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The Supreme Court let construction continue on President Trump's planned White House ballroom, declining to halt the project despite legal challenges. The East Wing came down in 2025 to make room for the venue, a decision that infuriated preservationists.

The ruling keeps cranes and crews on site while lower-court cases play out. Whatever the eventual verdict, the East Wing isn't coming back.

Federal officials cut water deliveries from the Colorado River to Arizona, California and Nevada, with Arizona's share shrinking by roughly a third. Farmers will lean harder on groundwater, and agricultural output across the Southwest is about to feel it.

The river supports 40 million people and a farm economy worth tens of billions. This year's cuts are the sharpest yet, and negotiations over post-2026 allocations still aren't done.

TikTok agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit alleging it violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The DOJ complaint accused the app and its Chinese parent ByteDance of collecting data from users under 13 without parental consent.

It's one of the largest COPPA-related settlements on record. And it lands with TikTok's U.S. ownership status still an open political question.

Investigators in Berlin are examining Russian links to a weapons cache found hidden in woodland last year, according to reports published Friday. Intelligence officials now believe the weapons were intended for assassinations carried out inside Germany on Moscow's behalf.

Israel has refused to open a criminal investigation into the 2024 strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. Britain, Canada and Australia jointly condemned that decision on Friday, while Israel's military maintains internal disciplinary action has been sufficient.

An 18-year-old man was arrested after a sword attack at a Swedish school killed one person and injured three others. Police shot and detained the suspect at the scene, and the motive is still under investigation.

SNAP enrollment has fallen 13% over twelve months as the new work requirements take hold, far steeper than federal projections had estimated. Arizona posted the country's largest single-state drop, and advocates say many people losing benefits still qualify but simply miss paperwork deadlines.

Thirteen current and former Penn State students were arrested this week over an alleged fraternity cocaine operation run from a chapter house. Pledges were allegedly made to package the drugs as initiation, and one brother reportedly assumed the police raid was an elaborate prank.

The Trump administration invited public feedback on how federal vaccine recommendations are structured. Public-health experts warn the step could muddle patient guidance and complicate insurance coverage, since the current categories drive school requirements and what insurers must cover.

Friday brought a rally of roughly 500 points, and the Dow still lost the week for a second consecutive time. Traders spent the entire session weighing a bond market that refuses to settle down despite the Treasury's high-profile intervention.

President Trump will allow 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported tariff-free, aiming to ease price pressure after a shrinking domestic cattle herd sent beef costs higher this year. Ranchers won't love it. Grocery shoppers might.

Wall Street faces a dense calendar next week with the PCE inflation print, Nvidia earnings and the Fed's Jackson Hole symposium all in play. Any one of them can move markets. All three in the same stretch is a stress test.

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Tesla shares jumped after Nevada regulators cleared the company to deploy thousands of Cybercabs in Las Vegas, following a smaller pilot in Austin. It's Tesla's biggest robotaxi footprint yet, and a real-world test of a strategy Elon Musk has been promising for a decade.

Dutch regulators fined Uber 825 million euros, roughly $964 million, for suspending driver accounts by software with no human review at all. Violations ran from 2018 through 2022 under GDPR, and Uber says it disagrees with the finding and will appeal.

New simulations suggest rocky planetesimals began forming just 100 million years after the first stars produced heavy elements — billions of years earlier than models assumed. The finding widens the window for potentially habitable worlds by an enormous margin.

Seattle's receiver room took a hit Friday when Jake Bobo went down with what coach Mike Macdonald called a serious knee injury. Macdonald offered no timeline for a return, and the injury lands with the regular season now roughly two weeks away.

Klay Thompson is expected to sign with the Miami Heat after agreeing to a buyout with Dallas. The four-time champion gives Miami perimeter shooting alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo and Bam Adebayo — a spacing problem solved on paper.

Brighton midfielder Carlos Baleba is headed to Manchester United for £70 million, sources told ESPN on Friday as the Premier League season opened. Brighton manager Fabian Hürzeler had insisted only hours earlier that Baleba remained very much a Brighton player.

A dozen state attorneys general are already challenging Paramount Skydance's pending $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Mark Ruffalo joined them Friday with a scorched-earth Instagram post naming the Ellison family's financing of the deal directly.

Six days before air, The CW pulled Miss USA and Miss Teen USA from its schedule over a contractual production issue. Pageant organizers say they identified the problem two weeks ago, leaving contestants without a network at the very last minute.

Extreme weather has now claimed a second year, and Bonnaroo will skip 2027 entirely after the 2025 festival collapsed one day in. Organizers spent the off-season adding drainage, 4.5 miles of new roadway and 135 acres of fresh grass in Manchester, Tennessee.

What it is: Long-dated Treasury yields climbed again on Friday, erasing the entire relief rally that followed the Treasury's emergency bond buyback announcement earlier this week. Investors are now demanding a higher return to hold thirty-year American government debt than at any point since 2007.

The detail: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to steady the long end of the curve by announcing buybacks, and the market handed him roughly one day of calm. Yields resumed their climb almost immediately, which is the bond market's blunt way of saying the intervention never touched the actual problem.

The numbers: Federal debt crossed $40 trillion this month, exactly double where it stood back in 2017, and annual interest costs have now passed $1 trillion. Washington pays out roughly $3 billion in interest every single day, which makes debt service the second-largest federal expense behind Social Security alone.

Why it matters: Treasury yields quietly set the floor under the price of nearly everything American households and companies borrow money to buy. Average thirty-year mortgage rates already sit near 6.7%, and car loans, credit cards, student debt and corporate borrowing all reprice off that exact same curve within weeks.

The politics: Trump has complained loudly about "ridiculous rates" while simultaneously signing a bill that extends his tax cuts and raises border security spending. Bond investors read those two facts side by side and price in more issuance, more supply, and correspondingly higher yields for years.

What to watch: Bessent has said the buyback operation could exceed $4 billion, which is a rounding error when measured against a $40 trillion federal balance sheet. Watch whether the next long-bond auction clears without a pricing concession, because that single data point is the only honest tell here.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team