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Greetings you rascals,

And a special welcome to those of you that are new here. If you take yourself and the world very seriously, we probably aren’t for you.

If you enjoy memes and irreverent writing that keep you informed without wanting to spoon your eyes out in horror/boredom, then consider us your new family.

A family that you only hear from a handful of times a week and ask you to help them pay rent from time to time.

⏰ Today's reading time is 7 minutes

In what experts are calling 'The Most European Move Of All', the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has introduced a decree law that bans the use of a burqa or niqab in schools, as well as a “30% cap on the number of students in a class who do not have an adequate command of Italian."

When pressed for what constituted an “adequate command of Italian”, the leader, who is also president of the nation’s right-wing party Brothers Of Italy, declared that it was her mission to assure no child will grow up to “order a Cappuccino after 1pm”, or talk without unnecessarily gesticulating with their hands.

The ceiling would apply to new enrolments from the 2027-28 school year. In primary schools it covers non-citizens born abroad or who have not attended two years of Italian nursery, while in secondary schools it covers those without three successful years in the Italian system.

Exceptions can be made if children have an encyclopaedic knowledge of which pasta shape goes with which sauce and/or they demonstrate proficiency in sending 5-20 min long voice notes while driving.

Failure to meet the standards may result in a €1,000 fine, but the bill features even more draconian laws than that are being widely reported.

If a child is found to “seriously struggle to integrate”, their parents may be sentenced to 8 consecutive weekends of Italian lessons.

Critics argue that the stipulation violates the Geneva convention, which defends a citizen’s right to not be forcibly submitted to extended periods of time in the company of Italians.

Trump laid out the red carpet, literally and figuratively, for Xi Jinping this week, as the Chinese leader made his first US visit in over a decade.

It took Xi barely stepping onto the tarmac for Trump to produce a meme-worthy moment. As the military flyover greeted Xi above them, the annoying orange winced in pain at the sound, while Xi stayed as cool as a cucumber.

Read into that as you wish.

We are standing in solidarity with our lamestream media counterparts (more on that later), so were not physically present at the White House to be able to report on events.

So here’s a quick rundown based on the research we made one of our interns do this morning over 7 espressos:

Like most 70+ year olds who’ve spent the day walking about and pretending to remember people’s names, their minds turned to food, provided at a lavish state dinner at the White House.

The guest list was America's tech and finance elite, who were presumably there to see if they could score a discount on some of those nice open-source Chinese LLMs.

Just two months into his tenure, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has already achieved the unthinkable: he’s made dystopia boring.

In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly – his first since taking office – the PM, presumably after 12 minutes of waffling about how Kes (1969) still makes him cry, revealed plans for a Ministry of Truth National Centre for Information Defence - a multifaceted organisation designed to counter “cyberattacks” by foreign state powers, seemingly through control of social media companies and censorship of alleged ‘deepfakes’.

Big Brother Burnham clearly loved his English lit degree at Cambridge so much that he wants to integrate parts of Orwell’s novel ‘1984’ into his government.

No more fake news, ladies and gents (Donald, take notes).

Facing the outcry of anyone who’s read any dystopian novel ever written, Burnham remains steadfast that his Ministry of Tru-uhhh….National Centre for Information Defence is a necessary measure to protect Britain’s democracy.

While details regarding the nature of said organisation remain scant, it is believed that the idea for the taskforce came to the Labour leader the previous week, after he sent a video of a “bloody talented labrador” singing ‘This Charming Man’ into the cabinet group chat.

We spend a lot of time taking in news sources from around the web, as you can imagine.

So we can tell you first-hand how easy it is to be misled and manipulated by much of today's lamestream mainstream news. 

Not a pretty sight. 

Which is why we teamed up with Ground News.

They pull coverage of the same story from thousands of sources across the political spectrum, flagging each outlet's known biases, factual reliability, and even ownership of the various outlets. 

Their Bias Comparison tool is a personal fave amongst The Pint team.

It gives you a no-nonsense breakdown of each individual story and how it’s being framed by different outlets from the left, centre and right.

We use Ground News every week to help put the newsletter together, and honestly, they've been a total game changer for us.

Subscribe to get 40% off the Vantage plan using our unique link.

Trump, in a very mature, rational, and completely non dementia related flare up, announced this week that he was banning journalists from his least favourite news outlets (CNN, MS Now, Politico) from entering the White House premises. 

Why you might ask?

Short answer: they don’t pee on him in a Russian hotel room kiss his ass as much as he’d like. 

Long answer: “Something, something, quite frankly, fake news, something or other, they’re fake news, did you see the latest episode of RuPauls Drag Race? They looked fabulous, didn’t they? Terrific show.”

In a show of journalistic solidarity at the fact that the President has blatantly violated the First Amendment, a coalition of the major U.S. television outlets (including ABC, CBS, Fox News, NBC and the newly-banned CNN) all agreed to suspend their video coverage of Donald Trump.

Consequently, all the pleasantries with Xi mentioned above weren’t televised. Well, not exactly…

The Orange Potus created his own YouTube channel called Trump TV to video broadcast all his events. Unfortunately, the sound quality isn’t great, and no one seems to really give a shit anyway.

In case you do though…

Live Stream TrumpTV HERE (or don’t, you’ll be fine either way)

A new alliance has formed around the watering trough.

Big AI moguls have come together and publicly pledged to unanimously ‘slow down’ their own technology in the name of safety.

Surely you all remember last week’s warning from an Anthropic worker that there is a 10% chance that AI ‘could kill all humans within a decade’.

Not too keen on being offed by their own creations, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's co-founder Demis Hassabis have all come together to collectively pull the reins on their AI development programmes until its safety can be guaranteed.

The billionaires do care about us! Cue the Disney music and roll the credits, right?

Nope. There has been a fair bit of backlash to the deceleration.

Firstly, Trump disagrees with it and he wants to rename AI ‘super intelligence’ as the word ‘artificial’ makes it sound too fake. Good to see he’s focusing on the crucial details of the issue.

There are subscription-paying users who are alleging that there is some kind of contractual violation to the AI companies deliberately taking their foot off the gas.

They clearly want development to progress as quickly as possible. 

To be fair, companies on ChatGPT Enterprise are shelling out a lot: it's custom-quoted (roughly $45–75 per user a month) with a minimum of around 150 seats. Roll it out to a few thousand staff and you're comfortably into seven figures a year.

Maybe you’d feel a bit miffed too. But also, I’d rather not get enslaved by a Terminator called Claude anytime soon.

A rogue OpenAI ‘agent’ has hacked into and ‘infiltrated’ a private statistics portal containing data from Australia’s universal healthcare scheme Medicare.

For any hypochondriac Aussies out there, no stress, the information is ‘non-sensitive’.

For any slightly scared shitless Aussies (or non Aussies for that matter), the ease with which the AI managed to get into a supposedly secure government portal is quite unnerving.

And no it’s not just because the Department of Health cybersecurity provider runs off a didgeridoo.

The agent is said to have gone ‘rogue’ during a test exercise where is was asked to use openly available statistical data sets to answer questions and instead decided to go one step further, hack into the Medicare system, and provide far more detailed answers than anyone was anticipating. 

The company training the model, realising their bot had accidentally hacked some confidential government data, decided the best option was to send off a wishy-washy email to a generic Australian government inbox several weeks later.

Whoever was monitoring the inbox was off wrestling a crocodile somewhere in the outback, so the rogue agent remained at large for almost a month. 

Maybe next time they can hack into my student loan portal and wipe the debt off. Just saying….

It was the 81st session of the U.N General Assembly this past week, bringing leaders from all over the world to the Big Apple to do what the U.N was built for:

Talk about the pressing issues of the world, with the full knowledge that half the people in the room with you probably a) disagree with you b) think your country shouldn’t exist or c) just don’t care and are there for the nightlife.

While Bibi Netanyahu was busy droning on about posts that other people’s wives had liked on Instagram, other leaders were busy aura farming.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France, got a great snap of him and his entourage (it physically pains me to have to use a French word here) walking to the U.N HQ in Manhattan.

A French person hasn’t looked this cool since Alain Delon.

We’d love it if you left us some feedback as to how you found this edition.

Our intern will get back to you within 4-5 business days, once we’ve let them out of the basement for their legally mandated half an hour of fresh air.

Thanks to Jack & Roberto