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Good morning/afternoon/evening,

Wherever you are in the world, we hope this email finds you well (and not in the passive aggressive corporate-speak way).

It’s been another whirlwind week, and as ever, we were on hand to soak it all up and spit it back out for your viewing pleasure.

Onto the main event…

⏰ Today's reading time is 6 minutes

A landmark trial has just kicked off in Los Angeles that could reshape how social media companies operate around kids.

The plaintiff's lawyer came out swinging, calling Instagram and YouTube "addiction machines" built to hook children's brains on purpose, as opposed to getting them hooked and selling their data to advertisers “by accident”.

The lawyers representing "KGM" (known by her initials for anonymity) are promising internal documents and emails from Zuckerberg himself, including one from 2015 where the Meta CEO demanded a 12% increase in time spent on the platform.

YouTube allegedly pushed young users away from its own YouTube Kids app because it could charge advertisers more on the main platform — given that, funnily enough, four-year-olds don't have a huge amount of household purchasing power.

Meta's defence strategy is essentially blaming the plaintiff's home life, pointing to domestic violence, parental abuse and therapy records dating back to age three.

Classy stuff.

Zuckerberg, Instagram head Adam Mosseri and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan are all expected to testify over the six-week trial.

Snapchat and TikTok settled out of court prior to the opening court date.

After the resignation of his Chief of Staff last week, British PM Keir Starmer looked like he was on his way out.

However, his fortunes were changed by a rallying (for his standards at least) speech to Labour MPs that earned multiple standing ovations, turning what could have been a mutiny into some temporary reprieve.

“He seemed like a completely different person tonight” said one Cabinet Minister after having witnessed it.

Drama aside, the bigger problem for anyone wanting him gone is that all the potential replacements are a bit shit:

Labour MPs are also concerned with looking too much like Tories, who churned through four PMs in six years and are now virtually unelectable as a result.

Keir lives to fight another day, but with local elections coming up in May and now no more senior advisors left to throw under the bus when shit hits the fan, he’s not out of the woods just yet.

Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe told Sky News this week that the UK had been "colonised by immigrants”.

He then apologised for his "choice of language" (English?), while insisting the conversation still needed having.

Maybe he could start that conversation with his own football team, which consists almost entirely of immigrants.

He claimed the UK population had risen by 12 million in five years.

It transpires that he pulled this number out of his arse, with the actual figure being closer to three million according to the Office of National Statistics.

Keir Starmer, relieved to have the attention taken off him by an old twat for once, called the comments "offensive and wrong."

Nigel Farage backed him, naturally, saying the comments were "accurate and right" if you just take out the word colonise.

Oh and brush aside that he was a Switzerland-sized population-off on the actual numbers.

It’s also worth noting that Ratcliffe, one of Britain's richest men, pays less tax in the UK than the vast majority of immigrants, given that his official residency is in Monaco.

Where the tax rate is 0%.

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, just raised $30 billion in a single funding round, doubling its valuation to $380 billion.

To put that in perspective, that's more than most of the largest publicly listed companies in the US are worth, and all from a company that was only formed in 2021.

Anthropic says its annual revenue hit $14 billion after growing more than tenfold each of the past three years.

The growth is largely driven by its AI coding tool Claude Code, which has been busy making swathes of white-collar workers consider moving to the countryside to raise chickens and/or become DJs.

Anthropic is forecasting to break-even by 2028, which would be two years ahead of rival OpenAI. Both companies are expected to pursue IPOs in the second half of this year, so they’re looking to get their houses in order before then.

OpenAI is meanwhile assembling an even more absurd round of up to $100 billion that would value it at $830 billion.

The spending to match is equally eye-watering, with both firms burning through cash on computing power and poaching researcher talent.

Oh, and replacing the employees that quit to study poetry due to their employers putting ‘the world being in peril’.

Switzerland will vote on the 10th June on whether to cap its population at 10 million, a proposal from the Swiss People's Party (SVP) that would ultimately force the government to start throwing the elderly off cliffs pull out of its free movement agreement with the EU if numbers don't fall.

The country currently has 9.1 million people.

Only about 10% of Swiss popular initiatives ever pass, but a December poll showed 48% support for this one, which is more mainstream support than expected.

Major employers like Roche, UBS and Nestlé all oppose it, warning it would wreck bilateral EU agreements that underpin Swiss prosperity, given that around half of its exports go to the European market.

The leading business lobby has branded it the "chaos initiative," arguing companies that rely on stashing away dirty money European workers would simply relocate abroad.

We bet Switzerland’s former arch-nemesis Colonel Gaddafi would have some creative ideas on how to control their population size.

Trump has reversed the 2009 EPA ruling that classified greenhouse gases as a threat to public health, removing the legal foundation for virtually all federal climate regulation in the US.

The Obamna-era endangerment finding underpinned emissions rules across vehicles, power plants, oil and gas, landfills and aircraft. Without it, the federal government has no legal basis to regulate carbon dioxide or methane.

The White House says scrapping it will save over $1 trillion and cut $2,400 off the cost of every new car.

Environmental groups dispute those numbers, arguing Americans will actually spend $1.4 trillion more on fuel for less efficient vehicles, while suffering up to 58,000 additional premature deaths and 37 million more asthma attacks.

Legal experts believe the administration wants the reversal challenged in court so it reaches the Supreme Court before Trump finally learns to read leaves office.

A win there would make the change permanent, meaning no future president could simply reinstate the finding without new legislation from Congress.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has shown his more progressive side and selected his 13 year old daughter Kim Ju Ae as his heir, according to South Korea's intelligence agency.

Provided she doesn’t get caught watching Squid Game any time soon, she would succeed her father and become her country’s first female supreme nutcase leader.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said it took a "range of circumstances" into account in making this assessment, such as the fact that he’s eaten purged every other viable candidate.

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