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As the search for survivors in Colombia reaches its most critical phase, several other major stories are unfolding: Poland says it foiled an alleged Russian assassination plot, Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty, and Europe's relentless heatwave is now straining power grids, rivers and critical infrastructure.

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Rescue crews in Cali demanded total silence around the debris fields Thursday as the survival window narrowed following the most powerful earthquake to strike Colombia this century. Cali, Pereira, Manizales and Quibdó absorbed the worst of the damage, and aid agencies treat the first two to three days after a quake as the prime window for pulling anyone out alive.

Volunteer rescuer Rojas, working the Cali sites since the shaking stopped, has witnessed only two people recovered alive from the rubble. Authorities now concede the operation is quietly shifting from rescue toward body recovery, the transition that families waiting behind the cordons have been dreading since Wednesday.

Poland says it broke up a Russian plot to assassinate an American citizen in Warsaw, and Prime Minister Donald Tusk framed the case as a first for the entire alliance. Never before, Tusk said Thursday, has someone acting on the order of Russia targeted a US citizen on the soil of another NATO country.

Warsaw police detained the suspect, allegedly recruited by Russia's secret services, on Aug. 7 and will hold him for three months while the investigation continues. Tusk described the intended target only as a Ukrainian-American who was "uncomfortable for the Putin regime," declining to say anything further about who the man is or what he does.

Luigi Mangione is expected to plead guilty as early as Friday in the federal case over the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a person familiar with the matter told the AP. Defense attorneys are meeting federal prosecutors on Friday, and both Mangione's lawyers and Manhattan federal prosecutors have so far declined to comment on the reported agreement.

Mangione, 28, faced possible life sentences in both federal and state court over the Dec. 4, 2024 shooting outside a Manhattan hotel. New York's double jeopardy protections kick in the moment the federal prosecution ends in a plea, which would badly scramble the state murder trial currently set to begin Sept. 8.

Mount Etna is belching enough ash to ground hundreds of flights across Sicily, snarling travel plans for tens of thousands during peak summer. Etna erupts often, but experts say this week's ash volume is unusual, and Catania's airport has been intermittently unusable for days.

An explosion at Rotterdam's port killed at least one person and injured several others Thursday at Europe's largest shipping hub. Police spokesperson Daan Valkenburg told the AP that investigators had drawn no definitive conclusions and were "keeping all possibilities open," while a separate transformer fire and major power failure forced several companies to halt work and evacuate.

Israeli forces ordered Palestinian families out of their homes in Qusra on Thursday while moving to dislodge settlers who had besieged three houses since Sunday, cutting off power and water. Mayor Abdel Azim Wadi told the BBC the occupied West Bank village had been declared a closed military zone, and Israeli spokesman David Mencer called the settlers' conduct "deplorable" and "unacceptable."

Senator Richard Blumenthal has raised alarms over conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, where roughly 5,000 personnel have now been deployed for more than 250 straight days. Blumenthal's letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth catalogues food shortages, water contamination, plumbing failures and deteriorating mental health, all of which Hegseth insists have been "completely misrepresented."

A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration's lawsuit accusing Harvard of tolerating antisemitism, finding the government never proved an ongoing federal civil rights violation. US District Judge Richard Stearns in Boston ruled the cited incidents, drawn mostly from the 2023-24 academic year, were "too isolated and episodic" to sustain the case.

Border czar Tom Homan defended ICE's electric shock gloves on Thursday as a way to force compliance without escalating straight to deadly force. Homan's argument arrives as ICE prepares to spend up to $20 million on thousands of the devices, after at least six people were shot and killed by immigration agents over the past year.

Tennessee and Oklahoma put two men to death within roughly half an hour of each other Thursday, the first time three executions were scheduled for a single day in 16 years. Eleven states executed 47 people in 2025, the highest annual total since 2009, and 21 people have already been put to death in 2026 with nearly a dozen more on the calendar.

The S&P 500 closed at a record 7,798.99 on Thursday, up 50.49 points or 0.7%, as cooling inflation data and falling crude prices pushed stocks past last week's high. Nasdaq added 214.54 points to reach 26,803.03 while the Dow gained 69.72 to 53,839.99, and Brent crude slid 2.1% to $87.07 a barrel.

Wholesale prices came in flat for July, below the 0.2% rise economists had penciled in and the second cool inflation print of the week. Annual PPI cooled to 4.7% from 5.5% in June, and futures markets now put the odds of a September Fed rate hike at 35%, down from roughly 50% two days earlier.

Workday logged its best day in a decade after a report that private equity firm Silver Lake is in talks to take the software company private. Trading in the stock was halted intraday as it spiked, and neither Workday nor Silver Lake has publicly confirmed that any deal is actually in progress.

Researchers told Nature that Anthropic's invisible text watermarks are already exposing undisclosed AI use, but they doubt the technique can meaningfully slow the flood of machine-written filler. Claude models released since Aug. 2 subtly bias word selection to embed a hidden signal, and watermark detection at the ICML 2026 conference flagged 506 reviewers violating the event's no-AI policy.

A Princeton group reported that AI is not ready to conduct its own research, grading a Claude-based system 2 out of 6 and 1 out of 6 on two genuine scientific tasks. Sayash Kapoor's team used "shadow evaluation," handing the output to the original papers' authors for marking, and found the system ran hundreds of clean experiments while locking onto its hypotheses far too early.

Nature examined the evidence on whether the mRNA flu shot will genuinely outperform a conventional seasonal vaccine this winter. Moderna's mFLUSIVA, approved Aug. 5 for adults 50 and older, cut confirmed influenza by 26.6% across a trial of more than 40,000 adults and produced stronger antibody responses than existing high-dose shots in the over-65s.

Josh Kushner and Bob Iger have agreed to buy the Lakers for $12.5 billion, a record price for any professional sports franchise in North America. Ramona Shelburne's sources confirmed the agreement Thursday, and ESPN followed with a separate piece on how rival executives and agents are reacting to the sheer scale of the valuation.

Barcelona and Spain forward Ferran Torres is joining Paris Saint-Germain in a deal worth roughly €50 million, sources told ESPN on Thursday evening. PSG, the reigning European champions, reached an agreement in principle with the Catalan club according to reporters Sam Marsden and Moises Llorens.

Reds ace Hunter Greene underwent Tommy John surgery on Thursday to repair a damaged ligament in his right elbow. Cincinnati will be without him for the remainder of 2026 and quite possibly all of 2027, a timeline that hollows out the front of their rotation for two full seasons.

Matthew McConaughey said 2003's "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days" is by far his best "mailbox money" — the residual checks that keep arriving with no additional work required. The rom-com, he said, is "the gift that keeps on giving" more than two decades on.

HBO's House of the Dragon finale drew 21 million viewers within three days, more than 11 million of them inside the United States. Season three averaged 34 million viewers an episode against season two's 35 million, and Larry David's comedy wrapped the same night averaging roughly 4 million US viewers per episode.

Apple TV recorded its biggest launch to date as Ted Lasso's fourth season racked up 296.6 million minutes watched over just two days. Jason Sudeikis returns as Ted three years on from the last finale, this time back in Richmond coaching a second-division women's side.

What it is: Europe's fifth heatwave of 2026 has stopped being a story about discomfort and started being a story about infrastructure failing under load. Romania shut its only nuclear plant on Thursday because the Danube no longer carries enough water to cool it, disconnecting the second of two 706-megawatt reactors at Cernavodă just before midday.

The detail: Britain logged its hottest day of 2026 at 38.1C in Kew Gardens, the fifth-highest reading in UK records, while weeks of almost no rainfall in central Italy dropped the Tiber far enough to expose an ancient bridge beside St Peter's Basilica. Archaeologist Antonella Bonini of Rome's cultural heritage office notes the structure known as Nero's Bridge was most likely built under Caligula and already stood by 39 AD, which is a fairly blunt way of saying the river has not sat this low in a very long time.

Why it matters: River levels are load-bearing for the European economy in ways that almost never surface publicly until the moment they stop working, and a heatwave that merely felt unpleasant last week is now removing generating capacity from the grid. The Danube cools reactors, moves freight, feeds irrigation and spins hydropower turbines across ten countries, so a shutdown at Cernavodă pushes Romania onto imported electricity during precisely the week that air-conditioning demand peaks and its neighbours are straining under the same heat dome.

What to watch: Whether Cernavodă restarts is now a question about rainfall rather than engineering, and the medium-range European forecast is offering very little encouragement to anyone hoping for a quick fix. Watch the Rhine next, where low water has repeatedly forced German industry to lighten barge loads and pay far more per ton of freight, and watch whether any government in the region actually has surplus power to sell once every major river on the continent is thinning at the same time.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team