Mysterious lawn tracings

ALISTER: Imagine a car that won't start if it thinks you're drunk. America's making it law, the EU is already fitting monitoring cameras to new cars, and it's coming here too. They're calling it the "kill switch" that could save 30 lives a day.

MERIDYTH: All for saving lives, but look at how it works. It's a camera watching your face in every new car. And we already know where car data ends up. The safety bit isn't what worries me. It's the surveillance needed to get it.

ALISTER: You're privacy panicking. They said the same about speed cameras and the breathalyser, and both saved thousands. Don't bin a life-saving device because the data might be misused. Write strict rules, keep it in the car.

MERIDYTH: Carmakers sold 16 million drivers' data to insurers, and premiums jumped the moment their cars grassed them up. "Keep it in the car" is the promise they break every time. Now you want a camera on every face here too?

ALISTER: Fine, that scandal was real, but they got fined for it. Meanwhile a drunk driver might still kill someone tonight, and this would stop them. Blame the firms that sold the data, and keep the tech that saves lives.

MERIDYTH: But the tech itself isn't neutral. Police facial recognition misreads Black and Asian faces far more often, and now we'd put that in every car that might judge them incorrectly. Not a fan.

The World Cup trophy weighs exactly 6.175kg. It’s made of 18-carat gold, and only former World Cup winners and heads of state are allowed to touch the real one. Everyone else gets a replica, unlike the AM Squabble which is for everyone. Share this fact and more with friends and family.

🗳️ Burnham makes his move. Andy Burnham, Manchester's mayor, says he'll challenge Starmer for Labour's leadership if he wins the Makerfield by-election on Thurs 18 June. The seat was vacated for him last month with 97 Labour MPs saying the PM needs to go. Knives, meet backs.

🪖 Defence chief walks. Defence Secretary John Healey quit on 11 June over a spending deal worth just 2.68% of GDP by 2030, not the 3% he wanted. Armed forces minister Al Carns went too, the 3rd ministerial exit in a month. Dan Jarvis inherits the role.

🏠 The squeeze plays favourites. UK rents are rising at their slowest in years, up 2.1% to £1,321 a month, which sounds like relief. Until you rent at the cheaper end. Homes under £750 are up nearly 5%, about £450 more a year, so the slowdown skipped the people who needed it most.

🧾 Spending the unspendable. St Helens' new Reform council has refused to fund Refugee Week in order to put British people first. Small problem. The £60,000 is govt cash that can only legally be spent on refugees. You can't actually unRefugee it.

✈️ Your queue, your problem. The first summer under the EU's new biometric border checks, and Britons face up to 6hr waits at passport control in European airports. Ryanair left 150 passengers behind in Toulouse last month. They won’t be waiting for you.

⚽️ GOOD NEWS… for Scotland fans, after a 1-0 win over Haiti gave them a winning start to their first World Cup in 28 years. BAD NEWS… for Brazil, after a 1-1 draw with Morocco left the five-time winners sitting below Scotland in Group C!

🌏 More friends for science. Australia and Japan have just signed up to Horizon Europe, with India in talks and the UK already in. It's the EU's €93.5bn research pot, the fund behind everything from cancer drugs to clean energy. The world's pooling its best brains, and America isn't part of it.

⚖️ Google's words, Google's problem. A Munich court has ruled Google legally liable for false claims in its AI search summaries, rejecting the idea that users should fact-check the AI themselves. Even a 91% accuracy rate, at Google's scale, means millions of wrong answers an hour.

🤖 Six thousand an hour. Canada's privacy commissioner has found that Grok generated over 6,000 sexual deepfakes per hour before safeguards came in, violating Canadian privacy law. X has since added protections. The watchdog said he was "encouraged."

💊 Ozempic, but a tablet. The UK has approved the first weight-loss pill of its kind, a tablet version of the jab Wegovy. No fridge, no needles. The NHS hasn't decided whether to fund it, and the maker hasn't even asked it to yet.

🧬 The undruggable, drugged. Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest, and the most common form was long thought untreatable. A new drug, daraxonrasib, has roughly doubled how long patients live, from about 7 months to 13, and cut the risk of dying by 60%. A genuine first.

🎯 Five and done. Thousands of men with prostate cancer in England will finish radiotherapy in 5 sessions instead of 20, fifteen fewer trips to hospital. One man was back on an archaeological dig five weeks after treatment. All 48 NHS centres will offer it within weeks.

🛫 Fake it till you land it. A man allegedly flew as a captain for Air Canada for 17 years, completing 900 flights, before anyone noticed his credentials were forged. A routine check finally caught it last year. The airline audited every other pilot and found no more fakes. Thorough, if a little late.

👪 Rent-a-parent. Worn down by work and family pressure, young people in China are turning to "virtual parents" for the warmth that’s rarely given IRL. One virtual parent couple has nearly 2mil followers. With over 15% of youth unemployed, comfort is scarce.

⚔️ For the Pokémon. A 43 year old man has been arrested after a bat fight outside a London toy shop over a Pokémon card restock. Purchases were limited to one per person. Police arrived in three minutes.

By Meridyth

I believe in fair markets, but I don't believe in this. FIFA’s controversial surge-pricing for World Cup tickets hiked nearly every match by an average of 34% and pushed some seats past $10,000.

The result, on day one?

At South Korea v Czechia, FIFA swore it was nearly sold out, but whole blocks of empty $400 to $5,000 seats could be seen. Dynamic pricing only rewards locals who can wait for the price to crash on match day. For everyone else who booked flights months ago paid the peak.

I would’ve loved to have attended and cheered on South Korea had the ticket price been remotely accessible. FIFA should be very ashamed.

By Meridyth

Can you imagine waking up at 6:30am to bagpipes? Well, apparently these residents in Massachusetts could during the morning of Scotland v Haiti!

Gotta love the dedication of the Tartan Army… unless you’re trying to sleep in. 😅

A British dad received a parenting magazine 19 years after ordering it, with an apology note from Royal Mail. His children are now leaving for university. We’ll be back sooner than that and in your inbox next Monday.

Alister & Meridyth