Teapot flavour newsletter 🍫

Happy Monday. In another chocolate travesty, two more lunchbox classics have been banished to the naughty corner of confectionary. Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband.

A few weeks ago, we wrote about Penguin bars and Club bars no longer qualifying as “chocolate” due to their lack of, well, actual chocolate. In the UK, a product needs to have 20% cocoa solids and 20% milk solids to qualify for the prestigious chocolate tag.

Nestle have had a recipe reshuffle, increasing the (cheaper) vegetable fat content, meaning your Toffee Crisp and Blue Riband nostalgia bars are now “encased in a smooth milk chocolate flavour coating”, not in chocolate. Yum.

MARKETS

Data: Google Finance, 5-day Market Close

Notable UK earnings this week: Carnival (CCL), Currys (CURY), WH Smith (SMWH), Pantheon Resources (PANR).

Notable US earnings this week: Micron Technology (MU), Accenture (ACN), Nike (NKE), Cintas Corporation (CTAS), Fedex (FDX).

📈📉

PROJECT WATCH

🔌 Sumitomo selected for subsea cable installation. Read more

🌊 Ithaca appoints Technip for North Sea flexible pipe work. Read more

🏗️ £2bn York Central regeneration plans submitted. Read more

BUSINESS & FINANCE

£44m fine for naughty Nationwide
Forget the Secret Santa, Nationwide’s stocking has been filled with something less festive: a £44 million fine. Courtesy of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), who apparently aren’t in the Christmas spirit when it comes to financial crime. And who can blame them? It’s hard to feel jolly when millions vanish in a puff of poorly-monitored accounts.

Nationwide’s penalty stems from what the FCA politely called “inadequate” anti-money laundering efforts. Less politely, they basically let one customer pocket over £27 million in dodgy COVID furlough payments without raising an eyebrow – even when £26 million of that landed in their account in just eight days.

The crimes occurred between 2016 and 2021, a time when Nationwide didn’t offer business current accounts - yet didn’t seem too fussed when customers started running businesses out of their personal accounts anyway. HMRC has managed to claw back most of the cash, but £800,000 remains out there, likely sunning itself next to other pandemic-era procurement scandals.

Economy shrank in October
The economy slipped on a patch of October ice and shrank by 0.1%, instead of the modest 0.1% growth economists had been naively hoping for. Bah humbug, indeed. The data shows the economy has only grown once in the past seven months.

One culprit limping into view is Jaguar Land Rover, which, after a cyber-attack in September, only managed a gentle cough back into action in October. Vehicle manufacturing dropped 17.7%, which seems less like a stall and more like a full-blown engine failure. Production picked up slightly with a 1.1% boost, but compared to August levels, well... let’s just say Santa’s sleigh has more horsepower at the moment.

Consumer and business spending were both tighter than a Quality Street tin post-Boxing Day. Uncertainty about the Budget turned us all into prudent penny-pinchers. Not exactly the festive spirit the Treasury was hoping for.

POLITICS

Puff piece: Senedd snuffs out smoking
In a move sure to leave Marlboro Men in mourning, the Senedd has voted to support Westminster's plan to create a "smoke-free generation". The Tobacco and Vapes Bill will ban cigarette sales to anyone born after January 1st, 2009, meaning a 16-year-old could be puffing away legally while their 15-year-old mate gets fined for a whiff of strawberry vape.

Health Minister Sarah Murphy hailed it as a once-in-a-century chance to stub out premature death. Meanwhile, Conservative James Evans went full libertarian, claiming the ban is "state overreach" and that people should be trusted to make their own bad decisions. It passed anyway, 36 votes to 9, with Plaid Cymru helpfully reminding everyone that many vapes are basically Haribo in smoke form.

Live Facial R-kid: smile, you’re on camera
Over in Merseyside, police are rolling out Live Facial Recognition (LFR) just in time for Christmas shopping. Yes, as you queue for your meal deal in Liverpool, Big Brother might be scanning your festive frown. But fear not - unless you're on a secret watchlist, your data’s apparently deleted faster than you can say "Alexa, what is mass surveillance?"

LFR vans will be parked around the city centre, looking for those on Santa’s naughty list. Assistant Chief Constable Jennifer Wilson assures us this isn’t snooping - just "smart policing", how assuring.

Chagos
Meanwhile, diplomatic drama, the UK and Mauritius are being gently slapped on the wrist by the UN for a Chagos Islands deal that smells suspiciously of 'colonialism, the reboot'. While Britain hands over sovereignty to Mauritius, it conveniently keeps a cosy lease on Diego Garcia - a.k.a. prime military real estate - while still blocking Chagossians from returning home.

The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is less than impressed, warning this shiny new treaty whitewashes past injustices and still leaves Chagossians exiled. London says it’ll support "heritage visits", which sounds like the diplomatic equivalent of letting you window-shop your childhood home.

Sponsored

Inside Kraft Heinz’s Talent-to-Value Playbook

When you're responsible for scaling talent in a fast-moving business, you don’t have the luxury of slow hiring cycles, disconnected systems, or reactive HR. You need frameworks that help you move faster — and actually influence the business.

That’s exactly what you’ll take away from this session.

Andrea Rickey, VP of Talent at Kraft Heinz, breaks down the tools and processes you can use to transform your own talent function — from AI-powered high-volume hiring to the talent-to-value model that helps you prioritize the roles that matter most. You’ll see how these systems unlock faster decisions, stronger leadership pipelines, and real alignment with business outcomes.

Whether you're supporting 50 employees or 50,000, you’ll leave with practical ways to streamline your talent workflows, elevate HR’s role, and operate at the pace your company needs heading into 2025.

Save your spot

ACROSS THE POND

$12bn bailout for US farmers
In a move that would make even Father Christmas question his generosity, President Donald Trump unveiled a whopping $12 billion aid package aimed at American farmers, gathered from the bounty of tariffs imposed worldwide. His mantra, "We love our farmers," was repeated like a seasonal carol at the announcement event.

This package includes $11 billion in shiny, one-time payments through a new bridge payment programme courtesy of the Department of Agriculture. The rest will be turned into miscellaneous crop support, like the stocking fillers of agricultural aid.

The President, flanked by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, emphasised that this aid will serve as a safety net for farmers navigating the economic uncertainty brought on by his very own trade policies. It was as if he were gifting them a parachute after nudging them off the tariff cliff.

The recent tussle with China has been a soybean-shaped thorn in the side of U.S. farmers. With China boycotting American soybeans, they watched in envy as Argentina stepped in to fill the void.

Paramount vs Netflix
Paramount has decided to skip the niceties and go straight for Warner Bros shareholders, launching an £81bn hostile takeover bid on Monday. The Hollywood battle intensifies as Paramount challenges Netflix's £54bn provisional deal to nab the creator of all things magic and medieval, including "Harry Potter" and "Game of Thrones".

In true blockbuster fashion, Paramount's offer is an enticing £22.50 cash per Warner share - a princely sum compared to Netflix's mixed offering of cash and stock. It seems the king of Hollywood intrigue, David Ellison of Paramount, is keen to woo shareholders with what's being touted as a "strategically and financially compelling offer", practically begging them to tell Netflix to take its proposal and shove it up the Tower of London.

Adding a sprinkle of global melodrama to the scene, Donald Trump has thrown his two cents into the American negotiations alchemy, suggesting that market share practices might make things a bit, well, dramatic. He seems keener than a Westminster fox at dawn to get involved, hinting at possible government intervention.

TECH

Warp gear
Sci-fi nerds, clutch your dilithium crystals: scientists have announced a physical warp drive model that doesn’t require negative energy. Yes, after decades of theoretical hand-waving and "if only we had a bucket of antimatter", the Applied Physics Laboratory has put forward a model that uses floating spacetime bubbles to potentially shift a spaceship faster than light - without having to bend the laws of the universe into a pretzel.

While the tech still lives in the 'probably centuries away' category (somewhere near jetpacks and GTA6), it’s now at least theoretically buildable.

Not so truly random crypto crash
From the cosmic to the criminal: Do Kwon, the man who once claimed to stabilise a stablecoin using algorithms, has been sentenced to 15 years in a US prison for what the judge dubbed a “generational” fraud. His TerraUSD token did anything but stay tethered, nosediving and wiping out $40bn. Kwon, it turns out, wasn’t just cooking the books - he brought his own flamethrower.

Meanwhile, the randomness required to create such epic chaos might finally have found a purer source. Enter CURBy - the Colorado University Randomness Beacon. Using quantum trickery, CURBy pumps out truly random numbers, unguessable and ungameable. Great for cryptography, simulations, and perhaps future algorithmic coin-stabilising schemes.

New fins, old friends, and legal teen tantrums
Down in the Amazon, scientists found Priocharax rex, a fingernail-sized fish with a never-before-seen organ: a curtain-like skin wing dangling from its belly. No one knows what it’s for. And speaking of biodiversity, a deep-sea mining trial between Mexico and Hawaii has revealed over 700 new species, even if a mining machine did leave biodiversity looking a bit... well, mined.

Back on land, Reddit has hurled its meme-laden gavel at Australia’s child social media ban, suing the Australian government, arguing that the "under 16 = no internet" rule is both unworkable and unfair. The High Court will now hear from teenagers who believe democracy shouldn’t be gatekept by birth years. Cue the great Gen Z vs Parliament showdown.

Mouse in the Machine: Disney gets Sora’d
OpenAI has inked a mega-deal with Disney to let users animate the likes of Mickey, Marvel and Jedi via its Sora app. Fan fiction just got an upgrade - and possibly a legal department. While critics worry about AI slop and copyright chaos, both companies insist it’s a responsible alliance. You can now produce your own Disney short, Darth Vader and Olaf search for Cinderella’s lost lightsaber, or a Bug’s Life Buzz Lightyear.

WORLD

Cave of Wonders
Somewhere between Indiana Jones and the Goddess of Fertility lies Turkey’s latest find: a 2,700-year-old rock-cut temple in Denizli. Yes, archaeologists have uncovered a Phrygian sanctuary carved into a cliff on Asar Hill - a sort of ancient Airbnb for the mother goddess Matar, complete with libation basins and panoramic mountain views. The Phrygians fused geology with theology, chiselling their devotion straight into stone.

Waddle well up
While ancient Turkey's mother goddess was being worshipped with grain and wine, over 60,000 African penguins have starved to death. The culprit? Sardines - or rather, the lack thereof. These little fish are the vital pre-moult snack penguins need before embarking on their feather-shedding lockdown. No food, no fat reserves, no feathers... no future.

Climate change and overfishing have decimated sardine stocks, leaving penguins out in the cold. It’s a bleak buffet, and unless sardine levels bounce back, the continent’s only native penguin species could be extinct in the wild within a decade.

Veiled threats & political prisoners
In Austria, lawmakers are banning headscarves for anyone under 14. Despite previous attempts being struck down, the government’s playing the same hand with a bigger fine (€800, if you're keeping score), and a strong whiff of déjà vu.

Over in Belarus, authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko has released 123 political prisoners, including activist Maria Kolesnikova and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, following a U.S. deal to lift potash sanctions. Sanctions out, freedom in - well, sort of. While some rejoice under their first free sunset in years, others warn it’s a diplomatic dance with dictatorial strings attached.