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A severed backup cable left controllers without radar or communications, canceling more than 600 Newark flights, while Paramount’s $111 billion Warner Bros. takeover clears its final legal hurdle. Elsewhere, Missouri’s disputed House map survives another court fight, and Texas freezes every data center permit pending a grid audit.

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The primary communications line failed at the FAA's Philadelphia facility on Monday, and the backup fiber had already been severed by a construction crew, leaving controllers without radar or communications across Kennedy, LaGuardia, Newark and Philadelphia. Administrator Bryan Bedford put the repair at roughly 13 hours: "It's massive."

By 5 p.m. more than 600 Newark flights were canceled — half the airport's entire schedule — with nearly 200 scrubbed in Philadelphia and close to 100 planes diverted, some after crossing the Atlantic. The FAA had launched an $875 million overhaul of its airspace software the same day.

A three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit ruled that Missouri should use its new Republican-drawn House districts in November, the same lines that governed August's primary, finding that a return to the old map would violate the Constitution.

The panel then delayed its own order a week so the losing side can appeal, and the Supreme Court has already twice sided against this map. Overseas and military ballots went out on the old districts, and absentee ballots must reach everyone else by Tuesday.

Paramount settled with twelve state attorneys general on Monday, clearing the path to close its Warner Bros. Discovery takeover — at $111 billion, the largest merger in Hollywood history — with days to spare before a $7 million-a-day ticking fee was set to start accruing on Oct. 1.

The concessions are structural. Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures must operate as separate studios, releasing 30 films a year for two years, with a new board walling CBS and CNN newsrooms off from corporate interference. Rob Bonta: "The settlement is not a vote of support for this merger."

Britain will refuel Saudi warplanes in the air within weeks, Prime Minister Andy Burnham said, after Houthi forces declared a blockade on Saudi shipping and fired a missile at Riyadh.

London prosecutors charged a doctor over the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the first such case in Britain, alleging he directed and incited acts of murder in Kigali's Rugenge district.

A gunman opened fire outside an Ontario synagogue on Yom Kippur, wounding a 13-year veteran constable; investigators counted as many as 30 shots across half a block.

Contractors severed a Verizon fiber cable in New Jersey and knocked out frequencies at Philadelphia TRACON, triggering FAA ground stops that killed more than 400 Newark flights — a quarter of the day's schedule — hours before world leaders were due at the UN.

Two years after calling him a "Communist Lunatic," Trump meets New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion today while in town for the UN General Assembly.

The FTC's case against Hims & Hers accuses the telehealth company of disclosing health data, auto-enrolling customers in recurring prescriptions and skipping live doctor consultations; Hims calls the whole thing headline-hunting.

The Nasdaq closed at a record, jumping 2.26% to 27,122.09 in its best day since August 4, while the S&P 500 added 1.49%, the Dow gained 366 points and October crude slid more than 5% intraday.

AMD crossed $1 trillion in market value for the first time, surging about 10% to an intraday record $615.52 on a five-day run worth roughly 25% — and it is still a fifth of Nvidia's size.

Meta had its best day since April 2025, climbing 11.4% to $741.25 as options volume ran 4.5 times normal on hype around Muse, its assistant that took 730,000 downloads in five days.

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A battery made from rice paper powered swallowable medical devices inside pigs and then dissolved, researchers dipping the whole thing in beeswax to slow stomach acid down.

Chemical tags silenced hepatitis B in human liver cells and mice with only minor, temporary side effects in monkeys, and a clinical trial has begun in Hong Kong and New Zealand.

The Gates Foundation assembled 60 partners, including Anthropic, Google and the OpenAI Foundation, to build AI language data sets aimed at three billion people over five years.

Jalen Hurts answered his critics again with a nine-play, 65-yard drive and no timeouts left, finding Darius Cooper with nine seconds on the clock to beat Tennessee 24-20.

Alex Bregman took a foul ball in the on-deck circle Sunday and suffered multiple fractures to the face, though no surgery is needed and he hopes to play in October.

Michael Penix starts Thursday night in Green Bay, his first start since tearing an ACL last November, with winless Atlanta turning from Tua Tagovailoa, sidelined by an oblique injury.

Taylor Swift will collect a 31st VMA on Sunday, taking the inaugural Artist Director Honors and breaking a tie with Beyoncé at the top of the all-time list.

Marvel is ending "Daredevil: Born Again" with its third season, already shot and due on Disney+ in 2027, after showrunner Dario Scardapane walked away mid-post-production.

Sylvan Esso is back on Spotify a year after pulling its catalog, with singer Amelia Meath calling the boycott unsustainable because "monopolies are bad".

What it is: Governor Greg Abbott ordered Texas environmental regulators on Monday to halt every data center permit until ERCOT, the state grid operator, finishes auditing its backlog of connection requests. It expands an August directive that froze new grid approvals, and the commission must report back by Oct. 19.

The detail: Texas was on track to pass Virginia as the world's largest data center market by the end of the decade, on a February estimate from JLL. An NBC News poll found 64% of Americans would be less likely to vote for a candidate who "supports building local data centers," and Abbott, facing a tight re-election, now wants the Legislature to strip the industry's financial incentives.

The backlash is not only Texan. More than 100 people turned out in Bideford, Devon on Monday ahead of a council meeting on a £14 billion AI data center and battery project, days after Britain's government rejected a national moratorium.

Why it matters: Data centers are where the AI buildout stops being abstract. They pull power off a shared grid and take hundreds of acres a neighbor can see from the road. Texas courted that trade harder than almost anywhere, and is the first big market reaching for the brake.

What to watch: ERCOT's audit and the Oct. 19 report, which together set how long the freeze runs; whether Texas lawmakers actually strip the incentives that drew the industry in; and whether developers already holding approvals break ground before the rules change.

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Police executing a warrant in suburban Manchester found a python and a caiman named Lyle — a crocodilian that grows to two metres — living unlicensed in a semi-detached house; both have been rehomed to a zoo.

A Trafalgar Square busker let a stranger share his microphone on "Viva la Vida," reasoning that Chris Martin does not roam the streets of London; the audience corrected him afterwards.

Six years after vanishing from a Perthshire roadside, a cat surfaced by breaking into a stranger's house, inhaled the first food offered, and was traced by microchip to owners two and a half hours away.

An Idaho man flipped ten cups face down in 6.63 seconds for a world record, after five months of practice that began as a bet with a coworker.

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" runs in The Sun (1897) · Boeing's XB-29 Superfortress makes its first flight from Seattle (1942) · ABC's Monday Night Football debuts (1970) · Ferdinand Marcos's Proclamation 1081 is dated today, announced two days later (1972) · Sandra Day O'Connor is confirmed to the Supreme Court (1981) · NASA steers Galileo into Jupiter, ending fourteen years (2003)

"We haven't lost a spacecraft, we've gained a steppingstone into the future of space exploration." — Torrence V. Johnson, Galileo project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

That’s your Five Minute Daily. Thanks for starting the day with us — share this briefing with someone who wants to stay informed without the noise, and we’ll be back tomorrow with what matters next.

—The Five Minute Daily Team