Send stories, jokes and hate mail to [email protected]
Greetings lovely people,
We’ve recently expanded our team and have been busy pretending to have any sort of structure/organisation in place.
That’s not to say that we’ve taken our eyes off the ball. The only difference is we can now exploit extra interns to help translate the news into funny memes and commentary.
Ah, the wonders of late-stage capitalism. Anyway, let’s get to it.
⏰ Today's reading time is 6 minutes
Quote of the Week
"I mean, we can talk about erectile dysfunction but not clitoris stimulation. Something is wrong. Something is just wrong."
UK economy grew faster than expected in February ahead of Iran war
The UK economy saw its biggest monthly rise in more than two years in February, official figures show.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the economy grew by a faster-than-expected 0.5%, while it revised its estimate for January up to 0.1% after previously saying the start of the year had seen no growth.
TLDR: When you’re starting from rock-fucking bottom, the only way is up.
The figures cover a period before the outbreak of the US-Israeli war with Iran on 28th February, which has caused a major energy shock and experts warn risks a global recession if it is prolonged.
More on that later.
The ONS said the key services sector - which accounts for more than three-quarters of the economy - grew by 0.5%. Services includes areas such as travel, accommodation, retail, hospitality, legalised tax evasion, real estate, finance and entertainment.
Production output also grew by 0.5% in the month, and construction rose by 1.0%.
This week, the lizards over at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) cut its estimate for UK growth this year, warning it was set to be the hardest hit of the world's advanced economies.
It expects the UK to grow by 0.8%, down from the 1.3% prediction it had made in January before hostilities began.
And economists are always right when they make bets predictions forecasts.
Peter Magyar’s Tisza wipes out Viktor Orbán in Hungarian elections
Putin-lapdog Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party was wiped out in the Hungarian parliamentary election.
Peter Magyar’s upstart Tisza party won 138 of the 199 seats in the Hungarian parliament on a record high voter turnout.
J.D. Vance’s endorsement of Fidesz before the election continued his remarkable streak of turning everything he touches into shit (the “J.D. Vance Curse”).
Previous victims of the curse include failed U.S. negotiations with Iran earlier this month and the late Pope Francis, who (presumably) decided he’d seen enough and died the day after meeting Vance in April 2025.
Tisza’s supermajority gives Magyar the power to enact constitutional reforms, purge the judiciary of Orbán-appointed judges, and promote freedom of the press.
Whether the “arrogant” Magyar uses his new office for good, or simply chooses to be Orbán 2.0, remains to be seen.
Wanker or not, he’s earned our respect by virtue of his meme knowledge.
Magyar, after spotting the outgoing Orbàn sulking about on his balcony, immediately hit the “Absolute Cinema” meme.
Shoe company Allbirds, otherwise known as Noblokes, has announced it's pivoting from footwear to AI infrastructure, rebranding as NewBird AI.
Again, the fucking shoe company.
The San Francisco firm struck a $50 million deal to buy GPUs and offer cloud computing services, citing a “race to the bottom” "gap in the market" for AI compute capacity.
Shares surged over 580% on the news, which sounds great at first glance, until you realise they're still down 90% from their 2021 IPO peak.
The Allbirds brand itself was quietly offloaded to fashion conglomerate American Exchange Group for $39 million back in March.
What's been left behind is essentially a listed shell, now wearing an AI badge.
Analysts, the quarter-zip wearing, modern day Oracles of Delphi, aren’t sold on the whole thing.
One called it a "liquidation dressed as a pivot", and another noted that a stock jumping from $3 to $17 on a press release "doesn't restore around $4 billion in destroyed value.”
Oil prices plunge as Iran says Strait of Hormuz 'open' during ceasefire
Iran announced the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow chokepoint through which a fifth of the world's oil and gas flows, is "completely open" for the duration of the current ceasefire agreement.
Oil dropped from $98 to $88 a barrel on the news and markets rallied.
Trump posted in all-caps on Truth Social, declaring a successful jihad victory, which of course is always a fantastic sign.
But before anyone cracks out the champagne and party poppers, let’s pump the brakes a bit.
Nobody's actually sailing through it just yet. One anonymous operator put it plainly: "We won't be the first to go through."
The Shipping body BIMCO has also warned of uncleared mine threats and potential rogue strikes, with lots of tanker crew feeling about as relaxed as Captain Phillips watching a bunch of Somali pirates board his ship.
The Strait has been effectively shut since the US-Israel strikes on Iran in late February, sending Brent crude from under $70 to a peak of $119 in March.
A nine-day ceasefire window is thin cover for normalising global supply chains, with economists saying even a full peace deal leaves months of backlog to clear, not to mention the damage already done to energy infrastructure in the region.
On the bright side, the latest development means that Trump Daddy is virtually a shoe-in for the ‘Israel Peace Prize’, which he’s due to collect during his next state visit.
European civil servants are being forced off WhatsApp
France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are all rolling out government-controlled messaging apps, ditching WhatsApp and Signal for in-house alternatives.
NATO already has its own, and the European Commission plans to follow suit by the end of the year.
Whether they are any good and/or work outside the hours of 9-4:30 (with a generous lunch break) remains to be seen.
The official reason is security-related.
Russian hacking groups have been going to town on phishing campaigns via both platforms, with the EU's own mobile device management system being breached recently.
Not sure if Russian hackers had anything to do with Ursula Von der Leyen’s text messages with the CEO of Pfizer magical dissapearing act, but we’ll give her the benefit of the doubt.
Speaking of Ruskies, Russian-founded Telegram may be able to get in on the act if Whatsapp and Signal are off the cards.
Given its popularity with perverts and drug dealers, you would at least hope it’s pretty solid from an encryption point of view.
The suspected reason behind all this urgency is, you guessed it, the US of A and reducing European reliance of American tech.
Europe is slowly, belatedly, building the digital infrastructure to be less dependent on fax Washington.
Slowly and belatedly being the operative words.
Legal advisers help migrants pose as gay to get asylum, undercover BBC investigation finds
A BBC investigation has exposed a network of lawyers and immigration ‘advisers’ charging thousands of pounds to help migrants pretend to be gay in order to stay in the UK.
One immigration adviser boasted that she had spent more than 17 years helping bring fake claims and said she could arrange for someone to pretend they'd had a gay sexual relationship with a client.
These scum of the earth independent immigration consultants didn’t just limit their advice to telling migrants to pull a “Gianni Infantino”.
The same investigators found migrants were encouraged to fabricate domestic abuse claims against their British partners to jump the residency queue.
Enter Saul Goodman Eli Ciswaka.
Unregistered, unregulated, operating out of a St Pancras hotel, and for the low, low price of only £900, will construct an entire domestic abuse claim from thin air.
With a frankly impressive 100% success rate, the Home Office had apparently been sending him official correspondence without once asking who he is.
I do love paying taxes.
Anyway, kudos to the BBC for some proper investigative journalism here, highlighting an abuse of the rules designed to protect some of the most vulnerable in society.
And on that note, another meme.
He actually said this
Start your day smarter. Or at the very least, less stupid.
Our chums over at 1440 distil thousands of news sources into one reliable and clean feed.
From quick daily reads to deep dives, 1440 delivers news and knowledge for the insatiably curious, without opinions or distractions.
You get 1,440 minutes in a day (see what they did there?).
Don't waste them reading slop.
🍻Half Pints
Quick-fire news you might have missed
Albanian of the Week
Former Mayor of New York Eric Adams has joined the likes of Dua Lipa and Mother Teresa in becoming a fully fledged Albanian.
Adams was granted citizenship at the discretion of the country’s president.
He has no ties to Albania whatsoever.
Our Albania correspondent managed to obtain a quote from Adams after the announcement was made:
“This is a great honour for me. Everyone knows that Albania is the New York of Europe, and that Kosovo is the Staten Island of Albania.”
That’s all for today, but before you go…
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.
How was it for you?
Thanks to Sam, Max L.S & Laurence
