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The Trump administration is moving to strip federal standards from Head Start, Peru's former president has won a dramatic legal reprieve, and a massive migrant surge into Spain's Ceuta is testing Europe's border policies.

Inside, you'll also find Oracle's high-stakes AI expansion, breakthroughs in wearable health tech, and Hollywood's latest box office milestone.

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 After failing to zero out its funding, the Trump administration is now pursuing a plan to strip federal standards from Head Start, the preschool program for low-income children. The rollback targets rules on health screenings, early literacy benchmarks, and requirements as granular as toothbrushing.

 Supporters say local providers can set their own bar without Washington micromanaging. Critics see it differently. The standards exist because poor children have historically received the least oversight — and loosening them risks widening the very gap the program was built to close.

Peru's former president Ollanta Humala had his 15-year sentence overturned, erasing a money-laundering conviction that a court had handed down against him back in 2025. Humala's wife had been convicted alongside him in the same sprawling case tied to foreign campaign financing.

Peru's Constitutional Court ruled that key due-process protections were violated during the prosecution, ordering the conviction thrown out and reopening one of the country's highest-profile corruption cases. The decision returns the matter to the courts for further proceedings, extending the legal fallout from the Odebrecht scandal that has ensnared multiple former Peruvian presidents over the past decade.

Roughly 60,000 migrants surged into Ceuta from Morocco overnight, overwhelming the small enclave's frontier in one of the largest single crossings in recent memory. Spain's prime minister blamed organized traffickers, and most had already returned to Morocco by Friday evening after the military deployed.

At least nine people died in the crush at the border fence, according to Spanish authorities still working to tally the full toll. Italy retaliated by suspending its Schengen free-movement deal with Madrid, while Trump seized on the chaos to amplify his own border message.

A new Interior Department blueprint would impose potentially steep water cuts on Arizona, California and Nevada over the coming decade, sparing upstream states Colorado, Utah and New Mexico for now. Cities, tribes and farms across the Lower Basin will absorb the pain of a shrinking river that supplies 40 million people.

A methane explosion tore through a coal mine in one of Pakistan's main mining regions, killing at least 34 workers as rescuers kept digging for more bodies. The country's mines are chronically underregulated, and gas explosions claim dozens of lives every year.

A Myanmar court handed 37-year sentences to a group of pro-democracy activists for staging a peaceful protest against an election critics call staged. The junta's crackdown keeps escalating as it tries to manufacture legitimacy through the ballot box.

Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have added the Council on American-Islamic Relations to state terrorism designation lists — an unusual move given that terrorism designations are traditionally a federal power. CAIR, the country's largest Muslim civil rights nonprofit, called the labels politically motivated and legally dubious.

Republican senators voted unanimously against expanding military coverage of in vitro fertilization for service members, killing a proposal many in the party had previously supported. The shift shows how post-Dobbs politics have reshaped GOP positioning on fertility treatments.

The State Department is rolling out passports featuring President Trump's portrait at 27 agencies across the country, expanding a program that had been limited to Washington. Officials call it a commemorative option; critics see a presidential likeness on a federal travel document as a norm worth arguing about.

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Shares of Novo Nordisk fell hard after its experimental drug ziltivekimab failed to show a meaningful reduction in major cardiovascular events in a late-stage trial. Another setback for a pipeline the market had been counting on to diversify beyond Ozempic and Wegovy.

BP is putting its entire North Sea operation up for sale, ending 60 years of production in the region that helped build the company. The move follows a strategic review as the oil major pivots capital toward higher-margin fields elsewhere.

Sainsbury's has agreed to offload Argos for £120 million, though the retailer will keep operating concessions inside Sainsbury's supermarkets and continue offering Nectar points. It closes a chapter on a decade-old merger that never quite delivered the synergies executives promised.

Archaeologists have documented hundreds of geometric earthworks carved into the Amazon, some more than 2,500 years old, shaped by embankments and ditches across huge swaths of forest. The find keeps rewriting the old assumption that the pre-Columbian Amazon was sparsely populated wilderness.

Engineers at UC San Diego have built an experimental smart ring that continuously analyzes finger sweat to track glucose, alcohol and other metabolic markers in real time. If it survives commercial development, it could push wearables past heart rate and steps into real diagnostic territory.

Beyond the collision itself, researchers plan to study the dust plume kicked up when the rocket strikes, offering a rare look at material buried below the lunar surface. It's an accidental experiment that would have cost hundreds of millions to run on purpose.

CBS Sports has placed Tony Romo on indefinite leave after his arrest for operating while intoxicated in Wisconsin, with JJ Watt getting elevated to the lead broadcast booth. It's an abrupt turn for the network's marquee color analyst just weeks before the NFL season.

Spurs star Victor Wembanyama has signed a long-term extension with Nike that includes his own signature sneaker line, joining the small club of active players with their own shoe. Nike is betting the 7-foot-4 phenom becomes the marketing centerpiece of the next NBA decade.

Attorneys for NBA veteran Terry Rozier argued in a court filing that a text from a co-defendant shows he didn't know about the alleged gambling scheme he's been indicted over. Prosecutors read the same message very differently, setting up a pretrial fight over what the words actually meant.

The Metropolitan Museum's next Costume Institute blockbuster and gala will center on designer John Galliano, making him one of only three living designers ever to receive the honor. The choice is already contentious given Galliano's 2011 antisemitic tirade, which the Met will have to address alongside the retrospective.

Warner Bros. is scrambling to strike a deal with Mattel for a Barbie sequel before December, when the rights revert to the toymaker. The original grossed $1.5 billion — so the pressure to keep the franchise in-house is roughly $1.5 billion large.

"Spider-Man: Brand New Day" shattered the box office record with a staggering $72 million in early previews, comfortably topping "Avengers: Endgame." Tom Holland's latest web-slinging outing now looks firmly poised for a truly massive opening weekend.

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What it is: Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, at 81, is reengineering his data empire into an artificial intelligence juggernaut, making debt-fueled bets that dwarf anything he attempted in the database era. The plan hinges on turning Oracle's cloud into the backbone infrastructure for the AI industry's largest customers.

The detail: Oracle has been signing massive multi-year contracts to lease computing capacity to AI companies, financing enormous data centers through borrowing rather than cash flow. Ellison — long dismissed by rivals as late to the cloud — has become one of the world's richest men on the theory that whoever owns the picks and shovels of the AI gold rush wins regardless of which model comes out on top. The company has also secured high-profile partnerships with firms building frontier AI models, giving Oracle a foothold in one of the fastest-growing segments of enterprise computing and helping reshape investor perceptions of its long-term growth prospects.

Why it matters: If Ellison is right, Oracle rejoins the front rank of tech companies alongside Microsoft, Amazon and Google. If he's wrong — if AI demand softens, or if hyperscalers eat his lunch — Oracle is left with a mountain of debt and a fleet of depreciating GPUs, and Ellison becomes the emblem of a bubble that popped. The outcome will influence not only Oracle's future but also whether investors continue rewarding companies willing to spend aggressively on AI infrastructure before profits fully materialize.

What to watch: The tell will be whether Oracle's booked backlog converts into recurring revenue at the margins promised, and whether the company can keep financing capex without spooking bondholders. Nvidia's chip roadmap and any signs of AI capex fatigue at Meta, Microsoft or Google will move Oracle's stock as much as its own earnings do. Analysts will also be watching customer renewal rates and the pace of new cloud contract announcements for evidence that AI demand remains durable rather than driven by short-term hype.

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