Friday closed on Claude Opus 5 shipping near-frontier coding at roughly half Fable’s price, Starship’s first post-IPO flight ending with an intact heat-shield splashdown, and Moody’s warning that hyperscaler AI capex is chewing credit quality — while Europe’s wildfire evacuations swelled past 220,000 and oil eased on unsettled Pakistan-brokered talk of U.S.–Iran diplomacy.
The First Circuit refused to stay a June ruling that struck down the administration’s $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas as an unlawful tax Congress never authorized. Twenty Democratic state attorneys general brought the suit; the three-judge panel of Democratic appointees left the block in place Friday.
After U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian grilled DOJ lawyers for nearly an hour over subpoenas for phone records and grand-jury testimony from New York Times reporters who covered security concerns about the Qatari-gifted Air Force One jet, the department withdrew the demands. The judge had framed the choice as quash or withdraw.
The nation’s largest multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak linked to shredded iceberg lettuce expanded to nine states, with Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania newly tied in. They join Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, and hard-hit Michigan as investigators keep tracing the produce supply chain.
Fresh Section 301 duties on goods from more than 80 countries, framed around forced-labor enforcement, drew lawsuits within hours of taking effect. Trade lawyers argue the statute was stretched beyond its traditional unfair-trade use and that courts may narrow or block parts of the package the same way earlier emergency-tariff theories have been contested.
French authorities ordered nearly 60,000 more people out near Bordeaux, lifting combined France–Spain wildfire evacuations past 220,000, with Macron mobilizing the military. West of Madrid, three fires merged into a blaze officials called beyond firefighters’ capacity and the worst in the region’s history, prompting a national emergency and tens of thousands ordered indoors or out.
The same Spanish fire weather forced an evacuation and temporary suspension at NASA’s Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex, one of three sites that give continuous coverage for more than 40 missions including Artemis, James Webb, and the Voyagers. Damage assessments wait until crews can safely return.
Karim A. A. Khan was removed as the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor after years of limbo over sexual-misconduct allegations, ending a leadership crisis at the court that prosecutes the world’s gravest crimes.
Brent slipped nearly 4% to about $96.78 and WTI about 3% to $89.31 after reports that Pakistan, with Chinese support, is exploring a path to restart U.S.–Iran talks. Both benchmarks were still on track for roughly 8–10% weekly gains as Hormuz and Red Sea shipping risk stayed elevated.
Anthropic rolled out Claude Opus 5 as a near-frontier coding model that matches or slightly tops Opus 4.8 and rivals GPT-5.6-Sol on many benches while landing just shy of Fable at roughly half the cost. The company deliberately under-trained cyber exploitation relative to Mythos-class models, skipping some of the heavier incident-retention policies that came with Fable.
Starship’s 13th test — first since the IPO — lofted from Starbase Friday evening. Super Heavy only partially relit for landing and took a hard Gulf splashdown; the ship made a soft, intact Indian Ocean splashdown with the first clear views of an intact heat shield and deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites en route. Analysts called it progress still short of rapid full reusability.
Moody’s warned the shift from asset-light software to asset-heavy AI infrastructure is eroding free cash flow at Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle, and CoreWeave, with sector capex headed toward $785 billion in 2026 and about $1 trillion next year. Direct debt is ~$460 billion and lease commitments ~$1.2 trillion; giants keep strong ratings for now while Oracle and CoreWeave sit nearer junk, and circular lab–cloud deals add concentration risk.
Paramount Skydance agreed not to close its Warner Bros. Discovery purchase until a state antitrust trial resolves or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first — abandoning a September target after California-led AGs won a TRO. A 25-cent-per-share quarterly ticking fee from Sept. 30 could add roughly $1.7 billion by mid-2027; a full breakup still carries a $7 billion fee.
Waymo will launch its own app in Atlanta and Austin in January 2028 alongside Uber, ending three years of exclusivity while keeping hundreds of robotaxis on Uber through at least May 2028. The shift lets Uber put rival AVs on its platform in both cities and mirrors Waymo’s non-exclusive posture in other markets and its Lyft deal in Nashville.
New Brunswick MLA Bill Oliver, reading a floor speech, aloud delivered the telltale line “here’s a more natural, flowing version of that section that reads like a legislative speech rather than a series of short points” — classic uncleared LLM prompt residue. Video spread on Reddit and Threads before CBC and the Toronto Star turned it into a mainstream parable about outsourcing political prose.
Anthropic ships Opus 5 as the day’s default coding model conversation.
A sharp dissent on AI-coding euphoria while everyday software still breaks.
Big Tech’s open-weights lobby hits the front page again as policy fights harden.
A Hanwha camera’s web UI leaked a live GitHub admin token in client-side code.
A private Indian launcher makes orbit on its first try after a dramatic flight.
Pushback on the “superhuman autonomous hacker” framing of the sandbox breach.
India’s takedown order for Dorsey’s mesh chat app reignites platform-censorship fights.
Nostalgia fuel: HL2 natively on Haiku as the Nvidia driver port lands.
An IRGC claim against AWS Bahrain sparks a fierce thread on fog-of-war infrastructure hits.
Mozilla previews a cleaner containers UX for site isolation in Firefox.
Benchmarks push back on the folk wisdom that LISTEN/NOTIFY can’t carry load.
A Zig-rebuilt Bun fork chasing sub-second incremental builds as a drop-in.
Independent leaderboard crowns Opus 5 #1 the same day it ships.
MIT’s three-way Y-zipper turns a forgotten patent into a neat hardware story.
A hands-on oil-network sim of a Hormuz closure built on real trade flows.