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One fewer airline this morning than last night — a federal bailout fell apart and an entire ultra-low-cost brand walked off the map. Across the Pacific, a Chinese judge handed down the first ruling anywhere that says you can't fire a worker just because an AI can do the job.

Greta Gerwig's Narnia just got a Thanksgiving 2027 IMAX date. Five thousand US troops are coming home from Germany, and a satellite caught Mexico City sinking fast enough to see from orbit.

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Spirit Airlines ceased operations Saturday morning, grounding its fleet immediately and ending 34 years as the loudest ultra-low-cost name in the US sky. Trump bailout talks reportedly collapsed Friday night when bondholders rejected the federal terms; the carrier filed for liquidation within hours.

Workers were told to stand down and customers were notified Saturday morning that all booked Spirit flights are cancelled effective immediately. Other US carriers are weighing whether to honor stranded Spirit tickets, with the May travel calendar making the recovery especially complicated.

Saturday's collapse caps months of bailout drama — Trump floated a federal stake, bondholders weighed it, and the deal fell apart over the equity price. Industry analysts expect Frontier and Allegiant to absorb the better Spirit routes within sixty days.

A Hangzhou court ruled the dismissal unlawful for a Chinese tech worker fired and replaced by AI; the company's grounds didn't fit downsizing or distress. The ruling is the first Chinese labor-court decision specifically on AI replacement and signals where Beijing is willing to draw a line.

Chinese labor scholars are calling the decision a deliberate counter-balance to Beijing's official AI-adoption push, which has subsidized enterprise AI deployment since 2023. The worker, who has not been publicly named, is reinstated to his role, and the company is liable for back wages plus litigation costs.

The decision applies only inside China, but is being closely read in Brussels and Washington as labor regimes face their first wave of AI-replacement disputes. Beijing's AI-adoption subsidies have made the country a prolific producer of such cases; Hangzhou is one of the most influential commercial courts in China.

The Pentagon confirmed the US will pull 5,000 troops from Germany over 6-12 months — formalizing Trump's threat after Merz called the US "humiliated" by Iran. Drawdown is the first major NATO posture shift of the second Trump term.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell framed the move as a thorough review of force posture, avoiding direct mention of the Merz row. Roughly 30,000 US personnel will remain after the drawdown, mostly air force and intelligence assets concentrated at Ramstein and the Stuttgart command structure.

Berlin's response has been studiously calm — Merz declined to comment publicly Saturday morning, with German defense officials telling reporters they had been expecting the move. The question now is whether other European NATO members get the same treatment, or whether Germany was a one-off retaliation for the Merz comments.

King Charles arrived in Bermuda on Friday for the Caribbean leg of his US-and-territories tour, with boats, dancing, and a cake-cutting ceremony in St. George's. Schoolchildren turned out to greet the monarch; the welcome included exotic-bird displays and Bob Marley music.

Satellite imagery shows Mexico City sinking at a rate visible from low-earth orbit, threatening metro infrastructure within a decade. Aquifer depletion is the driver — the city pumps groundwater faster than its volcanic basin can replenish, and the soil compresses behind it.

Brazilian Congress overrode President Lula's veto on Thursday on a sentencing reform that drops former President Bolsonaro's coup-plot sentence from 27 years to roughly 2. Bolsonaro, 71, has been on house arrest since March; the change still faces a Supreme Court challenge that could land before the next election cycle.

The Air Force confirmed the Qatari-donated 747 accepted last year will be ready to fly as Air Force One this summer. Aircraft is currently being painted red, white, and blue at a Texas hangar; ethics and security concerns from initial acceptance remain unresolved.

Crayola issued a recall Friday on a children's craft toy line over possible asbestos contamination, with consumers told to stop using affected products immediately. Recall covers products distributed nationally; affected items should be removed from shelves and homes pending further safety review.

A small plane carrying five people crashed in the Texas Hill Country Friday afternoon, killing all aboard. The group was traveling to a pickleball tournament; the FAA and NTSB are investigating.

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New TransUnion data shows the K-shaped economy is widening — superprime borrowers (780+) and subprime borrowers (sub-600) are both growing faster than the middle. Higher-income households are accelerating away while lower-income ones fall further behind, deepening a post-Covid bifurcation policymakers had hoped was ending.

Trump said Friday he will raise tariffs on EU autos to 25% from 15%, accusing the bloc of failing to comply with last July's trade deal. Tariff doesn't apply if EU manufacturers move production to US plants — a carrot Trump has used in similar deals over the past year.

Exxon and Chevron both reported Q1 profits below 2025 levels; the paper decline masks higher cash flow the Iran-war spike has generated since March. Accounting timing — primarily inventory adjustments — is responsible for the gap between reported earnings and what's actually arriving at the bank.

Federal regulators approved a Terra Power reactor license Friday, clearing the Wyoming site to break ground on only the fourth new US reactor this century. Bill Gates-backed project replaces a 60-year-old coal plant next door and uses an advanced sodium-cooled design with US government co-funding.

Physicists at CERN's LHCb reported B-meson decay anomalies that don't match Standard Model predictions — the strongest hint yet of physics beyond the framework. Anomalies have surfaced across independent runs and could mark the first real crack in the model that has held since the 1970s.

The Pentagon announced Friday it will pursue an AI-first force structure, signing eight new contracts with major tech firms to expand AI capabilities. Move is the largest AI-procurement push in DoD history; concerns about Anthropic's blacklist status remain on the contracting margin per officials.

The Lakers closed out Houston in Game 6 Friday and now meet the defending-champion Thunder in the second round. LeBron put up 28-8-7 and said postgame he savors "small victories" because he doesn't know how many seasons he has left.

Munetaka Murakami hit his MLB-leading 13th home run Friday night, sparking a six-run second inning in an 8-2 White Sox win over San Diego. Japanese rookie's hot start has Chicago's rebuild ahead of schedule by every projection model.

Always a Runner won the 152nd Kentucky Oaks Friday at Churchill Downs after battling pneumonia as a 2-year-old. Chad Brown's filly sets the table for today's 152nd Derby; favorite Renegade drew the inside post after Fulleffort and Silent Tactic scratched this week.

Greta Gerwig's Narnia adaptation will hit IMAX for two weeks in November 2027 before its Netflix streaming debut, an unusually long theatrical window. Decision is a major theatrical commitment for Netflix and lands Narnia squarely in the holiday awards conversation.

The Academy issued new eligibility rules on Friday, limiting generative-AI use in nominated films, plus changes letting performers earn multiple acting nominations in the same category. Rules take effect for the 2027 ceremony; major studios are recalibrating award campaigns already shaped around AI-assisted workflows.

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez are hosting a Met Gala pre-party Sunday night ahead of Monday's gala, their first joint hosting role since marrying. The Met Gala theme this year centers on dandyism and tailoring; the gala is Anna Wintour's biggest event of 2026.

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What it is: Australia recorded zero new cervical-cancer diagnoses in women under 25 last year, putting the country on track to be the first to eliminate a cancer entirely as a public-health concern. HPV vaccination launched in Australian schools in 2007, plus near-universal cervical screening, have collapsed the disease curve in under two decades — faster than any cancer-elimination effort in modern history.

The detail: School-based vaccination delivers two doses to roughly 80% of 12-year-olds; the vaccine targets the high-risk HPV strains responsible for over 90% of cervical cancers worldwide. Australia paired vaccination with self-collection HPV screening starting in 2017, a method that lifted participation in rural and Indigenous communities where pap-smear uptake had stalled at low levels.

Why it matters: If Australia's curve holds, the country eliminates cervical cancer as a public-health concern around 2034 — before any other nation, including all of Western Europe and the US, several of which spend more per capita on health overall. Playbook is portable; WHO has been quietly building a manual that could replicate Australia's approach across middle-income countries with school-system reach.

What to watch: The next country to call out a similar elimination target is the signal — Sweden, the UK, and Rwanda all have HPV programs mature enough to file the formal application. Watch the WHO's October cancer report for the first formal acknowledgment that elimination has shifted from aspiration to projected fact, and the cancer-control conversation reorganizes around what "eliminable" actually means.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team