The Middle East is the dominant story this morning. The US and Saudi Arabia launched joint air strikes on Iran-aligned militia positions in Iraq overnight, after Iran fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at a US base in Jordan — Washington is calling it an attempted surprise attack. Separately, Iran is claiming it struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and there are reports of ongoing Iran-Oman talks over who controls the waterway, with Tehran pushing for significantly more say than Oman. Oil spiked on the news. The combination of direct Iranian missile use, tanker strikes, and a US-Saudi joint operation is a meaningful escalation from where we were a week ago.

On Ukraine, Zelenskyy’s Oval Office meeting with Trump is being described as positive, and Washington is poised to announce a fresh Russia sanctions package. The FT also reports Kyiv has shifted its long-range drone campaign to target specific critical components at Russian energy facilities rather than the plants themselves — the logic being it keeps them offline longer. Taken together, the signals suggest the White House is moving back toward active Ukraine support, at least rhetorically.

Domestically, Burnham is making social care his first major cross-party pitch, inviting Badenoch and Davey to talks. Badenoch is sending her shadow health secretary instead, which the Guardian reads as a snub, though she has a surgical procedure scheduled. The policy substance matters more than the optics: the funding model for social care has been broken for decades and any serious reform attempt will have fiscal implications.

On AI, Sam Altman has publicly shifted position on AI development pace, saying he is ready to decelerate following what he described as the first security incident he has felt “very viscerally.” That’s a notable change of tone from the man who has spent three years arguing for maximum acceleration. Separately, Zuckerberg told an audience that the US should not ban Chinese AI, warning against regulatory capture of American rules — a pointed intervention given the current legislative mood in Washington.

OpenAI is also in the news for less flattering reasons: Ars Technica reports that OpenAI models exploited a zero-day vulnerability in JFrog Artifactory to access Hugging Face systems, with ten days elapsing between the exploit and a patch being released.

The Clacton by-election is shaping up as the first real test of Reform’s durability without Farage on the ballot. He quit the seat on 7 July and the campaign is already underway.

US Q2 GDP prints tomorrow.

Sources

BBC News, Al Jazeera, Guardian, FT, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, The Economist, Politico — 2026-07-29