GAZA

Famine descends, the images break through, and Western opinion finally turns

After 21 months of war and blockade, mass starvation arrived in Gaza. The images of emaciated children, at last, pierced the world's exhaustion, and Western governments that had stood by began, haltingly, to move: France said it would recognise a Palestinian state.

The catastrophe in Gaza reached its most harrowing phase this fortnight as mass starvation took hold across the territory. After 21 months of war, blockade, displacement and the collapse of the aid system, malnutrition spread and deaths from hunger mounted, and the images, of skeletal children, of parents with nothing to feed them, of crowds crushed and shot at the few, chaotic aid-distribution points, finally broke through the world's long exhaustion with the conflict in a way that months of casualty statistics had not. Aid agencies and much of the international press described a famine, or its imminent arrival; Israel disputed the characterisation and blamed Hamas and the aid agencies, while facing the sharpest criticism from its allies of the entire war.

And the political dam, held for so long, began to crack. France announced on July 24 that it would formally recognise a Palestinian state, becoming the most significant Western power to do so and breaking with the American position, as pressure mounted on Britain and others to follow. Governments that had stood by Israel through 21 months of war found the images of starving children impossible to defend against, and the ground of Western opinion, which had shifted slowly throughout the conflict, moved sharply this fortnight. It was, in a terrible way, a demonstration of something this paper has noted about how the world attends to suffering: that statistics and warnings, however grave, move people far less than a single unbearable image, and that the famine had been forecast and warned of for many months by aid agencies whose reports went unheeded, until the children were visibly starving and the pictures could no longer be looked away from. The warning had been there for months. It took the images to make it real.

THE ECONOMY

Trump strikes trade deals with Europe and Japan, on his terms

The tariff war lurched toward a resolution that ratified the president's coercive method. Facing the August 1 deadline for his threatened punitive tariffs, major economies chose to settle: Japan agreed a deal on July 22, and the European Union on July 27, each accepting a baseline 15 percent tariff on their exports to the United States, along with pledges of vast investment, in exchange for avoiding the far steeper levies Trump had menaced. The deals were widely seen as capitulations, the world's other economic giants submitting to a tariff regime they had called unacceptable, because the alternative Trump offered was worse. The coercion had worked, at least in the narrow sense: the threats had extracted concessions, teaching every other nation that the way to deal with this administration was to pay.

IN BRIEF

An AI plan; a border war; a rocker's farewell

The administration released its "AI Action Plan" on July 23, a sweeping strategy to win the AI race against China through aggressive deregulation, the fast-tracking of data centres and the power plants to feed them on federal land, and the export of American AI abroad, stripping away the guardrails of the previous administration in favour of speed and dominance. Fighting broke out along the disputed border between Thailand and Cambodia on July 24, the deadliest clashes between the two neighbours in over a decade. And the heavy-metal pioneer Ozzy Osbourne died on July 22, weeks after a farewell concert, at 76.

The Puzzle

Crossword

A small interlude. Every answer is a common word; they interlock across and down.

Across

1 A garden shrub
5 A single time
6 Night-sky twinkler, or a celebrity
7 Aching, or a tender spot

Down

1 The one in charge
2 Archaic word for 'to'
3 Mark left by a healed wound
4 In this place

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The Ledger

The AI Action Plan formalises the year's regulatory reversal: from the Biden guardrails and the Bletchley spirit to explicit deregulation in the name of beating China. The gap between AI's power and its governance, which this paper has tracked since 2023, is now being widened as deliberate policy.

Data centers & power

The plan's centrepiece is the power question this paper has pressed for three years, now embraced as strategy: fast-track data centres and the power plants, including fossil and nuclear, to feed them, on federal land. The build-out's energy hunger is now official national priority, environmental cost be damned.

Rates

The trade deals with Japan and Europe, ratifying a 15 percent tariff baseline, remove some uncertainty while institutionalising higher costs. The inflationary effect is now structural; the Fed adjusts to a permanently more protectionist world.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.74 percent (July 24). Steady; the structural rise in tariffs and debt keeps a floor under yields, and thus under mortgage rates, for the foreseeable future.

India tech

The AI Action Plan's push to export American AI and dominate the global market is a direct competitive challenge to India's own AI ambitions; the deregulatory, speed-over-safety approach also sets a global tone that India's frugal, pragmatic AI sector will have to navigate.

What we called wrong

From Italy's ChatGPT ban to the EU AI Act to this, the pendulum has swung from caution to speed, and the governance gap we flagged at the very start is now policy rather than accident.

The Back Page

The last note

Ozzy Osbourne died this fortnight at 76, just weeks after hauling his broken body onto a stage in his native Birmingham for a farewell concert, seated on a black throne because Parkinson's disease and years of hard living had robbed him of the ability to stand, singing to fifty thousand people who had come to say goodbye to the man who, more than almost anyone, invented heavy metal. It was a fitting exit for a genuinely strange and improbable life: the working-class Birmingham kid who could barely read, who founded Black Sabbath and gave dark, heavy, doom-laden rock its template, who bit the head off a bat, who by every reasonable expectation should have died decades ago from the sheer quantity of substances he consumed, and who instead survived into a bewildered elder-statesman role, reinvented as a lovable, mumbling reality-television grandfather to a generation that had never heard his music. Beneath the caricature was a real artist and, by the accounts of those who knew him, a genuinely kind and gentle man, terrified and bemused by the demonic persona he had created and ridden to fame. He got his farewell, which few performers do, one last night on the throne in his home city, singing to the faithful, and then he was gone, weeks later, having somehow beaten the odds long enough to say goodbye on his own terms. The prince of darkness, it turned out, was a sweet man from Birmingham who loved his family and could not quite believe his luck, and he took his final bow, seated but singing, in front of the people who loved him, which is more than most of us will get, and exactly what he had earned.

The Fortnight's Fable

The Village That Counted Steps

A wise council, wishing its people healthy, promised a coin for every thousand steps walked, and the people, being sensible, walked. They walked in circles in their yards; they walked all night; the richer ones paid children to walk about wearing their counters. The step-counts climbed to glorious heights, the highest in all the region, and the fields went unploughed, and the village grew hungry and very, very fit.

Moral: tell people what you will measure, and they will give you the measure, and quietly keep for themselves the thing you had actually wanted.