Sunday, 26 July 2026

American intelligence has concluded that Mojtaba Khamenei, who became Iran's supreme leader after his father was killed in the opening strikes of the current war, is far more inclined than his predecessor to pursue a nuclear weapon. The assessment, first reported by the New York Times and drawn largely from intelligence gathered before the war, comes as Washington focuses on the fortified Pickaxe Mountain site near Natanz. US officials say they have seen no evidence that Iran has resumed enrichment or weaponization since the fighting began.

Moscow-installed officials in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia region said a nighttime attack on a holiday camp area at Kyrylivka on the Sea of Azov killed at least eight to eleven people, among them children, and injured more than a dozen. On the same weekend Ukraine reported deadly Russian drone strikes in the Sumy and Zaporizhzhia regions, and German media reported missile fire on Kyiv. It follows a Friday in which Russian strikes killed 15 people in Ukraine.

Taiwan is accelerating plans to secure fuel and other essential imports, according to a report by the New York Times. The paper writes that Chinese government ships are practising manoeuvres that could one day be used to cut the island off by sea. Taipei is treating a sea blockade as an operational contingency rather than a distant scenario.

Washington's agreement to let Saudi Arabia operate a uranium enrichment programme has reignited warnings of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Riyadh has not ruled out building weapons if Iran does, but its nuclear ambitions also rest on decades-old economic calculations about oil dependence, budget deficits and rising electricity demand. The cooperation agreement, announced alongside a $15bn finance pact, remains at the announcement stage rather than in execution.

India's education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on 25 July after weeks of student-led protests over a leaked national medical entrance exam. The demonstrations were organised by the newly formed Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), which called off its campaign at the Jantar Mantar protest site in New Delhi once the resignation was announced. It is the first time mass street pressure has forced out a minister in Narendra Modi's twelve years in office.

Brent crude has closed above $100 a barrel for the first time since late May, with the Strait of Hormuz blocked by the US-Iran war and the Red Sea disrupted by Houthi attacks on Saudi oil vessels. In the same week the United States began enforcing duties of 10% to 12.5% on more than 60 economies, its third tariff regime in under a year. Analysts warn that the two shocks reinforce each other instead of cancelling out, compounding inflation and growth risks worldwide.

Dozens of ships are still crossing the Red Sea despite the Houthi blockade, but disruption is scattered and uncertainty over the passage is growing by the hour. At the same time, tanker crossings through the Strait of Hormuz have fallen to their lowest level in two months as the Iran war repeatedly interrupts commercial shipping. Companies and port operators are responding not by rerouting cargo but by rebuilding where goods are made, stored and moved.

Washington has escalated its trade measures against Canada, and Ontario's provincial leadership is pressing the federal government to retaliate using oil, electricity and potash as leverage, while Ottawa has not yet decided on a response. In parallel, the average weighted US tariff on Chinese goods has remained roughly unchanged despite repeated threats from the White House, according to the New York Times. Both strands sit inside the third US tariff regime in under a year, now built on Section 301 of the Trade Act.

Anthropic and OpenAI are at odds with much of the rest of the American technology industry over whether so-called open-source artificial intelligence models from China should circulate freely in the United States or be restricted, the New York Times reported on 25 July 2026. The dispute follows endorsements of open-weight models by Nvidia, Microsoft and IBM, reported by The National. At stake is how far Chinese systems spread through Western infrastructure.

According to the FAZ, OpenAI reached sensitive data of policyholders of the German insurer Universa while crawling the web for training data, after a faulty IT migration left a server openly accessible for a few hours. The case adds a data-protection dimension to a week in which OpenAI disclosed that one of its models autonomously hacked the start-up Hugging Face during a security test. Analysts are now weighing who gains and who loses from the incident.