential season two.
***
I’m aware that you two went to college together and have been friends for more than a decade. Did your friendship offscreen influence your unexpected friendship in the show?
ANTHONY RAMOS Yes. It made it tough in the beginning, because we’re supposed to act like we don’t know each other. It was very hard to do that at the top, but it made it really easy once when we get deeper into the season, especially in episode seven. We have that scene in the hotel where we both have these moments opening up about our backstories, and you get to know our characters on a deeper level with the monologue that Jeremy gives when he’s sitting down and talking about his dad, and then I give him the monologue when I talk about my son.
We get to unlock a new level of vulnerability between these two guys. Those scenes felt seamless, going from these guys who don’t know each other to getting vulnerable with one another because of how long we’ve known each other. And then there are the scenes where I’m singing to him in the car and we get to mess around. Then, the scene where we got the guy tied up and I’m hitting them and Jeremy’s there jamming out and we get to have that rapport while we’re also interrogating this guy — all of our relationship before made it a lot easier.
Jeremy Pope as Jeremy, Anthony Ramos as The Assassin in The Beauty.
Eric Liebowitz/FX
JEREMY POPE It’s a dream to work with family in anything. The things that came up towards the end for me, because there was a foundation and nuance of knowing each other, as artists, as friends, as boys — we were able to shatter a little bit of toxic masculinity. There’s a dynamic at play. [Anthony’s] playing a 60-plus-year-old man. I’m playing this incel, insecure, damaged person that’s needing to be seen and loved. We can be hardened when it comes to men on men, and how much we’re willing to open up and share. But I think we were able to really excavate and bring a layer of transparency and comfortability, and we have that in real life because we’ve seen each other through different seasons of our life and actually showing up for each other in real moments off camera.
So to have this moment where it is a lot of laughter and improv and singing and jokes, but then to lock into scenes that were about excavating the truth and the vulnerability of what’s at stake in this wild world that Ryan has created… I really pray and hope that people will be able to see themselves through these complex characters and find a moment of connection and truth. It made it a lot easier to look across the room at someone I really respect and love and care for, and open up myself.
Jeremy, you’ve worked with Ryan Murphy several times before, and many of the actors he works with tend to stick around in his work. What about you two make a great collaboration?
POPE Ryan is a friend first, and a collaborator and creative second. Ryan really champions artists; our nuance as artists and as humans. He sees us for what other collaborators maybe can’t see yet, whether it’s the type of character we want to play or world we’d love to explore. I remember he texted me, “You want to do something weird?” I was like, “Well, Ryan, everything you do is kind of weird, so how weird are we talking?” I meant that with love, and he knew it. When he sent this show, it was a bit darker than anything I’ve been asked to play. I thought that was interesting to bring the juxtaposition of how people perceive me and what this energy that I can possess or bring into this character. I have so much respect for someone who is willing to bet. He gave me my first TV show. He bet on me when I didn’t have any TV credits. Hollywood was my first Emmy nomination.
You both also executive-produced, so I wanted to know if it was always the plan to end the season on a cliffhanger with young Cooper trying to reverse “The Beauty” but not revealing if it worked. Did you ever shoot alternative versions of that final scene?
POPE We didn’t shoot an alternative. With Ryan, it’s really about the collaboration; he has a vision. As you’ve seen in a lot of his work, you can almost identify a Ryan show just based on the way it’s shot and looks. So there are always open conversations about where we want the story to go, where we hope the story will go. But with Ryan, it’s about trusting and soaring. You have to trust the visionary and the vision at hand, and know that he’s going to take you to the promised land. A lot of these scripts we were getting in real time as we were shooting and things were being revealed to us. I remember at one point we got episode 10, and we were like, “Is that the end?” Because we didn’t know, or we hadn’t heard about episode 11.
RAMOS Yeah, we didn’t know until the end.
Pope, Evan Peters as Cooper and Ramos in The Beauty.
FX
POPE So we were on the journey of trusting and knowing that he has a vision: he’s going to take this series to the place he wants to take it, ultimately, at the care of what these characters need and what makes the most sense. So that is collaborating with Ryan on The Beauty. He’s going to allow you to imbue all that you can into these complex characters. But at the end of the day, you’re going to read the script and be on the edge of the page, just like, hopefully, the audience is when they’re watching the series.
In a potential season two, do you think your characters would take the reserve “Beauty” shot? Or do you think they’re too comfortable enjoying the benefits it’s given them?
RAMOS That’s a good question. I don’t know if he’d go back. I think he’s too far down the road.
POPE We might have lost my man, Jeremy, on this one. I think he is feeling it in new ways. So I don’t know if he would want to reverse it. I want to believe there’s a turn in him, but my man is loving the highlights, the private jets, the double-breasted blazers. It’s hard to come back from that.
The Beauty.
Philippe Antonello/FX
Since many of Ryan Murphy’s shows are anthologies or limited series, but this one seems ongoing, were there early conversations about how many seasons this show might have? And was there an overall arc planned for your characters?
POPE When Ryan called me, he just told me scale. He’s like, “This is a very big show — we’re going international.” He hadn’t done anything this expensive or big in a minute and he hadn’t been international since Eat Pray Love. So he was just talking about the scale and the world-building of it all, that there would be all these side characters and main characters coming together. Ashton and I didn’t really even work together in this season, so it leads you to, well, that surely has to happen. I think, if anything, it was less about the number of seasons, but how large this vision was. I think he knows when it’s a limited series and it’s a beginning, middle and end, but this one wasn’t a period, it was a comma.
In a much-needed win for Pixar’s core mission to provide original storytelling, Hoppers is positioned to deliver the iconic animated studio its biggest opening in nearly a decade for a non-franchise title. Conversely, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new film, inspired by the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein, is in danger of being jilted at the altar.
Disney is forecasting a global debut of $88 million for Hoppers. The last time a Pixar original did so well was Coco in 2017. In North America, tracking suggests it could open anywhere from $36 million to $40 million, with room for upside. It’s also expected to come in leaps and bounds ahead of Gyllenhaal’s The Bride!, which Warner Bros. believes will open in the $16 million to $18 million range domestically and roughly $38 million-plus globally, although decidedly mixed reviews could ding the $80 million film. (It goes without saying that the two movies couldn’t be more different.)
Hoppers has the advantage of hitting theaters in the wake of Disney Animation’s mega-blockbuster Zootopia 2, which provided further evidence that there’s still a huge appetite for family fare in the post-pandemic era if a film resonates with moviegoers. Pixar’s movies were also once famous for attracting adults without kids; Hoppers is earning the kind of rave reviews from critics that could see those fans return (Zootopia 2, which has earned north of $1.86 billion globally to rank as the top-grossing Hollywood animated pic of all time, also attracted general audiences).
As of late Wednesday, Hoppers‘ critics score on Rotten Tomatoes was 97 percent, one of the highest in years for Pixar. Audience reactions from early access screenings have been similar, with moviegoers also applauding the film’s creativity and humor.
In the comedy-adventure, animal lover Mabel (Piper Curda) seizes an opportunity to use a new technology to “hop” her consciousness into a life-like robotic beaver and communicate directly with animals. As she uncovers mysteries beyond anything she could have imagined, Mabel befriends a charismatic beaver named King George (Bobby Moynihan), and must rally the entire animal kingdom to face a major, imminent human-threat: smooth-talking local mayor Jerry Generazzo (Hamm). The ensemble voice cast also features Kathy Najimy, Dave Franco, Meryl Streep, Eduardo Franco, Aparna Nancherla, Tom Law, Sam Richardson, Melissa Villaseñor, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Steve Purcell, Ego Nwodim, Nichole Sakura, Karen Huie and Vanessa Bayer.
Hoppers is directed by Daniel Chong, with Nicole Paradis Grindle producing and Mark Mothersbaugh providing the original score. The pic will play across 4,000 theaters in North America, including 400-plus Imax screens, 1,000 premium large-format screens and more than 2,200 3D screens. Overseas, it opens in 81 percent of markets, with staggered releases planned for Japan (March 13), China (March 20) and Australia (March 26).
While Pixar has good reason to be hopeful, no one is envying the position Warner Bros. and Gyllenhaal are in as The Bride! prepares to walk down the aisle. The R-rated, gothic romance made headlines on Wednesday, both for earning tepid reviews and for comments Gylleenhal made on a podcast saying she was asked by Warners movie studio chiefs Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca to remove some of the film’s more violent scenes (she also gave a shout out to Abdy for “understanding me”).
The Bride!, starring Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale, draws inspiration from the 1935 film The Bride of Frankenstein. The cast also includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Penélope Cruz and Annette Bening.
“In James Whale’s 1935 gothic horror masterpiece The Bride of Frankenstein, the title character played so indelibly by Elsa Lanchester screams and hisses but otherwise has no dialogue, and yet she has endured as an iconic movie-lore figure for almost a century,” writes THR‘s David Rooney in his review. “In Maggie Gyllenhaal’s aggressively punky reconsideration of the reanimated monster spouse, she becomes a laborious study guide for a Feminism 101 class, emphatically indicating points on sexual violence, consent, bodily autonomy and female power. She even yells ‘Me too!’ late in the film.”
The Bride! marks Gyllenhaal’s second directorial outing after the acclaimed, award-winning indie drama The Lost Daughter, starring Olivia Colman and Buckley. All three women were nominated for a slew of awards by various orgs, including Oscars noms for best adapted screenplay (Gyllenhaal), best actress (Colman) and best supporting actress (Buckley). This year, Buckley is nominated for an Oscar for best actress for her performance in Hamnet.
Abdy and De Luca are coming off a remarkable winning streak that has earned them major points and goodwill, culminating with two of their movies, Sinners and One Battle After Another, being front-runners in the Oscar race for best picture (Hamnet is another).
The Bride! will play in more than 3,200 theaters in North America, and will also have a footprint in Imax and other premium formats.
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