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The Federal Reserve is set to hold rates steady again, possibly marking Jerome Powell’s final meeting as chair while markets quietly shift toward what comes next. A late-night joke has escalated into a rare FCC move against Disney, raising fresh questions about how far regulators can go in policing media.

And after two months of conflict, the Iran war is finally facing direct scrutiny in a Senate hearing where key decisions and unanswered strikes are set to be challenged.

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The Federal Reserve meets Wednesday with rates expected to hold at 3.50%-3.75%, the seventh straight pause and what may be Jerome Powell's last meeting as chair. Senate Banking is voting the same morning to advance Trump nominee Kevin Warsh to a full Senate floor vote.

Bond markets opened steady ahead of the decision, with the 10-year hovering near 4.36% on the assumption Powell delivers no surprises. Traders are pricing the next move as a cut, not a hike — but only after Warsh is confirmed and the energy pass-through fades.

Justice Department dropped its criminal probe of Powell on Friday, removing the procedural objection Senator Tillis had used to block Warsh in committee. Senate Banking Committee votes Wednesday morning; Warsh's path to the full Senate floor is now considered clear.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr ordered ABC stations to file license-renewal materials within 30 days, three years ahead of the original 2028-2031 schedule. Trigger was Kimmel's "expectant widow" joke about Melania at the WHCA dinner — a joke Trump and the First Lady demanded ABC fire him over.

Senator Warren said the FCC "pulled out a sword" to hang over every news organization in America, with broadcasters reading the move as an explicit threat. Disney has not yet commented; ABC's filings are due by May 28 under the accelerated timeline.

FCC review is the first time licensing authority has been used against a single broadcaster's editorial content since Nixon-era attempts that produced today's renewal-protection rules. Press-freedom groups are mobilizing legal challenges, and the case is likely to reach federal appeals court within months.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chair Caine face their first Congressional hearing of the Iran war Wednesday, two months into the conflict. Bipartisan members are expected to press on Hormuz strategy, the supplemental defense budget, and the still-unexplained Pentagon strike on an Iranian school.

Republicans on the committee have signaled they will push back on what they call "micromanagement" of strategy, but several privately acknowledge the school strike is a vulnerability. Democrats are unified on demanding an after-action statement and a casualty assessment two months has not produced.

Pentagon's extended silence on the strike has drawn open criticism from former defense officials this week — they say the silence violates two decades of post-strike disclosure norms. Hearing is expected to run six hours and will be carried live across all major networks.

Kim Jong Un publicly praised North Korean soldiers who detonated grenades on themselves rather than be captured by Ukrainian forces, confirming long-standing intelligence reports. State media released the comments alongside footage from Sunday's Pyongyang memorial unveiling.

Trump posted an AI-generated image of himself holding a gun on Truth Social Wednesday with the caption "No more Mr. Nice Guy!" Image arrived as US-Iran talks remained frozen and Brent crude traded near $111 a barrel.

Australia is preparing draft legislation to tax major US tech platforms on revenue, with proceeds funding domestic journalism. Bill is expected by July 2 and follows the failure of Australia's 2021 Media Bargaining Code to compel platform-newsroom deals after Meta's exit.

A 17-year-old has been arrested on suspicion of murder after a man was fatally stabbed in a public altercation. Investigators are reviewing CCTV footage to map the moments before the attack.

Two former university staff members are pursuing employment tribunal cases alleging a toxic work culture and bullying, prompting calls for an independent inquiry. The institution has not commented on the specific allegations.

Rainforest losses dropped after stronger enforcement in key regions in environmental reporting. Continued progress depends on keeping fires, illegal clearing and agricultural expansion in check.

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Finland's Kone agreed to buy German rival TK Elevator for $34.4 billion, one of Europe's largest takeovers in years. Combined firm will own roughly 30% of the global elevator-and-escalator market, positioning around urbanization-driven demand in Asia.

A federal judge handed Purdue a $5.5 billion sentence Wednesday for the company's 2020 plea on opioid-marketing fraud and kickback charges. Sentencing clears the path for Purdue's bankruptcy and a $7.4 billion victim-compensation fund finalized last quarter.

Adidas reiterated targets while warning that market conditions remain unpredictable. Ongoing swings in demand, currency, and trade are complicating growth expectations across global markets.

Nature researchers published the first detailed smell maps Tuesday, mapping how mammalian noses spatially track and locate scent across complex backgrounds. Findings overturn the assumption that olfaction is purely concentration-based and could reshape both perfumery and search-and-rescue dog training.

The Pentagon's Chief Digital and AI Office confirmed an expanded partnership with Google after Anthropic was placed on a Pentagon contractor blacklist. Decision reshuffles which frontier AI labs can compete for classified national-security work and signals where DoD priorities are landing.

A Nature explainer Tuesday examined compute-in-orbit proposals where solar exposure is unlimited and cooling effectively free. Math doesn't quite work yet — launch costs and orbital traffic still drive the case toward ground-based hyperscale build-outs for the next decade.

Joel Embiid scored 33 to force Game 6 in Boston, with Philadelphia holding the Celtics to 11 points in the fourth quarter. Series shifts back to Philly Friday with Boston still leading 3-2 and Embiid playing through a minutes restriction.

Drew Romo became the rare switch-hitter to homer from both sides of the plate in his first two MLB at-bats Tuesday. Both came off Angels ace Jose Soriano, capping a 5-2 Chicago win.

Philadelphia fired manager Rob Thomson Tuesday after a 9-19 start that left the Phillies last in the NL East. Don Mattingly takes over as interim, walking into a clubhouse with one of the highest-payroll rosters in baseball.

Actor Sam Neill announced Tuesday that he is now cancer-free after standard chemotherapy stopped working on his blood cancer earlier in the year. Neill said he had spent months thinking he was "on the way out" before a new treatment course took hold.

Apple TV+ released the Ted Lasso Season 4 trailer Tuesday for an August release, with Jason Sudeikis coaching a women's professional team this time. Trailer includes returning cast from the original three seasons plus a wave of new signings.

A long-running gap in nutrition training at US medical schools is leaving doctors poorly equipped to counsel patients on diet. Preventive-medicine advocates want curriculum reforms tied to accreditation standards.

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What it is: World models are systems that learn an internal physics-and-causality picture of reality, the way a 4-year-old does, rather than just predicting the next word. Tech includes Google DeepMind's Genie, Google's Veo 3, OpenAI's reported Sora-V successor, plus academic teams at Berkeley, Tsinghua and ETH Zürich pushing video-conditioned simulation forward.

The detail: Where a language model maps text to text, a world model maps observation to physics — meaning it can predict what happens next if a robot pushes a cup, a basketball is thrown across a room, or a chemical is poured into water. Best current systems simulate roughly 10 seconds of plausible video from a single starting frame, with rapid progress on object permanence — but the math still breaks down when the camera moves more than a few meters or new objects enter frame.

Why it matters: Robotics and self-driving have been waiting for this layer for fifteen years. If a model can simulate the next two seconds of physical world reliably, robots can train inside simulation at a thousand-x the data efficiency of real-world trials, finally cracking the bottleneck that has kept general-purpose home robots permanently five years away.

What to watch: Google's Veo 3 demo released last month exceeded human-evaluator confidence on short clips for the first time, a milestone many in the field had pegged for 2027. Next signal: whether Genie or a competitor can hand off a coherent simulation longer than 30 seconds — the threshold robotics labs flag as the practical minimum for training useful manipulation policies.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team