USA - The personal savings rate fell to its lowest level in roughly four years on Thursday as Americans continued to dip into their earnings to pay for increasing prices on goods caused in large part by the Iran war. The personal savings rate fell to 2.6% in April from a revised 3.2% in March, marking the third straight month of declines, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis data. The savings rate hit its lowest level since inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 and is approaching levels seen during the run-up to the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Americans have turned to credit cards and personal loans to confront higher prices, with credit card debt at $1.25 trillion in 2026’s first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

IRAN - Iran will sign a peace agreement with the United States only if $24 billion (£17.8 billion) worth of frozen assets are released. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Tehran’s chief negotiator, and Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, delivered the ultimatum during meetings with Qatari officials in Doha. They insisted that the Islamic Republic would not proceed with any agreement until half the frozen assets – worth $12 billion – are transferred when the memorandum of understanding is announced, with the remainder released over the following 60 days. “Our demand is the release of the frozen assets – not in the future, but right now,” one Iranian official close to the negotiations said. “No negotiations are possible without depositing Iran’s blocked funds.” Donald Trump has been warned that accepting the deal would be tantamount to rewarding the Iranian regime, and paying to end a war he began.

USA - The optics for a president could not be worse: handing over billions of dollars to the very regime America has been at war against. Yet, that is the reality facing Donald Trump, who spent years criticising Barack Obama for sending “pallets of cash” to Iran under a 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany. The sum Mr Trump has to contemplate – $24 billion (£19 billion), half of it to be paid upfront – would be released in exchange for a memorandum of understanding to end two similarly costly and politically painful months of fighting in the Middle East.

IRAN - In Iran, trust is an invaluable currency. But it is in short supply. For more than 100 days, the Islamic Republic – one of the world’s most militarised theocracies, a state built on the idea of unimpeachable authority – has been governed by a supreme leader no one has seen. And now it is expected to do a deal with the United States. But the system of government is fractured. Not everyone can be controlled, and hardliners within the parliament and military are doing their best to scupper any agreement. That includes taking to the water and laying sea mines, inviting the US to launch missiles during a ceasefire and putting the entire deal in jeopardy. The Islamic Republic is built on the principle that elected institutions exist beneath an unelected supreme leader who holds final authority on all strategic matters. This concentrated power worked – however repressively – when Ali Khamenei wielded it for 36 years. Mojtaba Khamenei, his son, does not have that control. Peace is hard to make when one side bombs during talks and the other sabotages its own negotiators.

MIDDLE EAST - Netanyahu frozen out of Iran talks — but he won’t back down easily. What started with a Hamas attack in October 2023, led to conflicts with Iranian allies and proxies that drew closer to Tehran, the heart of the “axis of resistance” that had plagued Israel since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Netanyahu said Trump agreed that Israel had the right to defend itself, “including in Lebanon”, but his opponents have already seized on what could turn into an election issue. Benny Gantz, the former defence minister and opposition party leader, said: “It is absolutely forbidden under any circumstances to accept the ceasefire in Lebanon as part of a deal with Iran.” Michael Herzog, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Washington until early 2025, told The New York Times: “You don’t hear much enthusiasm for this deal in Israeli government circles.” Despite all this, it’s never wise to write off Netanyahu, who has returned time and again to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. He has yearned for 40 years to smite the regime in Iran, but his dream come true may turn into his career’s undoing.

IRAN - Iran launched an attack on a US airbase after American airstrikes, hours after President Trump said he was willing to “outwait” Tehran in ceasefire negotiations. “Following this morning’s aggression by the invading US military against a location on the outskirts of Bandar Abbas Airport using aerial projectiles, the American airbase that served as the source of the attack was targeted,” the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said, according to Iran’s state broadcaster IRIB. The IRGC did not provide the location of the base, though Kuwait, a US ally, said it was responding to missile and drone attacks on Thursday morning. Bandar Abbas is Iran’s most important port in the Persian Gulf and lies near the Strait of Hormuz. Despite hopes that a peace agreement could have been reached last week, efforts to end the impasse in negotiations have since faded.

VATICAN - Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, repeats the lesson of the incarnation of Christ, that man stands at the centre of the work of the Divine, and renews the challenge for our own day. The Pope is clear that artificial intelligence now risks this elemental Christian theology threatening human dignity by turning the ownership of our data into a new form of slavery, just as cruelly as that ubiquitous sin did, and does, around the world. The Pontiff says that, because of this harm, artificial intelligence cannot be governed by good intentions alone, still less by the consciences of the engineers who build it.

GERMANY - Germany is moving toward what critics are calling a sweeping new form of state influence over online speech, after plans surfaced to force social media platforms to prioritize content from government-approved outlets — raising serious concerns about censorship, narrative control, and the future of free expression in Europe. According to documents obtained by Apollo News, regulators are preparing a system that would require platforms such as X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to give preferential treatment to content from so-called “reliable” media. What makes the proposal particularly controversial is not just the intent, but the mechanism. For the first time, state-linked authorities would directly shape the algorithms that determine what information citizens see — effectively inserting government priorities into the digital public square. At the center of the plan is the concept of “public value” media. In theory, these are outlets that provide socially beneficial information, but in practice, critics argue, they are media organizations vetted and approved by the same political system they are meant to scrutinize.

USA - In a congressional hearing last week, acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao said that the US is "doing a pause" on weapons sales to Taiwan "in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury," the name of the US operation against Iran. Trump himself gave another reason for the pause on the way back from last week's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Weapons sales to Taiwan are "a very good negotiating chip for us, frankly," Trump told Fox News in Beijing. "I'm not looking for somebody to go independent, and we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war. I'm not looking for that. I want [Taiwan] to cool down. I want China to cool down." At that meeting, Xi warned Trump that conflict over Taiwan could go to "an extremely dangerous place." It's a quiet but massive shift in US policy.

USA - Donald Trump is postponing a highly unusual visit to Camp David on Wednesday, where he planned to huddle with his Cabinet as high-stakes Iran peace talks hang by a thread. Instead, Trump announced that he'd be holding the Cabinet session at the White House due to 'possible bad weather conditions.' In a major show of administrative unity, every single member of the Cabinet - including outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard - was expected to join Trump at the historic presidential retreat tucked away in rural Maryland. Trump's last visit to Camp David was in June last year, just two weeks before the US launched strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer. The shadow of war is set to completely hijack the summit after the US launched blistering airstrikes on targets in southern Iran late Monday.

USA - Donald Trump is planning to force all federal employees to sign sweeping non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in a dramatic bid to choke off leaks to journalists. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the HR arm of the federal government, published a draft NDA on Tuesday to be handed to staff across all agencies. Anyone who breaks the gag order faces being fired, banned from future federal employment, and hit with civil or criminal legal action. It bars workers from disclosing any non-public, confidential or proprietary information 'whether marked as such', covering internal operations and personnel matters. The gag would follow employees for five years after they leave government service.

USA - Trump's secret NATO ultimatum sparks panic! Donald Trump is set to slash the arsenal of US fighter jets, warships and submarines reserved for NATO allies should a military crisis erupt in Europe. A military envoy sent by Pete Hegseth blindsided senior NATO officials in a classified Brussels briefing late last week, revealing US firepower committed to defending Europe will significantly decline, Der Spiegel and Reuters reported. The US fighter jet commitment to NATO is to be slashed by a third, while the Navy will withdraw destroyers from the alliance's pool. Washington will also pull its submarines from the alliance altogether, envoy Alexander Velez-Green reportedly told officials behind closed doors. Europe will be left to maintain its own supply of reconnaissance drones, a weapon that has proved decisive on the battlefields of Ukraine.

MIDDLE EAST - As the conflict with Iran stretches into its fourth month, the world’s oil markets are confronting a harsh physical reality that headline inventory numbers obscure. Veteran strategist Jeff Currie of Carlyle Group delivered a sobering assessment Monday: Asia’s tanks are effectively at bottom, Europe stands weeks away from similar pain, and the United States could face acute challenges by July. The disruption of Middle East exports through the Strait of Hormuz has triggered a genuine supply shock, one that policy gimmicks cannot easily resolve. Every passing day of depleted inventories does indeed strengthen Tehran’s position at the negotiating table, as Currie observed. Yet yielding to urgency would reward aggression rather than deter it. Markets may eventually stabilize once the Strait reopens, but the deeper lesson endures. Nations that neglect their God-given resources and productive capacity invite precisely this kind of vulnerability.

VATICAN - Pope Leo XIV made a historic apology on Monday for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery and for having failed to condemn it for centuries, calling the Vatican’s record a “wound in Christian memory.” Past popes have apologized for Christians’ involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But no pope had ever publicly acknowledged, much less apologized for, the role that past popes played in giving European sovereigns explicit authority to subjugate and enslave “infidels.” History’s first US-born pope, whose family history includes both enslaved people and slave owners, delivered the apology in his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” (Magnificent Humanity), which was released Monday.

UK - A rogue prince, even one mired in the kind of sleaze, greed and overbearing entitlement that Andrew has so unattractively displayed, could surely not undo an affection and a respect for our First Family that has flourished for generations. But will he bring down the monarchy? Not so long ago, that would have been an absurd question to ask as the Royal Family has overcome scandals in the past which have posed existential threats to its survival. For nearly seven years he has dominated royal headlines, overshadowing his family’s good deeds, sucking the air out of the room - all of which suits the agenda of the Left and those who want to bring down the Royal Family. It would be a tragedy if this spreading scandal is allowed to now encompass the reputation of the Queen who only ever wanted to do the best for her country.