Iran's Revolutionary Guard struck a Singapore-flagged container ship, the Ever Lovely, in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday with a drone that hit the vessel's bridge 14 kilometers southeast of Oman. No crew members were injured, but the attack froze the International Maritime Organization's evacuation initiative, which had launched Tuesday to guide 600 stranded ships and around 11,000 mariners through the strait via two designated routes. IMO Secretary-General Arsenio Dominguez suspended the operation to verify that safety guarantees remained in place. The strike came days after the United States and Iran reached a 60-day interim peace deal, and hours after Iran's military warned vessels not to use the southern evacuation corridor without Tehran's permission. Oil prices climbed 1.9 percent on news of the attack. The incident demonstrates Iran's continued ability to reassert control over the waterway even after ceasefire agreements, with hundreds of ships still stranded in the Persian Gulf awaiting passage.
The Strait of Hormuz, a narrow channel between Iran and Oman, carries roughly one-fifth of the world's seaborne oil. Iran has used the threat of closure as leverage throughout its recent standoff with the United States. The IMO evacuation initiative, launched Tuesday, was the first coordinated effort to move stranded vessels through the strait since hostilities paused under the 60-day peace deal.
For the first time, researchers have decoded an entire sealed Herculaneum papyrus scroll without unrolling it. Scroll PHerc. 1667, a philosophical treatise on ethics from around the second century BCE, discusses human nature, impulse, and moral development, and references Aristocreon, nephew of Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. The breakthrough combined high-resolution X-ray scanning with machine-learning models developed through the Vesuvius Challenge, a crowdsourced competition. The project was led by Professor Brent Seales at EduceLab in collaboration with the National Library of Naples. Earlier Vesuvius Challenge work had recovered fragments from other scrolls, but this is the first complete reading of an entire sealed scroll. Roughly 800 carbonized papyri were buried when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE and recovered from the Villa dei Papiri in the 18th century; physical unrolling destroys them. The same X-ray and AI method could unlock most of the remaining collection, which contains texts from ancient Greek philosophy, poetry, and science that have been unreadable for nearly 2,000 years.
The Herculaneum scrolls were buried when Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE and recovered from an aristocratic villa near Pompeii in the 18th century. Opening the brittle, carbonized tubes destroys them; scholars have not been able to read most of the roughly 800-scroll collection. The Vesuvius Challenge, launched in 2023, crowdsourced the development of AI tools to decode them using existing X-ray tomography scans.
The Trump administration asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6, citing advanced cybersecurity capabilities that officials say pose security risks. CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday that the rollout would begin in limited preview form, with each customer requiring individual approval from the Office of the National Cyber Director, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. General access to the public is expected roughly two weeks after the preview period. The administration has not disclosed what specific capabilities triggered the security concern. OpenAI said the arrangement is "not our preferred long-term model" and that the company will work with government and industry partners on a more sustainable process for future releases. The arrangement marks the first instance of the US government controlling which customers receive access to a commercial AI model before its public launch.
GPT-5.6 is OpenAI's next major release after GPT-5.5-Cyber, a fine-tuned cybersecurity variant released in June. Prior US AI policy under executive order required companies to notify the government of frontier model training, but this is the first case of the government controlling access to a commercial model before launch.
Twin earthquakes struck Venezuela on Wednesday evening, killing at least 235 people and injuring more than 4,300, with the US Geological Survey estimating a 44 percent chance the death toll will exceed 10,000 as rescue teams continue searching through collapsed buildings. The first quake measured 7.2 magnitude, followed by a 7.5 tremor less than a minute later, the two largest earthquakes to hit Venezuela since 1900. La Guaira, a coastal city 40 kilometers north of Caracas, sustained catastrophic damage, with dozens of buildings reduced to rubble. Simón Bolívar International Airport and the capital also reported significant damage. Acting President Delcy Rodríguez declared La Guaira a disaster zone; President Trump pledged aid and announced deployment of search and rescue teams from Fairfax County and Los Angeles. The Red Cross and multiple international relief organizations are coordinating assistance.
Venezuela is in political transition following the US military's capture of former President Nicolás Maduro in January 2026, after which Delcy Rodríguez assumed the acting presidency. The country was already under heavy economic strain before the quakes. La Guaira is Venezuela's main port city on the Caribbean coast.
Internal Health and Human Services emails released Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders show Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. directing the CDC to halt its flu vaccine advertising campaign during a severe flu season, restrict childhood vaccine access, and allow researchers to mine confidential CDC data in search of a vaccine-autism link. The "Wild to Mild" flu campaign was paused; messaging shifted toward emphasizing vaccine risks over promoting uptake. The emails show Kennedy removed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory committee and replaced them with anti-vaccine appointees, then fired CDC Director Susan Monarez over her support for vaccine standards. Sanders said the conduct reflects Kennedy "prioritizing politics over public health." A federal judge had blocked some of Kennedy's vaccine changes in March 2026, finding he had likely violated federal administrative procedures. CDC officials themselves warned Kennedy that halting campaigns during what they called the worst flu season in years created significant reputational risk to the agency.
Kennedy, confirmed as HHS secretary in early 2025, had long questioned vaccine safety before entering government. The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices sets the US childhood vaccine schedule. Earlier in 2026, Kennedy reduced that schedule from 18 diseases to 11, removing vaccines including hepatitis A, RSV, and meningitis from universal recommendations.
A federal magistrate judge in Texas ordered Elon Musk to testify in two fraud cases alleging his America PAC deceived voters in swing states during the 2024 election. The cases center on a petition campaign in which America PAC offered participants $47 to $100 to sign a document supporting the First and Second Amendments, along with a promise of a million-dollar-a-day prize drawing before Election Day. A February 2025 deposition by the PAC's director Christopher Young revealed that drawing winners were not chosen at random but handpicked as PAC spokespeople, contrary to public representations. Voters in two Arizona cases say they would not have submitted their personal information had they known the lottery was staged. A class action filed in Pennsylvania brings the same claim on behalf of more than 100 swing-state voters seeking over five million dollars in damages. Prosecutors say the conduct may violate federal laws prohibiting payment for voter registration.
America PAC, funded primarily by Musk, was created to support Trump's 2024 presidential campaign through voter mobilization. Musk personally promoted the million-dollar drawing at a Pennsylvania town hall in October 2024. America PAC ran similar campaigns in Wisconsin during the March 2025 state Supreme Court election.
Every Homo naledi skeleton ever excavated, more than 20 individuals from Rising Star Cave in South Africa, has turned out to be female, according to a study published Thursday in Cell. Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Copenhagen determined sex using ancient proteins extracted from dental enamel, a method that survives fossilization better than DNA. The probability of finding only female skeletons by chance in a sample of 20 or more approaches zero; paleoanthropologist John Hawks calls the pattern evidence of deliberate burial practice, with the community choosing to inter its female dead in that specific location. The finding suggests Homo naledi, a small-brained hominin that lived in southern Africa alongside early Homo sapiens roughly 300,000 years ago, had a concept of gender significant enough to shape burial practice. Even the juvenile individuals in the collection are female.
Homo naledi was first described in 2015 by Lee Berger's team after finding hundreds of fossils in the Rising Star Cave system, accessible only through passages too narrow for most adults. The species lived 236,000 to 335,000 years ago. Neo, the most complete adult specimen, was originally classified as male but has been reclassified female by the protein analysis.
New York City's Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 Thursday to impose a two-year rent freeze on about one million rent-stabilized apartments, fulfilling the central campaign promise of Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The board, whose members are appointed by the mayor, typically votes on annual rent adjustment limits; Thursday's decision breaks a recent pattern of modest increases during elevated inflation. The freeze applies to units in pre-1974 buildings and those with certain tax exemptions and takes effect in October. Roughly one million apartments in New York City, about 44 percent of the city's rental stock, fall under rent stabilization. Landlord groups argued the freeze will deepen the housing shortage by making new construction and building maintenance unviable; tenant advocates and the Mamdani administration countered that renters have been squeezed for years. The last citywide rent freeze was in 2015.
New York City's rent stabilization system caps annual rent increases on eligible apartments and is governed by the Rent Guidelines Board, which sets yearly limits. Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, won the mayoral race earlier in 2026 on a platform centered on housing costs and economic inequality. He is New York City's first openly socialist mayor.
Florida's Board of Governors voted Thursday to advance a proposal that would bar undocumented students from enrolling in the state's 12 public universities starting with the 2027-28 academic year. The policy requires universities to accept all academically qualified applicants before considering undocumented students, a standard no selective school can meet, making the restriction a functional ban on new enrollment. A parallel proposal before the State Board of Education would extend a similar rule to the state's 28 community colleges. The change would affect roughly 8,000 undocumented high school graduates per year in Florida and an existing pool of around 49,000 undocumented students enrolled in public higher education. Governor Ron DeSantis expressed support for the policy. Florida currently lets undocumented students pay in-state tuition. Currently enrolled students would not be removed; only new applicants in 2027 would face the restriction. The proposal would make Florida the fourth state to restrict noncitizen enrollment in public colleges.
Florida enacted an in-state tuition policy for undocumented students in 2014. The Board of Governors proposal would put Florida in line with states like Alabama and Georgia that already restrict noncitizen enrollment. A parallel federal challenge is underway: the Justice Department sued Kansas this week over its similar in-state tuition law.
The Democratic Party is developing a hard-left populist faction that parallels MAGA in its political character rather than its policy positions, argues economist Noah Smith in his Noahpinion newsletter. Smith traces the shift to two forces: Trump's dominance normalizing counter-extremism on the left, and mainstream progressive failures leaving the base open to more radical voices. His central exhibit is the primary win Tuesday by Darializa Avila Chevalier, a DSA-backed candidate in a Manhattan district who has called for abolishing the police and, in Smith's reading, for dismantling Western civilization. Smith's comparison to Marjorie Taylor Greene is structural: both represent grievance-driven politics that rejects coalition building and institutional norms, regardless of which direction the grievances point. Three DSA-backed candidates won congressional primaries Tuesday; two unseated incumbents. Drawing on the victories of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's political operation, Smith argues the Democratic Socialists of America have learned to convert energy and membership growth into actual electoral wins.
Noah Smith is an economist and former Bloomberg Opinion columnist who writes the Noahpinion Substack on economics and political trends. The Democratic Socialists of America, which has nearly doubled its membership since 2016, operates as a separate organization from the Democratic Party establishment but fields candidates in Democratic primaries. The DSA endorsed Mayor Mamdani and the three congressional candidates who won Tuesday.
