The Brief

Despite a dual strike that has shut down most of Hollywood's production this summer, SAG-AFTRA, the actor's union has given the green light to actors to perform in more than 200 productions. That includes the Sigourney Weaver horror movie Dust Bunny, Rebel Wilson's Bride Hard, and Anne Hathaway's Mother Mary.

The union's rules say actors are not allowed to act in or promote their shows during the strike that began in July. But the union has given a pass to some independent productions to proceed, through some "interim agreements."

That means the stars of Michael Mann's new film Ferrari — Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz — will be allowed to work the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival this month. And actors there can promote Luc Besson's new movie Dogman.

"They're not waivers," says SAG-AFTRA's national executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland. "We've been trying to get people to stop using that term because really the interim agreement is a full-on collective bargaining agreement."

He says in order to be approved, productions have to agree to the same terms the union demanded from the major studios before contract negotiations broke off on July 12: That includes 11% wage increases, protections against artificial intelligence, and higher residuals when streamers reuse content.

"If independent producers are willing and able to sign this agreement and produce projects under it, it really directly defeats any assertion that our proposals are unrealistic," he says. "Well, if they're realistic enough that independent producers who don't have the bankroll of the studios can produce projects on them, how unrealistic are they, really?"

Before approving each production, he says, the union's contract experts vet them to make sure they are truly independent from the studios they're striking against. They do things like review corporate documents and copyright chains.

Crabtree-Ireland says some of the independent productions are also being made in other countries with different labor laws where they can't implement the strike. So Glenn Close can shoot the next season of the Israeli-produced TV series Tehran. And in Hungary, Jenna Ortega and Paul Rudd are allowed to film the comedy horror movie Death of a Unicorn.

The interim agreements have some union members confused and upset.

"So you're just letting people make movies?" actress Sarah Silverman asked in an Instagram post. "And movie stars are making movies that, you know, the goal is to sell them to streaming? ... That's called the end of the strike, which is now going to be probably exponentially prolonged because they have movie stars making movies."

Silverman later met with SAG-AFTRA leaders and posted a second Instagram message laying out various points of view and saying she agreed to disagree with her union. And the union has since revised this policy going forward to include only productions not covered by the Writers Guild of America, which is also on strike.

Outside Disney studios last week, striking actors said no one should get permission to work while there's a strike.

Actors Jeff Kaye, Lana Gautier and Ron Palmer on the picket line outside of Disney Studios in Burbank.

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"It's either we're all in or we're not," said actor Lana Gautier.

Actor Jeff Kaye added, "Everybody should have just dropped where they were and walked off to make the statement, because right now the studios are being rewarded with finishing up this content ... allowing them to go a little bit longer while we're out on strike."

He noted that actor Viola Davis had been offered a job on a production with an agreement, but she announced she wouldn't cross the picket line. "Much respect to her for that," Kaye said, and Gautier agreed.

"Brad Pitt put the kibosh on his production in Bulgaria," she said. "So I respect that as well."

Oscar-winner Troy Kotsur was also on the Disney picket line. Through an ASL interpreter, he explained that he worked on a production in Canada that has an interim agreement to finish up.

"I can understand a bit of the controversy," he signed. "But for me personally, I've always supported independent films because they're not under any of the major studios. And so these are real people making passionate productions from their heart and their creativity, and they're trying to show their art."

SAG-AFTRA says if any streaming platform does eventually pick up one of the projects with an interim agreement, they'll be on the hook for paying the actors more. The union leaders say if only the big Hollywood studios would agree to do the same, the strike would end.

The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday sued President Donald Trump’s administration for recent television advertisements that promoted his political message while costing taxpayers millions of dollars.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the ads are illegal government-sponsored propaganda and accuses Trump of personally directing them. It asks the court to declare the ads illegal and stop the use of federal funds to pay for them.

Trump has faced bipartisan backlash for the ads, which glorify him and echo his campaign pitch as voters cast early ballots with the midterm elections less than a month away.

The spots, which began airing in September, already have cost more than $12 million to run, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact, and a total of $20 million in Homeland Security Department funding has been tapped to pay for them.

Responding Monday to the criticism, Trump defended the ads as “positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said he’d pay for them using his MAGA Inc. super PAC going forward.

But on Tuesday, the fifth ad in the campaign began airing with the notice “paid for by the U.S. Government,” promoting Trump’s military actions in Venezuela earlier this year. The same day, Trump made it clear he hasn’t committed to reimbursing any money that has already been spent, telling reporters “we’ll decide.”

DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement that Trump is misusing taxpayer dollars in “a last-ditch attempt to save Republicans in November.”

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump’s illegal schemes,” he added.

Legal experts have suggested the ads run afoul of a federal statute against congressionally appropriated money being used for “publicity or propaganda,” and potentially other federal laws. The Homeland Security money tapped for the ads comes from a $175 million package Congress gave to the department as part of Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The White House has defended the ads as public service announcements akin to what past administrations have done to promote various policies. Legal experts have said the recent ads differ from many past public service announcements because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.

The defendants in the lawsuit — Trump, the White House, DHS and the Office of Management and Budget — didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Fall has only just begun, but it's already time to start thinking about the quintessential winter bug: the flu.

The annual flu season usually starts in October or November. But this year, it looks like the flu started to pick up in early September.

"There are enough signs pointing in the same direction to make me think, 'OK, yes. This is the start of flu season,'" says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The percentage of people testing positive for the flu in the West has been rising steadily since around the beginning of September, she says. And the number of people showing up in emergency departments because of the flu has also been rising for weeks, she adds.

"It's very uncommon to see flu activity rising this early. It's activity that we might normally see more like November or December," she says.

The timing of the flu season isn't the only thing that's odd. It's also unusual that flu activity seems to have started in Western states, such as California, Washington, Hawaii and Alaska.

"It typically starts in the South and then expands from there," Rivers says. "So two uncommon developments there."

Rivers stresses that the amount of flu activity is still very low in most parts of the country. But that's starting to change as the flu picks up nationwide.

It's unclear why flu activity would have started so early, and in such an unusual part of the country. But one clue might be a new variant that evolved a mutation, which appears to make it better at evading existing immunity, especially among teenagers.

"That's our best argument for what's going on right now in terms of this early flu season," says Dr. Alex Greninger, a virologist who heads infectious disease diagnostics at the University of Washington. Doctors there are seeing as much flu right now as they usually would around Christmas, and the mutated variant appears to be common, he says.

So Greninger, Rivers and others are urging people to think about getting their flu shot earlier than usual.

"It's crucial that people get an influenza vaccine," says Scott Hensley, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "And this might be a year that people might want to get a vaccine early."

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn't been promoting flu shots as it usually does. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the CDC, is a long-time vaccine skeptic.

"It is disappointing that CDC is quiet given that flu kills of hundreds of kids a year and can result in tens of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of deaths," says Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, who resigned last year as the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protest what he called political interference at the agency.

The CDC declined to make an official available to NPR for this story. In a statement, a CDC spokesperson said, "CDC is developing a communications strategy to provide clear, accessible information about influenza vaccination and other critical steps people can take to protect themselves during respiratory virus season. This includes information about the benefits and risks of vaccination to support informed decision-making."
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