The stunning ring girl, who went viral after stealing the show at the controversial Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul fight last month, could be seen
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Congress members urged President Joe Biden to exonerate civil rights leader Marcus Garvey.
The only man to lead the FBI and CIA urged caution to senators who might vote to confirm former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as DNI and Kash Patel to lead the FBI.
Survivors from the crash told ABC News that they heard and felt explosions outside the aircraft during the flight, after which the plane appeared to lose control.
When the South Korean drama Squid Game hit Netflix in 2021, the show became a bona fide cultural phenomenon . The story of people in debt competing to the death for a massive cash prize looked like nothing else on television, juxtaposing candy-colored children’s games with horrifying hyper-violence. Squid Game soon turned forest-green tracksuits into a trendy Halloween costume . It helped enter the word dalgona—the sugary treat used in one of the contests—into the pop-culture lexicon. It was parodied on Saturday Night Live . For weeks after I watched, I couldn’t get the murder doll’s song during the first contest, Red Light, Green Light, out of my head.
The second season, now streaming, begins where the first ended: with the game’s latest winner, Seong Gi-hun (played by Lee Jung-jae), choosing not to board the plane out of South Korea that would have reunited him with his family. Instead, he threatens Hwang In-ho (Lee Byung-hun), the tournament’s supervisor known as the “Front Man,” over the phone. As he hails a cab, Gi-hun warns In-ho that he’ll find him and stop the games—but In-ho is unperturbed. “You will regret your decision,” he coolly replies.
I began having regrets of my own as I made my way through Season 2. Gi-hun’s revenge quest is, for the most part, the opposite of thrilling. The show’s tedious opening hours depict him as a recluse who has hired a collection of incompetent men to find the games’ slap-happy recruiter (Gong Yoo). They’re monitoring every subway station in Seoul in the hopes of coming across him, but none of Gi-hun’s employees knows exactly what their target looks like. Gi-hun isn’t a reliable boss either; he’s too paranoid to visit the stations himself. Even teaming up with Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), the police detective who discovered that the Front Man was his own brother last season, to track down the island where the competition took place yields a monotonous search. Without the sadistic games going on, the show lacks momentum.
[Read: In Netflix’s Squid Game, debt is a double-edged sword ]
And then—and this is only a spoiler if you haven’t seen a single trailer —Gi-hun winds up back in that tracksuit, reliving his worst nightmare. It’s a neat trick: Season 2 withholds the deadly events just long enough for viewers to yearn for their return, making them wonder whether they’re actually on the protagonist’s side. As a result, when the games do begin, they make for an even uneasier watch than before. Season 1 framed the tournament as a straightforward allegory for the punishing trap of financial distress , rendering even the greediest characters as sympathetic to an extent. Season 2 isn’t as totalistic; it further blurs the lines between the show’s victims and perpetrators. The series displays a meaner, more critical streak toward the cash-poor participants this time around. It emphasizes how, as much as the capitalistic system may push people to do rash things for money, the players themselves work to uphold such values. Thornier questions arise: Is it possible to overcome cruelty, avarice, and selfishness? And if not, do the players actually deserve to live?
To Gi-hun, the answer to both questions is a resounding “yes”—but the show seems to revel in countering his perspective whenever it can. Even before this season’s competition begins, Squid Game argues that individuals will chase financial gain above all else with an interminable scene in which the games’ recruiter mocks unhoused people for choosing lottery tickets over food. Gi-hun reenters the competition in an effort to dismantle it from the inside and save his fellow players, but the show immediately underlines the futility of his attempt, with a fresh, brutal round of Red Light, Green Light. In-ho, too, toys with Gi-hun’s belief in the goodness of humanity by ordering players to vote on whether to end the bloodbath at the end of each trial; if they do, they walk away with far less cash than they could have if they continued on, because every death improves their chances of landing the jackpot. These deliberations unfold over and over, and they’re not especially fun to observe: Gi-hun sees each election as an opportunity to convince players that, together, they can defy both the temptation of the prize money and the game makers. Each time, he fails.
Still, the show’s latest lineup of trials allows it to return to form. Each contest is more diabolical and intriguing than those Gi-hun had experienced in his first go-round. The violence is more over-the-top, the visuals more absurd. And unlike Season 1’s hopscotch-like glass bridge and biscuit-carving challenge, which relied mostly on a person’s individual luck, Season 2’s selections are more dependent on interpersonal skills from the start, requiring the players to form alliances and rivalries right away. As such, the contests themselves help expand the new characters beyond their initial archetypal trappings: The pregnant player proves to be an asset. The wallflower being bullied by the obnoxious rapper has a callous side. One of the ubiquitous pink-suited soldiers might even care about the competitors. In Squid Game, people tend to reveal who they really are at their most desperate.
[Read: What happens when real people play Squid Game? ]
In-ho seems to hope that by playing the games again, Gi-hun will discover a surprising side to himself as well—and that doing so will break his spirit. The series shines most when the two share scenes, because they’re diametrically opposed in their worldviews: In-ho is convinced that people are inherently heartless, while Gi-hun insists that they can choose to be good.
When the season finale wrapped up with yet another cliff-hanger, however, I found myself wondering whether the story had progressed at all. Squid Game was meant to be a limited series ; the first season’s ambiguous ending simply underlined Gi-hun’s Pyrrhic victory. These new episodes just emphasize the foolishness of his bravery, forcing him—and a batch of other players I’ve come to root for—to undergo freshly excruciating tests. The show’s bleakness has always been quite torturous to absorb, even if I couldn’t help but keep watching. But in Season 2, the gloom comes not only from the violence. It comes from the show’s overindulgence in proving its own protagonist wrong.
A tornado watch has been issued for 5 million people in parts of east Texas, much of Louisiana, and southern Mississippi.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday morning agreed to take up a dispute over whether a South Carolina woman can bring a lawsuit challenging that state’s decision to end Planned Parenthood’s participation in its Medicaid program.
The court’s announcement that it will hear arguments next spring in Kerr v. Planned Parenthood came at approximately 11 a.m. Eastern, along with an order setting oral arguments on Jan. 10 in a pair of appeals seeking to block enforcement of a federal law that would require TikTok to shut down in the United States unless its parent company can sell it off by Jan. 19.
The justices granted two cases from their Dec. 13 conference on Friday afternoon and issued additional orders (mostly denying review) from that conference on Monday morning. Although the justices’ next regularly scheduled conference will not occur until next year, they have sometimes issued additional grants from their final conference of the year a few days later, just as they did on Wednesday.
Under federal law, Medicaid funds cannot generally be used to provide abortions. But Planned Parenthood provides other medical services to women, including gynecological and contraceptive care but also screenings for cancer, high blood pressure, and cholesterol.
At two clinics in Charleston and Columbia, Planned Parenthood has tried to make it easier to lower-income patients, many of whom are covered by Medicaid, to use its services – by, for example, offering same-day appointments and extended clinic hours. One of those Medicaid patients is Julie Edwards, who suffers from diabetes. She went to Planned Parenthood for birth control but says she wants to return to receive other care in the future.
In 2018, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster ordered the state’s Department of Health and Human Services to bar abortion clinics from participating in the Medicaid program. McMaster explained that the “payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life.”
Edwards and Planned Parenthood went to federal court in South Carolina. They argued that McMaster’s order violated a provision of the Medicaid Act that allows any patient who is eligible for Medicaid to seek health care from any “qualified” provider.
A federal appeals court agreed with Edwards and Planned Parenthood and blocked the state from excluding Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program. That decision prompted the state – represented by the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom – to come to the Supreme Court this summer, asking the justices to decide whether Edwards and Planned Parenthood have a legal right to sue to enforce the Medicaid Act.
The state told the justices that five federal courts of appeals “have wrongly subjected states to private lawsuits Congress never intended.” Moreover, it added, with 70 million Americans receiving Medicaid benefits and tens of thousands of health-care providers participating in the program, the question at the center of the case is “of great national importance.”
But Planned Parenthood and Edwards countered that the question does not come up very often these days. And most of the cases in which it did arise, they continued, “were efforts by states to target Planned Parenthood in ways courts have recognized are unwarranted and politically motivated.” But in any event, they concluded, as all three judges on the court of appeals agreed in this case, the Medicaid law is “clear and unambiguous in conferring a privately enforceable right.”
The justices considered the state’s petition at nine consecutive conferences before finally granting review on Wednesday. The case will likely be slated for argument in either March or April, with a decision to follow by summer.
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A Colorado man who allegedly attacked an AAPI TV reporter and demanded to know whether the journalist was a U.S. citizen, saying, “This is Trump’s