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What would you do if you were stuck in your house? The COVID pandemic forced many people to confront that question when faced with monthslong quarantines. But in Netflix’s The Last House, directed by Louis Leterrier and written by Matthew Robinson, that thought is taken to new and literal extremes. 

On a random day, the Delgado family, consisting of father Jason (Wagner Moura), mother Riley (Greta Lee) and their two children, find themselves unable to leave their home. The windows and doors have all been tightly sealed during a mysterious and endless rainfall. They’re not the only ones: everyone in their neighborhood is trapped inside their homes, too. It’s unclear how widespread this lockdown is, or how long it will last, but the family has no choice but to come together and try to survive against the unknown threat for as long as possible.

From the synopsis, it may sound like the movie is directly responding to COVID lockdowns,  but the idea actually came to Robinson two years ago, when he was cleaning up the toys in his young son’s bedroom. “I picked up these plastic toy binoculars,” says Robinson. “I had this thought: what if one day I needed these binoculars to survive?” From there, the rest of the movie fell into place, a story of what it would be like to try and survive only with what you already have. 

Despite the unknowns confining the Delgado family to their house, Robinson says The Last House is at its heart an optimistic movie. 

“I don’t think I can tell a story about four people who love each other trapped together without that—it would get so bleak and dark if there wasn’t hope at the core of it all,” he says. “It was really important that this was a story of the power of togetherness.”

Something The Last House leaves audiences wondering: what exactly are the creatures that have locked people inside their homes? It’s suggested they come from the ocean, given their abilities and powers come from water and the film’s opening quote from Arthur C. Clarke, “How inappropriate to call this planet ‘Earth,’ when clearly it is ‘Ocean.’” “We always referred to them as the creatures,” explains Robinson. “I think it’s important to stay in the perspective of the family. They don’t have a name for them. They’re just trying to understand and glean whatever they can from the clues they’re given throughout. It’s fun to have people be as confused as they are.”

Having said that, Robinson is open to theories, and he has one where the creatures do come from the ocean depths. “I’ve always loved the idea that so much of our Earth is completely unexplored,” he says. “Why bother going to Mars when we barely know what’s at the bottom of our own sea?”

Time weighs heavily on the family. The first days go by fairly smoothly, but weeks, and then months later, things get more and more difficult. Luckily, Jason has an engineering background, and once they run out of food, he’s able to create an elaborate trap out of the chimney to bring in a fairly steady supply of meat. And under their floorboards, they plant soil for vegetables. They develop a well-oiled machine that carries the family through e for an astonishing five years. The bizarre creatures that roam outside leave them in relative peace—until, one day, they decide to come inside. 

At the end of The Last House, the creatures come into the Delgado home. They’ve stayed outside all these years, so why now? “Nobody should have survived,” says Robinson. “How is it possible that they’ve made it this far? I think it could be seen as a curiosity. They want to understand how this family made it. Or,” Robinson pivots, “it could be seen as ‘we thought we wiped everyone out. We didn’t finish the job—let’s finish it.”

A creature releases the seal on the house and makes its way inside. But the Delgado family is prepared, and Jason’s skills as an engineer once again prove fruitful, as they’ve fashioned weapons from everyday objects. What they’re not prepared for is the creature flooding the house, which almost kills them. But Jason uses his harpoon to trap the creature. They have the opportunity to kill it, but instead they opt for a humane approach, freeing the creature from its restraints. It leaves the house, but leaves it unsealed, meaning that for the first time in five years, the family is free to go outside.

This leads to another surprise. The creature appears to be speaking to the others, and suddenly, the rain stops. The house finally collapses (the foundation has been sinking since before the rain began) and the creatures jump into the hole left by the house, never to be seen again. The Delgado’s get a boat just like Jason used to have before he had family, name it after their beloved family dog, Cassidy, who passed during the lockdown, and sail away into the unknown, perhaps hoping to connect with other survivors as they send a radio message out into the world. “Day 1” appears on the screen, signalling a new chance; a new life, for the Delgado family. Someone responds to their message: we hear a “Hello?” and the film cuts to black.

Why did the creatures decide to leave? While Robinson prefers to leave things open to interpretation, he has some ideas.

“By the Delgados granting them peace and understanding, I think they wanted to reciprocate that,” he says. “It’s two afraid species thinking the other one is out to destroy them, and in a moment of empathy, they realize they aren’t that different. They can’t understand each other, but they’ve seen how hard each other has struggled to survive. They’re going to give them their lives back, in hopes that they’ll do the same for them. Maybe we do deserve a life on this planet. But the family doesn’t know that—maybe as soon as the credits roll, they wipe them out on the boat.”

And what is it that the Delgado family is feeling at the end? “I always try and put myself in the kid’s perspective because I can only imagine how traumatic it would have been to spend five years trapped in your house, having lost all your friends and connections,” says Robinson. “But they did escape. It took all of them. They’re all necessary components of this machine, this family they’re a part of. They had to show up fully and trust each other, so I think because they have that, there’s a sense of peace and calm. Knowing that peace with your loved ones, that even if scary things are happening, the fact they’re in this together is all they need to survive.”

Adds Robinson: “The future is completely unknown. They don’t know what’s over the next wave, but they’re together and they’re going to find a way.”

It’s a rite of summer: enjoying time outdoors and all that nature has to offer. But that can come with dangers, and ticks, which can transmit Lyme disease, top the list.

Not every tick carries Lyme, however—and there's no way to know whether the one that's bitten you does, unless you send it out to get tested.

Until now, that meant finding a lab that conducts the test and waiting days for the results. Soon, you''ll be able to do it yourself at home. LymeAlert is the first at-home test for ticks that can detect whether they carry the bacterium Borrelia berdorferi that causes Lyme. To test your tick, you place it in the kit's container, drop in the included solution, put on the lid, crush the tick by twisting the top and grinding it up, and insert a test strip. Within 30 minutes, the strip tells you whether it detected any Lyme-causing bacteria in your tick. The kit is available for $49.99 to pre-order on the company’s website and will ship at the end of August.

Dawicki, co-founder and CEO of LymeAlert and a physician assistant in Boston, came up with the idea after spending years fielding questions and requests from patients who had been bitten by ticks: Can you test me for Lyme? Can you test the tick for Lyme? How do I know if I have Lyme? "I thought, 'Why not test ticks at home?' That way, patients know when to see a health care professional," she says.

Knowing which people are at higher risk for Lyme disease and therefore need confirmatory testing is important, since testing people is a bit complicated. Blood-based Lyme tests pick up antibodies that the body makes against the bacteria, so they may not read positive for several days after a tick bite, and depending on when people get tested, they may lead to false negatives. Knowing whether a tick that was attached to someone carries the Lyme bacterium, however, could provide more context for those results.

Testing ticks is also problematic. About half or more of people who get bitten by ticks aren’t even aware they’ve been bitten, says Dawicki, so the tick isn't always available to test. Even when it is, doctors and health facilities do not generally perform tests on ticks. You have to pay to send the tick to a commercial testing company or find your state’s health department and send the tick to their labs. Results can take days.

No commercial or at-home tick test, including LymeAlert, needs to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because these tests do not diagnose Lyme disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend getting ticks tested for several reasons. Commercial labs vary in the standards they use, which could affect the accuracy of their results. And even if a tick carries the Lyme-causing bacteria, depending on how long the tick fed, it may not have transmitted it to you. Finally, negative results don’t necessarily mean you’re in the clear, since you might have been bitten by another tick that you didn’t find.

Those concerns still apply if you test a tick at home. But Dawicki says there's value in knowing a tick's Lyme status right away, including getting antibiotics sooner if they're recommended and avoiding them if they're not. “Putting people on antibiotics just in case is not great health care,” she says, which is the current practice that many health care providers follow when someone is bitten by a tick.

Though LymeAlert does not diagnose Lyme disease in people, it can tell you whether a tick carries Lyme-causing bacteria, Dawicki says. “Nobody knows how much bacteria needs to be transmitted to guarantee an infection,” says Dawicki. “Animal studies from the 1990s and 2000s showed that you would need about 1,000 units of bacteria. We detect down to 400 units.”

If the test is positive, you should inform your doctor and discuss whether you need a course of antibiotics. Dawicki hopes the test will reduce the unnecessary use of antibiotics, and slow the current march toward antibiotic resistance that has already rendered several antibiotics ineffective.

Dawicki and her team are also collecting data on climate, humidity, and migration patterns that affect tick populations to build an AI-based model for predicting where different ticks are likely to spread and what their chances are of carrying the Borrelia bacteria. Such hotspot maps could become a useful source of information for the public to help determine their risk for Lyme disease, and also provide deeper insight into where ticks move and how that affects the incidence of Lyme. The company hopes to develop additional tests for other disease-causing pathogens carried by ticks, like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, as well for molecules like alpha gal, which in some people can lead to an allergic reaction known as alpha-gal syndrome. “We are working on multiplex test strips for next summer so multiple pathogens can be detected in a single test strip,” she says.

President Donald Trump is claiming that voters are angry with Republicans—but not with him.

In an interview with Punchbowl News released on Friday, the President asserted that he gets “a tremendous vote,” while expressing concerns about support for his party.

“If I don’t run, will those people go out and vote?” Trump said.

“The question is, will they vote? Because a lot of them are very angry at Republicans, to be honest with you,” he continued. “They’re not angry at me, but they are angry at Republicans.”

According to a New York Times/Siena poll conducted in May, about 64% of registered voters are dissatisfied with the Republican Party, including 23% of Republicans. The poll also found that, while the President is generally popular among voters in his party, there are many who want the GOP to move away from Trump: about 55% of potential Republican supporters said that they want the party’s next presidential candidate to follow in Trump’s footsteps, whereas 37% said that they want the next candidate to shift away from him.

And despite Trump’s claim that voters aren’t angry with him, his approval stands at just 33%, according to AP-NORC polling from July, a drop of 4 percentage points from June and far below where it was when he returned to the Oval Office for a second term last January. Support for Trump among Republicans remains high, though, with 73% approving of how he’s handling the job and just 27% disapproving.

The President has brushed off his low polling numbers as having been “made up by the Fake News Media.”

“My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been,” Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Monday. “Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll Numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”

Recent surveys have indicated that Democrats are leading over Republicans on generic ballots, with just a few months before the pivotal November midterm elections. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week found that 42% of registered voters said they would cast their ballot for a Democratic congressional candidate if the midterms were held that day, while 37% would back a Republican congressional candidate. 

A recent CNN/SSRS poll also suggested that support is higher for Democrats than it is for Republicans: when asked which party’s congressional candidate they would vote for if an election were taking place that day, 47% of registered voters said they would back the Democrat, compared to just 39% who said they would cast their ballot for the Republican. That 8-point difference is up from a 5-point gap between the two parties that was marked by CNN in January.

Read More: Democrats Lead Republicans in Polls Three Months Ahead of Midterms

While Republicans have historically won over some voters on their economic policies, that advantage over Democrats appears to have diminished in recent months, partly as a result of the economic consequences of Trump’s tariffs and his war in Iran. A Reuters/Ipsos poll released this week revealed that, for the first time in years, more U.S. adults said that Democrats have a better strategy for the economy than those who said that Republicans do. And the majority of U.S. adults—64%—say they think that the war in the Middle East has not been worthwhile, including 37% of Republicans, according to an AP-NORC poll released in July.

Some Republicans in the Senate have expressed concerns that Trump could be a liability to the party in the midterms. There has been simmering tension between the President and members of his own party over several issues during his second term—Trump has publicly shared his frustrations with Senate Majority Leader John Thune, for instance, over the fact that the restrictive voter ID bill that the President has aggressively championed has stalled in the upper chamber.

Still, in his interview with Punchbowl News, Trump indicated that he would have his super PAC roll out funds to his party in the upcoming midterms.

“I’m going to help Republicans,” he said.

A teenage boy in Thailand shot and killed at least seven people and wounded more than 20 others on Friday before taking his own life in the country’s deadliest mass shooting in nearly four years. 

The 14-year-old suspect, whose name authorities have not released because he was a minor, fatally shot his grandparents, with whom he lived, before going to his high school, the Debsirin Nonthaburi School outside of the capital of Bangkok, and opening fire, resulting in the deaths of at least five teachers and staff, according to Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, who spoke before reporters Friday evening. No students were killed in the shooting.

More than 20 people were wounded and nine remained in critical condition following the shooting. 

Video from inside the school shows students seeking shelter beneath tables in a classroom, tables overturned and stacked, and bullet shells on the floor. Other footage taken outside the school show people embracing next to a fleet of medical personnel and police on site. 

One student told the BBC that she was standing in front of one teacher when the teacher was shot. “She was talking to me when [the gunman] showed up and shot her," the student recalled.

Anutin warned that the shooting could have been much worse, noting that the suspect had more than 30 rounds of ammunition remaining when he turned the gun on himself. 

The Prime Minister said that the suspect appeared to have been stressed over his studies 

“We have learned from interviews with one of his close friends that he had been under stress and had complained about pressure over his studies,” Anutin told reporters. “His grandmother was a teacher and wanted him to do well academically, so she was reportedly quite strict with him.”

Anutin added that the suspect had a “clear course of action and specific targets.”

Police said that the suspect had also searched for websites on mass shootings before the attack and that the gun belonged to his grandfather and had been registered. 

The suspect's father told CNN that he does not know why his son might have carried out the shooting. 

“My son was guilty … he hurt people,” the father told the network. “I have nothing more to say. But I still don’t know why he did that.” He added that he had not witnessed “any sign of violence” from his son. “I still don’t know why he had to kill his own grandfather and grandmother,” he said.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Thai officials are moving to implement new safety measures.

Anutin said that a “new law will only allow government officials on duty to carry guns.” He did not provide further details.

The Thai Ministry of Education said in a statement that “following this incident, security measures at schools will be significantly strengthened.” It added that “enhanced school security and measures to protect students” would be discussed, and announced financial assistance including 20,000 Thai Baht ($600) for families of the deceased victims, and 5,000 Thai Baht ($150) for the people who were injured.

Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister Yodchanan Wongsawat also said on Friday that a mental health action plan would be announced to support teachers and students. 

Thailand has one of the highest civilian gun ownership rates in Southeast Asia and has had several mass shootings in recent years, prompting calls for stricter firearm controls.

In 2022, a former police officer killed more than 30 people, most of them children, using guns and a knife in northeast Thailand at a children’s daycare center. A year later in 2023, a teenager fatally shot two people at a shopping mall in downtown Bangkok.