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The Senate narrowly rejected an effort to require congressional approval for continued U.S. military action against Iran just hours after new American strikes, while the American Red Cross warned it has less than a day's supply of O-positive blood.

Belgian authorities also arrested a suspected spy accused of operating inside NATO headquarters.

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A war-powers resolution requiring congressional sign-off on continued US strikes on Iran failed 49-50 in the Senate Thursday. One Republican crossed the aisle. The vice president wasn't even needed to break the tie. The vote came hours after the US launched a fresh round of retaliatory strikes inside Iran.

Lawmakers on both sides admitted the conflict has stretched well past its original scope. That didn't change the math. The White House now has a free hand for the foreseeable future — and Congress has another resolution to draft.

The American Red Cross declared a national blood supply crisis Thursday, only the second such declaration in its history. Summer donations hit a four-year low. The organization now has less than a day's supply of type O positive on hand.

Heat, holidays, and travel always thin the donor pool this time of year. But this drop is sharper than expected. The Red Cross supplies roughly 40% of the country's blood — meaning shortages ripple through hospital networks far beyond its own centers.

Belgian prosecutors arrested a suspected spy accused of gathering intelligence while working as an intern at NATO's military headquarters near Mons, one of the alliance's most sensitive sites. A Canadian woman of Chinese origin, she was detained after NATO's own security services flagged her activity and tipped off Belgian authorities.

Investigators raided both her home and workplace as they moved to determine what, if anything, she managed to access or quietly pass on. Coming at a moment of acute tension with both Russia and China, the case has rattled an alliance that depends on absolute trust among its members.

Spain mobilized its military after thousands of migrants crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, the six-mile peninsula Madrid has governed for centuries. The surge has reignited a long-simmering diplomatic feud with Rabat and fired up domestic politics at home.

Record-low water on the Danube forced Hungary to shut down its Paks nuclear plant, which supplies roughly half the country's electricity and depends on the river for cooling. Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia are wrestling with the same heatwave-driven drought squeezing grids across southeastern Europe.

Saudi Arabia and more than a dozen countries, including Egypt and Turkey, announced a new defense coalition to protect Red Sea shipping as the US-Iran war widens. It's one of the more consequential regional realignments since the conflict began — Sunni Gulf states openly organizing around the chokepoint.

A Senate committee advanced a bipartisan bill rejecting the administration's plan to dismantle the Department of Education. It's the strongest congressional pushback yet against the White House's restructuring push, and while it's far from becoming law, the bipartisan support is the part that matters.

Colin Gray, the father of the teenager who carried out the 2024 Apalachee High School shooting in Georgia, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Prosecutors said he bore responsibility for giving his son a gun as the teen's mental health deteriorated.

A court Congress created 30 years ago and never used held its first-ever hearing this week, in an ISIS-linked deportation case involving classified evidence. The Alien Terrorist Removal Court, set up in 1996, lets the Justice Department deport non-citizens using evidence the defendant never gets to see.

Apple reported fiscal Q3 revenue that topped estimates as iPhone sales jumped 22%, though services came in softer than Wall Street wanted. Services has been the company's growth engine for years — so any wobble there tends to overshadow a strong hardware quarter.

Situational Awareness, the AI-focused hedge fund started by a 24-year-old that briefly became Wall Street's buzziest name, has been rescued by Ken Griffin's Citadel. Hype cycles compress fastest on a trading floor.

Amazon posted $62.6 billion in Q2 profit on more than $200 billion in revenue, boosted by paper gains on its Anthropic stake, while ad revenue jumped 26% to $19.8 billion. The ad business is now closing in on an $80 billion annual run rate — quietly rivaling Meta and Google.

Scientists sequenced smallpox viruses from 500-year-old remains in Chile and found the ancient strain looked considerably less lethal than the version that later ravaged the globe. That suggests the virus's deadliness evolved after arriving in the Americas — upending long-held assumptions about how the pathogen behaved on contact.

Researchers demonstrated a quantum computation that outperformed classical machines and, crucially, produced results that could be independently verified. Verifiability has been the field's soft spot. Fast is nice. Fast and correct is the actual product.

Astronomers identified the first three-lobed asteroid in our solar system, with a tiny moon in orbit for good measure. The odd geometry gives scientists a rare look at how loosely bound rubble-pile objects form and hold together in deep space.

Kody Clemens, no-hit through six innings, launched a two-out, two-strike walk-off grand slam in the ninth to lift the Twins over the Royals 4-3. Noah Cameron carried the no-hit bid deep before the Kansas City bullpen coughed it up in spectacular fashion.

A Florida memorabilia collector pulled a 1-of-1 Shohei Ohtani Dual Gold Logoman autographed card and sold it for more than $10 million, according to the buyer. It sets a new ceiling for modern baseball cards and confirms Ohtani has broken the hobby the same way he broke the pitching-and-hitting binary.

With MLB's trade deadline hours away, the Yankees are asking about Orioles catcher Adley Rutschman, the Cubs are chasing Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, and someone (not Detroit) is asking Cincinnati about a top prospect for Hunter Greene. Actual deals have been scarce — which usually means the last three hours produce most of them.

Universal and Imax have extended 70mm screenings of Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" into mid-September after showings sold out weeks in advance. Theater chains have been quietly celebrating what the extension confirms: a director can still turn a format into an event.

A Swiss producer sued Netflix for $105 million after the streamer lost an unencrypted copy of his WWII film "Fortitude," starring Nicolas Cage and Ben Kingsley. Simon Afram says he spent seven years and $45 million on the movie, which now apparently exists only in the memories of everyone who watched a screener.

"The Devil Wears Prada 2," which grossed $677 million at the summer box office, is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. The turnaround suggests Disney is testing just how compressed a modern release window can get before it collapses entirely.

What it is: Beneath a headline economy of soaring tech stocks and record corporate profits, ordinary American households are showing unmistakable signs of financial strain. Personal bankruptcies have climbed sharply, rising roughly 48% between 2022 and 2025 even as the stock market kept minting fresh new highs. A parallel squeeze is now building in health care, where federal subsidies that hold down Medicare drug costs are set to disappear at the end of the year.

The detail: The bankruptcy surge still sits below pre-pandemic levels, but its sheer speed has alarmed economists who track household balance sheets, ballooning credit-card debt and the slow erosion of pandemic-era savings. At the same time, the administration's move to end Medicare drug subsidies could push premiums sharply higher for millions of older Americans in 2027. Higher borrowing costs, sticky inflation near 3.3%, and a cooling job market have combined to leave many families with far thinner cushions than the top-line numbers ever suggest.

Why it matters: The widening gap between Wall Street's exuberance and Main Street's quiet anxiety is fast becoming one of the defining economic stories of the year. When corporate earnings and consumer distress point in opposite directions, policymakers face an agonizing choice between taming inflation and protecting households already stretched to the very brink. A rising tide of bankruptcies and health-care costs can quietly reshape everything from consumer spending to the outcome of the coming midterm elections.

What to watch: Watch whether bankruptcy filings keep accelerating through the second half of the year, a clear signal that the squeeze is deepening rather than stabilizing. Keep a close eye on how insurers reprice Medicare drug plans once the subsidies lapse, since those numbers will land in mailboxes just as the political calendar heats up. Any move by the Federal Reserve to cut rates could ease the pressure, but real relief looks unlikely while inflation stays this stubborn.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team