Cremation

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Tesco has apologised for promoting England's Lionesses with a huge display in a Cardiff store, just weeks before Wales face England at Euro 2025.

The supermarket blamed the "incorrect" display on... well, nobody really, but promised it won't happen again.

Some Welsh customers calmly described the display as “disgraceful” and "deeply offensive”, advising Tesco to “read the room”. It might have been enough to just read a map.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The BBC threatened Perplexity with legal action

It claims the startup trained its AI model on BBC content, which reproduces BBC content verbatim. Unless it stops doing so (or provides “a proposal for financial compensation”), the BBC will take legal action. That sounds like a threat, sir:

But does the BBC have a “fundamental misunderstanding of technology”?

Which is what Perplexity said in response.

Because Perplexity doesn’t actually build or train its models, unlike Meta and OpenAI. 

It’s a search engine that uses different models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to source and sift through information on the internet. 

Someone clearly didn’t tell the broadcaster, which wants to jump on the bandwagon, because:

All the other media companies have signed licensing deals

The Financial Times with OpenAI. Reuters with Meta. The Daily Mail with ProRata.

They get compensated whenever certain AI models are trained on their content. 

It seems the BBC should sue someone else. 

TRANSPORT
10% of taxi drivers are registered in… Wolverhampton?

Which is a tad suspicious, chaps, considering this Midlands city has a humble population of just 210,000. So what’s going on? 

Loose licensing laws

It’s easy to get a private-hire tax license in Wolverhampton.

It takes just 6 hours. Candidates need only a SatNav and enough brainpower to navigate a basic multiple-choice questionnaire. 

Plus, it only costs £49. Which is nearly one quarter of what they charge in Rotherham. 

Taxi drivers can work anywhere, regardless of where they’re registered

Thanks to David Cameron. 

In 2015, the Tory government passed a law that meant private-hire taxi drivers could work anywhere in the UK, regardless of where they obtained their license. 

Suddenly, everyone and their nan wanted to get a Wolverhampton taxi license. Which is why 35% of Manchester’s taxis are registered 80 miles away. 

But it’s ripe for exploitation

Because some councils are stricter than others in the name of protecting children. 

After taxi drivers were found to be involved in Rotherham-based grooming gangs, Rotherham-registered cabbies had to pass rigorous safeguarding tests and have CCTV inside their cars. 

But this little loophole means that potentially hundreds of Wolverhampton-registered taxi drivers are dodging these laws. 

Considering that there’s been a 41% rise in taxi driver-related rapes in London, we should all be concerned. 

STARTUPS
It’s a good time to be a tax dodger

Because His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is doing terribly at its job these days. 

Businesses aren’t paying taxes

They owe £46 billion, to be precise, which is a 15.8% rise from the year before. 

Nearly half is owed by small businesses, which are beset with cash flow problems, higher taxes (thanks, Labour), and economic volatility caused by tweets and wars. 

This means the ‘tax gap’ - how much blood HMRC has failed to suck from the veins of the economy - is at its highest in a decade. 

But that’s not the only reason why the ‘tax gap’ is getting wider. It’s also because:

HMRC is staggeringly incompetent 

HMRC officials are pursuing fewer cases than before. They’re barely looking into offshore tax evasion (no surprises there). 

And even if a small business wanted to pay their fair share of tax, how could they? One-third of them fail to speak to a human.

As a sign of just how bad things are getting over there, HMRC was the recent victim of a phishing scam, losing £47 million earlier this month. 

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🦳 😢 One-third of our ageing relatives feel negatively stereotyped in ads as grumpy, intolerant, technologically illiterate, and dying. According to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), daytime TV shows a disproportionate number of ads for cremation services and care homes. JD Williams was criticised for their “More girlfriend than grandma” strapline, LinkedIn for their “Parents don’t get B2B” spiel, and Strathmore Foods for suggesting that grandpa would rather puncture a football with a knife than play with his grandson. 

• 🦹 💻️ 16 billion passwords were hacked. According to researchers, these passwords were harvested from ‘infostealer’ software and leaks, and were briefly available to cyber criminals before being taken offline. These could give access to your Meta, Apple and Google accounts. So change your passwords, you glorious beasts. 

• 🛢️ 📈 Oil prices jumped today to their highest since January after the US bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, rising 3%. If Iran doesn’t respond, oil prices should ease, so investors are watching their reaction like hawks. Iran’s parliament voted to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of global oil production passes. If they do so, oil prices will skyrocket. In a weird turn of events, the US asked their longtime rival China to ask Iran not to do that. 

• 🛍️ 🔍️ Britain’s grocery regulator is investigating Amazon. The second-largest company in the world is apparently the most complained-about retailer in the country, and despite making $640 billion in revenue last year, they still find it hard to actually pay suppliers on time. 

• 🇬🇧 🐺 Britain’s “Wolf of Wall Street” is on the run with a fake Spanish passport for his role in a Ponzi scheme. Instead of investing his clients’ money, he spent it - a whopping £70 million - on Porches, a £2 million wedding on Santorini, and £70,000 on his son’s first birthday party. He’s also a sex pest, apparently. 

• 🟢 ✂️ The government is cutting green levies on businesses to bring down the ridiculously high energy costs they’re having to pay. This means that thousands of firms will get up to a 90% discount on their energy bills. British industrial energy bills will still be the highest in Europe because our system is so beyond the pale.