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A federal appeals court has kept mail-in voting rules unchanged in 23 states ahead of the midterms, while new data show more than 4 million Americans have lost SNAP benefits under tighter eligibility rules.

We'll also cover mass wildfire evacuations in France and Spain, rising tensions around Taiwan, and a looming record-breaking El Niño.

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A federal appeals court on Saturday declined to lift an injunction blocking the Trump administration from restricting mail-in voting across 23 Democratic-led states. The original injunction came down June 25 after a coalition of state attorneys general challenged federal directives on ballot handling.

State mail-in procedures stay intact through the coming election cycle. The bigger fight — federal versus state authority over ballot access — is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court.

More than a million American children lost access to SNAP food benefits between July 2025 and March 2026, per a new analysis of enrollment data. All told, over 4 million Americans were dropped from the program after Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The drop tracks with tightened work requirements and eligibility rules written into the law. Food banks in several states are already reporting sharp demand spikes as families adjust.

More than 250,000 people have fled wildfires in southern Europe as blazes tear through holiday regions near Bordeaux. Spain's prime minister warned of "complex hours" ahead while French officials admitted the fires remain far from contained.

Care homes and campsites emptied overnight, some evacuations ordered with only minutes of warning. Firefighting crews across both countries brace for shifting winds that could drive the flames toward larger towns.

India's education minister stepped down on Saturday as jubilant youth demonstrators declared victory and ended weeks of nationwide street protests. The unrest ranks as one of the biggest political challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in years.

Belgian authorities arrested a Canadian intern working at NATO military headquarters on suspicion of espionage, describing the woman as "of Chinese origin." Officials wouldn't publicly name the country she's suspected of spying for, but the detail all but points at Beijing.

Taiwan is stepping up plans to secure fuel and other vital imports as Chinese government vessels rehearse maneuvers that could one day be used to blockade the island. The drills mark a shift away from invasion scenarios toward slow-strangulation tactics that would be far harder for allies to counter.

Maine Democrats tapped former state Senate president Troy Jackson as their Senate nominee at a hastily arranged convention after Platner's exit. Jackson, a progressive, now inherits one of the cycle's most closely watched contests.

An investigation into President Trump's push to speed delivery of the next Air Force One found ballooning costs and safety trade-offs tied to the accelerated timeline. Engineers had flagged concerns about compressing testing on an aircraft meant to fly a sitting president.

The Harris County district attorney's office said white powder found in the van of a Houston ICE shooting victim tested negative for narcotics, contradicting earlier federal claims that the substance could be methamphetamine. The finding complicates the government's account of what happened.

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The recent brutal selloff in AI-linked names may actually extend the bull run, some strategists argue, by cooling the year's most crowded trades. Buyers have been quietly stepping back into the beaten-down 2026 winners.

A retail investor whose adviser secured a full SpaceX IPO allocation is asking whether it was luck or something else, given how rare full fills are on hot debuts. Most requesters get a fraction of shares, if any at all.

The Athletics reinstated slugger Nick Kurtz from the 10-day IL before Saturday's game in Minnesota, slotting him at DH batting second. Max Muncy was optioned to make room.

Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 5, the company's flagship frontier model, and pitched it as both its best-performing and most cost-effective offering to date. Release lands the same week Nvidia locked down memory supply through 2029 and Moody's flagged AI capex as a fresh credit-quality concern.

New fossil evidence reshapes the popular picture of adolescent T. rex as awkward growing predators, suggesting instead that hatchlings were fully capable killers from the day they emerged. Finding overturns a longstanding piece of Cretaceous ecology and shifts the debate about the species' pack-hunting behavior.

A bespoke gene therapy dropped seizure frequency to near-zero in two boys with a rare, previously untreatable form of severe epilepsy, according to results published this week. Treatment was designed patient-by-patient in a workflow researchers said could eventually apply to hundreds of ultra-rare pediatric conditions.

Mets All-Star Juan Soto was diagnosed with a Grade 2 left calf strain and hit the 10-day IL, with the team bracing for a significant absence. Grade 2 strains typically mean weeks, not days.

Jordan Devey, a former NFL guard who won Super Bowl XLIX with the Patriots and played seven seasons across five teams, has died at 38. His family said the cause was suicide. Teammates and coaches paid tribute across Saturday.

Raiders tight end Brock Bowers announced his engagement to Cameron Newell at the spot where the couple's relationship first began. The news landed just as training camps get underway.

The Athletics reinstated slugger Nick Kurtz from the 10-day IL before Saturday's game in Minnesota, slotting him at DH batting second. Max Muncy was optioned to make room.

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Katy Perry publicly condemned the White House for using her song "Firework" in a video promoting military strikes, calling herself "deeply appalled." Her music, she said, is for bringing people together — not celebrating warfare.

Swedish pop duo Roxette canceled their North American anniversary tour, announced just as their 1990 hit "It Must Have Been Love" crossed a billion YouTube views. The band broke the news to fans in an Instagram post.

Pamela Anderson stars in a twisted satire, "Rosebush Pruning," and says she likes "stirring it up." Now 59, Anderson has four films coming and calls this her boldest stretch yet.

What it is: Forecasters now project the current El Niño will become the strongest ever recorded, by what one scientist memorably called a "mind-blowing margin" that dwarfs the monster events of recent decades. Fueled by unusually warm oceans stacked on a steadily heating planet, the pattern is on track to redraw global weather for the coming year and strain systems built for calmer seasons.

The detail: El Niño forms when a vast pool of warm water spreads across the tropical Pacific, nudging jet streams, storm tracks and rainfall thousands of miles away in ways scientists can now model months ahead. Layered on top of record background heat already baked into the climate system, this event is expected to push 2027 global temperatures to fresh highs and shatter the marks set only a couple of years ago, with the strongest effects clustering in the final months of the year.

Why it matters: A super El Niño reshapes harvests, water supplies and disaster risk on nearly every continent, from drought in Australia and Southeast Asia to flooding along the Americas' Pacific coast. Farmers, insurers and governments all quietly price their coming year around what the Pacific decides to do, so a record event ripples straight into food costs, insurance premiums and national budgets thousands of miles from the ocean itself.

What to watch: Peak strength usually lands late in the calendar year, so the next few months of ocean readings and model runs will test whether the bold forecasts hold firm or quietly soften as new data lands. Watch for shifting monsoon timing, early drought warnings and climbing food prices as the signal sharpens, and expect governments from Jakarta to Lima to start bracing publicly for the fallout in the weeks and months ahead.

- UCLA scientists uploaded marmot videos to OnlyFans under the handle "OnlyMarms" to fund research amid budget cuts. Academia has officially run out of traditional grant applications.

- A seed-sized tick nicknamed the "Vegan Vampire" is terrorizing Martha's Vineyard by giving victims a lifelong red-meat allergy. Arguably the most passive-aggressive bug on the planet.

- A New York school pulled the plug on Sally the Robot, an AI-powered dark-haired female character students helped design, after community outrage over exactly the things students helped design.

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