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U.S. stocks tumbled Thursday as Treasury yields climbed again, wiping out the prior session's relief rally and knocking the Dow down roughly 700 points. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq followed, with rate-sensitive tech taking the brunt.

The trigger? A day earlier, Treasury had unveiled a plan to tame long-dated yields. Traders shrugged and kept selling. Which leaves the White House with the oldest problem in the book: bond vigilantes have deeper pockets than any policy memo.

FBI agents searched the home of California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell on Thursday as part of a federal sexual assault inquiry. That's an unusual venue — most sex crimes get prosecuted at the state level. Agents appear to be leaning on federal civil rights statutes.

Swalwell, a former House Intelligence and Judiciary member, has not been charged. What makes the case unusual is the federal footing. What makes it radioactive is everything else.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the United States intends to "squash" Iran's economy, framing sanctions as regime change rather than pressure. Allies got a blunt instruction along with it — "You are either with us or against us" — and were told to decide now rather than later.

Trump's Truth Social post set the tone on Wednesday night, calling the campaign an "ECONOMIC D-DAY" that every ally must join. Bessent also ruled out a return to large-scale fighting, arguing that maximum economic pressure makes a "kinetic restart" unlikely for now.

A boat carrying more than 70 people capsized in Sokoto state on Thursday, and police say 46 bodies have been recovered near the village of Gorau. Sixteen passengers were pulled out alive while 15 are still missing, and rescuers are struggling to reach a remote stretch of water.

Moscow has ramped up missile barrages on Ukrainian cities, exploiting Kyiv's dwindling stockpile of Western-supplied air-defense interceptors. Civilian casualties are rising as Russia bets Ukraine can no longer shoot down what it launches.

Five Western allies — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Canada — called Israel's plan for roughly 1,200 new settlement homes "unacceptable" in a joint statement and demanded an immediate retraction. Tenders cover land in a strategically vital stretch of the occupied West Bank, where all settlements are illegal under international law.

Nearly 2,300 Mexican nationals have gone to Guatemala this year and dozens more to Honduras, part of a fast-growing third-country deportation program. Mexicans removed from the United States were previously sent home to Mexico, making this one of the sharpest procedural shifts of Trump's second term.

Prosecutors charged Jessica Bowie, 35, with federal terrorism over an alleged plan to set off explosives at the New York state Capitol and kill lawmakers. FBI agents had watched her for more than a month, and say she believed recently passed laws were an affront to Islam.

Federal funding cuts left local food safety programs badly understaffed, and states around West Virginia are now the center of a record cyclosporiasis outbreak. Bob Custard, a 40-year veteran of environmental health work, compared it to pulling the smoke detectors out of a house and hoping for the best.

Bitcoin climbed past $72,000 on Thursday, its highest level since June 1 and the top of a 12% two-day run from about $63,000. White House and industry lobbying for the Clarity Act drove the move, amplified by roughly $2.7 billion in liquidated short positions.

June-quarter net income fell 75% as capital expenditure rose 75% to 67.7 billion yuan, or about $10 billion. Alibaba shares dropped 5% even though revenue climbed 9% to 268.95 billion yuan, with chip component prices eating the payoff from its cloud buildout.

CEO José Muñoz told CNBC the company will lift capacity at its Georgia Metaplant to between 700,000 and 800,000 vehicles a year by 2028, up from 500,000 today. Plans call for $26 billion of US investment through 2028, with a target of building at least 80% of American sales domestically.

A personalized mRNA vaccine from Merck and Moderna cut melanoma recurrence in a phase III trial of about 1,100 patients, the first late-stage win for the approach. Each dose is built from a patient's own tumour neoantigens, chosen by AI, though manufacturing still takes several months per person.

Signs of LLM-assisted writing turned up in roughly 90% of PubMed papers published last December, up from 52% across all of 2024. Co-author Dmitry Kobak said his first reaction to the number was certainty that his team had made a mistake somewhere in the analysis.

Data center backlash hit advertising this week, as Liquid Death and the Kelce brothers' Garage Beer put out a 90-second spot offering to send viewers' urine to cool the servers. Florida voters went to the polls the same day the clip dropped, in primaries where data centers were already a live local issue.

James Harden agreed to a three-year, $97 million deal with the Cavaliers that includes a player option for 2028-29 and a trade kicker. Career earnings now reach $511 million, making Harden the fourth player ever past $500 million, six days before he turns 37.

Austin Jackson and Jermaine Eluemunor were both ejected for throwing punches, and coaches pulled players off the field at a chaotic joint practice. Jameis Winston sat out a couple of plays too, and Kayvon Thibodeaux shoved Jackson down after he swung at rookie linebacker Arvell Reese.

Woody Johnson bought a stake in Aston Martin Aramco and joins the board as vice chairman, concentrating on the team's commercial growth in the United States. Johnson, 79, paid $635 million for the Jets in 2000 and took 43% of Crystal Palace last year for a reported $254 million.

Thousands of fans stood in the rain at Ravenna's beachfront on Thursday to greet a 46-year-old who retired more than a decade ago. Ronaldinho arrived by private jet and will miss Monday's Serie C opener, but club president Ignazio Cipriani wants him to score his final goal there.

Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" has passed "Deadpool & Wolverine" with $1.352 billion worldwide, split between $516 million domestic and $835 million overseas. Imax accounts for $354 million of that haul, the format's biggest release ever and well clear of "Avatar."

HBO's 'Lanterns' pulled 9.3 million views in its first three days, including 6.6 million in the US, the biggest DC Studios premiere in HBO Max history. Aaron Pierre and Kyle Chandler headline the eight-episode series, already a top-five platform premiere across every genre.

Labels and distributors will have to flag any track where a material portion was machine-generated, under a "Made With AI" tag arriving later this year. Executives have said more than a third of uploads to Apple Music are already entirely AI-generated.

What it is: NSF grant approvals have collapsed to roughly 6,100 for this fiscal year, about 30% below last year's total and 46% under the agency's 2021-24 average. Internal figures reviewed by Nature put that number at the lowest since the early 1980s, back when American research was a fraction of its current size.

The detail: More than a billion dollars — $1,016,862,632 of an $8.8 billion budget — is being held centrally instead of moving out to labs, much of it reserved for a White House "Grand Research Challenges" push on advanced materials and artificial intelligence. Only 5,684 new grants had gone out as of August 19, with roughly 400 more sitting unsigned at the Office of Award Management.

Who feels it: Grant Witness tracking puts the running total well below any comparable year, and reviewers describe proposals parked indefinitely rather than rejected outright. Jarett Wilcoxen, whose shared-instrument application has sat in limbo for months, is one of thousands waiting on a decision that may simply never arrive this year.

Why it matters: A 43-day government shutdown wrecked the review panel calendar that decides who gets funded and when, and in July the agency clawed back about $300 million from two directorates, killing more than 150 proposals reviewers had already recommended. Another $110 million vanished from education programs the Justice Department declared unconstitutional last week, so the deepest cuts are landing on the pipeline of people who would do the science a decade from now.

What to watch: September 30 closes the fiscal year, and withheld money can legally roll into the next one, so the backlog either clears in a rush or hardens into a permanent hole in the country's research base. Neal Lane, who directed the NSF from 1993 to 1998, put the situation plainly: he would never have imagined any of this happening under a previous administration.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team