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Greetings beautiful people,

The weather here in Europe (yes, the UK is still Europe) is absolutely stupendous. Maybe global warming isn’t so bad after all.

Once we’ve waded through the swarms of drunk Arsenal fans celebrating their first title in 22 years (COYG), we’ll be firmly parked in a beer garden all weekend.

Anyway, let’s get you up to speed with what happened in the UK and beyond this week.

⏰ Today's reading time is 6 minutes

I’ll have a mango ice and a dinghy ride please, boss. 

Fresh from uncovering the legal advisors helping migrants pose as gay to cheat the asylum system, the BBC has delved back into the murky underbelly of the UK’s illegal migration industry. 

This time, journalists were sent undercover in the UK and France to understand the financial and payments ecosystem underpinning small boat crossings.

It turns out that registered companies in the UK are acting as payment agents for people smugglers in France, taking in the cash which pays for individuals' crossings and arranging for the money to be transferred to the organisers once a crossing completes. 

The BBC footage shows a vape-shop owner telling an undercover journalist that he could drop off the money to pay for a channel crossing ( £2,700 for two people) at his shop. 

He later denied it when confronted, claiming that “I’m not moving anything”. 

As well as confronting our entrepreneur of the week, the BBC also identified two other businesses in the UK taking payments on behalf of people smugglers: a wholesale business in Newcastle and a car wash in Cambridgeshire. A car wash in Antwerp and a restaurant in Paris were also found to be connected.

Whilst unsurprising that such respectable businesses would be high street fronts for organised crime, businesses connected to the crossings are clearly untroubled by attempts to "smash the gangs", which would be Keir Starmer's attempt to look like he's doing something about small boat crossings without actually doing anything.

Elon Musk lost his case against OpenAI on Monday, the latest in his recent losing streak of court cases.

The OpenAI case was his big swing.

He'd sued Scam Sam Altman in 2024, claiming OpenAI betrayed its founding promise to stay a nonprofit and had "stolen a charity."

After a three-week trial, with Altman and other key figures from OpenAI all on the stand, the jury took about ninety minutes in total to throw it out.

They ruled that his claim fell outside of the three-year statute of limitations.

The court claims he'd known the score since 2021 and only sued after launching his own rival, xAI, whose highlight has been creating X-rated (no pun intended) versions of people using artificial intelligence.

Ahh, the wonders of technology.

‘On the spectrum’ Tony Stark hasn’t had the best luck in court as of late, but he won’t care all that much.

Despite the SEC chasing him for $150 million it said he gained by hiding his Twitter stake, he settled for a $1.5 million fine, which is unlikely to put a dent in his pocket considering he’s still the world’s weirdest richest man.

HS2 - Surely they’ve finished it by now?

Unfortunately not. It was announced this week that the mother of all white elephants will end up costing UK taxpayers an eye-watering £102.7 billion, with trains now not running until at least 2036 (pushing back the previous target of 2033). 

In the original plans, trains between Birmingham and London were meant to be running by 2026, and the total projected cost to the government was about £49 billion in today’s money.

This would have also included lines to Manchester and Leeds in the north of England, which were scrapped under previous governments.

On the positive side, it’s good to see a government finally taking the cost of this project seriously, a mere fourteen years after the plans were confirmed in 2012.

Years of delays and cost increases have stemmed from overly ambitious plans, haggling over concessions for affected communities, and a planning system unfit for handling a project like this. 

Taking the project to a nice farm upstate and putting it out of its misery is also no longer an option either, as it is now no cheaper to abandon the project than it is to finish it. 

At least HS2 will be high-speed, right? Um, yeah, about that…

The trains' top speed, originally 224mph, has been reduced for cost and time-saving reasons.

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Berkshire Hathaway has made waves among investors, as SEC filings made this week revealed that the firm has recently bought $4.3 billion of Alphabet (Google) shares. 

It was good to see new CEO Greg Abel finally deploying some of Smaug Warren Buffet’s $397 billion cash pile in a significant way.

The purchase places Alphabet among the likes of Apple, Coca-Cola, American Express and Bank of America as one of the company’s largest holdings, with Alphabet rising to become the seventh-largest holding in Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio. 

Typically, Berkshire Hathaway has invested in solid, income-producing businesses in traditional economy sectors (think industrials, consumer products, and insurance) while avoiding Silicon Valley like the plague.

This purchase could be signalling a shift towards growth- and technology-focused investments under the company’s new leadership.

Berkshire Hathaway has been an admirer of Google’s advertising business for a long time, and this investment should be viewed more as making a substantial bet on Google’s AI-driven growth than only buying into the present business. 

Perhaps this represents a gradual evolution at the company.

We’ll withhold judgement, and wait and see if Greg Abel decides to properly deploy the company’s cash pile (i.e., make some yolo plays on shitcoins).

As reported by the FT, a University of Cincinnati paper published this month claims that the rollout of smartphones has caused a collapse in fertility rates across the world.  

While I won’t stop sleeping with an iPad between my legs, it’s apparently not the 5G that is reducing fertility rates (we see you, put the tinfoil hats away).

Instead, the paper argues that because young people interact far more online than in-person, and fewer in-person interactions are leading to fewer pregnancies.

While it is interesting to see it explained, we didn't need advanced research to tell us that being chronically online doesn't get you laid. 

However, declining fertility rates are becoming increasingly prevalent worldwide. Previously this was an issue for only the most advanced economies like Japan. Now, in more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below 2.1 or the “replacement rate” (the birth rate at which a population stays flat).  

Why is this such a big deal?

Well, public services are largely financed by tax revenues generated by working-age people, but if the number of “dependents” gets too high versus the number of people in work, supporting them becomes increasingly difficult. 

Evidence suggests that providing secure and suitable homes to young couples increases their likelihood of starting a family, and could meaningfully raise fertility rates again. Who would have thought!?

Thankfully, councils across the UK seem to prefer preserving “heritage assets” like derelict shopping centres instead of allowing more housing to be built, so this problem will likely hang over the UK for years to come. 

In a move that would make any tinpot dictator and/or Silvio Berlusconi green with envy, Donald Trump has struck a deal with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to get them to leave him the fuck alone.

The agreement includes a provision shielding of Trump and his family from pending IRS audits involving past tax years, although the protection does not extend to future filings or potential criminal investigations.

Immunity from IRS scrutiny for Mr. Trump and his family was part of a broad agreement made by the Justice Department to resolve a lawsuit he filed against them over the leak of his tax returns.

Beyond the audit provision, the Justice Department committed to creating a $1.8 billion (1.776 billion to be exact) fund to pay victims of “weaponisation,” a proposal that has been rebuked by both Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

The IRS has historically made a point of not giving the president special treatment, as its internal procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president’s annual tax returns.

Unlike the Justice Department, they are subject to a federal law that bars the president, vice president or their aides from influencing or directing its investigations.

How’s that working out, guys and gals?

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Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) including gonorrhoea and syphilis have hit record levels in Europe, according to new data.

The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said both diseases had reached their highest levels in over 10 years in 2024, with Spain having the most cases.

Stay safe out there people, you don’t want to end up a syphilitic moron like Al Capone.

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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 Sam & Dom