Daily News · 2026-07-23

US News

Wright and the Saudi energy minister sign a 30-year nuclear pact¹

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman signed a peaceful-nuclear-cooperation deal, the kind known as a 123 agreement, that commits Riyadh to buy its reactors and fuel from American firms.¹ The agreement opens a two-year study of whether Saudi Arabia may enrich uranium on its own soil, with any enrichment run by US companies using technology the Saudis would not receive.² It clears Westinghouse, Bechtel and Centrus to sell, is written to last three decades, and now goes to Congress, which has 90 days to object.³ A US enrichment pathway on a partner's soil is a departure from how these pacts usually read.

US News

Hegseth puts the Iran war's cost at $37.5 billion and asks Congress for more⁴

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, testifying with Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Dan Caine, told senators on Tuesday that the war with Iran has cost $37.5 billion in its five months and pressed the case for more funding.⁴ The administration sent Congress an $87.6 billion supplemental request last month, most of it for the Pentagon.⁵ The number Hegseth gave sits below the Pentagon's own internal estimate, which CBS reports runs $80 billion to $100 billion once wrecked aircraft, base repairs and replenished weapons are counted.⁶

US News

The full Fifth Circuit keeps three Texas fathers detained, pausing their release⁷

The full US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stayed three Texas district-court rulings that had ordered the release of three men, all longtime residents with US-citizen children and no criminal record, arrested after routine traffic stops.⁷ The stay lets the administration keep enforcing its mandatory-detention policy while the court decides whether detained immigrants are owed bond hearings.⁸ Coverage divides on what to call it, a win for detention or a block on release, but both sides agree the release orders are frozen pending the full court's review.⁹

US News

Israel starts pulling back from south Lebanon as Trump hosts Aoun¹⁰

President Trump hosted Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the White House on Tuesday and backed Israel's phased withdrawal from the south and the disarming of Hezbollah.¹⁰ Israel has begun leaving several southern villages to create pilot zones where the Lebanese Armed Forces take sole control, the first step under a framework the three governments signed on June 26.¹¹ Hezbollah rejects both the talks and the disarmament, and Trump pledged to help Lebanon without naming specifics.¹²

AI & Technology

Substack starts scoring posts for how much was written by AI¹³

Substack, in a post by chief executive Chris Best titled "Against Claudefishing," turned on an AI-detection feature built with the startup Pangram.¹³ Readers can scan any post, note or comment longer than 100 words for an estimate of how much was written by hand versus with AI, and writers get a field to describe how they work.¹⁴ Pangram reckons as much as 40% of the text on some social platforms is now machine-written, and Substack calls its score a judgment aid rather than a verdict.¹⁵

AI & Technology

OpenAI runs its own support line on Presence, a new enterprise agent platform¹⁶

OpenAI introduced Presence, a managed platform for building and running AI voice and chat agents under set policies, guardrails and escalation rules.¹⁷ The company already routes its own English-language phone support through it, where it resolves 75% of inbound issues without a person.¹⁸ A Codex-powered feedback loop cut human handoffs by 15 percentage points within ten days, and the product is in limited release to enterprise customers.¹⁶

AI & Technology

Block releases Buzz, where AI agents hold their own keys¹⁹

Block, Jack Dorsey's company, released Buzz, a free and open-source workspace on the Nostr protocol where people and AI agents share channels, code repositories and workflows.¹⁹ Every participant, human or agent, holds its own cryptographic key, so an agent's identity and history travel between systems instead of living inside one vendor's account.²⁰ It works with Claude Code, Codex and Block's own goose, and teams can self-host it or use Block's hosted version, though at version 0.4 it is early software.²¹

AI & Technology

Fireworks raises $1.5 billion to run custom models cheaper than the frontier²²

Fireworks, an AI-inference company, raised a $1.5 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, led by Atreides, Index Ventures and TCV with Nvidia joining.²² It says it has passed $1 billion in annualized revenue and nearly tripled the tokens it serves each day, to more than 40 trillion.²³ The pitch is the one drawing this year's money into inference: run smaller tuned models for a fraction of what frontier ones cost, for customers such as Uber, Shopify and MongoDB.²⁴

Science & Health

A daily dose of spermidine lifted vaccine response in seniors who barely responded²⁵

In a placebo-controlled pilot, 40 healthy adults over 65 took 6 milligrams of spermidine, a compound found in foods like wheat germ and aged cheese, or a placebo daily for 13 weeks after a third COVID shot.²⁵ About one in four barely made antibodies even after three doses, and those weak responders carried a cellular signature of an aging immune system.²⁶ Among the weak responders, the spermidine group built higher antibody levels and broader protection across variants, though the trial is small and the benefit showed only in that subgroup.²⁷

Science & Health

Yo-yo dieting costs nearly four times the thigh muscle of steady weight²⁸

A study in Radiology followed 1,433 middle-aged adults for four years and used AI to measure thigh muscle on their MRI scans.²⁸ People whose weight repeatedly rose and fell lost about 3.7% of their thigh muscle, against about 1% in those who held steady, even though both groups ended near the weight they started at.²⁹ The gap held after adjusting for age, sex, diet and activity, which is why the authors push strength training and protein over chasing the number on the scale.³⁰

Science & Health

Sleeping past 8.5 hours tracks a higher Alzheimer's blood marker³¹

Using 2,410 people in the Framingham Heart Study, UT Health San Antonio found that regularly sleeping about 8.5 to 9 hours or more went with higher blood levels of p-tau181, a protein tied to Alzheimer's.³¹ The link climbed most sharply past ten hours a night.³² The study is a snapshot, not a clock, and the authors read long sleep as a footprint of early brain change rather than its cause, so sleeping less would not be expected to lower the marker.³³

World & Markets

Britain's new PM makes a defence hawk chancellor, and gilt yields jump³⁴

Andy Burnham, who became prime minister on July 20 after Keir Starmer resigned, named former defence secretary John Healey as chancellor, a surprise choice.³⁴ Healey has argued for defence spending of 3% of GDP and floated war bonds to pay for it, and Burnham has signalled he will bend the government's fiscal rules.³⁵ Investors read higher spending: sterling slipped and UK gilt yields reached fresh two-month highs on Tuesday as markets weighed how Healey would fund it.³⁶

The US opens Saudi Arabia a path to enrich nuclear fuel

Wright and the Saudi energy minister sign a 30-year nuclear pact¹

Hegseth puts the Iran war's cost at $37.5 billion and asks Congress for more⁴

The full Fifth Circuit keeps three Texas fathers detained, pausing their release⁷

Israel starts pulling back from south Lebanon as Trump hosts Aoun¹⁰

Substack starts scoring posts for how much was written by AI¹³

OpenAI runs its own support line on Presence, a new enterprise agent platform¹⁶

Block releases Buzz, where AI agents hold their own keys¹⁹

Fireworks raises $1.5 billion to run custom models cheaper than the frontier²²

A daily dose of spermidine lifted vaccine response in seniors who barely responded²⁵

Yo-yo dieting costs nearly four times the thigh muscle of steady weight²⁸

Sleeping past 8.5 hours tracks a higher Alzheimer's blood marker³¹

Britain's new PM makes a defence hawk chancellor, and gilt yields jump³⁴

Sources