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Greetings ladies and gents,

A bit of housekeeping before we get going: We’re looking for a writer to come onboard and assist with our growing operation.

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Enough babbling, let’s get into the news.

⏰ Today's reading time is 6 minutes

OpenAI has shut down its slop-generation app Sora less than two years after its unveiling made headlines for creating realistic clips based on simple prompts.

Despite the hype, Sora only made around $1.4 million.

For context, ChatGPT, something people actually use, brought in $1.9 billion over the period Sora was operational.

It’s not been the best week for the folks over at OpenAI, as Sora isn’t the only thing they’ve had to leave in the rear view mirror.

The company shelved its plans to move into the erotica space, due to the fact that none of the people responsible had ever actually had sex the prioritisation of other product developments.

The horny bastards among you needn’t panic though, as the company has promised to revisit the idea, as they still believe “in treating adult users like adults”.

And that’s not all.

The $1 billion ‘content partnership’ deal with Disney, announced in December as a historic turning point for AI and Hollywood, has also been canned, collapsing before a single dollar had changed hands.

Which is a crying shame, as it means we’re now unlikely to ever see the Sora-produced live action Disney version of The Teletubbies, starring Sam Altman as the Sun.

The UK is facing the biggest hit to growth from the Iran war out of the G20 major economies, according to the OECD.

Economic growth in the UK this year is forecast to be 0.7%, according to the policy wonks over at the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development said, down from its previous forecast of 1.2%.

Inflation is also predicted to be higher than expected.

In early March the UK government's official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), cut its expected growth rate for the UK this year to 1.1% from the 1.4% it predicted in last year's Budget.

Of course, economists can’t predict the future (or they’d all be millionaires), so it’s worth remembering these are forecasts, and subject to ongoing geopolitical developments.

The Iran war could end tomorrow, or it could rage on well into the summer. Only the world’s first Wotsit flavoured President really knows.

The UK is particularly vulnerable to energy shocks given we import most of our energy from Norway and Qatar, and it especially doesn’t help when the LNG facilities in one of them get bombed by a pissed-off Iran.

This, combined with the ‘Just in Time’ to get fucked in the ass system of gas storage, makes for a pretty bleak picture when it comes to gas supplies.

Volkswagen is in talks to convert one of its German car factories into a facility making components for Israel's Iron Dome missile defence system.

A certain Austrian painter is turning in his grave in Argentina.

The Osnabrueck factory employs 2,300 people and loses its current purpose in 2027 when T-Roc Cabriolet production ends. 

Volkswagen, having been trying to offload or repurpose the site since talks with German arms firm Rheinmetall collapsed last year.

Volkswagen has responded to the reports by saying it "ruled out the production of weapons," which is a curious thing to say while reportedly in talks about missile systems with a state-owned defence contractor.

To be fair, the Iron Dome is defensive rather than offensive technology, which could work as a loophole for letting the Nazi-commissioned company produce weapons defence systems.

Our German correspondent Peter O'Hanra-Hanrahan managed to sneak a word in with a Volkswagen exec about the whole thing:

The European Parliament has voted to deport migrants to countries they may have never visited (or even heard of), detain them for two years, and ban them from Europe forever.

The scheme works by shipping people to any country the EU has a bilateral agreement with, regardless of whether the migrant has any connection to it whatsoever. 

Green MEP’s have flagged this “a total renouncement of the EU values”.

The scheme could, for instance, end up deporting Afghans back to the famously progressive and forward-thinking Taliban.

The law passed by 389 votes, after which MEPs gave themselves a round of applause, as is customary when you get paid €8,000/month after taxes to scapegoat immigrants for your problems.

Mainstream conservatives once again teamed up with the far right to pass it, coordinating via a secret WhatsApp group.

No, not the one Ursula von der Leyen uses to chat with pharma CEOs.

The Parliament did show some restraint. Unaccompanied minors are excluded from deportation to random third countries.

Families with children are not.

The United Nations has voted to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs”.

The resolution - proposed by Ghana - urges UN member states to consider apologising for the slave trade and contributing to a reparations fund, though it does not mention a specific amount of money.

The proposal was adopted with 123 votes in favour and three against - the United States, Israel and the worlds first ever fourth world country, Argentina.

Unlike UN Security Council resolutions, those from the General Assembly are not legally binding.

Fifty-two countries said ‘no comment’ i.e. abstained, including the United Kingdom and European Union member states.

Countries like the UK have long rejected calls to pay reparations, saying that they’d have to raise the top rate of income tax to 80% to be able to afford them creating "a hierarchy of historical atrocities" was inappropriate.

A fabously convenient PR-stance for the country that ran the largest empire in human history and transported 3.1 million enslaved Africans across the sea. 

Hey, at least the likes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar had the decency to vote in favour of it, especially considering how much they still benefit from slavery today.

A Los Angeles jury has ruled that Instagram and YouTube are deliberately addictive, negligently designed, and responsible for leaving a teenage girl with body dysmorphia, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Meta and Google must pay $6 million in damages, with both appealing. 

Meta's defence was that a single app cannot be solely responsible for a teen mental health crisis, which is technically true in the same way that a single cigarette cannot give you lung cancer, or that a single hit of a crack pipe won’t make you rob a supermarket at gunpoint.

The top brass at Meta have consistently pushed back against the ‘a-word’, with the Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri insisting 16 hours of daily screentime was ‘problematic’ as opposed to ‘addictive’.

The platforms are currently protected by Section 230, a US law shielding tech companies from liability for their content.

This is great for protecting Zoom from liability when someone flashes their penis on a video call, but this trial has proven that social media companies are a different kettle of fish.

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Cooking pasta is one thing.

But cooking up explosives is a whole different ball game, as two Italian anarchists found out last week.

The pair of geniuses were killed in an explosion at an abandoned cabin on the outskirts of Rome.

Thankfully no one else was hurt.

Investigators say the device was made with fertiliser and a trigger, with nails also found in the wreckage. It’s possible a site close to the nearby Acquedotti park was the intended target.

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Thanks to Max L.S, Charlie & Harry