Nipples made out of wicker

ALISTER: More than a million young people are out of work or education, and for 30yrs we’ve pointed nearly all of them towards a degree. Burnham wants 14yos offered proper technical routes instead, think construction, coding or classics.

MERIDYTH: Fine in principle. But universities are already stretched, with regulators warning 119 of them could slip into deficit without help. Steer teenagers away and the intake shrinks further. That gap gets closed with higher fees, paid by whoever’s left.

ALISTER: But construction actually needs ~239k extra workers by 2029, and the sector warns Labour’s 1.5m new homes won’t get built without them. You can’t build houses out of dissertations. Somebody has to hold the trowel.

MERIDYTH: Fair if there is construction job locally. But which of Burnham's 3 routes - construction, coding, classics - exists in a town depends on that town’s economy, not the kid. That’s still the postcode choosing, not the student.

ALISTER: Is university choice any more real? 27% of graduates end up in jobs that never needed a degree. In Wales, it’s closer to 4 in 10. Three years of debt for a job you could’ve walked into at 18.

MERIDYTH: But nobody can predict what the jobs market will be like in 2040. Construction jobs shift and vary by area. You’re asking a teen to bet their future on something unpredictable. At least a degree gives you more options.

More than half of England is officially in drought, just months after a soaking January and February. July has seen just seven per cent of normal rainfall. Perform the digital rain dance by sharing the AM Squabble.

📮 Stamps get pricier. Royal Mail is hiking bulk postage prices by up to a third, a change that could cost the NHS millions for sending letters. Ofcom fined Royal Mail £21m last year, its third penalty since 2023 for missing delivery targets. Truly a premium service, in price if not in punctuality.

🤬 Journalists self-censoring. An investigation has found journalists are avoiding or softening coverage of Trump, right-wing protests, and trans issues due to personal safety concerns. Women journalists face the worst of the abuse. Almost half of those surveyed said it had shaped what they report.

🏥 GP notes on Wall Street. Doctors and MPs are raising alarm over a US private equity firm’s £300m purchase of the company holding medical records for more than half of English GP patients. Nobody asked you, but somebody in San Francisco now has opinions on your cholesterol.

🍄 Home Office used hallucinated evidence. A senior judge has said a Home Office letter refusing an asylum claim cited an official document that doesn’t seem to exist, signs of AI hallucination, calling it analogous to relying on bogus evidence.

🥩 A steak discount. Aldi has cut prices on 330 products including British steaks, bringing its total spend on cuts this year to £300m. It arrived, entirely coincidentally, right as families began their 6 wks of summer holiday shopping.

GOOD NEWS… for football staying true to the sport, UEFA, Concacaf, and AFC leagues rejected Infantino’s plan to sell a stake of the World Cup to private investors. BAD NEWS… for Infantino, now fighting for his job after UEFA stated they have lost confidence in his leadership. Trump has distanced himself.

📰 Earthquake kills at least 36 in Japan. A deadly 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Kumamoto prefecture last week, severely damaging a shopping mall and a factory. Rescuers spent days combing the wreckage for survivors.

🚪 Storming out of the room. US diplomats walked out on France at the UN Security Council, after Paris said Washington was no longer a "beacon of human rights," a jab tied to the US voting against renewing the UN's human rights mandate. France, ever so French, moved on.

🏖️ Heat homes with a sandbox. A Finnish town of 5,000 is heating homes and businesses with a giant tower of hot sand, storing renewable energy without any rare earth minerals. It has already cut emissions by 70%.

🍗 Chicken nuggets of doom. Scientists say industrial chicken farming has driven a 100 fold rise in how much campylobacter (top cause of chicken poisoning) moves and mixes between flocks, thanks to packing 31bn birds together. Cook thoroughly, wash everything, maybe just have the fish.

🧽 Your sponge is a bacteria hotel. German researchers found that food poisoning bugs like Salmonella and E.coli can survive in kitchen sponges for 2 wks, even after drying out, and spread to worktops with a single wipe. Time for a new one.

🕰️ Slow poop means slow trouble. Researchers reviewing decades of gut studies found that how long waste lingers inside you may influence conditions from IBS to Parkinson's, as slow moving gut bacteria start producing genuinely toxic by-products.

🎤 Obama on tour. Barack Obama brings his arena chat show to Belfast, Glasgow, and Manchester this October, on what comes next for America. He’s called Trump's Tylenol (paracetamol) autism claims, violence against the truth. Somewhere a merch stand is selling that on a tote bag.

⌨️ Your keyboard is a snitch. Researchers built an AI that reconstructs what you type from keystroke sounds alone, hitting 99% accuracy after just 100 to 150 keystrokes, and it still works over Zoom, Teams or Google Meet audio. Maybe learn to type quietly.

🕷️ eBay pays for its cockroach phase. A newsletter-writing couple who criticised eBay have won $56m after former executives sent them live spiders, a bloody pig mask, and a funeral wreath to shut them up. Somewhere there is a corporate away day that went very, very wrong.

💸 Amazon forgets to check the meter. An internal Amazon project meant to match author names to listings ran up a $1.8m bill, 860% over budget, and nobody noticed for 5mos. AWS, Amazon’s own cloud division, sells the cost control tools that would have caught it.

📱 Meta brags about being sued. Meta told investors its AI is now brilliant at keeping people hooked on Instagram, boosting session times and reshares. At the same time, 40+ US states are suing the company for allegedly designing that exact addictiveness into teenagers' feeds.

By Alister

I love travelling. I hate currency. My travel debit card covers most things, but it does nothing for tips or the cash only places that still seem to run half of Europe.

I am away next week for my birthday and I wanted to go all out, because every birthday is a milestone if you squint. That meant a proper wad of euros.

After an unreasonable amount of review reading I went with TravelFX. Best rate of everyone I checked, upfront about the fee on smaller orders, no fuss. Picked a delivery day, paid by card, and a Royal Mail Special Delivery landed exactly when promised. Insured and tracked, obviously.

There is no dignified way to accept an envelope of cash from a postman.

By Alister

Katy Perry once asked if we ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind. Now she’s found out.

At Isle of MTV in Malta she climbed inside a giant inflatable bottle, the idea being that the crowd would roll her gently toward an enormous straw by the stage. The crowd had other ideas. The footage shows her pointing, then waving, then eventually just bellowing "Go back to the stage!" while several thousand people cheerfully carried her in precisely the wrong direction.

She said later she was worried she would not get back.

The bottle has "Katyade" written on the side, which is the funniest part.

Sadly (or not) Alister is away celebrating his birthday next week. So expect a higher quality, more polished, intellectual think piece next Monday.

Alister & Meridyth