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Greetings lovely people,

Given that WW3 may be around the corner, no one would blame you for not having memes as your top priority this week.

But as G.K Chesterton once said, "It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light".

So with that in mind, we hope that today’s email makes you smile as much as Bill Clinton looking at old pictures of himself on Epstein’s island.

Enough foreplay, let’s get cracking…

⏰ Today's reading time is 5 minutes

Emmanuel Macron wants to show you his wife’s balls nukes.

France is bumping up its nuclear warhead count beyond the current 300, launching a new submarine in 2036 called The Invincible (The Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey was taken as a username).

The plan is to give-up give France’s nuclear umbrella to eight European allies, including the UK, Germany and Poland.

The concept is called "advanced deterrence", which is diplomat-speak for "we will absolutely nuke someone if pushed, don’t push us or we’ll fucking do it."

Eight countries get to join French nuclear exercises and potentially host France's nuclear bombers on their soil, which is either a fantastic security guarantee or a great way to make yourself a target, depending on your outlook.

Crucially, President Macron made clear that France alone keeps its finger on the button.

So partners get the comfort of the umbrella, whilst outsourcing the decision making to Emmanuel Macaroon and whoever ends up succeeding him.

Officials called it the biggest shift in French nuclear thinking since the Charles de Gaulle days.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves stood up in Parliament on Wednesday to deliver the Spring Statement.

The SS (no, not that SS) is crucially different from a Budget in that absolutely nothing of significance policy-wise happens afterwards.

The OBR, the government's independent maths nerds, downgraded growth from 1.4% to 1.1% this year, which Reeves blamed on another sandbox war Middle East instability rather than anything closer to home.

Immigration is falling, though that’s largely because more UK nationals are leaving, so pitching it as a policy win is a bit like saying the Titanic solved it’s overcrowding problem by hitting an iceberg.

She also shelved chunks of the inherited farmland tax and gave pubs a business rates discount, costing the Treasury £100 million a year each.

In short: “things are not great, not terrible. If they get any worse, there’s not really much we can do about it.”

The last time Texas last sent a Democrat to the Senate in 1988, the internet didn't exist, Donald Trump had just released his magnum opus The Art of the Deal, and you still didn’t have to ask “the smart one or the village idiot?” when referring to George Bush.

James Talarico, a 36-year-old state lawmaker, won the Democratic primary on Tuesday, with over 100,000 more Democrats voting in the Texas primary than Republicans, and twice as many Democrats that turned out compared to the last Senate primary.

Fresh off of a big donations drive and savvy social media distribution, Talarico has gone from a virtually unknown Texas state legislator to a real rising star within the Democratic Party, drawing comparisons with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Granted, Mamdani is playing on a easier mode, given that most New Yorkers would rather have a Sesame Street character as Mayor than a Republican.

Texas is redder than a British person trying to tan in Spain, so flipping it Democrat is a big ask.

But if he pulls off the upset, he could secure more mainstream backing from a party that is still trying to figure out it’s 2028 strategy.

On Friday, OpenAI announced a deal with the US Defense Department, literally hours after rival AI company Anthropic were deemed a ‘security threat’ and iced out of a $200 million deal.

The timing was, to put it bluntly, shady as fuck.

It landed hours after Trump banned federal agencies from using rival Anthropic's tools, and hours before the US bombed Iran.

The company’s top brass were reportedly uncomfortable with the idea of its flagship model Claude being used for fully autonomous weapons systems and domestic mass surveillance of Americans.

Ahh the spirit of Snowden lives on. No such qualms for Scam Altman, though!

By Monday, he was on X posting an external internal memo, admitting the company "shouldn't have rushed" and that the deal "looked opportunistic and sloppy." He was so sorry, that he went ahead and signed the deal anyway.

Anthropic, for context, was founded by people who left OpenAI over concerns about safety, which is the equivalent of leaving an oil company over environmental concerns.

Revenue reportedly hit $19 billion recently, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, so it’s unlikely they’ll be sweating the Pentagon deal falling through too much.

For the first time since the Romans arrived on British shores and realised just how bad food can really taste, UK unemployment has overtaken Italy's.

Yes, the same Italy that invented the three hour lunch break, have a word in their language for standing around watching others work, and shut down their entire country every August to go to the beach.

Official figures put UK unemployment at 5.2%, nudging ahead of Italy's 5.1%.

The country that gave the world "il dolce far niente" (the sweetness of doing fuck all) is now, statistically, better at finding people jobs than we are.

The UK labour market has been softening for months. Employers are hiring less, redundancies are ticking up, and the National Insurance rises announced in last year's Budget are widely blamed for pushing things in the wrong direction.

Italy is moving the other way.

Their pint-sized leader Giorgia Meloni has implemented a series of labour reforms designed to make hiring easier, and the economy has created jobs at a pace that match their “it ain’t much but it’s honest work” 0.5% economic growth.

And to really rub salt in the wound, the weather and food is still considerably better over there.

On the 28th of February, the two best friends that anyone could have US and Israel launched strikes on Iran, targeting key Iranian officials, military commanders, and facilities.

When they weren’t busy levelling schools full of children, the joint US-Israeli forces managed to kill the Supreme Leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khamenei, who had ruled Iran as a theocratic dictatorship since taking over from the original Ayatollah Khomeinei in 1989.

They aren’t doing much to dispel the rumour that the only requirement for the Supreme Leader gig is having a similar sounding name to the previous guy, as the next theocratic nutcase to take charge is apparently also a Khameinei.

But worry not, the yanks have a genius plan to get him out of there:

Secretly arm the Kurdish forces on the ground to do your bidding and force regime change. Because arming a militia against a regional adversary never ends up biting you in the arse and producing Osama Bin-Laden.

Bombing continues across the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, The UAE, Qatar, Oman and Cyprus all being hit in the crossfire as Iran says ‘fuck the lot of you’ and targets US and foreign military forces across the region.

In Lebanon, Israeli forces have begun a ground invasion following attacks from the Iranian proxy army Hasbullah.

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As conflict in the Middle East raged on and emergency meetings were held to deal with the fallout, European Commission President Ursula Von Der Karen Haircut Leyen, like a good European, refused to let it derail her weekend.

In order for our whole team to go full-time and take The Pint to the next level, we need at least 50,000 subscribers (we’re currently at 17,000).

We’re working on it, but in the meantime, you can help by referring us through your unique link below (right next to DiCaprio).

Thanks to Max L.S, Sam and Harry