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DETROIT — Major automakers operating in the U.S. are increasing pressure on Congress to permanently ban the domestic sale, import and manufacturing of Chinese connected vehicles, hardware and software.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents the vast majority of companies selling vehicles in the U.S., urged congressional leaders in a Thursday letter to make a move before the end of Congress' current session on Jan. 3.

"Right now, Chinese automakers are dumping subsidized vehicles with connected software and hardware around the world," John Bozzella, CEO of the group, said in the letter seen by CNBC. "This hasn't happened inside the U.S. yet, but given the scale and urgency of this threat, we urge you to enact a Chinese vehicle, software and hardware ban before adjourning this year and make this policy the law of the land."

Midterm elections are also coming up in November, which could affect Congress' momentum.

Bozzella's comments come amid bipartisan efforts in the House and Senate to address Chinese vehicles, including legislation advanced by the Senate Commerce Committee that could ban Mercedes-Benz in the U.S. because Chinese investors hold nearly 20% of the German automaker.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which includes Mercedes-Benz, said in the Thursday letter that it wants to work with lawmakers to "achieve a balanced policy so all our member companies continue to succeed and thrive inside the U.S."

Automakers have been worried that Chinese rivals like BYD and Geely are flooding global markets, undercutting domestic production and vehicle prices. Those Chinese-based companies have been increasing their vehicle exports to Europe and Central and South America.

"Enacting a permanent ban on Chinese vehicles and high-risk hardware and software in the 119th Congress will send a clear and bipartisan message that China's strategy to dominate global automotive manufacturing will be met with a national security policy response from the American government," Bozzella said. %!s()

The 2026 “Soul Train Awards” will also air on Paramount Skydance cablers VH1, MTV2, Logo and BET Her. Jesse Collins Entertainment is back to produce the revived event.

The awards show won’t be live, but it will be taped in Chicago — where Cornelius first launched the iconic music and dance series “Soul Train” in 1971 (first on indie station WCIU, then in national syndication).

“As a Chicago native, I’m proud to bring the ‘Soul Train Awards’ back to the city where it all originated,” said BET president Louis Carr in a statement. “Coming off a landmark year for BET, this return reaffirms what we do best: bringing our community together around the culture, and connecting the artists who built this sound to the ones carrying it forward.”

The “Soul Train Awards” aired its last edition in 2023, hosted by Keke Palmer. In 2025, BET’s then-CEO Scott Mills (who departed at the end of last year) told Billboard that the company had “suspended” both the “Soul Train Awards” and “BET Hip-Hop Awards”: “I would say that it’s less about them being no longer and more about our team having to reimagine them for this changing media landscape that we find ourselves in,” he said in an interview with the publication.

In bringing the show back, BET’s Connie Orlando, exec VP of specials, music programming and music strategy, said the “Soul Train Awards” will be “reimagined” with a “bold new format.”

“The ‘Soul Train Awards’ has always been the home for R&B and soul,” she said. “It’s about honoring the artists who shaped the genre while reinventing the night for where the music is headed.”

In a press release, BET described this year’s telecast as blending “honorees who defined the sound with the artists carrying it forward, celebrating a legacy that has influenced American music since ‘Soul Train’ first went on the air in 1971. Performances, honorees, and host details will be announced in the coming weeks.”

Orlando is exec producer of “Soul Train Awards” 2026 for BET, while Jesse Collins Entertainment’s Jesse Collins, Dionne Harmon and Jeannae Rouzan-Clay are also EPs.

Spotify is on board as exclusive music streaming partner, while Toyota is a key sponsor. Spotify global head of music content and partnerships Joe Hadley called the return of the “Soul Train Awards” a “significant moment for R&B and soul,” while Toyota marketing communications VP Dedra DeLilli added, “we’re proud to help bring this iconic platform back in a way that honors its legacy and the significance it continues to hold today.” %!s()

It also makes perfect sense under the intellectual and idiosyncratic terms of this oddball personal endeavor, a final-act provocation which only someone with fuck-you money can realize at such colossal scale and scope. A museum as Megalopolis. The approach taken by Lucas, 82, is a striking throwback to the rich, eccentric autodidact’s cabinet-of-curiosities concept associated with Gilded Age figures like Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington and P.T. Barnum. But it’s also a distinct expression of Lucas’ own artistic influences and impacts.

Lucas has taken an increasingly strong hand as the museum’s Sept. 22 opening neared. (His wife, the prominent business executive Mellody Hobson, has also been deeply involved.) In 2025, when its inaugural director-CEO as well as its chief curator departed, Lucas assumed direct creative control and remains the lead curator. The project ended up in L.A. after earlier efforts to develop it in San Francisco and then Chicago failed, in part due to the billionaire filmmaker’s unwillingness to compromise with opponents of his plans. “I’m a contrarian” is how Lucas put it at a press conference on Sept. 2. “I don’t like to do things that people think can be done. I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done.” He added, explaining that the endeavor had taken 17 years, “This one almost broke my will.”

His populist mission is grand: ignoring precepts about high and low culture in favor of a pop-culture-centered focus on “narrative,” which is to say storytelling. He’s referred to what he terms “narrative art” as both “an illegitimate child of art — you won’t see it in any [existing] major museum” to Vanity Fair in 2018 and, more affirmatively, “the people’s art” at a San Diego Comic-Con panel last year. Detractors are likely to scorn him for canonizing what they consider kitsch. (In 2017, when the museum’s L.A. location was first publicized, the Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight wrote a piece deriding Lucas’ plan as “the Treacle Museum — a sentimental vanity gallery pumped up on soppy emotional steroids.”)

In practice, Frida Kahlo paintings mix with Garfield comic book panels in the same conceptual universe. Elsewhere, Lucas does things like situating Norman Rockwell’s famous “The Runaway” (1958), depicting a friendly policeman speaking to a white boy, beside Richard Williams’ recontextualized “The Militarization of the Police Department” (2014), depicting a menacing modern-day cop intimidating a black boy.

The museum is a clear extension of Lucas’ auteurism. He spent his film career not just world-building on screen but creating an ecosystem of institutions like Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound and Lucasfilm. Here, his Hollywood retirement project is a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, in which “narrative” is the Wagnerian organizing principle. In his telling, its creation was analogous to the way a film is put together: casting is the collection, scripting is the curation, editing is the installation, and architecture and landscaping are the production design. “It’s like making a movie — exactly the same thing,” Lucas explained to Vogue in May.

The Lucas Museum isn’t unique for being named after and guided by its founding benefactor. In L.A. alone, there’s the Getty, the Broad, the Marciano Foundation and others. Instead, it reflects a far rarer, at times impudent, even radical tradition of pioneering patrons whose emphatic prerogatives have helped redefine our culture.

These include Albert C. Barnes, who insisted the collection of modern European art at his Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia would be shown based on formal visual relationships like line, light, color and shape rather than conventional categories such as chronology, as well as Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, whose namesake made binding curatorial and presentational decisions. Then there’s Bill Paley, founder of CBS, who in 1975 established what became the Paley Center for Media, with a thesis bearing a similar egalitarianism to Lucas — that lowly radio and TV were, in fact, artifacts worth serious attention — and Walmart heiress Alice Walton, who 15 years ago opened her well-endowed Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas to decentralize and democratize the country’s fine art scene.

The Lucas Museum feels, too, like another category of U.S. civic institution — presidential libraries established by still-living commanders-in-chief. Only with the distance allowed by their subjects’ deaths do these institutions truly mature. (For instance, one day the Star Wars exhibition may dispassionately examine Jar Jar Binks and how the character’s reception affected the career of its actor Ahmed Best.)

Until then, the presence looms. Exhibit A: In 2016, Kathleen Kennedy, then running Lucasfilm at Disney, said there would’ve been no notorious “slave Leia” costume “with a chain around her neck” under her reign. Hobson responded that her husband was “not apologetic about the bikini” and “would probably do the same thing today.” 

A massive, commissioned work entitled Princess Leia Frees Herself from Jabba the Hutt is now situated in the most prominent spot at the Lucas Museum’s vast outdoor sculpture garden. It’s a faithful recreation of the iconic scene from Return of the Jedi — rendered in bronze, for posterity. %!s()

“Part of the problem is I’m a contrarian,” Lucas continued. “I don’t like to do things that people think can be done. I’m fascinated by doing things that people say can’t be done. And even when you do it, they say, ‘Well, that’s not any good. You can’t do that.’”

Then came his blunt assessment of the undertaking: “I’m used to doing the impossible. This one almost broke my will.”

The approximately $1 billion museum, co-founded by Lucas and his wife, business executive Mellody Hobson, opens to the public Sept. 22 in Exposition Park, across from Lucas’ alma mater, USC. Earlier attempts to build it in San Francisco and Chicago collapsed amid disputes over location, design and public land. Los Angeles was selected in 2017, and construction began the following year, only to encounter pandemic shutdowns and supply-chain delays.

“We still had to deal with bureaucracies and people who have contrary thinking,” Lucas said. “But we managed to make our way through all that.”

Designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects with Stantec, the curving, elevated structure has been likened to a spaceship, a cloud and a tree canopy. The five-story, 300,000-square-foot building is surrounded by a 13-acre campus of gardens, paths and public gathering spaces designed by landscape architect Mia Lehrer. Inside are more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space, two theaters, a free research library, classrooms, a café and a rooftop restaurant called Skywalker Grill.

The inaugural displays comprise more than 1,300 objects drawn from a permanent collection of more than 40,000 works. They range from paintings by Frida Kahlo, Norman Rockwell, Jacob Lawrence and Charles White to comic art, children’s-book illustrations, movie posters, murals and pieces by Banksy and Frank Frazetta. (Works from Disney are notable absent.)

And, yes, there is Star Wars. The opening cinema exhibition, “Star Wars in Motion,” includes C-3PO, R2-D2, Darth Vader, Princess Leia’s costume, Luke Skywalker’s battered landspeeder and an enormous model of an Imperial AT-AT. Outside, a bronze sculpture depicts Leia confronting Jabba the Hutt. But the franchise occupies only a fraction of the museum, which Lucas has repeatedly described as a “temple to the people’s art.”

“This is a big celebration for us because it’s taken so long to get here,” Lucas said. “But it’s something that I felt very, very strongly about in terms of honoring illustrators, artists who illustrate stories that are already written. And most of the stories are myths. They’re not real. But the illustrations make them real.”

The museum rejects the customary separation between fine art and popular imagery. Its galleries are arranged around subjects such as love, family, work, childhood, sports, adventure, science fiction and community, placing familiar commercial artists alongside figures more commonly encountered in major art institutions.

For Lucas, the stakes go beyond elevating illustrators. He argued Wednesday that shared images and stories create the common beliefs that hold societies together.

“A picture is very powerful, and the stories are very powerful,” he said. “You combine them together, and those two elements create a society.

“Narrative art creates a group of people with common belief systems,” Lucas added. “And that common belief system allows them to work together, not kill each other, and do things that one person can’t do.”

Hobson characterized the institution in similarly populist terms, calling it “a museum by the people, for the people.” General admission will cost $25, while visitors 17 and younger will enter free. Residents of the surrounding 90037 ZIP code will be eligible for free admission through the museum’s LM37 pass.

Lucas ended his remarks with a characteristically wary acknowledgment of the reporters assembled before him.

“I know we have a tendency to draw in because I’m controversial in terms of the media,” he said. “But hey, I just do what I feel I have to do. And you guys do what you have to do. So I’ll just let it go at that.” %!s()

Launching alongside the FL4K and the Last Resort expansion, Loveless will bring some high-tech powers to the looter-shooter, as well as some entirely new combat mechanics. For the team at developer Gearbox, a new Vault Hunter was an opportunity to both play with lore and find a creative way to rethink the assassin archetype — all while squeezing in a bit of topical humor for any techies navigating our current RAM crisis.

Image: Gearbox Software/2K

Loveless is a cyber hacker that’s meant to fill the same niche Zer0 once did. Sniping and melee attacks are her specialty, and she’s a character focused on dishing out damage over time. That’s your basic looter-shooter archetype, but her backstory is what makes her unique. Loveless was a cybersecurity expert working for Anshin, one of Borderlands’ weapons manufacturers. (Well, a cybersecurity expert who also did a bit of dirty work too.) It turns out that Anshin had been working on a mind-controlling virus while she was working there, but it broke containment. To stop it from wreaking havoc on the world, Loveless was forced to assimilate with the virus, infusing her with tech powers.

For game designer Ryan Bailey, those powers gave the team at Gearbox a fresh sandbox to play in. Not only did the team get to play with Anshin’s Asian-inspired iconography to build Loveless, but they also got to experiment with how an experienced, high-tech character fits into a cast that’s proficient with machines in their own ways.

“When I think of the tech of the main cast, I think of Harlowe and all of the sciency stuff. All of that was much more grounded. Or Amon, it’s a lot of tech, but tech to punch with,” Bailey told Polygon in a video interview. “I wanted to make sure that Loveless’ tech felt a little more refined and directional… It was more about putting the physical and technical ends with a little more precision, and making sure she had more mastery over those things, I didn’t want it to feel like she was figuring it out. Nothing is being done for the first time; this is all for the thousandth time.”

Image: Gearbox Software/2K

That philosophy inspired Loveless’ action skills. Visual Paradox Nexus (or VPN, for short) is a high-tech version of a stealth cloak, allowing Loveless to get around undetected. Plague Star, on the other hand, is an oversized shuriken that can inflict a new status effect called contagion. It’s basically a disease that can spread to other enemies when someone infected with stacks of contagion dies. Loveless’ skill trees offer lots of room to tinker with those abilities, too. You can change Plague Star so you have multiple shurikens that spin around you, or gain access to a kusarigama that you can break out during VPN. Character design director Nick Thurston was especially excited about the possibilities a techy character opened up for him.

“I love melee weapons a lot, and putting them in the game,” Thurston told Polygon. “We talked about what kinds of weapons we have not explored. There’s the kusarigama, which is something you might see in a lot of other games that we’ve never done before. That’s very exciting, and a part of VPN. The empowered melee attack isn’t just a melee attack. We have a really sick digital claw that I think we’re calling the technocoggie? So you’ll see a lot of weapons that you haven’t seen before.”

More striking than Plague Star or VPN is Loveless’ pet worm. The hacker has a summonable companion that looks like a Chinese dragon built from metal and cables. It’s basically a murderous pet that players can issue commands to. Loveless can lose control of it too, causing a bit of chaos on the battlefield when left to its own instincts.

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On top of those powers, Loveless has a wholly unique mechanic. She can gain RAM from landing critical hits or inflicting status effects. The more her RAM gauge fills, she’ll get a bit of a power boost. When that gauge is filled up, her next melee attack becomes empowered. That, of course, begged a topical question: How much is all that power costing her, giving the current price of RAM? Always count on Gearbox to jump on a topical joke.

“She’s got it all optimized! Nearly endless amounts!” Bailey joked. “There were a lot of expensive RAM jokes that were definitely made, and a couple made it into some passive names if I recall.”

For old Borderlands players who have missed being able to play like an assassin, Loveless should hopefully suffice as a successor to Zer0. Her tech powers bring a bit of stealth to the shooter, while giving players who love inflicting status effects a new virus to play with. Considering that FL4K and the Last Resort will bring a brand-new island to Borderlands 4, that seems like as good an excuse as any to see what levels of hell a new Vault Hunter can inflict with her cyberworm. %!s()