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Today’s edition is about rules being rewritten — in government, technology, education and business. A $2 billion AI wager shows where investors see the next opportunity, Michigan is testing a radically different approach to college grading, and an extraordinary baseball streak is reshaping a season. Plus, a rock reunion 33 years in the making and one of the stranger police calls you’ll read today.

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A federal lawsuit filed this week challenges the Truth Social product that sells subscribers early access to President Trump's market-moving posts, arguing the arrangement violates federal insider-trading and securities laws. Plaintiffs are individual retail investors and a class of small-fund managers seeking damages and an injunction.

The complaint follows weeks of public warnings from securities lawyers that the product's tiered-access structure looked like an insider-trading platform with extra steps. Trump Media & Technology Group has said the product complies with existing law, and the case is expected to be assigned to the Southern District of New York.

The Justice Department has effectively allowed a pillar of the Prohibition-era National Firearms Act to lapse, retreating from enforcement of rules that have governed silencers, short-barreled rifles and machine guns since 1934. That ends nearly a century of federal treatment of those weapons as a distinct regulated class.

Gun-rights groups have long argued the statute was outdated. Gun-control advocates say the registration regime was one of the last federal guardrails on the most heavily restricted firearms. The practical effect on dealers, owners and state laws will play out over the coming months.

An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter crashed in a central Texas field near Fort Hood on Wednesday, killing both people on board and sparking a wildfire that forced nearby homes to evacuate. The Bell County Sheriff's office confirmed both occupants died at the scene.

No cause of the crash has been announced. Fort Hood's Criminal Investigation Division is leading the investigation, and the Army has not yet identified the two service members pending family notification.

A vessel carrying passengers on Zimbabwe's Lake Kariba overturned after being struck by strong waves, killing at least 44 people in one of the country's worst recent disasters. Lake Kariba is among the largest man-made reservoirs on earth, and its sudden squalls have caused repeated tragedies along the Zimbabwe-Zambia border.

Fidel Castro would have turned 100 on Thursday, and his influence still looms over Cuba. Posters and slogans bearing his image are common across Havana, and this year's International Book Fair has been dedicated to his memory.

Police in Ecuador seized 469 kilograms of cocaine featuring Manchester City striker Erling Haaland's face on the packaging near the Colombian border. Traffickers appear to have used the Norwegian footballer's image as a branding marker for the shipment.

Wisconsin's primary result broke a winning streak for the Democratic Party's left flank, as David Crowley edged out democratic socialist Francesca Hong in a genuinely close race. Minnesota produced its own surprises, with Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan taking the Senate nomination over Rep. Angie Craig and Sen. Amy Klobuchar winning the gubernatorial primary.

Police arrested a young suspect after a shooting at Warner Robins High School in Georgia that left one student injured. The wounded student was treated on-scene and transported in stable condition, and the school district canceled classes through Friday for grief counseling.

Federal efforts to revive uranium mining in the American West have alarmed tribal water advocates still reckoning with the industry's mid-century contamination legacy. The push aims to reduce US reliance on Russian uranium for reactor fuel.

Home Depot said CEO Ted Decker is taking a medical leave of undisclosed length, with COO Ann-Marie Campbell stepping in as acting chief executive. The board said the leave is not related to company performance and that Decker is expected to return.

Thrive Holdings has raised $2 billion to buy up service businesses and infuse them with artificial intelligence, drawing checks from backers including SoftBank. It's one of the biggest bets yet on the "AI-inside-legacy-firms" thesis sweeping private equity.

Bank of America is investing $1.9 billion for a 49.9% stake in a non-bank lending unit of India's Jio Financial. It's the latest large Western wager on India's rapidly expanding financial services market.

Physicists say they've found the glueball, a particle made purely of the force that binds matter together, containing no quarks whatsoever. BESIII researchers analyzed roughly 10 billion J/ψ decays over 13 years before concluding that X(2370), first spotted back in 2011, is mostly glue.

July's average sea surface temperature hit 20.96°C, beating July 2023 by 0.07°C and leaving the ocean a fraction of a degree below its all-time March 2024 peak. Copernicus data suggests the record falls before the year is out as El Niño strengthens, which Woods Hole's Amy Apprill called "basically a terrifying time for corals."

Twitch users can now block Amazon from using their streams and clips to train AI models, a rare opt-out in a market where consent is usually assumed by default. Amazon owns Twitch outright, which makes the concession genuinely notable — the company is voluntarily giving up training data it already controls.

Tampa Bay finished 9-0 on a West Coast road trip with an 8-4 win over the Athletics, becoming only the second East Coast club in MLB history to pull it off. Liam Hicks supplied a three-run homer and Drew Rasmussen took the ball to start, capping a stretch that has completely reframed the Rays' season.

Shohei Ohtani went deep and Mookie Betts added a solo shot as the Dodgers rolled past the Royals 4-2 to complete a three-game sweep at Kauffman Stadium. The sweep pulls LA back within a game of the NL West lead.

Elena Rybakina came from behind to knock Naomi Osaka out of the Canadian Open, reversing a match that had looked comfortably in Osaka's control. Hard-court form matters enormously right now, with US Open seeding and momentum both being settled over the next fortnight of play.

Travis Kelce shared first details from his wedding to Taylor Swift, calling it "the best night of my life" and publicly using the word "wife" for the very first time. Madison Square Garden hosted the ceremony, which Kelce described as the fulfillment of an actual childhood dream.

Ritchie Blackmore rejoined Deep Purple on stage for the first time since the acrimonious split of the early 1990s, ending a standoff that has lasted 33 years. Blackmore had warned fans beforehand that he had not played rock music in 25 years, then walked out and played "Smoke on the Water."

Lilly Wachowski, co-director of "The Matrix," says Hollywood has refused to finance her new film "The Hunted" because it features a trans cast. She called the script "extremely important" and said she's still looking for backers.

What it is: The University of Michigan is piloting a freshman year without letter grades starting fall 2027, replacing them with narrative feedback and pass/no-record markings across a large slice of first-year courses. Deep Dive walks through what the experiment is, why it's happening, and what could actually change.

The detail: The pilot covers roughly 40% of Michigan's first-year courses in year one, with plans to expand to the full first-year experience by fall 2029. Faculty will write narrative feedback for each student on skill-specific rubrics — writing, quantitative reasoning, collaboration — rather than assigning letters. Students who need letter grades for graduate school or scholarship applications can opt into a supplementary transcript, but the default record will not include them. Advisors will help interpret the reports for internships and jobs during the transition years.

A short history: The letter-grade system is a 20th-century artifact of industrial-scale higher education; before that, undergraduate feedback was almost entirely narrative or oral. Small liberal-arts colleges — Reed, Hampshire, Evergreen State — have run narrative-only systems for decades with mixed employer reception. Michigan's experiment is the first attempt to run the model at a large flagship research university.

Why it matters: Grading policy shapes admissions decisions, financial aid, athletic eligibility, medical- and law-school pipelines, and how employers evaluate early-career candidates. Anxiety-driven grade inflation across US higher education has made letter grades progressively less informative — average GPAs at four-year colleges have climbed roughly half a point over 25 years. Alternatives like narrative feedback offer more diagnostic detail but require a serious cultural shift among students, faculty, and employers.

What to watch: Watch how Michigan graduate schools and the medical- and law-school pipelines respond, because their acceptance of narrative feedback will determine whether the pilot survives. Watch how Big Ten peers — Ohio State, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin — treat the model. And watch major employer feedback in engineering and consulting, which will decide whether narrative-only transcripts get read at all in early-career hiring.

Five Minute Daily gives you the stories shaping the day without the noise. Share this edition with a friend and subscribe to keep the five-minute briefing coming.

—The Five Minute Daily Team