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US diesel prices hit a record $5.85 a gallon Thursday as the Iran war disrupted refined-fuel flows and forced refiners to reroute shipments away from the Gulf. Truckers, farmers, and construction firms are absorbing the shock through the peak harvest and building season, and consumer freight rates are moving with them.

Strategic Petroleum Reserve refills have kept crude prices from spiking harder, but diesel supply is thinner and less flexible than gasoline. Analysts said the record is likely to translate into higher grocery, produce, and consumer-goods prices by mid-October.

A federal project to stop invasive carp from reaching the Great Lakes is back on after Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer called Trump directly, reversing a Trump administration halt from earlier this summer. Whitmer said the fifteen-minute phone call convinced Trump the project protects a $7 billion fishing industry and 300,000 jobs.

Michigan officials confirmed the project's federal engineering match is now back in the White House budget, and construction on the Brandon Road lock will resume this fall. Environmental groups said the decision shows governors can still win reversals through direct engagement rather than court fights.

Norway's Government Pension Fund Global — the world's largest sovereign wealth fund — plans to trim its US Treasury holdings in coming quarters, citing fiscal-sustainability and Fed-independence concerns. Investment officials said the fund manages about $1.7 trillion and has held US Treasuries as its single largest position for more than a decade.

Fund officials said the reduction is a rebalancing rather than a fire sale, but that they want less US concentration heading into a higher-rate era. Bond desks read the announcement as the first significant sovereign vote against the current US fiscal trajectory since S&P's 2011 downgrade.

Volkswagen's board approved a plan to cut another 50,000 jobs as US tariffs and Chinese EV competition squeeze the automaker's margins from both directions. VW shares jumped 6% on the announcement as investors interpreted the cuts as long-overdue structural discipline.

Rescue crews pulled two hydropower workers out of a collapsed tunnel on the Nepal-Tibet border nine days after Himalayan floods trapped them underground. Officials said the men survived by rationing water pooled in a maintenance chamber and tapping SOS signals into an overhead pipe.

Argentine President Javier Milei escalated the Falklands dispute with Britain this week, threatening to sanction UK oil firms and reiterating Argentine sovereignty over the islands. Milei said Trump's recent comments questioning postwar borders emboldened him to reopen a claim frozen since the 1982 war.

An ICE whistleblower described "unprecedented" drops in background-check standards during the agency's post-2024 hiring spree, warning that unvetted officers are already carrying weapons on operations. Members of Congress from both parties asked DHS's inspector general to open a formal review this week.

The Forest Service will close 23 research facilities as part of a broader agency reorganization under the current administration, ending decades of continuous work on wildfire, hydrology, and forest ecology. Researchers said the closures will effectively erase the federal capacity to track long-term climate impacts on Western forests.

A former Columbus police officer pleaded guilty to reckless homicide Wednesday in the 2022 shooting death of Donovan Lewis, a Black man killed as he lay in bed. Sentencing is set for later this fall under a plea deal that avoids a full jury trial.

New U.S. sanctions target Cuban individuals and a company involved in importing equipment for the island’s struggling electricity system. Additional restrictions could make repairs harder as Cuba deals with blackouts, fuel shortages and persistent inflation.

Nvidia's balance sheet of strategic equity investments in AI-adjacent companies has climbed to $99 billion, making it one of the largest venture capital-scale investors on the planet. Analysts said the position gives Nvidia leverage across the AI stack and blurs the line between chip supplier and platform owner.

Adobe named Anil Chakravarthy as its next chief executive Wednesday, replacing Shantanu Narayen after his 15-year run running the company. Chakravarthy has led Adobe's digital experience business and is expected to accelerate the shift toward agentic-AI creative tooling.

A gene-edited pig kidney has functioned in a human patient for 271 days, the longest xenotransplant survival to date and a threshold researchers said was needed before broader trials could open. Surgeons said the milestone brings organ transplants from other species meaningfully closer to routine clinical use.

The 2026 Ig Nobel Prizes went to research on cockroach milk and other quirky science, alongside studies of kissing apes and anti-splash urinal design. Organizers said this year's slate had the strongest field of genuinely useful findings that also happen to sound absurd.

France recorded its hottest summer since national temperature measurements began more than a century ago, with meteorologists confirming the season broke the 2003 benchmark that killed thousands. Climate scientists said summers of this intensity will become "the new normal" across Southern Europe within a decade.

Teoscar Hernández delivered a walk-off double in the ninth as the Dodgers beat the Cardinals in Los Angeles on Wednesday night. The win keeps the Dodgers in front of the NL West with three weeks left in the regular season.

Colorado blocked Georgia Tech's game-winning field goal with under a minute left to escape with a 14-13 win in Atlanta. Freshman QB Julian Lewis led the Buffs' game-winning drive with 42 seconds left before the defense finished it.

Karen Khachanov knocked out Felix Auger-Aliassime at the US Open Wednesday, an upset that removes the third seed from an already-thin bracket. Khachanov advances to the fourth round with a straightforward path to the quarterfinals as much of the pre-tournament draw collapses around him.

Barilla, the Italian pasta giant, acquired Goodles, the celebrity-backed mac-and-cheese startup Gal Gadot invested in during 2022. Terms were not disclosed, but the deal marks one of the largest CPG acquisitions of a celebrity-backed food brand this year.

Actress Carla Jeffery, known for Disney's Zombies film franchise and a recurring role on Curb Your Enthusiasm, has died at 33. She also appeared across several Disney and Nickelodeon series.

Tom Hardy will return as Harry da Souza for the third season of “MobLand” after months of uncertainty surrounding his future on the series. Confirmation of his season three return preserves the drama’s central character following reports of behind-the-scenes tensions.

What it is: Flock Safety, the private company that supplies automated license-plate cameras to more than 4,000 US cities and towns, is becoming a target in midterm campaigns as candidates on both the left and right run against the concentration of surveillance power in a single private vendor. Voters are objecting to how quietly the cameras arrived — most rollouts happened without public hearings — and how easily the resulting data flows to federal agencies through informal partnerships.

The detail: Flock's cameras capture every license plate that passes and store the data in a searchable national database that police departments, sheriff's offices, and increasingly federal agencies can query. Civil-liberties groups have documented cases where Flock data was queried across state lines to track women driving out of state for reproductive care, and where the same data was pulled into ICE workflows without a warrant or judicial oversight. Elected officials on both the left and the right are converging on the same argument: whether or not surveillance is legitimate policy, it should not be run by one private vendor whose contracts and data-sharing arrangements are largely opaque.

Why it matters: Flock represents a new model where a single private company sits between cities, police, and federal enforcement without the disclosure requirements that would apply if the same infrastructure were run by government. When a private vendor manages both the sensors and the search interface, the accountability chain runs through the vendor's terms of service rather than through public records law, congressional oversight, or Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.

What to watch: Whether any of the ten or twelve competitive Senate races swing on the tech-vendor issue, and whether Congress finally passes federal license-plate-reader legislation that would set uniform retention, query, and audit rules. Municipal-level Flock contracts are also up for renewal in a wave of cities this fall, and a handful of local ordinances have already begun banning specific data-sharing arrangements — which could preview what a federal framework eventually looks like.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team