It's well and truly not summer now. I'm writing this with the lights on because the screen's backlight is suddenly too bright for these eyes grown weak and lazy by the abundance of natural illumination.
Despite Rockstar Games' silence on the matter, the cat rather seems to be out of the bag about GTA 6 getting its own online component that'll doubtless serve as GTA Online has for GTA 5. Court docs the studio themselves filed as part of the ongoing final hearing in a legal battle over the firings of 34 developers last year are partly to thank, but now so is the boss of streaming platform Twitch just blurting out when he expects GTA 6 to get a big multiplayer bump.
If you've given The Blood of Dawnwalker a go, odds are you've got thoughts about the 30-day and 3-night timer it applies to Coen's quest to save his family from fate most vampy. Devs Rebel Wolves are very much aware of how divisive the feature's proven, and now the game's director's made clear that it's not guaranteed to return in future entries unless it can be made to mesh with the story being told.
No siree. We are not trying to fight those big bosses. It's arguably a bit of a weird thing for a publisher with Diablo and World of Warcraft in their arsenal to say, but that's the stance Blizzard are sticking to with their storefront Battle.net, even though it now boasts two big CD Projekt Red RPGs. Instead of an unknowably girthy hoard of games, the publishers say Battle.net's still designed to feel like a handpicked basket of things to play.
Back in October 2025, GTA 6 developers Rockstar fired a group of 34, mostly UK-based employees on a charge of "gross misconduct", alleging that they had risked the leaking of confidential information while posting on a Discord server set up by union organisers. The ousted UK workers and their representatives have since taken Rockstar to court, accusing the company of getting rid of them to stop their union gaining enough members to win official recognition under UK law.
This week, both parties filed opening submissions at an employment tribunal in Glasgow, which Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive have emailed to RPS and Game Developer, among others. Taken together, the filings amount to over 100 pages of claims and counterclaims, with thousands of pages of evidence to be discussed in the coming weeks. Amongst other things, the docs give us more sense of events leading up to the dismissals, including the revelation that Rockstar had a mole or "whistleblower" passing them information on the people using the Discord server.
Up until now, Rockstar Games have kept mum about what plans they have for the future of Grand Theft Auto multiplayer once GTA 6 releases on consoles in November. Thanks to filings submitted by the studio as part of the final hearing in a legal battle over the firings of 34 developers last year, that silence appears to have been broken.
Rockstar Games have issued a statement making clear they're sticking to their guns, as the final hearing in the legal battle between them and a group of former staff they fired last year begins. The hearing's set to run from today, September 10th, until at least October 15th. The Independent Workers’ union of Great Britain (IWGB) and fired staff re-emphasised their stance earlier this week, announcing they'd be hosting a rally ouside the tribunal venue this morning.
United Airlines is set to resume the shipment of military hardware to Israel aboard passenger flights, according to shipping data reviewed by The Intercept. The airline, one of the biggest in the world, had halted the practice more than six months ago amid the outbreak of the war on Iran.
On Wednesday evening, United is scheduled to transport five shipments of military cargo onboard United Airlines flight 90, a passenger route from Newark Liberty International Airport, in New Jersey, to Tel Aviv, Israel, a day after resuming the route and another direct flight to Israel, records show.
The shipments, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept, include one transport to the “electro-optics” wing of the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems, in Rehovot, Israel, where the arms maker has a major campus. Another shipment is bound for Elbit Systems Land, a division of the company formerly known as IMI Systems, located in Ramat Hasharon, Israel. And a further three shipments are scheduled to go to an Elbit Systems facility in Karmiel, Israel.
At least one of the shipments to Karmiel was specifically labeled as “FMS,” or foreign military sales, the records show, though all the military hardware bound for Israel on the Wednesday flight is destined for defense firms under Elbit’s umbrella.
“United, consistently and on a regular basis, ships military materiel that is used by the Israeli military.”
The shipments appear to be a return to status quo for United, which had used civilian passenger flights to transport thousands of shipments of military cargo to Israel amid its wars in the occupied Gaza Strip and Lebanon and in the run-up to its joint attack on Iran alongside the U.S., according to a new report released this week by Movement Research Unit, Palestinian Youth Movement, People’s Embargo for Palestine, and the Democratic Socialists of America. (A spokesperson for United declined to comment. Representatives of Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense did not respond to requests for comment.)
The report, based on open-source data, found that United transported nearly 3,000 loads of military materiel over a seven-month period in 2025 and early 2026. The cargo ranged from critical components for fighter jets and tanks to helmet displays, electronics, and nuts and bolts. The transfers stopped only amid the outbreak of war with Iran.
“This report shows that United, consistently and on a regular basis, ships military materiel that is used by the Israeli military for its operations in Gaza, in Lebanon, and against Iran,” said Griffin Mahon, a co-chair of the national labor committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the groups behind the report. “These parts are shipped on civilian passenger flights, and they represent one way that American companies enable the Israeli government’s war crimes.”
Using open-source methods to find publicly accessible cargo documents, researchers with the Movement Research Unit — a group that provides investigative muscle for left-wing groups and causes — said they tracked 2,761 shipments to weapons manufacturers transported by United aboard 160 civilian passenger flights between July 24, 2025, and February 27, 2026.
Due to the volume of data, the authors were only able to analyze a subset of the overall shipments, but after analyzing the product descriptions of a sample of 546 of those shipments, the group found 28 shipments of tank parts, 131 shipments of parts for weapons maker Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jets, 67 shipments of components for other aircraft, and more than 100 other shipments of radio and communications equipment, nuts and bolts, and helmet-mounted display systems.
Many of those parts include key components to some of the most critical military vehicles in Israel’s arsenal, many of which have been documented in the commission of alleged war crimes on numerous occasions, according to Belal Elsiesy, a spokesperson for Palestinian Youth Movement.
“We’ve seen parts directly tied to the carrying out of the genocide, from armored tank sights and gunner display units to the bomb-release units of the F-35,” Elsiesy said. “We often have seen videos of Israeli occupation forces on social media recordings from inside of a tank, the demolition of schools, mosques, and other buildings, and often the screen that they are recording on is a gunner display unit — the same gunner display unit that is transported by United Airlines. It’s not an abstract connection.”
The report found no evidence that United transported any explicitly hazardous material aboard passenger flights. The use of civilian infrastructure to carry weapons components to a belligerent in the midst of open conflict, however, raised ethical questions for the researchers, according to Abdullah, an investigator with Movement Research who spoke with The Intercept on the condition that he be referred to by his first name only due to the sensitive nature of his work.
“There are ammunition handling systems and F-35 parts and tank sites that are being transported on these flights, without [passengers] actually knowing.”
“We all get on our flights and have to worry about taking too much water in our water bottles, and meanwhile, there are ammunition handling systems and F-35 parts and tank sites that are being transported on these flights, without us actually knowing,” Abdullah said. “Crimes are being committed in Gaza, so United needs to do a full and thorough review of their policy related to the transport of these components that might be violating international law.”
The cargo shipments were not just stowed away on flights bound for Israel, the report found.
While the majority of cargo documents for shipments did not reveal a domestic origin point other than Newark, 235 shipments were shown to have arrived at Newark on domestic flights from cities across the U.S., including flights from Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport, Houston International Airport, Atlanta International Airport, San Francisco International Airport, Los Angeles International Airport, along with Washington’s Dulles International Airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport.
The domestic route with the most shipments in the period analyzed was a United flight from Dallas–Fort Worth to Houston, aboard which the airline transported 128 shipments, according to the report. That was followed by 90 domestic shipments onboard a United flight from Houston to Newark.
Most of the shipments going directly to Israel — 2,565 in total — appear to have been carried aboard United flights 84 and 90, passenger flights that travel directly from Newark to Tel Aviv. Data obtained by the report’s authors showed that Newark served as the primary hub for United’s shipments to Israel, with all but 45 of the shipments in the documented period arriving in Israel from there. Of the remaining 45 shipments, 36 left the U.S. from Chicago, and nine from Washington, the report found.
Most of the shipments — 2,070 in total — were destined for Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer and a frequent target of Palestine solidarity activism, according to the report. A total of 78 shipments were transported to the Israeli headquarters of Lockheed Martin, while hundreds more were destined for the Israeli Ministry of Defense and to several military airbases in Israel, including the operational hub of the country’s fleet of F-35I jets, the Israeli version of Lockheed’s flagship stealth fighter, the report found.
While information on the senders of the shipments was only available in some cases, a portion of the transfers were shipped by Lockheed Martin and by Elbit System’s U.S. branch, according to the report’s authors.
The Intercept reviewed a portion of the underlying data in the report, including cargo documents that showed the transport of F-35 parts and weapons systems for armored personnel carriers, but has not independently corroborated every claim made by Movement Research Unit and its partners.
Movement Research investigators provided a detailed explanation of its methodology to The Intercept, which agreed to withhold some details to prevent a clampdown on the research that made the report possible. Previous work by the group has exposed a multi-ton shipment of explosive material out of New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and a Portland drone company shipping hardware to Israel.
Work on the report began last summer, after an investigative story by the Irish publication The Ditch revealed several shipments of military hardware aboard passenger flights passing through Irish airspace.
Suspecting the practice might be more widespread than the limited samples in The Ditch report, Movement Research delved deeper into the airline’s shipments to Israel over the ensuing seven months.
The shipments appear to have mostly stopped in February, when U.S. direct flights to Israel were suspended amid the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran. With those flights set to resume this week, the report’s authors hope to pressure United to cease its practice of moving military cargo onboard, according to Abdullah, the investigator with Movement Research.
“This is very timely, because United needs to commit to not shipping military cargo on those passenger flights,” Abdullah said. “Not only on the ones that are going directly to Tel Aviv, but also on flights within the U.S.”
The post United Airlines Ships War Materiel to Israel Aboard Passenger Flights appeared first on The Intercept.
Being a vampire is a pretty raw deal... or so the vamps inform us when they are not having freaky gothic sex, shapeshifting into wolves, enjoying the slimming effects of a uniquely low-carb diet, or enduring through marvellous future epochs we foolish cattle can only dream of.
I find most stories about vampirism tend to do a poor job of convincing me that vampirism is to be avoided. "Immortality is no gift, but a curse," breathe the bloodsuckers, like parents telling kids that staying up late only makes you tired in the morning, and I think: OK, so you're definitely going to outlive everybody you've ever loved, but also, 1) you've got marble hard abs, and 2) you're going to be knocking around when generations to come finally put a stake through capitalism and roll out UBI.
Look, I know it's way to early to be talking about sequels to The Blood of Dawnwalker, given Rebel Wolves' vampire RPG hasn't even been out a week as I write this. However, the game's devs are already putting pieces in place to get on with making such a game, so with help from strong spoiler tags, I'm doing it.
THIS IS A VERY STRONG SPOILER WARNING FOR THE BLOOD OF DAWNWALKER, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.
From Software and Bandai Namco have released a hasty new Elden Ring patch to stop people getting their hands on items from the game's Tarnished Pack DLC for free.
What came first, the chicken or the egg? I know, it's a tough one. I'll put it another way. What came first, Todd Howard's lone desire to make a space RPG or what the devs working under him had initially anticipated they'd be working on once Fallout 4 shipped? Well, according to a fresh account given by long-time Bethesda developer and Skyrim co-lead designer Kurt Kuhlmann, those among the latter who'd mentally prepped to be making The Elder Scrolls 6 right away were rather whisked along on an interstellar journey Todd seemingly charted a course for without much of a heads up.
The final hearing in the legal battle between a group of former Rockstar workers and the GTA 6 studio over the latter's decision to fire the former last year kicks off this week. It'll get underway on September 10th, and the Independent Workers’ union of Great Britain (IWGB) - who're representing the fired staff - are organising a rally to take place first thing on that opening day.
Left-wing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has a proposal to shield her country from Donald Trump’s growing influence over Latin American politics: changing the constitution to bar dual nationals from running for president or governor of any Mexican state.
“A Mexican president is Mexican and does not represent another country,” Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference on August 25. If adopted, her proposal would make Mexico’s presidency qualifications in some respects more restrictive than those of the United States, where a president must be born in the country but there is no explicit ban on dual citizenship.
Sheinbaum’s proposal marks the latest in a suite of changes that her critics deem authoritarian. In May, for example, Sheinbaum gave the National Electoral Institute, Mexico’s highest electoral authority, the power to annul presidential elections deemed to have been influenced by foreign actors.
But Sheinbaum argues the reforms are necessary to stave off the growing influence of the far right in Latin America, where now two heads of state — Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa — are also U.S. citizens.
De la Espriella, the far-right Colombian president who received strong support from Trump during his campaign and took office in June, is a U.S. and Italian citizen and a registered member of the Republican Party. Noboa, who assumed office as Ecuador’s president in 2023 at the age of 35, was born in Miami, Florida, and is the son of one of Ecuador’s richest men. (His father, Álvaro Noboa, also ran unsuccessfully for president five times.)
It’s clear that Latin America has an ascendant right wing under U.S. influence, said Pamela K. Starr, a professor of political science and international relations at the University of Southern California. Morena, the party that Sheinbaum leads, genuinely seems to believe there’s an international far-right movement that has taken over most of Latin America and that efforts to weaken Mexico’s left-wing political leadership come from Washington. How Mexican observers view Sheinbaum’s protectionism, meanwhile, is something of a political Rorschach test.
“Those who trust her trust that her efforts are legitimate, that she’s not trying to establish authoritarianism,” Starr told The Intercept. “Those who oppose her have the exact opposite read: that this is simply an extension of the Fourth Transformation’s effort to recreate an authoritarian government in Mexico. The truth obviously is somewhere in between.”
The Fourth Transformation is the political project launched by former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the founder of the Morena party who swept to the presidency in 2018 promising to break with Mexico’s political establishment, reduce inequality, and root out corruption. López Obrador cast his movement as a historic transformation of the country, and his successor, Sheinbaum, has pledged to protect it.
Her strategy raises an uncomfortable question inside Mexico: whether measures designed to shield the country from foreign political influence could themselves be used to consolidate Morena’s power.
“I don’t think it is an absurd idea,” said Damián Zepeda, the former president of Mexico’s conservative party PAN, of Sheinbaum’s proposed dual-citizenship ban. “But we cannot lose sight of the context of the authoritarian government we are living under.”
“What is being done is protecting Mexico from leaders who would sell out their own country.”
For Cynthia López Castro, a Morena senator, the initiative seems fundamental. The logic behind it is that someone who holds dual nationality has a legal bond with another state, López Castro said, while whoever holds the presidency can only represent the Mexican people.
“What is being done is protecting Mexico from leaders who would sell out their own country,” said López Castro, who told The Intercept that the measure was discussed in parliament this week. “President Claudia Sheinbaum argues that dual nationality is incompatible with serving as president or governor because these positions require exclusive representation.”
Sheinbaum’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
There are people within and around the U.S. administration who see Sheinbaum’s government as hostile to American interests and are seeking to see Mexico governed by conservatives, Starr said. The irony, she added, is that “the United States has never, literally never, had such good security cooperation from Mexico.”
The State Department and U.S. military are highly supportive of the Mexican president because of the level of security cooperation her government has provided Washington.
“There are two messages coming out of the United States, and Donald Trump just depends on what day it is, which side he apes in his rhetoric,” Starr said.
Framing Sheinbaum’s proposal as an authoritarian measure, Zepeda, the conservative, also presented it as an attack on a critical target for the Trump administration: the rights of millions of Mexican immigrants.
“A great deal of progress has been made on the migration agenda to recognize the rights of our fellow Mexicans abroad, and this proposal would prevent anyone who was born in the United States because of their family’s migration circumstances from aspiring to certain public offices,” Zepeda said. “It is a double narrative: On the one hand, we support migrants, and on the other, we restrict their rights in order to protect those in power.”
In Starr’s view, while the U.S. president is clearly an influential force, he’s inflating his own role in Latin American politics.
“There’s no question that Trump thinks that he has created a conservative coalition in Latin America, and it supports him. He’s right that it supports him, but he’s not right that he created it,” Starr said. “Latin Americans are voting on Latin American concerns.”
The post Claudia Sheinbaum Wants to Ban Dual Citizens From Office to Shield Mexico From Trump appeared first on The Intercept.
Coen, the half-man and half-vampire protagonist of The Blood of Dawnwalker, doesn’t like chomping down on rats.
I know this because he’s told me multiple times, after I’ve made him slurpily drain a rodent like it’s a furry Frube (other brands of tubed yoghurt are available). Sometimes he shudders a bit and makes noises of disgust. Other times he straight up says things like "This is not a nice thing to do". I know it’s not, farmboy whose family needs saving, but what’s the alternative?
Witcher-flavoured vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker has received its first post-launch patch, with developers Rebel Wolves dipping their fangs into a modest neckful of problems with blocked quest progression and general controller behaviour on PC. They've also taught a blacksmith a new recipe. Alas, the devs are still working on fixes for those problems with stuttering, PlayStation button-mapping, and shader compilation we covered last night. Still, at least little Lunka will no longer get hopelessly lost while walking you through the tutorial.
The mayor of Miami-Dade, Florida has been pitching Rockstar Games about transforming parts of the county into recreations of areas from Grand Theft Auto 6, in the face of complaints from law enforcement and members of the judiciary. GTA 6 is itself inspired by Miami, so yes, this is one of those "simulation colonising reality" situations. The proposed publicity event would include "an immersive arrival experience" at Miami International Airport. with signs for Vice City and planes coated in GTA 6 livery, together with branded Metromover skytrains and specially designed manhole covers.
It's a predictable bid to snaffle a few of those GTA marketing dollars, while driving up the regional circulation of affluent Vice City nuts. Also predictable: a few people, and specifically the cops, find the idea of their neighbourhood being mocked up to resemble a Grand Theft Auto game problematic. Miami-Dade sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz and commissioner Juan Carlos Bermudez have already spoken out against the potential deal, observing in a joint statement that "we should be promoting the Miami-Dade we have worked so hard to build, not a fictional version of our community defined by crime and violence.”
It's The Blood of Dawnwalker release day! The debut game of Rebel Wolves and the first new game from director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz since The Witcher 3. A day of what should be celebrations for many, I'm sure, instead a day of "oh, huh, this isn't running so well on PC, is it?" This is fairly common for big releases these days, but the devs do come with some temporary suggestions for the variety of issues they're aware of.
CD Projekt Red and Fool's Theory might have used Gamescom to make clear that they've got a Witcher thing in the pipeline for this year and the next two, but they've also had to put one of their previously cat-eyed projects on hold for the time being. The remake of the first Witcher game is on the back burner right now, since the next stage of work on it requires more progress to be made on The Witcher 4.
Login
