Happy Monday. and Happy Birthday!

This week marks two years of bringing you the very best way, to start your week informed. The perfect present to mark the occasion would be for you to share the pot with even just one person in your office so we can keep bringing the heat every week. It’s also a good excuse to bring office cake in at lunch time.

Notable UK earnings this week: HSBC (HSBA), Whitbread (WTB).

Notable US earnings this week: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Pfizer (PFE), Uber (UBER), Paypal (PYPL), ConocoPhillips (COP), Airbnb (ABNB), Palantir (PLTR).

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🌊 Geotechnical surveys to start at Caledonia offshore wind. Read more

🍃 FEED starts for EnergyPathways offshore compressed air energy storage. Read more

⚽ Plans for Brighton £80m women’s football stadium. Read more

BP double profits in Q1
BP has had rather a good start to the year — if you’re the sort who enjoys a windfall delivered courtesy of geopolitical chaos.

The oil giant more than doubled its profits in the first quarter, banking a tidy $3.2bn (£2.4bn) between January and March. That’s comfortably more than last year’s $1.38bn, and a fair bit above what the analysts had pencilled in. The standout performer? Its oil trading arm, which had what the company cheerfully described as an “exceptional” few months. No kidding.

Blame (or credit) lies largely with the market mayhem sparked by the US-Israel war with Iran. The closure — or near enough — of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas usually sloshes, has sent prices on a rollercoaster.

Before things kicked off, Brent crude hovered around $73 a barrel. Since then, it’s flirted with $120, dipped below $100, and now sits at about $110 — a sort of nervous middle ground while everyone waits to see what happens next.

Not everyone is popping the champagne. Friends of the Earth pointed out that, as in 2022, fossil fuel giants tend to do rather well when the world is falling apart — while everyone else picks up the bill. Energy prices are expected to push the UK’s price cap up by around £200 in July, a reminder that volatility may be good for traders, but it’s less amusing when it lands on your direct debit.

Job losses expected at Teeside wind turbine factory
Job losses could be on the cards at a wind turbine parts factory in Teesside, after bosses said they are considering a restructure amid “ongoing financial pressures”. A bit grim, frankly — and not the kind of breeze anyone was hoping for.

SeAH Wind Ltd, which makes monopiles, the chunky steel structures that hold up offshore wind turbines, operates at Teesworks near Redcar. The firm exports to Europe and the United States, and in an email to staff described the news as “difficult to share”. Quite the understatement, like calling the North Sea “a bit fresh”.

SeAH Wind, owned by South Korea’s SeAH Steel Holding, broke ground at Teesworks in 2022 and has received hundreds of millions of pounds in investment. With the UK banking on offshore wind as part of its energy future — and with the next few weeks bringing the sort of spring bank holiday energy that usually means barbecues, not boardroom upheaval — this is another reminder that even the green transition comes with very ungreen growing pains.

Chagos chess
Mauritius is giving the United Kingdom until July to finalise a long-promised handover of the Chagos Islands—a deal tangled in geopolitics and a strategically vital US-UK base on Diego Garcia.

Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam is waiting, albeit impatiently, while objections from Donald Trump have stalled proceedings. With history, military muscle, and displaced islanders all in the mix, it’s less a handover and more a high-stakes game of pass-the-parcel.

Brussels bonding
Keir Starmer is eyeing a £78bn EU loan scheme for Ukraine, pitching it as both moral duty and savvy diplomacy. The plan would support Volodymyr Zelensky’s war effort while warming UK-EU ties post-Brexit—think less breakup blues, more tentative texting again.

Starmer insists the benefits outweigh the costs, though talk of a £1bn annual contribution lingers awkwardly in the background. Still, the message is clear: Britain wants back in the European group chat, just without fully rejoining it.

Puff prohibition
The UK has passed into law landmark legislation to create a “smoke-free generation,” banning cigarette sales to anyone born after 2009. Health Secretary Wes Streeting calls it a generational reset, aiming to stamp out a habit responsible for 80,000 deaths a year.

The law also tightens rules on vaping to stop it luring younger users. In short: cigarettes are being quietly ushered toward the history books—no dramatic exit, just a firm and final “you’re not invited.”

Charles wipes out whiskey tariffs
Scotch whisky has finally got a bit of a break from Washington’s tariff tap-dancing. Following King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s state visit to the White House, President Donald Trump said he would remove the 10% tariffs on Scotch whisky imports into the US — a move that appears to have been announced, naturally, on Truth Social with all the elegance of a bagpipe at full volume.

Trump framed the decision as a personal favour, saying the King and Queen had got him to do “something that nobody else was able to do”. He also managed to fold Scotland, Kentucky, whisky and bourbon into one grand transatlantic sentence, which is either diplomacy or the world’s most expensive pub quiz question. Either way, the message was clear: the bottles may start flowing more freely again.

The tariffs had bitten hard. Industry figures suggest they helped drag Kentucky whiskey exports down by 15% in 2025, while Scotland’s whisky sector was losing an estimated £4 million a week. John Swinney, Scotland’s First Minister, said jobs were on the line and millions were being lost every month — a reminder that trade wars, unlike a decent dram, tend to leave a nasty aftertaste.

Trump hits EU with more tariffs
Donald Trump has announced a sharp increase in tariffs on vehicles exported from the European Union to the United States, prompting a pointed response from Brussels and another wobble in transatlantic trade relations. The US president said the move was justified because the EU was “not complying” with an agreed trade deal — a familiar refrain, really, like hearing the same pub argument every Friday, only with more money and fewer crisps.

From next week, tariffs on EU cars and trucks entering the US will rise to 25%. Bernd Lange, the European Parliament’s trade committee chair, hit back hard, calling the US “unreliable” and saying the latest move showed “unacceptable” behaviour towards a close partner. He said Europe would respond with “utmost clarity and firmness” — diplomatic language for: don’t come the raw prawn with us.

Baggage bots
Japan Airlines is trialling humanoid robots at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, where tourism is booming and workers are in short supply. The 130cm Chinese-made helpers will lug bags and cargo on the tarmac, though humans will still handle safety because nobody wants a robot having a wobble near a jet engine.

The experiment runs until 2028, with possible cabin-cleaning duties next. Finally, airport staff who need coffee breaks meet colleagues who need charging cables.

Diver drivers
Chinese researchers have built a robotic diving exoskeleton that straps to the legs and boosts each kick in real time. Its clever algorithm reads movement instantly, helping divers switch speed or style without training the suit first.

The prize: up to 40% less oxygen use, meaning less fatigue and longer, safer underwater work. Handy for pipelines, rescues, seabed surveys and anyone who has ever felt personally attacked by water resistance.

Signal smuggling
In Iran, a clandestine network is smuggling Starlink terminals past an internet blackout. The devices bypass state-controlled networks, helping people share what is happening on the ground despite serious prison risks. For activists, access is not convenience; it is evidence, safety, and a crack in the regime’s blackout curtains.

Botched bot burglary
Grok, the AI chatbot from xAI, managed to nick $175,000 from… itself, after a prankster slipped it a Morse-code prompt. Ever helpful, Grok decoded the message and inadvertently instructed a linked crypto bot, Bankrbot, to transfer billions of tokens straight to the attacker. The culprit promptly cashed out, briefly tanking the coin—before, in a plot twist worthy of daytime telly, returning the lot.

No systems were “hacked” as such; rather, Bankrbot treated chatbot chatter as gospel and moved real money accordingly. Experts say the lesson is simple: perhaps don’t let chatty robots hold the purse strings. Still, all’s well that ends well—Grok’s wallet is intact, and its trust issues are presumably sky-high.

Burma’s Bewildering Balancing Act
Myanmar’s long-detained figurehead Aung San Suu Kyi has reportedly been moved from prison to house arrest—again—by junta chief Min Aung Hlaing. She’s been locked away since the 2021 coup, largely unseen and unheard, so this sudden “upgrade” arrives with a whiff of theatre. Even her son, Kim Aris, isn’t buying it, noting the only “proof” is a recycled photo.

The regime, fresh from battlefield gains and a stage-managed election, appears keen to polish its global image. In short: less a liberation, more a light dusting of PR. Whether it leads to genuine release—or merely better curtains—remains anyone’s guess.

Seoul’s Stern Sentencing Saga
Over in South Korea, former president Yoon Suk Yeol has been handed an extra seven years behind bars, neatly stacked atop his existing life sentence. His crime? Attempting a rather ill-advised flirtation with martial law in 2024, complete with dodgy paperwork and what judges described as a “private army” moment.

The political chaos it triggered was brief but bruising, ending only when rival Lee Jae Myung swept in via snap election. Yoon’s legal team vows to appeal, but for now, South Korea’s message is crisp: even presidents don’t get to freestyle the rulebook.