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Happy Friday ladies and gents,

At the risk of sounding like an episode of Curb your Enthusiasm, the statute of limitations of wishing people a “Happy New Year” has now firmly passed.

So any of you still saying “Happy New Year”, feel free to shut the fuck up.

Mercifully for you however, there is no statute of limitations on staying informed via memes, so without further ado…

⏰ Today's reading time is 5 minutes

Nearly 150 countries have signed up to an OECD plan meant to stop multinationals shifting profits into tax havens, with one very notable exception: The United States.

After pressure from the Trump administration, large US multinationals will not be subject to the 15% global minimum tax, hollowing out a 2021 agreement designed to rein in the corporate tax shifting of…drumroll please…mostly US multinationals.

The original deal aimed to stop companies like Apple and Google shifting profits to rocks places like Bermuda and pretending they have legitimate business in countries with a higher population of hermit crabs than human beings.

The revised version keeps the ‘structure’ but removes most of the substance, allowing the aforementioned US companies to keep booking profits offshore while everyone else can effectively go and fuck themselves.

OECD boss Mathias Cormann called it a landmark for tax cooperation, which is a bit rich considering he, like all of his employees, doesn’t pay any tax at all.

The US Treasury meanwhile are understandably quite happy with the arrangement, calling it a victory for sovereignty and American business.

In a similar vein, we’re thinking of pitching a global porn restriction plan, with the understanding that the OECD will ensure Pornhub are exempt from any restrictions.

Accenture is buying UK AI firm Faculty for more than $1 billion, turning a politically notorious start-up into the consultancy industry’s latest AI trophy.

Faculty, best known for advising Dominic Cummings during the Vote Lie Leave campaign, becomes the largest-ever acquisition of a privately held UK AI company and the country’s first tech unicorn of 2026.

Founded in 2014, Faculty later reinvented itself as a public-sector and enterprise AI specialist. Its software was used by the NHS to build Covid early warning systems and now counts OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral among its clients.

Faculty’s CEO, Marc Warner, will become Accenture’s chief spreadsheets technology officer.

For Accenture, the deal is about bulking up AI credibility and reducing reliance on the manual labour of twenty-somethings who did well at school but don’t know what they want to do with their lives.

For the UK, it is another friendly reminder that its most successful tech firms tend to exit rather than scale independently.

The US captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife in a military raid on Caracas this week, scooping him up and bringing him to US soil to face a host of charges ranging from narco-trafficking to money laundering.

After months of surveillance tracking everything from his sleep patterns to his pets, Washington launched “Operation Absolute Resolve” (without informing Congress).

More than 150 aircraft, drones, cyber operations that reportedly cut Caracas’ power, and Delta Force troops were used to storm targets across the city and seize the Maduros, who were allegedly confused as to why they could hear Fortunate Son in their bedroom at 2am in the morning.

Don’t feel too bad for ol’ Nicky, though.

Given that he’s being held in the same New York detention centre as Sean “Diddy” Combs and Luigi Mangione, he will have plenty of opportunities to discuss their common interests in oil and extrajudicial killings.

We caught up with a local Venezuelan, who managed to summarise the situation better than most analysts.

Rachel Reeves has headed off another Labour rebellion by promising a U-turn on planned tax hikes for pubs in England, after weeks of protests from MPs and the hospitality industry.

The Treasury is finalising a support package expected to cut business rates, after pubs faced average rises of 76% over three years once Covid reliefs ended and property were revalued.

Hundreds of pub landlords banned Labour MPs, while companies like Whitbread warned of £40–50 million in extra tax bills. More than 30 Labour MPs were preparing to rebel on the finance bill before Reeves eventually backtracked (again).

Details of the pub package are still pending, and MPs are keeping amendments ready if it falls short.

Industry figures are pleased, but many are waiting to see whether this fixes the damage or just papers over the cracks.

Donald Trump is again pushing to acquire Greenland, with the White House confirming the US is discussing “a range of options”, including military force.

Washington says taking control of the Arctic island is a national security priority, citing growing polar bear and reindeer Russian and Chinese activity in the region.

European leaders have closed ranks behind Denmark, warning that Greenland’s future can only be decided by current colonisers Copenhagen and Nuuk (the capital of Greenland), threatening to collectively lecture US forces to death if they try any funny business.

Danish PM Mette Frederiksen has gone further, saying a US attack would effectively kill Nato, essentially admitting they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway.

The row has sharpened since the US raid on Venezuela, with Greenlanders now openly worried about becoming the next imperial coup “strategic intervention”.

Polls show strong opposition to US rule, even as many favour eventual independence from their friendly neighbour Denmark, who were still forcibily sterilising Greenlanders as recently as the 1970s.

Head of the European Central Bank and honorary Greek citizen Christine Lagarde will be well pleased with herself today as Eurozone inflation hit the ECB’s 2% target in December, down from 2.1% in November, confirming that the post-pandemic price surge is finally cooling down.

Core inflation also eased to 2.3%, its lowest since summer, helped by falling energy prices, which are now nearly 2% lower than a year ago. Services inflation remains sticky at 3.4%, but even that is drifting down.

For households, price stability offers some breathing room after years of erosion, but for policymakers, it creates a new headache.

Inflation is behaving, but consumer spending is weak, industry is sluggish, and the ECB is stuck trying to nurse a fragile recovery without reigniting the very inflation it just managed to get under control.

Still, a leisurely coffee and cigarette is well deserved.

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In today’s episode of “Maybe This World is Another Planet’s Hell”, public figures are now having to politely ask X’s AI chatbot Grok to not make porn using publicly available images of them.

British TV presenter Maya Jama was one of the latest to raise concern, after her own mother sent her concerned messages about illicit images being spread of her.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said the material was being shared in a dark web forum by users “boasting how they had used Grok, and how easy it had been”.

Whilst it may be enabling our descent into a perverted techno-hellscape, Grok does have its uses:

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Thanks to Harry, Connor and S