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Greetings ladies and gents,

We managed to make it through St Patrick’s Day without a) decimating our livers and b) having to listen to another Brit or American claim they were Irish because their great-grandfather had a pint of Guinness once.

Before we go out to finish what we couldn’t on Tuesday, let’s get you up to speed on what happened in the world this week.

⏰ Today's reading time is 6 minutes

Keir Starmer held a press conference this week to announce that the UK would not be getting involved in the Middle East war, successfully reducing the number of things people can have a go at him for by a grand total of one.

With the desperation levels of a crackhead who has definitely not relapsed and won’t spend the money on drugs, Trump has been asking anyone in his contacts allies to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz.

He did also ask China, which went as well as you can imagine.

Starmer said “the UK is "looking through options" and working on a "viable plan" with allies, while simultaneously insisting Britain "will not be drawn into the wider war”.

He’s clearly learnt from the last time a vanilla flavoured centre-left lawyer followed a random idiot into a sandbox war.

Starmer also announced £53 million to help households struggling with heating bills, which, depending on whether you’re a glass half full or half empty kind of person, is either compassionate governance or the equivalent of handing someone a glass of water while their house burns down.

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg renamed one of the most valuable companies in human history after a virtual world that nobody had even the remotest interest in.

The Facebook became Meta, with Zuckerberg putting on a META VR headset™ and announcing that within a decade, a billion people would be living and working in the metaverse. 

In the real world-verse, the Horizon Worlds Metaverse platform never attracted more than a few hundred thousand monthly users, which is fewer than the number of people that race pigeons competitively each month.

Meta has now shut the whole thing down and cut over a thousand employees, with Fuckerberg acting like the whole thing never happened.

To be fair, if you’d spent more than the GDP of Azerbaijan on recreating the Wii Sports waiting room, you would want it forgotten as quickly as possible.

On the bright side, the company can now focus more of their attention on pretending that their products aren’t designed to be inherently addictive to teenagers.

The strikes on Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial hub have sent gas prices in the UK soaring to over double pre-conflict levels.

Ras Laffan Industrial City is Qatar’s main site for producing liquefied natural gas (LNG), which is used globally for cooking, heating homes and generating electricity.

It produces about a fifth of the world’s supply of LNG, on which the UK and many other European countries are heavily reliant.

The Iranian strikes were a direct retaliation to Israeli strikes on Iran’s own South Pars gas facility.

South Pars is the largest natural gas field on earth, sitting directly next to Qatar's own energy infrastructure.

Despite initial being reported as a joint strike with the US, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has since claimed that Israel acted alone in striking South Pars.

Our Middle East correspondent managed to get a statement from Bibi himself:

The EU has announced "EU Inc.", a shiny new scheme letting entrepreneurs launch a company anywhere across the bloc within 48 hours, for under €100, and all entirely online.

Countries like Italy, France and Germany still have strict notarisation laws that delay the setup of LLCs/Limited Liability companies, adding needless red-tape to a process that takes far less in the UK and elsewhere.

In theory at least, EU Inc would mean no more waiting to get an appointment with an 80 year old notary who still communicates entirely by fax, only for them to tell you that setting up a company will take months and cost you thousands of euros.

However, the industry group that literally inspired the name of the proposal hit out at the plans, saying that it fails in its main objective of harmonising company law because it still defers authority to the national courts.

The EU has sinced promised revisions to the draft, insisting the scheme it will be available to any founder who considers it suitable, alongside existing national company forms.

Translating legal fuckwit to English, that last bit may just mean “you still have to do all the paperwork your country requires as well as paying us €100 for a shiny EU Inc label.”

Either way, the proposal still needs sign-off from member states and the European Parliament before becoming law, with a target date of end of the century 2026.

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Cuba’s entire electricity system had collapsed on Monday afternoon, leaving about 10 million people without power.

Emergency teams were still struggling to restore it when the US leader made his latest not-so-thinly veiled threat.

“I believe I will have the honour of taking Cuba,” he mused to reporters. “I mean, whether I free it, take it – I think I could do anything I want.”

Who knows, maybe he’s looking to open up a Trump Casino & Hotel there if when he leaves office.

After the success of the mission to abduct the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, one of Cuba’s greatest allies in the region, the Orange Maniac has steadily ratcheted up the pressure on the territory, signing an executive order to impose tariffs on any country that sends oil to the Caribbean island.

The blockade against Cuba has accelerated the crisis, but it’s not like things were all sunshine and rainbows beforehand, no matter what the likes of Jeremy “Castro didn’t mean it when he called gay people worms” Corbyn will have you believe.

Cuba’s archaic power network has been partially collapsing regularly since October of 2024 and the country has already seen three national collapses in the past four months, with a knock-on effect of the water supply.

Throw in the fact that the country imports between 60-80% of its (still rationed) food, and the picture gets even darker, if you’ll pardon the pun.

The number of Palestinians forcibly driven from their homes by Israel in the occupied West Bank surged 25% between November 1st 2024 and October 31st 2025, according to a United Nations report released on Tuesday.

Over that that period, more than 36,000 Palestinians were displaced. The report recorded 1,732 incidents of settler violence that caused casualties or property destruction, up from 1,400 in the previous reporting period.

The attacks included sustained harassment, intimidation and the destruction of Palestinian homes, farmland and livelihoods.

“Settler violence continued in a coordinated, strategic and largely unchallenged manner, with Israeli authorities playing the central role in directing, participating in or enabling this conduct,” the report said, making it difficult to distinguish between state and settler violence.

Hundreds of strikes have also hit southern Lebanon and Beirut, including Dahiya, a dense residential district that also happens to be a Hasbullah Hezbollah stronghold. The strikes have killed over 900 people in Lebanon and displaced more than a million.

Israel has told displaced Lebanese in the south they are not going home until Hezbollah's infrastructure there is gone.

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Tech entrepreneur Paul Conyngham used AI and RNA technology to create a personalised cancer vaccine for his dog Rose after being told she had just months to live

The vaccine reduced Rose's cancer by 75% and significantly improved her mobility and quality of life.

"Rose is my best mate and she's been with me through really tough times. I felt I had to do my part for her as well."

I’m definitely not crying writing this.

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 some fresh air.

Thanks to Max L.S, Harry & Laurence