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Colombia's earthquake death toll is climbing by the hour, the U.S. has escalated its Iran blockade with a direct military strike at sea, and a former U.S. Marine is finally heading home after years in Russian custody. Plus, inflation data looms, AI spending surges, and college basketball's transfer revolution accelerates.

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Rescue crews in western Colombia scrambled for survivors through Tuesday, with the confirmed death toll climbing to 180 and still rising. Aftershocks rattled the region all afternoon, forcing teams to abandon collapsed buildings mid-dig and then start over an hour later.

Seismologists measured the initial shock at magnitude 7.4, the strongest to strike western Colombia in years. Early Tuesday the count stood at 111, a figure that nearly doubled within hours as crews finally reached towns cut off by landslides and broken roads.

American forces struck a ship's engine room with missiles in the Gulf of Oman on Tuesday, US Central Command said, disabling the vessel without sinking it. Central Command identified the target as a Panama-flagged cargo ship attempting to break the blockade around Iranian ports.

Choosing the engine room over the hull was deliberate, a calibrated strike meant to stop the cargo without killing the crew aboard. Washington has spent weeks warning that it would enforce the blockade with force if necessary, and Tuesday was the first time it actually did.

Moscow released Robert Gilman on Tuesday, a former US Marine arrested in 2022 and reported in seriously deteriorating health. Trump said the release came on humanitarian grounds, with no publicly announced exchange attached to it.

Gilman had reportedly been held in a catatonic-like state in recent months, a detail that pushed his case up the diplomatic queue. Family advocates had spent more than a year arguing that he would not survive his full sentence in Russian custody.

A Houthi attack killed six people in the Red Sea on Tuesday, the group's first fatal operation since the Iran war began. Rebels claimed the vessel was carrying Saudi military equipment, an assertion that has not been independently verified by anyone else.

Hungary's parliament elected a former judge that Viktor Orban had personally removed from office, installing him as the country's new president. Lawmakers seated back in May are moving quickly to unwind the institutional legacy Orban spent a decade building.

Lebanon's parliament voted to end capital punishment on Tuesday, a step no other country in the Middle East has taken. Cabinet approval is still required before the law can formally take effect, leaving a short window for reversal.

A New York judge ordered an anonymous jury for Luigi Mangione's state murder trial and arranged overflow seating for the public. Several procedural questions in the case remain unresolved with the trial date closing in fast.

Alabama voters returned to the polls Tuesday for a second primary, months after lawmakers redrew four of the state's seven congressional districts. Black voter share in the 2nd District dropped from roughly 47% to 40%, and Republican candidates there went from one to six.

Two primaries Tuesday will measure how much room the left actually has in Midwestern politics this cycle. Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old democratic socialist, leads Wisconsin's governor polling, while Angie Craig and Peggy Flanagan fight for Minnesota's open Senate nomination.

CoreWeave shares jumped 11% after hours Tuesday as quarterly revenue roughly doubled year over year on relentless AI infrastructure demand. Debt is the asterisk, with the company now carrying about $35 billion of it against that growth.

Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms struck a 20-year compute deal with Anthropic worth roughly $9 billion, the latest miner to pivot toward AI. Shares spiked 22% intraday on 75 million shares before giving most of it back to close up 4.3%.

July's consumer price index arrives Wednesday morning and is widely expected to show only a modest monthly increase. Stocks slid into the print, with the S&P 500 down 0.32% to 7,728 and the Nasdaq off 0.60%.

NIH is rejecting grant applications whose primary function is informing policymakers, according to internal documents reviewed by Nature. More than 3,700 projects funded in fiscal 2025 contain policy language in their titles or abstracts, putting a large slice of the portfolio in question.

New modelling puts the Amazon's collapse threshold at 1.5 to 1.9 degrees of warming combined with 22% to 28% deforestation. Roughly 17% of the rainforest is already gone, and its southeastern reaches have flipped from carbon sink to carbon source.

Inland waterway vessels produced nearly a quarter of all shipping carbon dioxide in 2022, despite covering under 1% of navigable water. Twenty river systems, the Yangtze among them, accounted for almost 70% of that entire total.

Minnesota named Kyler Murray its starting quarterback Tuesday, dropping 2024 first-round pick J.J. McCarthy to the backup job. Murray signed a one-year, $1.3 million deal in March after his release, while Arizona still owes him $35.5 million.

The Angels fired pitching coach Mike Maddux, assistant Darryl Scott and bullpen coach Dom Chiti in a single Tuesday purge. At 45-74, Los Angeles owns baseball's worst record and a staff that has issued a league-high 508 walks.

LeBron James makes his 76ers debut on October 20 in New York, where the champion Knicks will raise their title banner. Boston at Detroit opens the tripleheader in a 3 p.m. matinee, and Oklahoma City visits San Antonio to close it out.

Taylor Swift will be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame this fall at 36, the youngest writer ever honored. Executive director Mark Ford read her statement aloud during the livestream announcing this year's class of inductees.

Lucy Davis revealed on Instagram that her Stage 4 breast cancer has spread to her spine, right hip and ribs. Diagnosed a year and a half ago, the original UK Office star says it is too late for chemotherapy.

Attorney General Rob Bonta called the threat blackmail after Paramount chief David Ellison floated pulling the studio out of California entirely. Bonta is leading a 12-state lawsuit trying to block Paramount's takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery.

What it is: College basketball has a new roster mechanic. The "five-for-five" transfer, in which programs rebuild entire starting lineups in a single offseason through the portal. What used to be a slow rebuild is now a checkout cart. Coaches increasingly view the transfer portal as the fastest path to contention, replacing years of player development with experienced veterans who can contribute immediately from opening night.

The detail: Texas Tech and Gonzaga top the early winners list, assembling veteran cores designed to contend immediately in 2026-27. Both leaned on NIL infrastructure and coaching continuity to attract experienced guards and frontcourt scorers who might otherwise have declared for the draft. Other major programs are following the same blueprint, prioritizing older players with proven production over high school recruits who may need multiple seasons to develop into reliable starters.

Why it matters: The portal has functionally turned college rosters into one-year contracts, collapsing the distinction between recruiting and free agency. Programs that treat it as a talent market — with real budgets, real scouting and real player-development pitches — are pulling away from the ones still running it like an afterthought. Traditional roster continuity is becoming rarer, making coaching chemistry and rapid integration just as valuable as raw talent.

What to watch: Mark Mitchell's landing spot is one of the most-discussed individual moves of the cycle, and how he fits into his new system will be an early tell for how well these overhauled rosters actually mesh. Expect preseason polls that look nothing like last year's. Early-season tournaments will provide the first meaningful test of whether portal-built contenders can develop cohesion quickly enough to meet sky-high expectations.

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—The Five Minute Daily Team