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Happy Friday you lovely people,

We’re coming to you from beautiful Malta this week, where the team is celebrating The Pint’s 1-year anniversary.

This time last year, we sent the first email out to exactly 0 people (we were extremely drunk), right here in the middle of the Mediterranean.

Today it’s going out to 10,000+ people, all staying (kind of) informed on current affairs and business through memes.

We appreciate every single last one of you. This is only the beginning of something bigger.

⏰ Today's reading time is 5 minutes

Quote of the Week

Tim Davie resigns as BBC director general after accusations of bias in coverage

Two of the BBC’s top bosses, director general Tim Davie and head of News Deborah Turness, have quit after an ex-advisor accused the corporation of “serious and systemic” political bias.

The storm centres on a Panorama episode that stitched together parts of a 2021 Trump speech, creating the impression he told supporters to march on the Capitol.

Trump’s camp pounced, branding the BBC “fake news,” and his 8 year old press secretary Karoline Leavitt openly celebrated the resignations.

Davie said he still had full backing from the board but accepted responsibility for mistakes after a year of political flare-ups.

Turness called the saga damaging to an institution she “loves,” though she rejected claims of institutional bias.

The timing couldn’t be worse for the BBC as it enters funding talks with the government to renew its charter.

UK politicians across the spectrum are now demanding reform, while insiders fear the corporation is being dragged into a coordinated political campaign orchestrated by its political enemies.

The US just crawled out of its longest-ever government shutdown (42 days), after a deal between Republicans and a handful of Democratic senators forced the government back open until January.

The core fight was over the Epstein emails Obamacare tax credits created under Biden, which kept premium costs down.

Democrats tried to use the shutdown to strong-arm an extension, but the final deal didn’t include it. Instead, they get a vote in December that may well go nowhere.

Premiums are already set to jump roughly 26%.

Trump and Republicans are blaming Democrats for the shutdown and the chaos that followed: furloughed workers, unpaid military and airport staff, food stamp payments halted, travel cuts, and mass flight cancellations.

Democrats say the GOP caused the crisis by refusing to negotiate on diddling kids healthcare and rescinding cuts.

A small bloc of Democratic moderates ultimately helped Republicans push the compromise through.

Party leaders are furious but say the fight isn’t over, especially with another funding cliff coming in January (ahhh shiitt, here we go again…)

SoftBank sells stake in Nvidia for $5.8 billion as it doubles down on OpenAI bets

SoftBank just poured fuel on the “AI bubble” debate by quietly dumping its entire Nvidia stake for $5.8 billion, right after Nvidia briefly became the world’s first $5 trillion company and CEO Jensen Huang celebrated by pottering around South-East Asia eating noodles.

The reason for the sell-off is SoftBank is going all-in on OpenAI.

Its CFO says the firm needs over $30 billion for new AI bets, so it’s selling off existing holdings, including part of its T-Mobile stake, to fund the spree.

He insisted the timing wasn’t a judgement on Nvidia, but the markets didn’t really buy it.

Nvidia fell 3.5% on the news and the wider Nasdaq slipped, with Arm (another SoftBank link) dropping over 5%.

Analysts say this kind of profit-taking is exactly what investors do when valuations look frothy or when they see a better opportunity elsewhere.

Nvidia’s meteoric rise through 2024–25 already had people asking if the AI rally was/is overheating.

Hey, maybe SoftBank will retarget the funds toward a round 2 with the office-sharing second coming of Christ, Adam Neumann.

Starmer refuses to sack chief of staff, claiming briefing against Health Secretary didn’t come his office

Keir Starmer is trying to smother a Westminster clusterfuck after briefings claimed No 10 feared health secretary Wes Streeting was plotting to have him shot in the dark alleyway a leadership coup.

Starmer apologised to Streeting and hauled in senior staff to warn that briefing against ministers is “completely unacceptable,” but says he believes Downing Street didn’t authorise it and is standing by his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney.

Some Labour MPs wanted McSweeney sacked, while ministers floated an inquiry into the whole thing.

Starmer doesn’t look keen to investigate further, happy with essentially saying that the media briefed themselves and that it may as well have been the ghost of fucking Christmas past.

Streeting himself has shrugged it off, and the episode has actually boosted his stock if anything.

Still, paranoia is lingering. One minister predicted it’s “a question of when, not if” a leadership challenge comes.

Senior Labour figures warn the real issue isn’t the gossip but the sense of drift and panic inside government, just months after taking power.

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Von der Leyen lays out alternatives to reparations loan for Ukraine

Ursula von der Leyen is trying to stop the EU’s Ukraine-funding plan from blowing up over Belgium’s objections.

The Commission’s preferred option is a €140 billion “reparations loan” backed by frozen Russian central bank assets held at Euroclear in Brussels.

Ukraine would only repay if Russia ever pays reparations.And I’ll only repay back my crippling gambling debts when I win the lottery.

Belgium is the main roadblock.

As Euroclear’s host, it fears it would be first in the Kremlin’s crosshairs and wants iron-clad guarantees from all EU states.

They don’t want to take any risk with it, which Brussels says isn’t possible, like seeing Von Der Leyen’s text messages the Pfizer CEO. Belgian PM Bart De Wever refused to sign off last month and is still digging his heels in.

So von der Lesbian hair Leyen floated Plan B: issuing EU-backed debt or letting individual countries borrow bilaterally. Neither is politically popular, especially among Nordic governments that don’t much care for joint borrowing.

Privately, EU officials admit the Russian-asset loan is the only realistic option.

With the Orange Maniac cutting US aid, Europe must cover Ukraine’s budget from mid-2026, so someone’s gotta find a few hundred billion euros in a mattress somewhere.

UK unemployment rate rises to 5% as jobs market weakens

UK unemployment has climbed to 5%, the highest since early 2021, signalling a softening jobs market and increasing bets that the Bank of England will cut interest rates in December.

The jump came in above forecasts and arrives just weeks before the Budget.

Wage growth is cooling too, slipping to 4.6%, while payrolls fell by 180,000 over the past year.

Vacancies saw their first tiny rise in three years but remain far below pandemic-era highs. The ONS warns the labour data still has quality issues, but the trend is clearly weaker.

Public sector pay is running hotter than private-sector pay, though economists expect even that party to end soon as more people look for work and bargaining power fades.

With firms already spooked by higher NI costs, many have paused the Budget lands on the 26th of November.

🍻Half Pints

Quick-fire news you might have missed

Emails of the Week

Now you’ve finished reading the best email in existence, we highly recommend dipping into the latest Epstein emails, which contain pretty damning claims about the artist formerly known as The Duke of Pork Prince Andrew and a certain orange maniac.

Further proof that Epstein definitely killed himself and that this is not going to get any worse for those involved or implicate anyone else.

That’s all for today, but before you go…

We’re always open to feedback (and hate-mail), so feel free to reply and we’ll get back to you within 5 “working” days.

Barring an act of god or being kidnapped by Mossad the deep state, we’ll see you next week.

A special thanks to Stavros