Stabi extends its arm from the shadows with a large barrel mounted to its wrist, and what is inside that barrel is not subtle. A kilowatt class laser capable of cutting through wood at a distance or turning stone into a glowing, molten mess sits at the heart of the setup, mounted in the back of a truck and pointed at a series of test targets. The whole rig was built by Prop Department to explore how high energy laser systems might be put to work in future productions.

They started by using an ancient six-axis industrial robot arm that had been working in factories for years. They next installed some special steel mounts and protective windows, which they had laser-cut from a batch of precision parts ordered online. The actual problem was getting the programming just right so the arm could travel smoothly over a target without any abrupt jerks that could scatter the beam.

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Four tiny targeting lasers sit at the corners of the main barrel, creating a visual outline of where the invisible main beam will hit once the system is turned on. There’s a regular camera on top and an infrared camera down below, which detects heat signatures that the human eye cannot see. To be extra safe, the team installed three safety interlocks to prevent accidental firing, and the operator is required to remove the power plug from the barrel at any stage of setup to ensure that nothing fires until everything is in the proper position.

Power comes from a source hidden in the truck bed. The beam itself delivers a continuous punch equivalent to a thousand watts focused down to a small area. Dark materials absorb energy quickly and heat up, whereas reflective surfaces bounce it back, explaining why certain objects endure longer than others. Every test takes place at night, when no one is around, and the operator is wearing two layers of eye protection.

Early tests started with everyday objects to get a feel for how the laser behaved. An old iPhone held up for a few seconds before the beam carved deep grooves into it, leaving the device looking like it had been through something much worse than a bad drop. A metal can was gone in a second, a clean hole punched straight through. Glass proved more interesting, with a tomato inside a jar heating and steaming before the beam eventually broke through, though the jar itself refused to shatter cleanly.

Coconuts caught fire almost on contact, the outer shell blackening and bursting into flame as the laser continued driving energy into the center. Eggs were a different story entirely. After 15 seconds of direct exposure the shell remained intact and the contents barely warm, a reminder that smooth, light colored surfaces can reflect a surprising amount of incoming energy.

As the tests scaled up, so did the results. Chunks of imported lava rock glowed brilliant orange and began to melt under sustained exposure, while a small piece of sterling silver softened and pooled slightly without ever reaching a full melt, highlighting the difference between an intense focused burst and the steady high temperatures needed to break down denser metals. One particularly interesting result came from a solar panel positioned at a distance across the test area, which registered a slight voltage increase when the beam struck it, suggesting that the same energy can still be harvested as usable power even after traveling through open air.

The final test brought everything together. A small tree stood at the far end of the test area looking completely unassuming right up until the robot arm swung into position and locked onto the trunk. Smoke came first, then a clean line began to form in the wood as the beam burned steadily through. Within seconds the top half toppled and hit the ground with a thud. For all the raw power involved, the cut it left behind looked almost surgical.

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced the shutdown of AnimePlay, a major anime streaming platform with over 5 million users.

Backed by more than 50 major television networks and film studios, including Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Netflix, and Universal Pictures, ACE focuses on taking down illegal streaming services through civil litigation, criminal referrals, and cease-and-desist operations.

In recent years, ACE targeted and dismantled a long string of other large-scale illegal streaming networks in joint operations with law enforcement. Most recently, in November 2025, it shut down Photocall, a massive TV piracy streaming platform with over 26 million users annually.

In its latest action, the anti-piracy coalition shut down the AnimePlay anime streaming platform, which hosted more than 60 terabytes of anime TV shows and movies and had amassed over 5 million registered users, most of them from Indonesia.

ACE took control of the AnimePlay app and dismantled the operation by taking all infrastructure offline, including hosting servers and web domains.

“ACE secured control of not just the application, but also its underlying infrastructure, including 15 associated domains, source code, hosting environment, and related digital assets, all of which have now been taken offline,” the anti-piracy organization said in a Thursday statement. “In so doing, ACE has effectively dismantled the operation and restricted the operator’s ability to rebuild or relaunch the service.”

The developer and admin of the piracy service also surrendered control of the backend ecosystem powering AnimePlay to ACE, including backend servers, associated databases, advertising tools, and 29 GitHub repositories containing full source code.

“We will continue working with our partners across the Asia Pacific region and globally to dismantle criminal operations like this and safeguard the integrity of the creative economy,” added Larissa Knapp, Chief Content Protection Officer and Executive Vice President for the Motion Picture Association (MPA).

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from the benched-by-the-bench dept

This judge ain’t fucking around. Earlier this month, we covered New Jersey federal judge Zahid Qurashi’s response to the actions of Trump’s DOJ, which begins with lots of illegal appointments of prosecutors and runs right through these prosecutors’ inability to defend the administration’s actions.

To wit:

The Government’s handling of Petitioner’s detention is emblematic of its approach to immigration enforcement in this state. On the merits, its detentions are illegal. The Government knows this. Its reliance on Section 1225 has been roundly rejected.

And:

Sadly, the well-deserved credibility once attached to that distinguished Office is now a presumption that “has been sadly eroded.” The Government’s continued actions after being called to task can now only be deemed intentional.

Courts have been flooded with immigration cases and vindictive prosecutions targeting Trump’s enemies. They’re fighting back, but even a massive consensus seems incapable of slowing Trump’s roll.

This case — brought to our attention by Owen Barcala — involves the sort of serious crimes the administration has put on the back burner so it can flood the immigration enforcement zone. While the administration focuses on ejecting all non-white foreigners from this country while claiming they’re simply seeking out the “worst of worst,” the (alleged) worst of the worst are pretty much being ignored.

Thanks to the massive amount of turnover at the DOJ, there are not a whole lot of qualified prosecutors left to do the government’s (increasingly) dirty work. In New Jersey, (illegal) appointee Alina Habba (a former Trump PAC spokesperson/advisor) has already voluntarily stepped down, proving she’s more capable of reading the writing on the wall than her former employer.

In her place, Mark Coyne (in a made-up position meant to shield him from being booted for being illegally appointed) has stepped up to wrap up a child pornography prosecution. It’s not going well for Coyne, as the New York Times reports:

A federal judge threw a top prosecutor from the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office out of his courtroom during a sentencing hearing this week and demanded that the office’s leadership testify about who had authority over their actions, according to court documents.

The rapid sequence of events on Monday in the courtroom of Judge Zahid N. Quraishi was the latest indication of growing tensions between the Justice Department and the federal judiciary in New Jersey. It came during the scheduled sentencing of a man who last year agreed to plead guilty to possession of child pornography.

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The hearing did not go as prosecutors had planned. Judge Quraishi grew frustrated with the office’s head of appeals, Mark Coyne, who had not formally disclosed that he would appear, and fiercely interrogated a more junior prosecutor about whether the former interim U.S. attorney, Alina Habba, still had some role in operating the office.

Judge Qurashi referenced an order issued by federal judge Matthew Brann earlier this month, which declared the three-prosecutor hydra cobbled together by Pam Bondi to be a trio of unlawfully elevated prosecutors. That decision made the court’s displeasure explicit, using emphasis in the ruling to point out that the Trump administration cared more about who was running the New Jersey prosecutors’ office, rather than whether it was legally capable of running at all.

There are plenty of wonderfully quotable moments in the transcript of the hearing that ended with the government’s prosecutor being removed from the proceedings by the court.

It starts like this:

THE COURT: Mr. Coyne, did you file a notice of appearance in this case?
MR. COYNE: I did not.
THE COURT: Are you here for moral support? Because you’re not going to speak.
MR. COYNE: I would ask —
THE COURT: No.
MR. COYNE: — that the Court allow me to speak.
THE COURT: Nope. That’s not the representation made by the Government.

And then the court continues to riddle his body with bullets:

THE COURT: I’m not going to hear from you, Mr. Coyne. If you want to sit there for moral support or hand Mr. Rosenblum Post-its or whisper in his ear, I’ll let you do that as supervisor.

You’d think a corpse would keep its mouth shut. But Mr. Coyne apparently didn’t realize he was already dead.

The judge asked whether or not the three people Judge Brann had ruled were appointed unlawfully were still running the NJ US Attorney’s office. Mr. Rosenblum claimed he only knew what he’d been told by Mark Coyne, which apparently was nothing more than to shut up and claim ignorance. Unsatisfied with these non-answers and dodgy quasi-denials, Judge Quraishi pressed Rosenblum hard enough that Coyne — who had been directly ordered to sit this one out — felt compelled to respond:

THE COURT: What role does Alina Habba have currently in operating your office?
MR. ROSENBLUM: None that I’m aware of.
THE COURT: None that you’re aware of.
MR. ROSENBLUM: None.
THE COURT: All right. So she could be operating the office.
MR. COYNE: She is not.
MR. ROSENBLUM: She’s not.
MR. COYNE: She is not.
THE COURT: Sit down, Mr. Coyne. If you speak again, I’m going to have you removed. I already told you not to speak.
MR. COYNE: Your Honor —
THE COURT: You didn’t file a notice of appearance. You don’t get to blindside the Court and do whatever it is you guys want to do. So if you continue to speak, you can leave.
MR. COYNE: Your Honor —
THE COURT: Sit down.
MR. COYNE: — if —
THE COURT: Sit down.
MR. COYNE: If a notice of appeal–
THE COURT: Sit down.
MR. COYNE: -is entered–
THE COURT: I’m directing the court security officers to remove Mr. Coyne.

And with that, Mr. Coyne exits the court. Voluntarily, according to the transcript, but only voluntarily in the sense that court officers didn’t have to physically restrain him and remove him from the court.

But it’s not like the DOJ prosecutor left in the court room gets to skate by just by being less of an ass that Mark Coyne. Judge Quraishi refers to the order from Judge Brann from earlier in the month — one that specifically warned that if the DOJ kept the same “triumvirate” of illegally appointed US attorneys in that office, that it did so at its own peril.

The closing of the transcript says what so many federal judges think, but have also said in hearings and on the record in rulings and orders: the Trump DOJ has managed to completely destroy the reputation of the Department of Justice, despite having controlled it fully for barely over a year.

THE COURT: Here is your risk. This is your risk.

So your authority to operate is while [Judge Brann] has stayed the opinion, when he says literally on the last page, you don’t even have to go through all of this. All you have to do is turn to the back and it says “If the government chooses to leave the triumvirate in place, it does so at its own risk.”

What you’ve told me today, what your representation is, which I don’t believe by the way. I won’t believe it until you testify. That is what happened to the credibility of your office.Generations of U.S. Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy within a year.

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This damnation isn’t unique. The DOJ is painting itself into a corner all over the nation. Hundreds of judges are no longer willing to take the government at its word. And that gives the government a handful of choices, none of which could be considered “wins.” The DOJ is going to have to dump prosecutions. Or it’s going to have to send its top prosecutors to testify under oath in court (which is way different than simply submitting sworn declarations). Or it’s going to have to go back to respecting the law, starting with the ousting of every illegally appointed US attorney.

The final option, however, isn’t generally considered viable, but it’s the one the administration is most likely to put in motion: ignoring every entity that opposes it while simultaneously telling Americans whose rights it’s trampling that this is the only way to make America great again.

Filed Under: alina habba, doj, mark coyne, new jersey, pam bondi, trump administration, zahid quraishi

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