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Greetings lovely people,

The 2026 World Cup is underway.

In case you were confused as to why the first game was in Trump’s favourite country (Mexico), a friendly reminder that this year’s tournament is being shared between them, Canada and of course, the US of A.

Maybe by the end of the tournament, 2/3 can start to call the sport by its proper name: football.

British snobbery aside, let’s get you up to speed with the news through memes and slightly unhinged commentary.

⏰ Today's reading time is 5 minutes

In another concerning notable moment in the AI arms race, Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 this week. 

Anthropic has released Fable 5 to enterprise subscribers, describing it as a “Mythos-class model…made safe for general use”. I.e., a Mythos model with failsafes which (hopefully) prevent it being used for cybersecurity-related activities, amongst others.

Fable is based on the Mythos architecture deemed too dangerous to release to the public just eight weeks ago.  

Thankfully, Claude’s Mythos 5 model will also be rolled out without the guardrails to responsible parties like the US Government under its early access program, Project Glasswing. 

Per Anthropic’s benchmarking Fable 5 is their most powerful model yet, and it beats OpenAI’s GPT 5.5 across the board. However, there is a 67% chance that GPT 5.6 is released within the next two weeks (per Polymarket), so prepare for yet more announcements in this space soon enough. 

Early feedback from users on Fable’s performance is positive, but according to one Reddit user the “burn rate” (i.e., speed at which tokens are used up by queries) is considerably faster than previous Claude models due to the agentic nature of the model.

The tokens themselves also cost double what Anthropic charges for tokens on the previous flagship model, Opus 4.8.

After all, something other than hype needs to form the basis of the upcoming IPO valuation.  

Despite Russia’s attempts to encourage voters to back pro-Russian parties, it was a tough night for them in Sunday’s Armenian elections. 

The pro-Western Civil Contract party scooped 60% of national assembly seats with 49% of the vote, a slight reduction in their majority.  

Armenia has been firmly Russian-aligned since becoming independent in 1991. 

However, Western leaders watched the election with interest as Russo-Armenian relations have been strained since Russia failed to honour its security guarantee to Armenia during a regional conflict in 2023. 

Prime Minister Nikol something ending with yan Pashinyan has been hedging his bets diplomatically, hosting US delegations twice this year and the first Armenia-EU summit last month.

Pashinyan’s government put the EU and Russia on notice last year when it launched the process of applying for EU membership.

Yet another country that’d be ahead of the UK in the queue.

Russia still accounts for around a third of Armenia’s trade and maintains a military presence in the country, so don’t expect Armenians to be taking all of August off and/or trying to regulate their way out of a chronic lack of economic dynamism anytime soon.

Before the election, Putin also commented that Ukraine’s ‘problems’ "began with efforts to move toward EU accession".

Clearly, any attempt to reduce Armenia’s dependence on Russia involves treading carefully to ensure the next special military operation doesn’t roll through Yerevan.

Shares in Elon Musk's SpaceX jumped more than 20% in their first hour of trading today after the biggest initial public offering in history made him the world's first trillionaire.

In case you’re not big on numbers and need some context as to just how much money that is, it takes 12 days for a million seconds to pass, but 31 years for a billion seconds to tick over.

It would take 31,000 years to get to a trillion seconds.

Now before the raving commies amongst you look for your trusty pitchfork and start ordering guillotines on the dark web, it’s worth factoring in a few things.

Most of that money is not in cash, and is still tied to the fairly illiquid stock he holds in SpaceX, Tesla and other companies.

Musk has several restrictions in place for selling his shares in the space exploration firm.

Also, there’s every chance that SpaceX is a total bust.

Their IPO prospectus, which reads like it was written by an analyst that’s read way too much sci-fi, talks about addressing the “largest total addressable market in history” of $28.5 trillion i.e intergalactic ubers and putting data centres in space.

To spare you the technical mumbjo jumbo finance types invented to buy more coke sound clever, it’s all basically a massive gamble on them being able to address that TAM, and eventually to stop burning through billions of dollars a year.

Whilst on the spectrum Tony Stark getting mega rich may not have exactly made your day, the IPO has made lots of regular folk who work at SpaceX very rich, which is nice.

Now, where’s my pitchfork?

I don’t know why they got the writer who failed their finance and economics modules at university to write this ad, but go figure.

I know what you’re thinking:

‘You guys went to university?’ ‘This is just another ad, leave me alone!’

And you’d be in the right.

But it could help make you some money, as well as stop me being fired, so please click away like your job depends on it (mine does).

AI isn’t a tech trend – it’s a full-blown, multi-trillion dollar race, and 10 companies are already pulling ahead.

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Another day, another mess for Keir Starmer.

Speaking the day after two of his defence ministers quit in a row over funding, Sir Keir Stalin Starmer insisted he had made "hard-edged" choices, including getting every department to make cuts to pay for defence.

I thought hard-edge were people who didn’t drink or take drugs, but then again I work here, so what the fuck do I know.

In his resignation letter, Defence Secretary John Healey made scathing criticisms, accusing the PM of being "unable" to commit to the spending needed to keep the country safe.

Healey's resignation was triggered by an ongoing internal row over funding of the government's defence investment plan (DIP).

The plan, which sets out how new military equipment and infrastructure will be paid for over the next decade, was due last autumn but has been repeatedly delayed.

Our sovereign debt rising at levels close to Botswana may have something to do with the delay. No offence intended to Botswana of course.

Asked if he would be willing to reduce spending on welfare to pay for a further boost, Sir Keir said the government was making changes to help people into work and said, rather ominously, that would "free up resources".

With a big Andy Burnham shaped problem potentially on the horizon for him very soon, this latest setback isn’t ideal for the PM.

Oil stockpiles are approaching lows not seen since 2003 due to oil supply still falling short of global demand, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

The news seemingly went unnoticed, as Brent Crude dropped below $85 a barrel on Thursday. 

Consumer anxiety around the US-Iran conflict could make you think that oil importers are living on borrowed time unless the Strait fully re-opens, but several factors have changed the picture recently: 

The US has also become the world’s biggest oil producer in an attempt to shore up the market. 

Hopefully a US-Iran deal materialises before global inventories become a serious issue, but we’re probably more likely to see the Pope do the 6-7… ah, never mind. 

In what can only be read as a sign of things going really well for them at the moment, Russia is considering lowering the country’s working age to 12 and reopening Soviet child labour camps to solve a jobs crisis driven by the war in Ukraine.

You can almost hear dear Uncle Joseph beaming with pride in his grave.

Moscow’s children’s rights commissioner proposed the change to get young people into employment during the holidays, claiming “almost all of them want to shovel shit in the snow and sing old Soviet songs work in the summer”.

Olga Yaroslavskaya argued the camps would provide employment and structure for teenagers, particularly those whose parents cannot afford to give them a “three-month fiesta”.

Russian labour laws allow children to work from the age of 14 with written consent from their parents, or to independently sign a labour contract from the age of 15.

The country’s economy needs 1.5 million additional workers to balance the labour market, Bloomberg estimated, while the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs has projected a deficit of three million workers up to 2030.

The demographic crisis has been driven by a record low birth rate, the emigration of up to one million mostly educated young professionals to dodge the draft, and an exceptionally high mortality rate of young men on the front line.

Things may not be perfect in the West, but at least here summer camps are just an excuse to get rid of your annoying kids for a few weeks so you can have sex more than once a week and sleep in on the weekend.

Mexico vs South Africa was a wild World Cup opening game, with more red cards than actual goals scored.

It also produced what may turn out to be the meme of the tournament.

When South Africa’s Themba Zwane’s red card went to VAR for appeal, the referee had to give an explanation (in English) for why it stood.

Small issue though.

No one, least of all the players, seemed to have a fucking clue what he said.

Watch the video for yourself, but after having watched it about 100 times, this is our best attempt at a transcription:

“Uhhh, arrr the refereessseehhhthethe faceehhhhehhh the defender.”

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.

Thanks to Sam, Elliot & Dom