Chipmaker Nvidia became the first public company to top $4 trillion in value on Wednesday after two-year investor frenzy. Nvidia shares rose 2.5%, or $3.97, in early trading Wednesday, topping $164 each. At the beginning of 2023, Nvidia shares were around $14 each. The poster child of the AI boom, Nvidia has grown into the most valuable company in the world, surpassing Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google parent Alphabet. The stock’s movement carries more weight on the S&P 500 and other indexes than every company except Apple. Two years ago, Nvidia’s market value was below $600 billion. In its most recent quarter, Nvidia overcame tariff-driven turbulence to deliver another quarter of robust growth amid feverish demand for its high-powered AI chips.

Crews used backhoes and their bare hands Wednesday to dig through piles of debris that stretched for miles in the search for more than 160 people believed to be missing in the flash floods that laid waste to state’s Hill Country. Over 100 bodies have been recovered, but the large number of missing suggested that the full extent of the catastrophe was still unclear five days after the disaster. “We will not stop until every missing person is accounted for,” Gov. Greg Abbott told a news conference Tuesday.

Hezbollah leader Naim Qassem has admitted that the group gravely misjudged the scale and sophistication of Israel’s intelligence capabilities, following a covert Israeli operation last September in which thousands of booby-trapped pagers detonated across Lebanon, killing dozens and injuring thousands of Hezbollah terrorists. In a rare interview with the pro-Hezbollah Al-Mayadeen news outlet, Qassem confirmed that an internal investigation revealed serious lapses in the group’s procurement and security protocols, allowing Israel to infiltrate the supply chain undetected. “We didn’t know the supply chain had been exposed,” Qassem said, referring to the pagers, which were believed to have been distributed to operatives over the course of the previous year.

At least three people were missing in a mountain village in southern New Mexico that is a popular summer retreat after monsoon rains triggered flash flooding Tuesday that was so intense an entire house was swept downstream. Emergency crews carried out at least 85 swift water rescues in the Ruidoso area, including of people who were trapped in their homes and cars, said Danielle Silva of the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. No deaths were immediately reported, but three people had been taken to the hospital and were in stable condition, according to Kerry Gladden, public information officer for Ruidoso.

It was almost midnight when a truck driver resting in his cab heard the crackling of flames at a warehouse in east London storing equipment for Ukraine. He grabbed a fire extinguisher and leapt out — but realized the blaze was too big and retreated. When police arrived, they banged on the doors of a nearby apartment building, shouting at residents to evacuate. Parents grabbed children and ran into the street. About 30 minutes after the fire started, Dylan Earl, a British man who admitted to organizing the arson, received a message from a man U.K. authorities say was his Russian handler. “Excellent,” it read in Russian.

Europe’s top human rights court ruled that Russia was responsible for widespread violations of international law in Ukraine, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, marking the first time an international court has held Moscow accountable for human rights abuses related to the conflict there. Judges at the European Court of Human Rights on Wednesday delivered decisions on four cases brought by Ukraine and the Netherlands against Russia since the start of the conflict in 2014. The allegations include murder, torture, rape, destroying civilian infrastructure, kidnapping Ukrainian children and shooting down the Malaysian Airlines passenger jet, Flight MH17, by Ukrainian separatists who side with Russia.

A union representing thousands of city workers in Philadelphia and the city have reached a deal to end a more than weeklong strike that halted residential curbside trash pickup and affected other services, officials said Wednesday. Nearly 10,000 blue-collar employees from District Council 33 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees had walked off the job July 1, seeking better pay and benefits after failing to agree with the city on a new contract. The tentative agreement was announced on what would have been the ninth day of the strike. That period, which included the Fourth of July holiday weekend, created a backlog of trash. Some drop-off centers were overflowing.

Russia fired more than 700 attack and decoy drones at Ukraine overnight, topping previous nightly barrages for the third time in two weeks, part of Moscow’s intensifying aerial and ground assault in the three-year war, Ukrainian officials said Wednesday. Russia has recently sought to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses by launching major attacks that include increasing numbers of decoy drones. The most recent one appeared aimed at disrupting Ukraine’s vital supply of Western weapons. The city of Lutsk, home to airfields used by the Ukrainian army, was the hardest hit, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It lies in western Ukraine near the border with Poland, a region that is a crucial hub for receiving foreign military aid.

A “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, has been blocked by a federal appeals court just days before it was set to go into effect. The Federal Trad Commission’s proposed changes, adopted in October, required businesses to obtain a customer’s consent before charging for memberships, auto-renewals and programs linked to free trial offers. The FTC said at the time that businesses must also disclose when free trials or other promotional offers will end and let customers cancel recurring subscriptions as easily as they started them. The rule was set to go into effect on Monday, but the U.S.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said Wednesday that it’s taking down “inappropriate posts” made by its Grok chatbot, which appeared to include antisemitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler. Grok was developed by Musk’s xAI and pitched as alternative to “woke AI” interactions from rival chatbots like Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Musk said Friday that Grok has been improved significantly, and users “should notice a difference.” Since then, Grok has shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism. “Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said. It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of a post that has now apparently been deleted.