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Many in Lebanon can't access their life savings because of the economic crisis. A hostage-taker in Beirut surrendered in exchange for some of his funds, which he needed for his father's medical bills.

Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump was released 28 years ago, transforming "from film to phenomenon" since landing in cinemas in 1994. Robert Zemeckis' film, based on Winston Groom's novel, strung together themes of redemption, tradition, and hope, to create the sweet, iconic pop culture moment that would win hearts across countries and generations.Laal Singh Chaddha (LSC), Bollywood's adaptation, is faithful to its roots; there's a similar, tear-inducing sweetness to the Aamir Khan-starring film. Directed by Advait Chandan and released through Paramount, the movie follows Laal (Khan) as he unwittingly finds himself in the midst of pivotal events in Indian history (like Forrest living through American history), oblivious to the magnitudes of what he witnesses and yet a key player throughout.The bulk of the story takes place on a moving train, as Laal, an Indian-Sikh, unveils his life story to fellow passengers who are at once reluctant and enthralled. Viewers of the film may feel similarly, particularly given recent press: some domestic critics have delivered a lukewarm response to the movie; threats of boycotting LSC have emerged since before its release, prompted by social media users and leading #BoycottLaalSinghChaddha to trend on Twitter. This is largely due to Khan's articulation about religious intolerance in India, following his 2015 movie PK that sparked widespread protests by Hindu nationalists. SEE ALSO: 28 years after 'Forrest Gump', Bollywood offers a remake LSC may suffer from these challenges commercially or otherwise. But simply as a piece of cinema, this universally relevant film deserves to be watched by a global audience. If nothing else, there's a level of curiosity such an ambitious project evokes. How does a quintessentially American movie translate to the Indian landscape?

Google is stepping up its background effects in Google Meet. The company's videoconferencing software has been offering all sorts of effects for a while now, allowing you to blur your background or remove it entirely, adding a virtual background instead. But the way these effects worked left a lot to be desired. OK, I'll be frank, they sucked. Now, they're getting better. In a blog post Monday, the company said it has improved the background and foreground separation, allowing for more accurate effects such as background blur, background replace, and immersive background and styles. SEE ALSO: You can now be a cat in Google Meet calls The company demonstrated these new capabilities in a GIF, below, showing how you can finally attend a Meet call while wearing a hat and not having your virtual background look totally weird.

TL;DR: As of August 16, you can get the Global Drone 4K Platinum Version for just $98.95 with code DRONE

Looking to get the best value for your old phone? Here are your best options.

We've listed the biggest banks in the US based on their total assets owned.

The class action lawsuit argued that hourly retail workers deserved compensation for time spent going through mandatory bag and equipment checks.

US Fish and Wildlife estimates there are only about 20 of the animals in the wild.

A Supreme Court ruling overturned Roe v. Wade. Now there's a big push to increase funding for Title X, a federal program that offers birth control and other reproductive care to low-income patients.

The small town of Nikopol, Ukraine, sits across the river from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Attacks are causing serious alarm for the community.

TL;DR: As of August 16, you can get the truRelief Impact Therapy Device

Thousands of wild cherry juice pouches have been recalled.

The week's in full swing and there's a new Wordle to solve. Our daily Wordle help is here as well, just in case you need a nudge or two in the right direction.The answer to the August 16 Wordle, puzzle #423, can be found at the end of this article. Before you get there, though, there are a couple of subtle clues to help you narrow it down, and as you scroll down, you'll see we've gathered a selection of the best tips and strategies from our previous reporting to help you every day.Where did Wordle come from? Former Reddit engineer Josh Wardle came up with the game in 2021 as a bit of fun for him and his word game-loving partner. It eventually became a staple of their family WhatsApp messaging, and that's when Wardle started to suspect he might have something special enough to merit a wider release.Thousands of people around the globe now play this game each day, and fans have even created alternatives to Wordle inspired by the original format. This includes music identification game Heardle, Hollywood nerd faves Actorle and Framed, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once.Not the day you're after? You'll find the Wordle answer for August 15 here.What's the best Wordle starting word?We have some ideas to help you pick the perfect first move. Such tips include choosing a word with at least two different vowels to rule those building blocks in or out, plus a few common consonants such as S, T, R, or N.

Naturally aspirated models net an extra 5 horsepower, but the base 2.0-liter engine is no longer available.

VPNs are great tools for anyone concerned about diminishing privacy on the internet. These days, it's difficult to surf the web without leaving behind a trail of your activity.While there's certainly no foolproof privacy option, VPNs are a popular way to shroud your web identity, and they're available for almost any device that connects to the internet, including iOS devices like the iPhone.What is a VPN?A VPN forms a protected tunnel that you send all of your information through. Instead of sending and receiving information in the open, it happens under the cover of an encrypted connection between your iPhone and the websites and services that you are visiting. Nobody can see your data, and all of your activity is protected against online threats like viruses, hackers, and malware.Do you need a VPN for your iPhone?An iPhone is an expensive purchase, and therefore something that you should really be protecting at all costs. To keep your data protected in transit, you need a VPN. With a VPN's protection, nobody can see or tweak your network traffic, not even the network's owner. VPNs encrypt your traffic before it leaves your phone. This encrypted data stream travels to a server owned by the VPN company, where it's decrypted and sent on its way. This keeps your activity under wraps. What is the best VPN for your iPhone?Whether or not you need a VPN

Voting concludes Tuesday in the Wyoming primary elections, including notable races for governor and a House congressional district.

Sterling K. Brown dropped by The Tonight Show to chat with host Jimmy Fallon about his upcoming new film Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. In an unrelated but relatable moment, the This Is Us actor also recounted getting utterly starstruck in the vicinity of Meryl Streep.

Let CNET help you sift through the available broadband deals for this coming semester, including discounts for AT&T, Cox, Xfinity and more.

VPNs are useful for anyone around the world, but these powerful cybersecurity services are even more important when you're travelling to a country with tight restrictions on internet usage, like China. If you're planning a trip to China or you've made the country your home, you could benefit from using a VPN.Do you need a VPN in China?You've probably heard and read quite a bit about China's internet censorship, but what does it actually mean for the average internet user in the country? What is understood is that the Chinese government block access to foreign websites and slows down cross-border internet traffic. The government censors content for mainly political reasons, but also to maintain its control over the population.

We tested multiple rust dissolvers to find out which ones were best for loosening rusty bolts and screws.

Looking to take your filmmaking, video-editing, or streaming talents beyond YouTube, Vimeo, TikTok, or Twitch

The 700 Series from Ride1Up is a fantastic e-bike that almost made my car obsolete -- and with gas prices these days, that's a big deal for me.

TL;DR: Save on back-to-school essentials at Best Buy.

Make those marathon sessions of Beat Saber and Pistol Whip much more comfortable for just $15.

Anne Washburn, the playwright behind Mr. Burns, explains herself: ?It?s about the comfort of looking again.? Anne Washburn?s play Mr. Burns begins with a striking image. A group of four people sits around a campfire. They are tense, watchful, carrying guns. A woman apparently mute with trauma crouches on the outskirts of the firelight. The group is trying to remember the details of an episode of The Simpsons.Mr. Burns takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, one now oddly more familiar than it was when the show was first staged in Washington, DC?s Woolly Mammoth Theatre in 2012. Humanity has been decimated by a pandemic. In the aftermath, the electrical grid has failed, which in turn has led to the meltdown of the world?s nuclear reactors. Now, just months after civilization has been utterly destroyed, a few scattered survivors are trying to pass the night by reconstructing the 1993 Simpsons episode ?Cape Feare,? which sees ex-convict Sideshow Bob setting out on a murderous campaign to kill Bart Simpson.In the second of Mr. Burns?s three acts, we see the post-apocalyptic world advanced seven years into the future. Now, the survivors we met in Act 1 have formed an acting troupe. They travel what?s left of the US performing old episodes of The Simpsons, complete with interludes for commercials and a medley of the biggest pop hits of the 2000s. In the final act, which takes place 75 years later, things have changed yet again. Now, ?Cape Feare? has become a kind of epic poem that a new society uses to mourn the loss of the old. It?s Homer meets Homer (the other one).Mr. Burns is now onstage again at the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. It?s the first major revival of the work since it became a cult sensation at New York?s Playwrights Horizon in 2013, which means it?s also the first major revival since the pandemic hit in 2020. And now that we?ve all lived through lockdown and what felt like at least one minor apocalypse, we know that Washburn was correct about what you do at the end of the world: you sit down and you try to lose yourself in some good old-fashioned comfort television.To find out more about what Mr. Burns has to tell us about stories, how they change, and why we need them, I called Washburn up over Zoom. Highlights from our conversation, lightly edited for length and flow, are below. I want to start with the creation of this idea. I?ve read that you said you were interested in seeing what would happen if you pushed a TV show past the apocalypse. Did you always have in mind the same ending point, with the TV show becoming a piece of classical tragedy?Yes. What I knew about it when I started was that the first act would be right after the fall of civilization. The second act would be five or seven years later, and then the end would be 75 years later. There would be a few old people around who could still remember what it had been like before, but mostly it would be a new generation.Talk to me about the development process for this show. How did you build out the three acts?I wanted to start with getting a few actors in a room to remember a Simpsons episode, because that language of trying to remember something is so specific and wonderful and delightful. But I didn?t want to inconvenience my friends, the actors, for more than a day without paying them, and I didn?t know how long it would take. So I kind of sat on this idea for a couple of years.And then I was talking with Steve Cosson, who is AD [artistic director] of The Civilians, this investigative theater group that I?m part of. He asked if I wanted to apply for a commission. So we [proposed Mr. Burns] for that, and the commission came with some development money. So then we plunked this group of actors together in this weirdo rehearsal space in a bank vault underneath Wall Street, which was a free space that summer that was getting passed around. Very post-apocalypse. It was very post-apocalypse. Our cellphones didn?t work in there. We were in a literal bank vault, with a huge door to it. The lights flickered. It was incredible, kind of great and horrifying. I knew I wanted to start with that language [of remembering], so we sort of had them remember Simpsons episodes, and we had them do it many different times. I had a transcript of it, and then I sat on it for two years until Steve began to bug me, because I didn?t think it was a show anyone would do.I transcribed their multiple versions and put it into one version, and that was how it started. And then I just basically wrote it. The episode you landed on, ?Cape Feare,? is really a perfect episode of The Simpsons for this project because it?s so referential. It?s built around the Robert De Niro movie Cape Fear from 1991, which itself is a remake of the 1962 movie Cape Fear and also heavily drawing from the 1955 movie Night of the Hunter. And both of the Cape Fear movies are based on a novel. Did you ever have a moment of being like, ?Yes, this referentiality is going to be one of the big themes of this show, and it?s all coming together??I didn?t have that train of thought. But it seemed perfect. Even before we got the actors together in the room, the show was still called Mr. Burns. So I didn?t know how it was going to end or what was going to happen at the ending, but I knew that Mr. Burns was a central figure of it somewhere, the central villain. We were really taking a chance on them remembering episodes that would have been good. I love to think what would have happened if we?d had a different episode. How differently would the play have gone? It might not have gone differently. I think the moment you come up with an idea for a play, in some weird way you?ve already structured it in your head. But then so much of the play depended on that. All of which is to say it felt quite perfect in many ways. It?s deeply referential, but it?s also just such a deeply primitive story: It?s a family on a river, with a killer. So it?s horrifying in that way, and also in a post-apocalyptic time of poor societal control, it would really feel right.I had a conversation after I had written it with Jon Vitti, who was the lead writer on that episode. He came to see it in DC, which we hadn?t considered as a thing that might happen. I thought, ?Oh, The Simpsons is created by this phalanx of Harvard men.? Suddenly I realized, ?Oh, there?s a writer who wrote this.? I was sort of terrified that he wouldn?t like it and would feel violated, but he loved it. One of the things he said to me that I thought was really interesting was that it was the practice of [The Simpsons] that you couldn?t reference any one source very particularly. It was mixed and mashed up so that any audience member coming in who might not have seen one particular thing wouldn?t be left at sea. But this episode was written at the very end of season five, when that initial writer?s room was just about to go. They kind of figured, ?Fuck it.? They wanted to do an episode that centered more around one movie. A lot of people really remember that episode very well, and I think it?s because it?s a more intact story, and a more intact set of references. It references a million other things as well, like any of them do. But it?s easier to put together in your head, because it retains this kind of ancient lineage of the remake of Cape Fear and the original Cape Fear and Night of the Hunter. It has this core running through it. I want to zoom out a little now. In the first act, we see the survivors of this apocalypse sitting around the campfire, trying to retell this Simpsons episode from memory. It feels very true to what life was like at the beginning of lockdown, when so many of us were spending time watching nostalgic old TV shows. Why do you think this kind of pop culture comfort food can feel so important in times of deep disaster?It seemed to me that if you had a group of people who didn?t know each other around a campfire, they would want to tell the stories they have in common. Because when you?re anxious, you look for stories you already know. And the stories that we all have in common at this point are TV shows. I mean, they used to be. It?s not the same anymore. I would write it differently if I were writing it now, honestly, because we?re much more divergent. But at that time, everybody had seen The Simpsons. Also, it?s funny. It?s a place you would want to go if everything around you was dark and unholy. In the same way that I was about to watch what I am told is an uncommonly fine television series, Chernobyl, and then the pandemic hit. And I was like, ?That?s on hold. I will not watch this program, however wonderful, anytime soon.?I think of this play ? and I didn?t think of it in this way when I wrote it ? but I think of it as being in many ways a 9/11 play. It was written about 10 years afterward, and it takes about that long to digest something. I?m sure there?s going to be all sorts of stuff about the pandemic coming out soon, but it?s going to be longer before it really starts. But something I thought was really interesting about 9/11 was the way that, because it was a shared group crisis in New York, there was this etiquette. People instantly cottoned onto ways of behaving or ways of giving information, and everybody did it very quickly. I?d never seen the formation of etiquette or group process happen that quickly.I felt a similar way in the pandemic. Nobody was masking, nobody was masking, nobody was masking, there was a mandate, and then suddenly everybody was masking. Everybody suddenly began panicking and running for the beans. There was this whole elaborate thing of wearing a mask in the park when no one was there, or taking it off the moment you saw someone in the distance. We all obeyed the same rules at the same time. So in that way it felt recollective to me of groupthink, or the ways we all operate as animals when we?re in crisis and decide to do the same thing. In the second act, we see this acting troupe recreating not just the Simpsons episode, but also a long commercial segment. We learn that they pride themselves on the strength of their commercials as being what sets them apart from other troupes. The commercial isn?t really selling anything in particular, but it?s sort of an invocation of brand names and various capitalist creature comforts. What led you to including that segment in the second act?Commercials are kind of incredible. They?re an incredibly useful way to create suspense within a narrative. This is something we don?t experience in the same way anymore, but it used to be you?d be experiencing your drama or your comedy, and then you?d be bopped out of it. And it?s irritating, but then you?d see one commercial, and then another commercial, and then another commercial. They?re actually an incredibly weird, creative thing to have in the middle of other stories. Like vaudeville in the middle of the drama.It?s about the comfort of looking again. It?s about the deeply bittersweet comfort of looking at where we were when we had all this food, and the problem was someone in your office taking food from the fridge. But it?s also the place where they [the actors within the play] could stretch a little bit, in ways they might not even understand as being creative. It?s not the way that we handle commercials now. We talk about commercials satirically, so I think even the fact of watching people handling commercials not satirically signals to the audience, in a very quiet way, that this is a very different society. Even if you can?t quite put your finger on it.We also learn in the second act that there are a bunch of other acting troupes out there, and they?re all vying for control of various Simpsons episodes to perform. How did you decide that copyright would outlast the apocalypse?Any creative group has monitored, if they could, their version of things. As long as art is worth something, people want to know that their version is protected, and in the absence of a copyright office you turn to different methods. If something?s worth something you?re going to be protective of it, and art is always worth something.You mentioned earlier that you knew from the beginning that Mr. Burns was going to be a central character, and then you ended up building the play around ?Cape Feare,? which is a Sideshow Bob episode where Mr. Burns doesn?t appear. I really love the way that in the final act, we see that Sideshow Bob has become conflated with Mr. Burns as the great mythic villain who the Simpsons must fight. How did you come to the decision that this transformation would have to happen?Villains swap out easily, as we see in Batman and Spider-Man. The hero?s always the same and the villain?s always different. That doesn?t take much.Without getting too far into it, I felt like the villain in the third act would be a figure which would reflect the fears of that world, would articulate the dangers which aren?t going away. In Night of the Hunter, he?s a force who?s noncivilized. Robert Mitchum who becomes Robert de Niro who becomes Sideshow Bob: he?s uncontainable. He can?t be controlled by society. If you expand that to all the forces who can?t be controlled in Act 3, that?s what that figure can circle around. It?s social stuff, it?s violence, it?s everything that can?t be regulated by law. It?s environmental damage. All of the darknesses which are invisible.Okay, time for us to wrap up. It?s the end of the world and you?re sitting around the campfire, telling stories. What stories are you telling?I think it would happen much the way it happened in the bank vault: you?d have a group of people canvassing each other and riffing off of this and riffing off of that, and then something would catch fire in the group. And people would figure out what kind of story they wanted to hear together. So the story comes from the group and from our shared communities?I think it comes from our need, right? And we don?t necessarily know what we need until we touch on something that starts to fulfill that.

Most people have heard of top secret documents. After the FBI seized 11 sets of classified documents from former President Donald Trump's residence, a less familiar security designation came to light.

TL;DR: The 2022 School of Graphic Design Bundle

Not just for the super fit, gravel bike racing has exploded into one of the most popular forms of biking in the U.S. Organizers have worked so that everyone feels included and welcome.

When Samsung first announced the Odyssey Ark, back in January 2022, it focused on the fact that this gaming monitor can be flipped to the side and used in a vertical position.

You can't mix the two, however.

William MacAskill's book, What We Owe the Future, urges today's humans to protect future humans ? an idea he calls longtermism. Here are a few of his hardly modest proposals.

The classic racing game hits the service Aug. 19.

You've got two choices in Lord of the Rings keyboards, and they're both going to make any Tolkien fan very happy.

Get ready to go outside and enjoy some fresh air while your phone updates, Google Pixel

The cancelation in federal student debt for 208,000 borrowers came after authorities found "widespread and pervasive misrepresentations" at the defunct college chain, the Education Department said.

Book Review: Author Beth Revis' novel doesn't make their honeymoon adventure quite as engaging though.

As far as collaborations go, they don't come much bigger than Fortnite and Dragon Ball joining forces.On Tuesday, Epic Games' official Fortnite channel dropped a gameplay trailer for their upcoming event

Cheney, who has spoken out clearly against former President Donald Trump, is down by 20 points in primary polls ? and her approval ratings are in the tank among Wyoming Republicans.