For women's sake, England must win

ALISTER: Here's the hidden cost of AI. Data centres guzzle water, and campaigners found 84% of proposed UK ones sit in areas under water stress. It's a menace, it's happening now, and the government must slam on the brakes.

MERIDYTH: Agreed, it's a real problem. But you're reaching for a ban when the fault is price. A data centre pays a fraction of what its water actually costs us. Make that price real and behaviour changes fast.

ALISTER: One hyperscale site uses the daily water of 10,000 people, and UK data centres already get through nearly 10bn litres a year. A few pence a litre won't stop firms this rich, but limits will.

MERIDYTH: Charge the true cost and behaviour shifts. Taiwan surcharges its biggest water users, so chipmakers switched to recycled water. Hard limits just push the build abroad and pawn the problem off. Make water expensive and data centres will switch too.

ALISTER: Some things you regulate, not invoice. You wouldn't let a factory drain a town's drinking water and settle up later. The cloud is thirsty, and nobody underneath it agreed to go without.

MERIDYTH: Get the price right first, so the waste actually costs them. Then ban what pricing alone can't fix. Sounding the alarm is the easy bit, but getting it right is the hard part.

Roger White has spent £18,000 hiring a security guard to protect a two-brick-high wall in Gloucester from developers who want to demolish it. Share this fact and the AM Squabble with anyone who would defend a brick wall so intently.

🗳️ North meets Westminster. Andy Burnham won the Makerfield by-election and cleared his path to challenge Starmer. His plan is to nationalise energy, water, and transport the same way he took Manchester's buses back into public control. Polling puts him ahead of Starmer, Streeting and Rayner.

📵 No TikTok, no strangers, no robot girlfriends. The UK is banning under-16s from social media including X, YouTube and TikTok, with blocks on livestreaming, stranger contact and overnight curfews. AI romantic companion chatbots must verify users are over 18. Quite the sentence to write.

💸 Built on bad data. A report claiming wealthy people were fleeing the UK helped persuade Parliament to soften wealth taxes. Now it's quietly dropped its author and its migration figures, admitting the methodology doesn't hold up. Turns out most of the "leavers" never left.

🛒 104 people, 5,300 crimes. The Met Police revealed that 104 repeat shoplifters committed more than 5,300 offences across London over 2 years. Each offended at least 31 times before being jailed. All but 3 kept stealing after being charged. The Met is now calling for trials within 72 hours of charge.

⚡ The EV retreat continues. The govt is preparing to halve its 2030 electric car sales target after the car industry warned of job losses and fines of up to £11,000 per car. Starmer backed the business secretary over his own climate secretary.

⚽️ GOOD NEWS… for Cape Verde (pop. ~500k people), holding their own at their first ever World Cup. One of their players was scouted on LinkedIn while working at a Dublin bank and assumed the message was spam! BAD NEWS… for Scotland, beaten 1-0 by Morocco and staring at the exit. As ever, it's the hope that kills them.

⛽ Talks begin, strait stays tense. The US and Iran opened direct negotiations in Switzerland this weekend, even as clashes continued in Lebanon, after signing an initial deal to end the war. The Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world's oil and gas travels, remained in dispute. Its effective closure has driven up fuel prices globally.

🔌 Wilders wants Claude back. Washington ordered Anthropic to disable its most powerful AI models outside the US, and Europe panicked. I want my Claude back! said Dutch nationalist Geert Wilders. When nationalists and centrists agree, something's shifted.

🗳️ 16 years, zero returns. Hungary's new PM Péter Magyar, who ousted Viktor Orbán in April, has changed the constitution to bar anyone who served 8+ years from returning as PM. Orbán served 16.

🕵️ The pound sign gave it away. A BBC investigation found Russia ran the arson attacks on Keir Starmer's properties via fake British far-right groups. The tell? They wrote cash rewards with the pound sign after the number, not before. Superpower tradecraft.

🎉 A vaccine that works. Girls vaccinated against HPV at 12 have near-zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30. From 2020 to 2024, no English woman aged 20 to 24 died of it. Researchers call it the tip of the iceberg. The best kind.

🍺 2.5 months, gone. One alcoholic drink a day shaves roughly 2.5 months off your life expectancy. The scientist behind it spent years believing moderate drinking was fine, until he found the research that convinced him was flawed.

💊 Better outcomes, lower pay. Patients treated by female doctors have lower death rates and are 5% less likely to be readmitted. Yet female doctors are still paid far less than men, which the data makes increasingly hard to justify.

🎵 Napster wore a tie this time. Searchable databases now confirm roughly 21 million copyrighted songs were fed to AI music generators without permission. Taylor Swift is in there. Sony, UMG and Warner want $150,000 per song in damages. The AI companies call it fair use.

🥬 Fined for a kale leaf. A food-waste volunteer in Nottingham was hit with a £150 littering fine after a single kale leaf fell from her bag in a Sainsbury's car park. The council cancelled it after watching the body-cam footage. All for one leaf.

👬 Best friends, actually brothers. Two men from Margate, best friends for 60 years, took a DNA test while one was in hospital with heart failure. It revealed they're biological brothers. Friends first, family all along. 🥰

By Alister

I'm evangelical about First Table.

Round up a few mates, book the restaurant, and you get 50% off the food. Pick from restaurants right across the UK (plus Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand), with new cities added constantly.

I bagged half off the full set menu at Six by Nico, an absolute steal and made for an impressive date night.

And solo diners are finally welcome, no plus one needed. The only catch is eating during off-peak times.

By Alister

Asked on BBC Breakfast what she'd do with her time once the under 16s social media ban lands, one pupil clocking nine hours a weekend delivered the most deadpan four words on live telly.

Such bleak honesty. She's either proving the ban's point or roasting it, and somehow both at once. 🧱

England face Ghana at 9pm on Tuesday, then Panama on Saturday. We'll be back next Monday with another Squabble.

Alister & Meridyth