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President Trump is pressuring Senate Republicans with a threat to revive a $1.8 billion fund as the standoff over his agenda intensifies, while Iranian drone attacks are drawing Gulf states deeper into the conflict.

You'll also find California's minimum wage hike, a landmark AI math breakthrough, and the discovery of mysterious "ghost" ancestors hidden in human DNA.

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President Trump threatened to revive a $1.8bn 'anti-weaponisation' fund, declaring the money "will immediately be back on the table" if senators keep stalling. A deepening standoff over confirmations and Justice Department picks pushed him toward the dramatic ultimatum.

Republicans remain sharply split over whether to bow to the president's demands or defend the chamber's fraying institutional traditions. Senators named directly in the fight now face relentless pressure from both the White House and their own party leadership.

Kuwait says it downed a wave of Iranian drones as President Trump threatened to intensify the U.S. campaign, and American embassies across the Gulf warned citizens of the "potential for unforeseen escalation." Separate reporting shows Tehran spent a brief truce quietly coordinating a wider war plan with regional proxies designed to raise the cost on U.S. forces.

The drones push the confrontation past Iran's usual targets and into wealthy Gulf capitals that had tried to sit this one out. Oil markets and shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz are now bracing for a genuinely regional war.

Investigators released the handwritten ransom notes tied to the kidnapping of a mother related to Today host Savannah Guthrie, hoping the notes' "distinct linguistic characteristics" jog someone's memory. Guthrie said in a statement that "our hearts are in ruins."

The FBI is treating the phrasing and handwriting as its strongest lead — an unusual public play that suggests other angles have stalled. High-profile kidnappings of a celebrity's family member remain rare in the U.S., which is why federal resources have flooded the case.

An Israeli settler told the BBC that attacks on Palestinians are justified as revenge, as violence surges across the occupied West Bank. Settlements and outposts keep expanding even as international pressure builds.

A small sightseeing plane crashed over Peru's famed Nazca Lines on Friday, killing all 13 people aboard the tourist flight. Investigators have not yet identified a cause for the crash above the fragile UNESCO World Heritage site.

Italy placed almost all its major cities on the highest heat alert, with Rome, Milan and Naples under red warnings. Forecasters expect all but two big cities on top alert by Monday.

Governor Gavin Newsom announced that California's minimum wage will rise to $17.40 an hour on January 1, the highest state floor in the country. Newsom paired the announcement with pointed jabs at the Trump administration, framing the increase as a rebuke of federal wage policy.

The Labor Department is unwinding Biden-era plans to require heat protections for outdoor workers, opting for what officials call a gentler approach with employers. The reversal lands during one of the hottest summers on record for farm, construction and warehouse crews.

A federal contract funding legal counsel for unaccompanied immigrant minors expired Friday, stripping more than 25,000 children of court representation as their cases proceed. Advocacy groups warn that children as young as three will now face deportation proceedings without an attorney.

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The U.S. Treasury intervened to support the yen after Tokyo stepped in first, marking Washington's first yen-buying operation with Japan in more than ten years as the currency languishes near 40-year lows. The move suggests a coordinated line in the sand against further yen weakness that had begun rattling U.S. exporters.

Shares of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway climbed to an eight-month high this week, with analysts flagging room for more gains if the conglomerate plays catch-up to the S&P 500. The rally comes as investors rotate back into insurance and industrials-heavy names amid volatile tech valuations.

Currency traders reacted to the yen intervention by trimming short positions against the dollar, resetting one of the year's most crowded trades. Whether the Treasury-Tokyo action holds depends on next week's Bank of Japan meeting and any signal on rates.

An AI-assisted counterexample has disproved the Jacobian conjecture above two dimensions, collapsing 87 years of unsolved algebra into a formula short enough to fit in a single social media post. The original two-dimensional version stays open, but the result is being called one of the clearest wins yet for AI-assisted math.

Scientists analyzing fibers taken from the Shroud of Turin nearly five decades ago have uncovered a complex record of DNA traces accumulated over centuries. The Scientific Reports study doesn't resolve the shroud's origin debate, but it does map the biological fingerprints of everyone who has handled it.

Researchers studying the TBX5 gene found that a single defective copy is enough to unravel the three-dimensional structure of heart DNA, leading to congenital heart defects even when the second copy is healthy. The finding opens a new therapeutic target for a class of birth defects long considered nearly unsolvable.

Caitlin Clark recorded her fourth career triple-double as the Indiana Fever won their fifth straight, and she became the fastest player in WNBA history to reach 1,500 points and 500 assists. The Fever's win over the Fire keeps them in playoff contention despite the season's off-court distractions.

The Pittsburgh Pirates agreed to a trade for Yankees reliever Camilo Doval, adding bullpen depth as they chase their first playoff appearance in 11 years. It's Pittsburgh's most aggressive deadline move in years and signals real belief in a wild card push.

A Colorado judge ruled Friday that all players from the 2022 recruiting class are eligible for a fifth season, sending college football GMs scrambling to rework rosters weeks before kickoff. The decision could reshape depth charts across the FBS and reopen the transfer portal in ways nobody planned for.

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Vincent Pastore, who played Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero on HBO's The Sopranos, has died at age 80. Pastore anchored the first two seasons of the mob drama and delivered one of the most iconic scenes in prestige TV history.

Day three of Lollapalooza was delayed from noon to 3 p.m. CT amid intense flooding, with Wolf Alice and K-pop group Cortis both taking shortened sets. Several other acts were canceled outright as organizers scrambled to salvage the final day.

The Locarno Film Festival opened with its leopard mascot once again prowling the Swiss lakeside city, a symbol the artistic director says captures the festival's willingness to hunt where it wants. It remains one of Europe's most influential showcases for arthouse premieres.

What it is: Scientists have identified two 'ghost' lineages of ancient human relatives whose DNA still survives in people alive today, even though no fossils or sequenced genomes of them have ever been found. A team at the University of California, Berkeley reported the discovery in the journal Science on 30 July.

The detail: Led by geneticist Priya Moorjani, with lead authors Yulin Zhang and Arjun Biddanda, the researchers built a method called TRACE that detects archaic ancestry using only present-day human genomes, without any ancient DNA to compare against. One ghost lineage interbred with humans in Africa more than 50,000 years ago and left roughly 0.5 to 1 percent of its DNA in every living person. A second, far older lineage split around 1.8 million years ago, later mixed with the Denisovans, and shows up most strongly in Pacific Islander and Oceanian populations, where Denisovan ancestry alone can reach about 4 percent.

Why it matters: Neither group left behind bones or directly sequenced DNA, yet their genetic traces cluster in stretches of the genome tied to immunity and metabolism, functions central to how the body fights disease and processes food. Their finding adds to growing evidence that human ancestry resembles a web of interbreeding populations rather than a single branching tree, with Neanderthals and Denisovans only part of the picture. Because TRACE needs no ancient samples, it can probe populations whose deep history has been hard to reconstruct from fossils alone.

What to watch: The team says TRACE could be turned on other species to reveal hidden episodes of interbreeding across the tree of life. Follow-up studies will test whether these inherited archaic genes affect health or physical traits in people today, and whether still more unidentified ancestors remain to be found.

That’s today’s Five Minute Daily. Share it with someone who wants a clear, fast read on the day’s biggest stories.

—The Five Minute Daily Team