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This pair of lawsuits are the first to be filed after the recent passage of laws by California and the US Congress, which strengthen US-based claims to artwork that were forcibly taken from Jewish families during the second world war.

One lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles superior court on Monday by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and its board chair, Daniel Gryczman, against the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena for the return of painting Adam and Eve. These are two lifesize oil-on-panel masterpieces created by Lucas Cranach the Elder in 1530.

The other lawsuit was filed in federal court in Los Angeles the same day by the daughters of the late Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, a Holocaust survivor and California-based animator who was held in Auschwitz. It demanded the return of watercolors of fellow prisoners that the artist was forced to paint for Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician who had earned the nickname the “Angel of Death”, from the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum in Poland.

Spokespersons for both museums say the museums legally hold titles to the works, and intend to continue displaying them to the public. The lawsuits don’t specify the monetary value of the paintings.

The issue of Nazi-looted art is an emotionally, legally and ethically charged topic that pits Jewish families that have suffered intergenerational trauma against museums that say they are trying to preserve a painful, yet important, chapter of history.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated the largest art theft in world history, seizing more than 600,000 works of art across Europe from Jewish families, collectors and museums. Decades later, many of these masterpieces reside in prominent museums around the world, making the push for their recovery more complex than a simple property dispute.

Rabbi Noah Farkas is president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles, the organization to which Marei von Saher, sole heir of Dutch Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, has signed over her rights. The paintings were seized from Goudstikker’s collection by Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, and changed a number of hands before being sold in the 1960s to the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art, which was renamed the Norton Simon Museum in honor of its benefactor.

Farkas said the federation plans to use most of the net proceeds from the recovered art to provide much-needed help to the approximately 2,500 Holocaust survivors living in the Los Angeles area.

Von Saher, in a statement, said she is grateful to the Jewish organization for taking up her family’s cause.

“This effort represents a meaningful step toward justice for Holocaust survivors and victims of Nazi-era atrocities,” she said.

The Norton Simon Museum released a statement pointing out that a federal court in 2018 unanimously determined that the museum had proper title to the Cranach paintings. In May 2019, the US supreme court declined to get involved in the case, leaving in place lower court rulings.

They said the Cranach paintings, which originally belonged to the Stroganoff family, were put up for sale in 1931 by the Soviet Union in an illicit auction in Berlin, where they were purchased by Goudstikker. After a complicated journey, the paintings were sold to the museum by a Stroganoff family descendant. The museum later restored and preserved the pieces.

“For nearly 50 years, they have been on view at the Norton Simon Museum and will continue to be accessible to the public for years to come,” the statement said.

Pawel Sawicki, a spokesperson for the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, said the watercolors of Roma victims that Gottliebova Babbitt was forced to paint by Mengele to document his horrendous experiments and racial research “must remain in the memorial” to document the man’s crimes. He said these paintings must not be mischaracterized as “Nazi-looted art” because Gottliebova Babbitt painted them against her will as a prisoner and therefore didn’t have ownership of the watercolors.

While he understands the family’s sentiments, Sawicki said the portraits of Roma and Sinti victims are among the few remaining documents of Mengele’s criminal experiments and should be treated as unique documents related to the history of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

“While fully respecting the rights of people who created some of the documents here, we are of the opinion that any loss in the collections of the memorial will constitute irreparable harm,” he said. “The loss of even the smallest part of the documentation is an irreparable loss and blemish on the memory of the victims of Auschwitz.” %!s()

Created by the talented Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers (The Night Agent) and boasting an ensemble led by a likably understated Jon Hamm and a convincingly overstated Giovanni Ribisi, American Hostage starts off promisingly, peaks in the middle and overstays its welcome — in part because after initially focusing on what were apparently the wrong characters, few of its storylines end up being interestingly resolved.

American Hostage

The Bottom Line

Great story, great cast, squandered execution.

Airdate: Sunday, September 20 (MGM+)
Cast: Jon Hamm, Mireille Enos, Giovanni Ribisi, William Jackson Harper, Kristoffer Polaha
Creators: Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers

The series is set in 1977, and if you’ve seen Gus Van Sant’s 2025 Dead Man’s Wire, you already know a somewhat fictionalized version of the story, which was the subject of the first season of the American Hostage podcast from Criminal Content.

Hamm plays Fred Heckman, an Indianapolis news radio legend. Heckman, who has a wonderfully supportive marriage to Barbara (Mireille Enos) plus three kids who are irrelevant to the series, is described on bus ads as “the most trusted voice in news.”

Heckman has largely given up on the reporting that launched his career and, after 22 years in Indianapolis, he’s weighing a lucrative offer to move to CBS Radio in New York City. Then he becomes part of the biggest story to hit Indianapolis in years.

Tony Kiritsis (Ribisi), a former used car salesman, has walked into a mortgage office and taken Dick Hall (Kristoffer Polaha) hostage, accusing Dick and his family of complicity in granting him a mortgage they knew he could never repay, in order to seize control of the 17-acre plot of land that Tony hoped to turn into a shopping destination anchored by a steakhouse.

All Tony wants is an apology, immunity and the chance to resume his quest for the American dream.

The only person Tony will talk to is the most trusted voice in news, forcing a connection that rekindles Fred’s interest in journalism and torches his sense of journalistic ethics, much to the concern of co-worker Ben Hairston (William Jackson Harper).

With local cops, plagued by rumors of departmental misdeeds, looking for a peaceful solution and federal authorities contemplating extreme action, the situation escalates. In a country pushed by the counterculture and Watergate into a pervasive distrust of authority, Tony briefly becomes as famous as his chosen mouthpiece, which won’t come as a surprise to anybody who has seen Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, one of several stories that America Hostage calls to mind.

The recent Broadway adaptation of Dog Day Afternoon — admirable in terms of stagecraft, but marred by odd choices like star Jon Bernthal’s slavish Al Pacino impression — aggressively underlined the period’s paranoia and suspicion toward establishment power as timeless and contemporary. It wasn’t subtle, but it had a point.

American Hostage spends a couple of episodes suggesting that it wants to refract its story through a modern lens. We’re only a month after Luigi Mangione admitted to killing a healthcare executive, an act seen by many people as an extreme but understandable expression of rage at a rigged system. Tony Kiritsis’ crime, conducted with the use of a shotgun affixed with a so-called “dead man’s switch,” is meant to resonate similarly. He’s doing the wrong thing, but his reasoning is as familiar today as it would have been 50 years ago.

Ribisi and the series writers don’t overly sanitize Tony. He’s a mess of a man with a predilection for expressing himself in operatic and intense (and illegal) ways, but he’s a good neighbor, a good brother and his dream of a restaurant that’s fancy but inclusive is universal. He talks fast and he’s bursting with nervous energy, which the series smartly contrasts with Polaha’s low-key resignation faced with a plight that interrupts what Tony thinks is a perfect life, even as viewers are coming to realize it might be the opposite.

The captor/captive dynamic is a good one and it’s given ample screen time. But star power causes the narrative to gravitate toward Fred, played by Hamm as a sincere and genuine man hollowed out by personal tragedy and the writers running out of things to say about him after a fragmented, flashback-looping sixth episode that reduces everyone in the series to interchangeable daddy issues.

The series has a lot of initial fun with the mechanics of 1970s radio — phone-call transferring and impromptu recordings, with a technological fascination that reminded me of the Munich Olympics drama September 5 — and hints at a pragmatic approach to journalistic ethics, only to go nowhere with it. The early episodes, with their nervousness about FCC crackdowns and government interference in the news-gathering apparatus, suggest that American Hostage is going someplace provocative, only to have the series run out of things to say.

This hampers several of my favorite performances, especially Harper, whose Ben is full of sarcastic indignation, and June Laporte as Ginny, an aspiring reporter in need of proper mentoring. In the middle of the season, Ben is presented as the show’s moral compass and Ginny as its heart. By the end, both characters are thoroughly stranded, almost as if the series creators finally realized that the people covering the story weren’t the real story after having already committed in that direction.

It’s a series of strange decisions that, as the show progresses, leave Enos’ Barbara and Kat Cunning’s Ibby (Dick Hall’s wife) to take up the prominence that the journalistic side of the story has surrendered. Barbara and Ibby forge a friendship that’s unexpectedly compelling because of the strength of the two actors, radiating an interiority that isn’t on the page. But Barbara and Ibby are left unresolved by the end too, as the series becomes a veritable graveyard of things and people that it could have been about, when suddenly it’s recreating things that actually happened yet aren’t all that dramatically satisfying.

Everything in the show just runs out of creativity and energy, even giving up the flourishes that fueled the first half of the season, like an often-clever use of split-screens to wordlessly develop characters and build tension. It’s a device that’s everywhere and then nowhere, though formal kudos to production designer Caroline Hanania, who ends up being responsible for the best of the series’ world-building, turning sets like the radio offices and Tony’s dingy apartment into living spaces that defy claustrophobia.

From Ryan and Myers to directors Adam Arkin, guest starring as a shady lawyer to boot, and Nina Lopez-Corrado, everybody on American Hostage deserves credit for introducing all these good elements. Jonathan Tucker as a fledgling FBI profiler, Mark McKinney as the local chief of police, Joe Cobden as the radio station’s head of ad sales and Fred Ewanuick as Tony’s weary brother are other standouts. Somebody, though, had to recognize that there wasn’t eight episodes worth of story here, or at least not eight episodes of the story being told.

There’s so much potential in American Hostage, mostly squandered. %!s()

Sega has been making video games since 1973 and owns the rights to everything from modern hit franchises like Yakuza and Persona to arcade mainstays like Crazy Taxi and Streets of Rage. The possibilities were endless. McMahan didn't hesitate. He chose Golden Axe.

"I'm very old," McMahan tells Polygon by way of explaining his somewhat surprising choice. "When the NES came out, that was amazing for me, and before then, I played an insane amount of Golden Axe."

For the unfamiliar, Golden Axe is a series of beat-'em-up fantasy video games released by Sega. The first one debuted in 1989 as an arcade cabinet. Seven sequels and spinoffs followed, with the last being 1995's Golden Axe: The Duel, though a new game was announced by Sega at the 2023 Game Awards and is seemingly still in development.

In other words, Golden Axe is not exactly a hot commodity, but that didn't stop McMahan, whose memory of the game dates back to his time at a Chicago summer camp where Golden Axe and a few other arcade cabinets were rigged up so you could play them for free.

"When you're a kid, everything gets magnified," he says. "For a lot of people, Golden Axe isn't a big deal, but for this motherfucker, it was a huge deal."

Image: Paramount Plus

Series co-creator Joe Chandler, who also serves as showrunner, sees another advantage to adapting a property like Golden Axe. While the game's "swords and sorcery" world may seem like yet another generic high fantasy, it's also full of bizarre, half-defined characters and settings that give the writers plenty of room to explore.

"You have all this weird stuff," Chandler says, "like the guy you kick for potions." (More on that later.)

"There are these big visual signposts — a village on the back of a turtle or an eagle — that makes it really fun to adapt. You get to explore what those things are without the game having it be super dictated beat by beat. In a modern game, Eagle Village would be really well explained. In this game, it's just a thing. That allows for some creative freedom."

All 10 episodes of Golden Axe season 1 are streaming now on Paramount Plus. Ahead of the show's release, Polygon spoke to McMahan and Chandler about how they adapted a 37-year-old game into a modern animated comedy and their potential Sega crossover plans for season 2.

"Obviously, we have to address this issue"

Image: Paramount Plus

The premise of the original Golden Axe game is simple. The evil Death Adder has captured the King of Yuria and taken control of the magical Golden Axe in an attempt to install himself as ruler of this Tolkien-esque world. You play as one of three warriors: the sword-wielding barbarian, Ax Battler; the Amazonian, Tyris Flare; or the dwarf, Gilius Thunderhead.

"You have this big buff Conan guy, this Amazon warrior, and this little green dwarf," Chandler says. "We both just always picked the dwarf."

The games never give much thought to the disparity between those three heroes, but it's something the series immediately leans into.

"Gilius is the third greatest warrior in the world, but he's with the two others, so he never feels appreciated," Chandler says. This gave the show a natural starting point as those feelings of resentment finally bubble up and Gilius (Matthew Rhys) sets out on his own adventure. "It was a way in that felt really honest. It feels like a real story to tell in this world."

Image: Paramount Plus

As for Ax Battler (Liam McIntyre), the writers had one clear objective: point out the absurdity of a guy with "ax" in his name who spends most of his time fighting with a giant sword.

"It's crazy," McMahan exclaims.

"That was on the list of like 10 things we had to do when we started the writers' room," Chandler adds. "Obviously, we have to address this issue."

For McMahan, Ax Battler's absurd misnaming speaks to a delightfully weird streak that's running through the entire Golden Axe franchise, especially when it comes to the Americanized versions of the games.

"There's almost an art appreciation of reading through the manuals and starting to realize what the translators did," he says.

For example, the boss battles in the localized U.S. version of Golden Axe are named after a brand of beer (Bud Brothers, Lt. Heineken, etc). It's the kind of thing a modern, big-budget video game could never get away with.

"It used to be that everything wasn't so corporate," McMahan says. "Now, everything is so figured out."

"They're enjoying getting their little butts kicked"

Image: Paramount Plus

Of the core trio, Tyris Flare (Lisa Gilroy) probably gets the least character development. In an early episode she comments that her "battle bikini" covers way too much skin, but that's about the extent of her self-awareness. Instead, the series makes more time for audience stand-in Hampton Squib (Danny Pudi), an inexperienced adventurer who tags along with Gilius when the original group splits up.

However, one character from the original video game who gets a surprisingly deep backstory here is the Thief (or Thieves). These gnome-like critters serve a specific function in the games: attacking the little guys causes them to drop magic pots that refuel your character's special abilities.

"If you've played the game even once, you reference those little guys," McMahan says. "They're really memorable, and it's a great mechanic."

Image: Sega

The series takes this simple premise about 10 steps further, imagining a legion of Thieves that literally get off on being kicked in the butt by the heroes.

Once again, it's an example of the show's creators taking something bizarre and under-explained from the game and following it to its (mostly) logical conclusion.

"The sprite has this little grin on his face," Chandler says of the arcade game character. "He looks like he's enjoying it. What is happening here?"

The series offers a hilarious answer: because it's their kink.

"They're enjoying getting their little butts kicked," McMahan says.

However, a later episode of Golden Axe goes far deeper when we follow one Thief home and learn he's been living a lie to hide his shame from his tiny family. This unexpected sidequest leads to a conclusion that's both hilarious and heartbreaking — just like many of the show's best moments.

"There's comedy to it, but instead of them just being a detail or a wallpaper, they're also a thing that we want to give motivation to," McMahan says. "Those little guys have a point of view in this world."

"Death Adder always comes back"

Without getting into any spoilers, Golden Axe ends in triumph for its heroes, while also leaving the door open for season 2 and beyond. Based on the games, the path forward is pretty obvious: bring back the show's defeated big bad for another round.

"Death Adder always comes back in the games," Chandler says. "There's always a new adventure for these heroes. And we've talked a lot about what those would be. Of course, we'd love to do more."

There's other Sega properties that kind of touch on and cross paths with this game that we'd want to expand into that as well.

With eight existing games in the series, there's also plenty of source material to riff on if Golden Axe gets another shot.

"There's other interesting things to pull from all the other games," McMahan says, before adding that he's also open to the idea of a brand-friendly crossover. "There's other Sega properties that kind of touch on and cross paths with this game that we'd want to expand into that as well."

But for now, there's still plenty more stories to tell in the fantasy land of Yuria without crossing over into other properties. So don't expect to see Sonic or Crazy Taxi show up in Golden Axe season 2.

McMahan adds: "Right now, we're so proud of this first season that we'd want to spend more time with these characters and see where we could expand the show in a place that still feels like the games." %!s()

You can't expect devs to maintain games in perpetuity. Unless, I guess, they happen to be the stewards of the Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment Enhanced Editions, which are still getting patches almost three decades after the original games released. Most recently (September 15), Planescape got a beta update to its, uh, beta update: a release candidate for an upcoming patch that will bring the game in line with the 2.7 patches some of Beamdog's other Enhanced Edition games already have.

As with those other games, the new Planescape beta (itself an addition to a previous beta from August) makes Steam Cloud saves work how they ought to: toggleable through the Steam client itself rather than via in-game options. GOG cloud saves now actually work, too and—this is probably the biggest thing—Planescape now has a UI scaling option in its settings. Leave it off and the game will keep its UI at god's own resolution, 1024x768, but if you flick it on it will adapt to better fit modern monitors. Like yours!

Aside from that? Mobile fixes and "significantly easier" dialog.tlk modding. That's the file that contains Planescape's voluminous text and dialogue. Good news for modders, but less meaningful to me and, quite likely, you.

There's no hint as to when Beamdog will convert the patch from beta to full-release, but I get the feeling it's not far off. Frankly? I'm just happy classic games like this are still getting TLC in any capacity. Fans will undoubtedly keep these games alive long after we're all dead and buried, but that they're still getting a measure of official support this far along? I just wish everything worked like this.

Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War. %!s()

- | Afp | Getty Images

Saudi Arabia issued alerts to its citizens early Saturday amid reports of explosions in the capital Riyadh, as Pakistan's foreign minister stressed to his Iranian counterpart the need for uninterrupted energy supplies as war in the Middle East continued.

The Directorate of Saudi Civil Defense issued the early warning alerts while Reuters reported the sound of two booms in Riyadh, but the agency later gave the all-clear. It subsequently reported a large plume of smoke and flames visible near the city's main airport, King Khalid International Airport.

It was unclear what caused the smoke and flames, and Saudi authorities did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen stepped up their attacks on Saudi Arabia in recent weeks and launched a lightning ground offensive around Bab el-Mandeb Strait — a strategically vital oil choke point — seizing Mokha and nearby islands

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration last week approved the potential $24.3 billion sale of nearly 50 F-35 warplanes to Saudi Arabia, seen as a major boost for the kingdom.

The package, announced on Thursday, includes the sale of 48 of Lockheed Martin's advanced F-35 jets, plus 49 Pratt & Whitney engines and other parts.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar spoke with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Saturday as regional diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict between the U.S. and Iran have stalled.

"DPM/FM stressed the importance of uninterrupted energy supplies and the safe and expeditious passage of ships, particularly given their implications for developing countries and global supply chains," Pakistan's foreign ministry said in a post on X.

The two diplomats agreed to meet on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week, the ministry said.

Reuters quoted a State Department spokesperson as saying on Sept. 11 that a "core delegation from the Iranian regime" would be allowed to attend the meeting in line with the United States' obligations as the world body's host country. 

'Hopefully' nearing the end of the war

Trump said Wednesday that the country is "hopefully" approaching the end of its nearly seven-month war with Iran.

Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, is up 72% since the start of 2026 as the war choked off energy supplies flowing through the Strait of Hormuz between Iran and Oman.

Saudi Arabia has tried to divert its oil exports away from the strait by pumping it through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea. But a drone attack that Saudi Arabia said originated in Iraq damaged the East-West pipeline on Sept. 11, forcing a shutdown.

Crude prices fell for the third consecutive session Friday to finish the week basically flat, as the market anticipates the closure of Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline will not have as big an impact on supplies as originally feared.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures fell 1.6% to close at $100.30 per barrel. Brent crude traded 0.9% lower, settling at $103.87. %!s()