Spanish troops and police deployed in Ceuta on Friday after roughly 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish territory. The Associated Press reported that at least 57 people died. Because Ceuta belongs to Spain, the crossing placed the migrants inside the European Union’s asylum system even though Ceuta sits in North Africa. That does not make the migrants EU citizens or give them an automatic right to travel across Europe. It does allow them to request asylum from Spain, which must register and evaluate those claims under Spanish and EU law.
The influx, equal to about 70 percent of Ceuta’s normal population, became a European dispute Friday. Italy temporarily restored checks on air and sea travel from Spain because its government feared that migrants admitted or released by Spain could travel onward through Europe’s normally border-free Schengen Area. Italy does not share a border with Spain; the restrictions apply to passengers arriving from Spain by plane or ship. The European Commission said Friday that it had not detected such onward movement. For migrants who remain, the next morning begins with registration, screening and a possible asylum proceeding. For other travelers, the political reaction means the return of passport checks on routes where they had largely disappeared.
President Donald Trump announced Friday that Hamas had accepted a plan to disarm in Gaza, but Hamas tied disarmament to an Israeli withdrawal while Israel insisted that Hamas surrender its weapons first. The Associated Press verified a written roadmap and reported Friday that Hamas had confirmed its participation; Israel had not formally accepted the plan. Under the roadmap, Hamas would first surrender police weapons and later turn over heavier arms. A new Palestinian security force would replace Hamas, while an international Board of Peace official would oversee a transition expected to last between 200 and 350 days. According to the Associated Press, Israeli forces remain deployed in or control access to roughly 60 percent of Gaza.
Reconstruction is estimated to cost $70 billion, but contractors cannot safely rebuild while Hamas and Israel disagree over who disarms or withdraws first. For civilians, the agreement arrives amid continued displacement and shortages. The United Nations humanitarian office reported that military operations, movement restrictions and insecurity were still forcing families to move and limiting access to drinking water, food, shelter, sanitation and medical care. Many people remain in temporary shelters or damaged buildings while reconstruction is stalled. Reconstruction cannot begin at scale until Hamas, Israel and the international force agree on who disarms, who withdraws and who controls Gaza during the transition.
Drones hit Kuwait on Friday, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it had attacked two oil tankers. Donald Trump’s pledge to hit a piece of Iranian infrastructure for each Iranian attack has not been followed up on. Four other tankers turned away from the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia assembled a 14-country security alliance to protect shipping and regional infrastructure, according to the Guardian’s live reporting. The alliance is intended to coordinate the protection of tankers, ports and regional infrastructure, although its members have not publicly explained how they will divide that work.
The war’s financial effects appeared in oil-company earnings Friday. Exxon earned $14.53 billion and Chevron earned $12.07 billion as oil traded above $100 a barrel and briefly reached $126. Exxon’s refining profit increased sixfold, while diesel prices rose 41 percent. The same supply disruption produces opposite mornings: producers and refiners collect higher prices, while drivers and businesses pay more for fuel, shipping and petroleum-based products.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration’s expansion of mandatory detention for immigrants arrested inside the United States, the Associated Press reported Friday. The policy denied many detainees the opportunity to ask an immigration judge for release on bond while their cases proceeded. Previous administrations generally allowed immigrants without criminal records who were arrested away from the border to request bond hearings. Immigration officials expanded mandatory detention last year, arguing that a 1996 law authorized it.
The Ninth Circuit said the administration’s interpretation conflicted with the law’s words, structure and history. Congress created different rules for people stopped while entering the country and people already living inside it; the administration sought to apply the stricter border rule to both groups. The decision deepened a split among federal appeals courts. The Fifth and Eighth circuits have upheld the policy, while several others have rejected it. The dispute captures a recurring legal fight in Trump’s immigration crackdown: whether the executive branch can use broad readings of older statutes to eliminate hearings that previous administrations provided. For detainees covered by the ruling, the immediate consequence is not automatic release. It is the right to ask a judge for release while the government tries to deport them.
Jessica Treviño, a 34-year-old Texas mother protected under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, sued the federal government after it sought to terminate her status for “unauthorized travel” caused by her deportation. The Associated Press reported the lawsuit Friday. Treviño arrived in the United States at seven and received DACA protection at 20. Federal agents arrested her and her husband in December, and the government deported them to Mexico on March 25. Citizenship and Immigration Services then cited her departure on March 25 as unauthorized travel. Their three children, all American citizens, remained with relatives in the United States. The government forced her across the border and then cited that crossing as the reason to cancel her protection.
Medicare currently pays private insurers a temporary subsidy to keep monthly premiums from rising sharply for people enrolled in stand-alone Part D prescription-drug plans. The subsidy does not lower the price charged by the drugmaker; it absorbs some of the added cost that insurers would otherwise pass to customers. The Trump administration will stop making those payments after 2026, the Associated Press reported Friday. Insurers will then recalculate their premiums without the federal cushion, and some of the roughly 25 million Part D enrollees are likely to pay more each month in 2027. The subsidy cost the government an estimated $3.6 billion this year. Beneficiaries will see their new premiums during the fall enrollment period, which overlaps with the November election. The change will first appear not at the pharmacy counter but in the monthly premium listed in each plan’s fall enrollment materials.
Amazon raised its projected 2026 capital spending from $200 billion to $220 billion, largely to build data centers and other artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Its shares rose about 12 percent Friday after the company reported that Amazon Web Services revenue grew 37 percent, up from 28 percent and its fastest growth in 18 quarters, according to the Associated Press. Capital spending is money used to build or buy assets expected to last for years—in this case chips, servers, data centers and the electrical equipment needed to run them.
Amazon’s stock jump helps explain the current rule on Wall Street: investors will tolerate enormous AI spending when a company can show that customers are already buying more computing services. The spending alone was not the good news; AWS’s accelerating growth gave investors evidence that at least part of the construction bill is producing revenue. In the AI boom, Wall Street is no longer rewarding the size of the promise. It is rewarding evidence that customers have begun paying the bill.
Amazon’s increase pushed the combined artificial-intelligence investment plans of the largest technology companies above $1 trillion, the Financial Times reported Friday. The companies are spending the money on data centers, advanced chips, power plants and transmission equipment. Some can pay from their own cash, while others are borrowing or using investment vehicles financed by outside investors. AI revenue has not grown as quickly as the infrastructure bill, so the returns depend on companies and consumers paying for far more AI computing in the future.
The closest Industrial Revolution comparison is the railroad boom: the technology companies are laying tracks, building stations and securing the power supply before they know exactly how much freight and how many passengers the system will carry. If demand arrives, they control essential infrastructure. If it does not, they still owe the cost of the tracks. The comparison also explains why the spending reaches beyond Silicon Valley: data centers require land, construction crews, cooling equipment and enough electricity to compete with homes and factories for power.
The Federal Reserve disclosed Wednesday that Beth Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie Logan had voted to raise its main interest rate by a quarter-point while the majority kept it between 3.5 and 3.75 percent. Friday’s news was their explanation. Hammack and Kashkari argued that inflation had remained high for too long and that repeated disruptions to supply could become permanent price increases if the Fed did nothing. Kashkari also cited the data-center construction boom as a new source of demand for workers, equipment and electricity.
They argued that a small increase now, while employment remains healthy, could reduce the need for a larger increase later. Higher oil prices reinforce their case: oil raises fuel and shipping costs, businesses can pass those costs to customers, and renewed inflation makes the Fed less willing to lower borrowing costs. Anyone seeking a mortgage, car loan or business loan notices the dispute because a Fed debating increases is much farther from delivering the rate cuts borrowers have been waiting for.
Yum Brands said Taco Bell’s American same-store sales had fallen 2 percent so far in the current quarter as customers avoided the chain during a cyclospora outbreak. It turns out the slogan “Explosive Diarrhea, It’s What Comes After Dinner” is not a real sales generator. Nearly 2,000 people reported illnesses during an outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce, and Taco Bell stopped using lettuce from the implicated Mexican supplier on July 17. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Taco Bell planned to bring customers back with discounted app promotions, including $1 food.
The size of the outbreak reflects the scale of the modern restaurant supply chain: one contaminated ingredient from a large supplier can reach many locations before investigators identify the common source. Taco Bell could replace the lettuce immediately. Customers decide when the outbreak is over.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez asked a state court to order the child-welfare department to help return a 15-year-old American citizen whom its employees allegedly sent alone into Mexico. The Associated Press reported the lawsuit Friday. State employees allegedly drove the boy to El Paso on July 6 and told him to cross the border to find his estranged mother, a Mexican citizen who had been deported after a drug-related arrest. The teenager later contacted the independent Office of the Child Advocate. Torrez also asked the court to prohibit officials from taking other children out of the country for reunification without judicial approval. The institutional failure is visible in who finally raised the alarm: not the agency responsible for the boy, but the boy himself, calling an outside watchdog from another country.
Anthropic reported Friday that three of its AI models had broken into real organizations during authorized security tests. The company conducted 141,000 evaluation runs using Opus 4.7, Mythos 5 and an internal model. Weak passwords helped the systems enter networks, and defenders failed to detect two of the intrusions. The tests began as early as April. The models did not invent a new kind of cyberattack. They found familiar human mistakes and exploited them at machine speed.
The World Meteorological Organization warned Friday that the strengthening El Niño could bring extreme heat, drought and heavy rain through spring 2027. El Niño is a periodic warming of the equatorial Pacific that rearranges weather patterns around the world. A key Pacific measuring region reached the warmest level recorded at this early point in an El Niño’s development. Most forecast models indicate that the event could become the strongest on record, although scientists told the Associated Press that the forecast is not certain because the event will not peak for several months. Farmers, water managers, electric utilities and disaster agencies notice first because they must make planting, reservoir, power-supply and emergency plans months before forecasters know precisely where the droughts and floods will land.
And in other facts, cosmetic surgeons told USA Today on Friday that rapid weight loss from GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic can remove fat from the temples, producing “temporal hollowing.” Doctors can restore volume with fat or filler, but the temple contains arteries and veins connected to the eye, so an injection into the wrong blood vessel can cause blindness. The unexpected risk therefore comes not from the weight-loss drug itself but from an elective attempt to correct one of its visible effects.
The cave beneath Pembroke Castle
National Geographic reported that archaeologists are excavating an enormous cave reached by a spiral staircase beneath Pembroke Castle in Wales for evidence of Neanderthals and some of Britain’s earliest modern humans. Researchers once believed Victorian-era work had stripped the cavern of its archaeological value, but test excavations found burned bone, animal remains and worked stone. Those finds showed that archaeologically useful layers survived, which is why researchers are returning now for a larger excavation. They could establish whether Neanderthals, Homo sapiens or both occupied the site. The juxtaposition is unusual: a medieval fortress and the birthplace of Henry VII stand directly above a potential record of human life extending back as far as 100,000 years.
Children make music inside an MRI scanner
The Conversation highlighted an experiment in which musically untrained children ages 9 to 11 lay inside an MRI scanner with a specially built, nonmagnetic 35-key piano resting on their knees. The children alternated between playing a memorized five-note pentatonic scale and improvising melodies with the same five black keys. Because the notes were selected to sound harmonious together, the children could explore without playing a “wrong” note. Brain scans showed that improvisation strengthened connections among regions associated with emotion and reward more than the rote exercise did. The results suggest that improvisation engages children’s emerging creativity networks even before they receive extensive musical training.
Five million artworks in one searchable museum
Axios Finish Line reported that The Last Museum has assembled an online index of more than 5.8 million artworks, creating what amounts to a museum without walls, closing hours or a final gallery. The collection stretches across roughly 5,000 years, from about 3000 B.C. to the present. The site is free, and every work links back to the institution that holds it. Go to lastmuseum.com.
A civilization emerges beneath the Amazon canopy
Live Science reported that an airborne-laser survey of nearly 1,740 square miles of Brazilian rainforest revealed 396 previously unknown earthworks belonging to a complex civilization that arose about 2,500 years ago—close to the beginning of the Roman Republic in 509 B.C. The population in the area may have reached 1.25 million to 3 million between A.D. 100 and 300. The laser system, called lidar, measures reflected light from an aircraft and allows researchers to digitally remove the trees from an image, revealing roads, platforms and geometric earthworks hidden at ground level. The findings, published in Nature, add to evidence that the precolonial Amazon was neither empty nor untouched but supported large, organized communities whose monumental architecture is still being recovered from beneath the trees.
Four runs on one final swing
The Minnesota Twins entered the bottom of the ninth inning against Kansas City trailing 3-0 after failing to score in the first eight innings. With two outs, the bases loaded and Kody Clemens facing an 0-2 count, Clemens hit his 19th home run of the season to right-center field, giving Minnesota a 4-3 victory. The play qualified as an “ultimate grand slam,” the name for a walk-off grand slam hit when the home team trails by exactly three runs in the ninth inning or later. Kansas City had been one strike from a shutout; Minnesota instead scored all four of its runs on the game’s final pitch. According to Major League Baseball’s historical list, Clemens hit the 35th ultimate grand slam in major-league history—and the first with two outs and an 0-2 count.
