Happy Monday. Last week was hot. Might’ve been too hot.

A new record set for June’s highest temperature in the UK, 36.7°C was recorded in Somerset, the hottest June day since 1976. Forecast is that we might be able to sleep again this week - fingers crossed.

Notable UK earnings this week: Currys (CURY), Redcentric (RCN).

Notable US earnings this week: Nike (NKE), Constellation Brands (STZ), General Mills (GIS).

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🌊 OEG clearing seabed for East Anglia offshore wind. Read more

🏗️ New £250m student tower set for Glasgow. Read more

⚡ £325m super grid win for Balfour in Scotland. Read more

£900k telling off for StubHub UK
Ticket resale site StubHub UK has been ordered to refund more than 51,000 customers and pay a fine after the Competition and Markets Authority found it had been sneaking in mandatory fees late in the checkout process. Because apparently “the price” is a charmingly flexible concept until the regulator turns up with a clipboard.

The CMA said the penalty amounts to just under £900,000, while affected customers will receive an average refund of about £10 per transaction, at a total cost to the company of more than £590,000. The watchdog said the fees — including delivery and service charges — were unavoidable, but were only revealed at the final stage of purchase between 6 April and 7 December 2025. In other words: a deal that looked one way, then did a little plot twist at checkout.

The CMA is also investigating rival resale platform Viagogo, so this may not be the end of the matter. Quite the encore, really.

Ryanair change policy after their telling off
Ryanair has tweaked its family seating rules so parents travelling with young children can now sit next to them without coughing up a reservation fee. The change follows a Competition and Markets Authority investigation, because apparently even budget airlines must occasionally be persuaded to stop acting like every inch of cabin space is prime London property.

Passengers with children who don’t pay for reserved seats will be told where they’re sitting after check-in. Ryanair says the move brings it into line with most European airlines — a rare moment of continental harmony, if not exactly a treaty of Versailles.

Chief executive Michael O’Leary said the airline would “reluctantly adjust to this industry standard”, though he maintained the old system complied with the rules and gave families certainty. That’s one way of putting it. Another would be: pay up, or hope luck and the gods of row allocation are feeling charitable.

Ban, bang, bill
Ministers have published a draft ban on conversion practices in England and Wales, eight years after first confirming one. Abusive attempts to change someone’s sexuality or transgender identity could bring five years in prison and unlimited fines, with protection orders for those at risk.

Campaigners call it overdue; critics fear legitimate therapy, prayer or exploratory conversations could be caught. The government insists the criminal threshold is high and healthcare is exempt. Parliament now gets the unenviable task of defining the line without tying it into a legislative Windsor knot.

Cell squeeze
Scotland, meanwhile, is considering fewer short sentences and earlier releases as its prisons buckle: 8,515 inmates are crammed into a system designed for 7,805. Proposals include discouraging jail terms under two years and releasing some prisoners after 30% of their sentence. At this rate, the only thing serving a full sentence will be the policy document.

Oil price falls to pre-war level
Oil prices have fallen back to levels last seen before the Iran war, as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz slowly returns to something approaching business as usual. Brent crude briefly dipped below $72.48 a barrel, before nudging back up to $73.23 — a reminder that global energy markets are about as steady as a shopping trolley with one rogue wheel.

The route through the Strait is critical for oil and gas shipments, so when Iran responded to the strikes by effectively shutting it down, prices were sent on a little excursion of their own. Since the US and Iran signed a memorandum on 17 June, however, crude has tumbled, with the deal setting out a 60-day period for negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme and wider steps to end the war. Peace talks in Switzerland last weekend also led the US to partially lift sanctions on Iranian oil exports — which, unsurprisingly, helped unclog the pipeline of supply.

More ships are now crossing the Strait, though not in the sort of numbers that would make the maritime industry crack open the celebrations just yet. Kpler says 284 vessels have made the transit since 18 June, still well short of the pre-conflict average of around 138 crossings a day — a figure that, in the nicest possible way, suggests the Strait has not fully got its mojo back.

Reflecting pool vs algae rumbles on
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington has become something of a very expensive lesson in public works: the repainting to “American flag blue” alone has now climbed to more than $14.65 million, topping the original no-bid estimate by over $4 million. Add in a further $1.74 million for a so-called “nano bubble” algae-busting system, and the whole caper is nudging beyond $16 million. In other words, it’s less a splash of maintenance and more a full-blown money fountain.

The National Park Service brought in Ohio-based Green Water Solutions to install the filtration kit ahead of Fourth of July celebrations, using a fast-track no-bid contract to get the job done in time for the holiday. Very on-brand for Washington, really: nothing says patriotic spectacle like urgent deadlines, public money, and a bit of pond theatre. The Interior Department has claimed the technology has killed the algae and that staff are now vacuuming up the remains from the bottom of the pool, which is quite the image — somewhere between civic pride and a bit of pond-based crime scene work.

Silicon skyline
IBM says its new 0.7-nanometre “NanoStack” chip could squeeze nearly 100 billion transistors onto a fingernail by stacking them like a block of flats. Production is still years away, but the design promises more speed with less power.

Conveniently, Britain has also begun building a £750m supercomputer near Edinburgh. Fifty times stronger than ARCHER2, it will model everything from climate and quantum physics to jet engines and the universe while recycling its considerable heat to warm buildings. Tiny flats for transistors, one enormous radiator for Scotland.

Wearable wonders
Texas engineers have created a jacket that pulls moisture from the air, producing up to 1.5 pints of drinking water daily. Meanwhile, the Met plans a London-wide drone network for 999 calls, alongside more facial recognition and AI. Police say it means faster, safer responses; civil-liberties groups fear surveillance has taken flight without enough scrutiny.

Clouds in court
Apple faces a £3bn UK class action alleging iCloud users were overcharged and boxed out of rival storage services, potentially covering nearly 40 million customers. In California, Google has settled a teenager’s social-media addiction case, though TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram still face trial. With thousands more claims pending, Big Tech’s next upgrade may be a larger legal department.

App trap
Australia is doubling the maximum fine for social media platforms that fail to keep under-16s off their apps, raising the penalty to A$99m (£51.7m). The eSafety Commissioner will also gain powers to demand proof of compliance after seven in ten underage users reportedly retained some access. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube are under investigation. Canberra says Big Tech is doing the littlest; the maximum is about to become rather expensive.

Peaks and protection
France has created a 370,000-acre nature reserve in French Guiana, protecting the granite Armontabo Peaks and the intact rainforest around them. The area sits within the wildlife-rich Guiana Shield and helps France edge towards its target of strongly protecting 10% of its territory by 2030. Jaguars, tapirs, otters and hundreds of bird species now have rather more room to rainforest in peace.

Pressing silence
Uganda’s army chief, Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba, has ordered leading independent outlets including the Daily Monitor, NTV and Spark TV to shut, with soldiers surrounding their Kampala headquarters. Kainerugaba, the president’s son and possible successor, openly declared he does not believe in a free press. Opposition figures call it military rule; the government has yet to explain the crackdown. In Uganda, it seems the news has not merely been censored but marched off the premises. When the chief says “no comment”, apparently it’s an order.