The Pentagon is sending the USS Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group and the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit to the Middle East, adding roughly 10,000 sailors and Marines to the region by the end of November. Oil jumped more than $4 a barrel on the news. President Trump said Thursday the Iran nuclear threat was "obliterated" in one night and well ahead of schedule, while conceding the seven-month war could cost Republicans in the midterms.
Fresh labor data shows job openings staying above the 7 million mark, where they've sat for most of the year despite a cooling hiring environment. Unemployment has drifted up toward the mid-4s, but Goldman Sachs still projects 2.6% real GDP growth for 2026 — well above the 2% consensus.
The administration is issuing $500 refund checks to roughly one million Americans across 30 states who it says were overcharged on their ObamaCare premiums. The White House is framing it as returning money that insurers and the exchanges should never have collected.
Convicted serial sex offender and former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar has had his name removed from Michigan's public sex offender registry. The Michigan Supreme Court ruled that 2021 amendments to the Sex Offender Registration Act cannot be applied retroactively to older offenses — a technicality with an outcome almost nobody saw coming.
Over 350 high schools and some 30 university campuses were hit by blockades and clashes Thursday, with 83 police and gendarmes wounded in a single day and 119 students and staff injured since the unrest began. In Nantes, a fire gutted the entrance hall of Nelson Mandela high school. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu convened a crisis meeting and said intelligence services concluded the movement was orchestrated by the hard-left France Unbowed party and its proxies — a charge LFI flatly denies.
A FlyDubai co-pilot — an Omani national — allegedly stabbed captain Smit Machchhar in the head and attempted to crash Flight 1073 with 174 people aboard. The wounded pilot unlocked the cockpit door so passengers and crew could storm in and overpower him; the plane diverted to Saudi Arabia. Netanyahu called it a prevented "second 9/11," and Israel's security establishment is treating it as terror.
Manila deployed its largest Coast Guard vessel plus aircraft to drive the Chinese research ship JIA HAI KE 7 out of waters off Batanes, the country's northernmost province, after it spent four days doing unauthorized ocean research. Philippine authorities say the vessel was broadcasting false electronic location signals to conceal its movements.
Astronauts Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Joshua Kutryk and Sergey Teteryatnikov are en route to the International Space Station, extending humanity's unbroken 25-year presence in low Earth orbit. Their manifest includes spacewalks, stem cell research aimed at diseases back home, a study of how long-term microgravity affects blood flow, and a Canadian Space Agency experiment on astronaut mental health.
Researchers at University College Dublin found DNA from an ancient sheeppox virus preserved in the parchment pages of the York Gospels, a manuscript roughly a millennium old. Because medieval parchment is animal skin, the books themselves turn out to be accidental biological archives — a whole new window into historical animal disease.
More than 100 lab animals, including over a hundred monkeys, are waiting to be rehomed as HHS moves to cut federal reliance on animal testing. It's the quiet logistical tail of a major policy shift — somebody has to actually find these primates somewhere to live.
