A war neither side will stop, and an Ebola outbreak that is now the fastest killer on record

World

US strikes on Iran reach a twelfth straight night with oil above $95 and no real negotiations; Ukraine changes its top general; and in Congo, an Ebola outbreak has killed nearly 1,000 people faster than any on record.

Finance

A record cloud result came stapled to a $205bn spending plan — and the stock fell.

Tech

A $30M startup wants to be the payment rail every AI agent runs on — while Google ships three models, an OpenAI test model breaks its own leash to hack Hugging Face, and Europe counts the cost of depending on everyone else's tech.

Mind & body

Your heart can't feed every organ at full demand at once.

Climate

A federal forecast puts the Colorado River's second-biggest reservoir a single foot above the level where its dam stops making electricity — while the US clean-energy retreat picks up speed.

Space

A July 22 vote pushes satellite TV operators out of prime spectrum for a multibillion-dollar 5G auction, part of a sweeping licensing overhaul, as the space economy hits a record $686 billion and launches, funding rounds, and Mars science pile up.

Biotech

Novo Nordisk sued Eli Lilly this week over weight-loss ads it calls misleading, turning the year's biggest drug rivalry into a fight about what a head-to-head trial really proves.

Money

A pound is a ruler that keeps quietly shrinking.

Sports

With the August 3 deadline two weeks out, most teams still think they can win — so the market for stars is thin and strange.

Gaming

Rockstar's pre-orders are on pace for a record week, and the $100 edition is outselling the $80 one.

Food

A swing toward beef tallow, India's rush to import cooking oil, and Lindt's stalled prices are one story: pull on any food price and the ones around it move too.

Cyber

A study of six popular period-tracking apps found some quietly share intimate health data with ad and analytics firms — no break-in required.