Happy Monday. More brilliantly bizarre news for your 2026 bingo card (incredibly no full houses yet).

American clothing company Patagonia has taken the unexpected step of filing a trademark infringement against an environmental activist and drag queen, who calls themselves Pattie Gonia. They’ve essentially said, “we’ve had to do it because you’ve ignored our DMs asking to stop flogging stuff that looks like our stuff”.

Meanwhile Old Blighty is gearing up for the start of the World Cup this week, while England don’t play until next week, Scotland get us started on Sunday.

Notable UK earnings this week: Oxford Instruments (OXIG), Molten Ventures (GROW), Workspace Group (WKP), Halma (HLMA), Wizz Air (WIZZ).

Notable US earnings this week: Oracle (ORCL), Adobe (ADBE), Campbell Soup Company (CPB).

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🌊 JDR Subsea cable factory opens in Blyth. Read more

🔌 Start of early works to link Western Isles to UK transmission network. Read more

🤖 Big win for McLaren on £1bn Buckinghamshire data centre. Read more

I’m going to Disneyland *Bedfordshire
Universal’s first theme park resort in Europe is coming to Bedfordshire, on the former Kempston Hardwick brickworks site south-west of Bedford. The new Universal United Kingdom Resort is being billed as one of the biggest leisure developments ever attempted in Britain — which, given our national talent for queueing, weather commentary and half-finished infrastructure, will be right at home.

The Government is helping grease the wheels with major investment in roads, rail and local services. That includes £474m for upgrades to the A421 and Wixams railway station, plus £838m in grant support for regional growth and community infrastructure. In other words, before the rollercoasters arrive, the grown-up stuff has to happen first.

The resort is expected to attract 8.5 million visitors a year and could end up challenging for the title of Europe’s busiest theme park. Universal, owned by Comcast NBCUniversal, plans to spend more than £5bn on construction over around five years, with a further £1bn earmarked for capital investment in the first decade of operation. By 2055, the project is forecast to generate 20,000 construction jobs during delivery, 8,000 permanent jobs once open, and almost £50bn in economic benefit — a figure that certainly makes the old brickworks look like a rather modest pile of rubble.

Welsh Water latest water firm in hot water
Welsh Water has become the latest big utility player to be hauled over the coals for wastewater failings, with regulator Ofwat proposing a £44.7m enforcement package. In plain English: the company is being told, rather firmly, to sort out its pipes, procedures and managerial oversight after failing to properly operate, maintain and upgrade its wastewater assets. Not exactly the sort of performance review anyone wants on a Monday.

Ofwat said the shortcomings meant the system could not cope with the sewage and wastewater flows it was supposed to handle, leading to excessive spills from storm overflows into the environment. It also found that senior management controls were not robust enough to ensure legal requirements were being met. Given the public mood on sewage, this is not exactly coming at a time of buoyant Jacuzzi-themed optimism.

The package is the seventh recent enforcement action against a water firm over sewage spills, underscoring the scale of the problem across the sector. Bill hikes, already unpopular enough to make most households feel as if they’re paying champagne prices for tap water, have only sharpened the anger.

Of the £44.7m package, £40.6m will be spent by Welsh Water on measures to address harm and reduce spills at specific overflows, including works on private parts of the sewer network to tackle groundwater infiltration. Another £4.1m will go towards improving river water quality in what Ofwat described as “extremely sensitive catchments” — because apparently some waterways are having a far worse summer than the rest of us.

Betting battle
The widow of Luke Ashton, a gambling addict who took his own life after falling £18,000 into debt, is taking Betfair to court in a case that could rattle Britain’s betting industry. His family says the company failed to intervene as he placed thousands of bets, lost heavily, self-excluded, returned, and received promotional “free” bets.

Betfair denies owing him a duty of care, saying he did not disclose his disorder and that safer gambling checks were in place. If the claim succeeds, betting firms could for the first time be legally responsible for protecting customers showing signs of harm. That’s not a flutter; it’s a potential industry earthquake.

Visa vise
Universities could lose the right to recruit international students if too many applicants fail to enrol, complete courses, or pass visa checks. The Home Office says the move targets visa abuse, with student asylum claims down 30% after earlier action. From 2027, a traffic-light system will name and shame poor performers, with “red” institutions facing caps and action plans. Universities warn they need stability, not another policy migraine with a mortarboard.

SpaceX IPO may set Elon for trillionaire status
SpaceX is reportedly preparing to raise up to $75bn (£56bn) in a stock market debut this month, in a move that could propel Elon Musk to becoming the world’s first trillionaire. It would be the biggest IPO ever seen, which is a bit rich even by modern capitalism’s standards — and that’s saying something in a year when markets already seem to have had more ups and downs than a Heathrow departure board.

The company plans to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 (£100) each, giving it an estimated valuation of $1.77tn (£1.53tn). That would put it comfortably above Saudi Aramco’s $26bn fundraising in 2019, and leave only a few giants ahead of it in the S&P 500, with Nvidia currently top of the pile at $5.2tn. Not bad for a firm whose business model involves quite literally blasting money into the sky.

According to the IPO paperwork, some of the cash will help fund plans to land humans back on the Moon — and eventually build a permanent Mars colony with at least one million residents. Ambitious? Certainly. Slightly bonkers? Also yes. But then again, mankind has always liked a grand project, from the railways to Concorde to, apparently, turning another planet into a very expensive housing estate.

There’s just one small detail: SpaceX is still losing billions. The filing shows operating losses of $2.6bn last year, with the red ink still flowing at the start of this year. So while the company is aiming for the Moon, its accounts are having more of a crash landing.

Florida sues OpenAI
Florida has taken a very public swing at OpenAI, with Attorney General James Uthmeier suing the company and chief executive Sam Altman over allegations that profit was put ahead of safety. The complaint claims OpenAI knowingly pushed a product capable of causing harm, from addiction and mental health problems to violence. In other words, the state is accusing the firm of doing what Silicon Valley too often does best: moving fast, breaking things, and then looking faintly astonished when the things are people.

The suit is the first by a US state against OpenAI and Altman over design and safety. Uthmeier is seeking financial penalties and a court order, and wants Altman personally held liable for what Florida says is reckless conduct. The action sits alongside a separate criminal investigation opened in April, which is still ongoing.

Florida’s filing is broad enough to make a parliamentary committee look minimalist, accusing OpenAI of deceptive trade practices, negligence, product liability breaches, fraudulent misrepresentation, and creating a public nuisance. It claims the company’s systems pose a “great danger” of addiction, cognitive decline, suicide, violence and related harms. OpenAI, naturally, says it has safeguards in place and has built specific protections for minors, including age prediction tools and a more protective experience for under-18s.

Scalpel satnav
British surgeons have tried an AI helper in a live operation for the first time, using Japan’s Eureka system during a bowel resection at St Mark’s Hospital in northwest London. Trained on thousands of surgery videos, it colour-codes hidden anatomy in real time, helping doctors spot what to protect or cut. Think Google Maps, but for bowels: fewer wrong turns, ideally no scenic route.

Leaky lodgings
The International Space Station had a nervy Friday after a long-running air leak in the Russian Zvezda module worsened, prompting five crew members to shelter in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule in spacesuits. Roscosmos paused repairs after one leak was reportedly sealed, but NASA and Russia still appear at odds over the fix. The crew is safe; the station, less so. Even space now has dodgy plumbing.

Cosmic cash
Google will reportedly pay SpaceX $920m a month for cloud compute, including access to 110,000 Nvidia chips, to feed demand for Gemini Enterprise. With SpaceX eyeing a monster IPO, Elon Musk’s empire is selling rockets, AI muscle, and possibly the world’s priciest server cupboard.

Spy games

US journalist Thomas Weir Pauken II has pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent for China, admitting he helped gather sensitive information for Beijing while living there. Prosecutors say he was paid at least $100,000, met potential intelligence sources, and reported back to handlers with names straight from a budget thriller: Cathy, William and Richard. He says he wanted better relations and religious freedom; the court may prefer the phrase “espionage conspiracy”.

Nuclear nudge

Kim Yo Jong, sister and senior aide to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, says Pyongyang will never give up its nuclear weapons. Ahead of Xi Jinping’s visit, she dismissed US talk of denuclearisation as an “anachronistic dream”, which is diplomatic code for “not a chance, sunshine”. North Korea is expanding nuclear fuel and missile production, hoping to look less like a pariah and more like a power no one can ignore.

Visa var

Iran’s World Cup squad has landed in Mexico because its US fixtures now come with border-control gymnastics. Players can enter on match days, but 15 officials were reportedly denied visas. Football’s biggest tournament has met geopolitics, and VAR can’t review this one.