After giving CinemaCon attendees a sneak peek last week, Paramount Pictures has publicly released the trailer for Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning , the eighth installment of the blockbuster spy franchise starring Tom Cruise as IMF agent Ethan Hunt, and a sequel to the events that played out in 2023's Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning .

This may, or may not, end up being Cruise's last film in the franchise; everyone's being pretty cagey about that question. But the trailer certainly gives us everything we've come to expect from the Mission: Impossible films: high stakes, global political intrigue, and of course, lots and lots of spectacular stunt work, including Cruise hanging precariously mid-air from a 1930s Boeing Stearman biplane.

(Spoilers for Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning below.)

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A second unvaccinated child has died of measles in Texas, according to state health officials and the hospital in Lubbock, Texas, that treated the child.

“We are deeply saddened to report that a school-aged child who was recently diagnosed with measles has passed away," a representative for UMC Health System in Lubbock said in a statement emailed to Ars Technica. "The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized. It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions. This unfortunate event underscores the importance of vaccination."

US Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. identified the child as 8-year-old Daisy Hildebrand . Media reports indicated that she died early Thursday morning .

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A White House investigation has reportedly identified the mistakes that led to a journalist being added to a Signal text chain in which bombing plans were discussed hours before the strikes occurred.

As previously reported, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz last month invited The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which top Trump administration officials discussed a plan for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. Waltz publicly claimed that Goldberg's number was "sucked in" to his phone and added to a different person's contact information without his knowledge.

A report published yesterday by The Guardian said a forensic review by the White House IT office "found that Waltz's phone had saved Goldberg's number as part of an unlikely series of events that started when Goldberg emailed the Trump campaign last October." The Guardian reported:

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Nintendo's barrage of Switch announcements over the last two weeks have also come with changes to the way Nintendo treats physical and digital copies of games.

Digital games can now become " virtual game cards ," facilitating slightly more flexible sharing of digitally purchased games between multiple Switch systems owned by the same person or family of people. And physical copies of games can now be either traditional game cards—little bits of plastic with the game stored on a flash memory chip inside—or "Game-Key cards," which look the same from the outside but don't actually have any game data stored on them.

A Game-Key card has a "key" stored on it that prompts a download of the game data from Nintendo's servers the first time you insert it. From then on, the game behaves like a cross between a digital download and a physical game—all of the game's content has to be on the console's internal storage or a microSD Express card, but you need to have the Game-Key card inserted before the game will launch.

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Formula 1 held the third round of its 2025 season at Suzuka in Japan yesterday. The race used to be held toward the end of the calendar, but F1 now visits while the cherry blossoms are blooming, which certainly makes for some good visuals. With a hefty timezone difference between Suzuka and fans in Europe and the US, a difficult decision must be made: Do I stay up all night to watch it live? Let's just say I was glad I did that for qualifying on Friday night—and I was equally glad I slept in the following night and watched the race on Sunday morning.

The circuit at Suzuka is one of the few old-school tracks left on the calendar. Along with places like Monaco, Catalyunya, and Spa-Francorchamps, it's a real driver's track; anyone who's played it in Forza , Gran Turismo , or the racing franchise of your choice will know what I mean. The first corner is flat after a long straight. The left-right-left-right of turns 3-7 might be the best set of esses on any track in the world. It even crosses over itself in a figure-eight.

Like Spa, though, some bits have become less of a challenge for modern F1 cars with their immense amounts of power and grip. 130R used to be a test of nerve, but now the cars barely notice it as a corner.

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After dealing with years of widespread reports of "stick drift" on the original Switch Joy-Cons , Nintendo watchers have been hoping the Switch 2 would make use of magnetic Hall effect sensors that avoid most of the physical wear and tear that causes the problem. Now, though, a Nintendo executive has confirmed that the Joy-Cons on the new console won't make use of the more reliable but more expensive technology.

"Well, the Joy-Con 2's controllers have been designed from the ground up," Nintendo of America Senior Vice President of Product Development & Publishing Nate Bihldorff told enthusiast site Nintendo Life in a recent interview. "They're not Hall effect sticks, but they feel really good."

The confirmation comes after Nintendo pointedly refused to offer details about the Switch 2's joystick hardware at a roundtable Q&A session attended by Ars last week. When a reporter asked whether stick drift "is the sort of thing that has been improved with the Joy-Con 2 and the Pro Controller 2 as well," Switch 2 Technical Director Tetsuya Sasaki responded (via a translator) that the "new Joy-Con 2 controllers have been designed from the ground up from scratch to have bigger movement, and also a lot smoother movement."

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There is no action star quite like Jackie Chan, who made his name in the Hong Kong movie industry starting in the late 1970s and developed his own signature style: combining slapstick physical comedy with acrobatics and martial arts, and designing astonishing stunts—all of which he performed himself along with his own handpicked stunt team. His stunt sequences and fight choreography have influenced everything from The Matrix and Kill Bill to the John Wick franchise and Kung Fu Panda (in which he voiced Master Monkey).

Born on April 7, 1954, Chan studied acrobatics, martial arts, and acting as a child at the Peking Opera School's China Drama Academy and became one of the Seven Little Fortunes. Those skills served him well in his early days as a Hong Kong stuntman, which eventually landed him a gig as an extra and stunt double on Bruce Lee's 1972 film, Fist of Fury . He also appeared in a minor role in Lee's Enter the Dragon (1973).

Initially, Hong Kong producers, impressed by Chan's skills, wanted to mold him into the next Bruce Lee, but that just wasn't Chan's style. Chan found his milieu when director Yuen Woo-ping cast him in 1978's kung fu comedy Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and gave Chan creative freedom over the stunt work. It was Drunken Master , released that same year, that established Chan as a rising talent, and he went on to appear in more than 150 movies, becoming one of Hong Kong's biggest stars.

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Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency ( DOGE ) has plans to stage a “hackathon” next week in Washington, DC. The goal is to create a single “mega API”—a bridge that lets software systems talk to one another—for accessing IRS data, sources tell WIRED. The agency is expected to partner with a third-party vendor to manage certain aspects of the data project. Palantir , a software company cofounded by billionaire and Musk associate Peter Thiel, has been brought up consistently by DOGE representatives as a possible candidate, sources tell WIRED.

Two top DOGE operatives at the IRS, Sam Corcos and Gavin Kliger , are helping to orchestrate the hackathon, sources tell WIRED. Corcos is a health-tech CEO with ties to Musk’s SpaceX. Kliger attended UC Berkeley until 2020 and worked at the AI company Databricks before joining DOGE as a special adviser to the director at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) . Corcos is also a special adviser to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Since joining Musk’s DOGE, Corcos has told IRS workers that he wants to pause all engineering work and cancel current attempts to modernize the agency’s systems, according to sources with direct knowledge who spoke with WIRED. He has also spoken about some aspects of these cuts publicly: "We've so far stopped work and cut about $1.5 billion from the modernization budget. Mostly projects that were going to continue to put us down the death spiral of complexity in our code base," Corcos told Laura Ingraham on Fox News in March .

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is taking a hard line against broadcast TV stations accused of bias against Republicans and President Trump. To pressure broadcasters, Carr is invoking the rarely enforced news distortion policy that was developed starting in the late 1960s and says the FCC should consider revoking broadcast licenses .

The FCC has regulatory authority over broadcasters with licenses to use the public airwaves. But Carr's two immediate predecessors—Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel and Republican Ajit Pai—both said that punishing stations based on the content of news programs would violate the First Amendment right to free speech.

Rosenworcel and Pai's agreement continued a decades-long trend of the FCC easing itself out of the news-regulation business. Two other former FCC chairs— Republican Alfred Sikes and Democrat Tom Wheeler —have urged Carr to change course.

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