Happy Monday. With chaos dominating the headlines at the moment, you’d be forgiven for not realising the Commonwealth Games had been underway in Glasgow.

The games ended with Australia comfortably top of the medals table, followed by England, Canada, India and Scotland completing the top 5. Two years ago, Australia pulled out of hosting the games, leaving Glasgow to heroically step in to ensure they still went ahead. Great effort from the Scots all round!

Notable UK earnings this week: Legal & General (LGEN), Travis Perkins (TPK), Diageo (DGE).

Notable US earnings this week: Palantir (PLTR), Eli Lilly (LLY), Uber (UBER), Walt Disney (DIS), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Caterpillar (CAT), Airbnb (ANBN), ConocoPhillips (COP).

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🌊 CO2 storage project secures lease. Read more

🏗️ Truman Brewery estate approved for redevelopment. Read more

Job cuts expected at JLR
Jaguar Land Rover is planning to cut hundreds of jobs, less than a year after a cyber attack sent production into a tailspin and left factory floors quieter than a bank holiday Monday in August. The company said the number of departures is expected to be fewer than 300, with affected employees being offered support to find other roles where possible, plus the option of voluntary early exit.

The layoffs are understood to hit salaried and management staff rather than production line workers — small comfort, admittedly, but there it is. JLR, whose global headquarters are in Whitley and whose UK manufacturing sites include Solihull, Wolverhampton and Halewood on Merseyside, employs about 30,000 people in Britain and around 10,000 overseas.

The cyber attack in September 2025 shut down all manufacturing for several weeks, meaning not a single vehicle rolled off the lines. That helped drag overall production down by 27% and added to the pain for one of the West Midlands’ biggest employers — a region that knows a thing or two about making things properly, thank you very much.

Interest rates held
The Bank of England has kept interest rates unchanged at 3.75%, as policymakers wait for a clearer picture of how the U.S.-Iran war may feed into inflation. But this was no cosy consensus in Threadneedle Street: the Monetary Policy Committee voted 6-3, with Catherine Mann joining Megan Greene and chief economist Huw Pill in backing a rise to 4%.

Governor Andrew Bailey and the majority opted for the “let’s not do anything daft just yet” approach, hoping to avoid piling more pressure on an economy already wobbling along with rather limited cheer. Bailey said market pricing for a rise later in 2026 was more about the risk of the Middle East conflict worsening than about current price pressures demanding fresh tightening. In other words: the Bank is watching, not sprinting — no need to get the bunting out.

Embassy unease
High Court upholds plans for a vast new Chinese embassy in London have sparked warnings that this is less bricks-and-mortar, more spies-and-mortar. Hong Kong activist Chloe Cheung, who says Beijing has placed a bounty on her, argues the decision will test whether Britain can protect dissidents from foreign intimidation. Conservatives including Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel likewise want Prime Minister Andy Burnham to block the scheme, citing national security and China’s economic muscle.

Ballot bonanza
Clacton’s by-election ballot is a whopping 90cm long after 34 candidates joined the race triggered by Nigel Farage’s resignation. Farage is standing again, naturally, while 20 independents and several absent major parties have turned voting into something resembling a wallpaper order. The council says printing costs four times the norm, with double tables needed just to count the thing. Democracy, now available in family size.

Hostel hostility
Edinburgh campaigners are fuming after ministers approved a 544-bed pod hostel in four listed Georgian townhouses. Opponents fear noise, over-tourism and a precedent for turning heritage streets into supersized sleepovers; officials say 21 conditions will protect the site. The buildings keep their grand doors, then—just with rather more snoring behind them.

Fifth for Fauci
Dr Anthony Fauci, the man who became the public face of America’s Covid response during Donald Trump’s first term, has refused to answer more than 100 questions at a congressional hearing in Washington DC. At 85 and long retired, he invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination — which, in plain English, is the legal version of saying, “I’ll pass, thanks, not today, mate.”

Appearing before a Republican-led Senate committee, Dr Fauci declined to answer 15 questions posed by chair Rand Paul, taking the Fifth each time. In his opening statement, he said he was acting on legal advice and would “refrain from answering your questions” — a phrase that tends to land rather differently in a hearing room than it does at a dinner party.

The row, inevitably, is not just about one hearing but about a pandemic-sized backlog of anger, suspicion and political score-settling. Mr Paul has long accused Dr Fauci of lying to Congress over so-called gain-of-function research and the origins of Covid-19, while Dr Fauci rejects those claims and says he has testified truthfully multiple times. As ever in Washington, the facts and the theatrics are having a proper scrap in public.

Iran strikes paused
Donald Trump says he has called off strikes against Iran — on the condition, naturally, that a deal with Tehran is struck “rapidly”. In a post on Truth Social, the US president claimed Iran and other Middle Eastern countries had asked Washington to “hold off” while the “perimeters” of an agreement were being worked out. It’s diplomacy, apparently, with a side order of threat and a very large helping of chaos.

Robotaxi rumble
Lyft, Freenow and China’s Baidu have begun testing self-driving cars in Brent, with safety operators aboard for now. They join Waymo, Uber and Wayve in London’s increasingly crowded robotaxi race. Public rides are pencilled in for 2027, regulators permitting. Mind the gap - and possibly the driver.

Synthetic satellites
Google’s AI image tools can generate convincing fake satellite scenes, including fabricated destruction, raising fears about misinformation during wars and crises. The tool has since been pulled after just one day as, you guessed it, images like certain events in New York were recreated. Even genuine evidence may now need an alibi.

Moonshot mishap
An abandoned SpaceX rocket stage is expected to smack into the moon at 5,400mph, blasting out a crater roughly 27 metres wide. Scientists are treating the accidental collision as a useful experiment in lunar debris. One giant thump for unmanaged parking.

Claude and disorder
Anthropic says three of its AI models accessed real companies’ systems during supposedly sealed cybersecurity tests. Weak passwords and an open internet path were blamed, not a dramatic sandbox escape. Still, “the computer misunderstood the exercise” is hardly soothing.

Palantir predicament
London’s policing office is defending its decision to block the Met’s £50m Palantir AI deal, arguing the procurement process was unlawful and misleading. Palantir says the veto improperly targeted its ethics. The High Court will now debug the dispute.

Flagged and forbidden
Massive Attack have been banned from Singapore after holding up a Palestinian flag and shouting “free Palestine” during a concert. Authorities say the display breached strict rules on foreign emblems and political demonstrations, designed, they argue, to protect social harmony. The band, long fond of putting the protest into trip-hop, now faces a rather definitive encore request: don’t come back.

Humala homecoming
Peru’s constitutional court has overturned former president Ollanta Humala’s 15-year corruption sentence, declaring the case against him null and void. Humala had been convicted of taking illegal campaign money from Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, but the court ruled those contributions did not amount to money laundering. He left prison to cheers from supporters, calling the case political persecution. In Peru’s revolving door of presidential scandals, this one has spun backwards.