Today, Elon Musk offers to fight Mark Zuckerberg. A gas explosion occurs in Paris. Amazon is sued by the FTC. The UK jacks up interest rates yet again and Ukraine accuses Russia of considering a terror attack.
From TLDR News, this is your daily briefing for Thursday the 22nd of June 2023. Never has the battle for social media dominance been less metaphorical. In an incredibly strange turn of events, it seems that the CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, and the CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, may have just agreed to a cage fight. This whole saga started with a tweet from Mario Newfall in which he criticised Facebook for copying Snapchat, TikTok, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, BeReal and Clubhouse before then going on to criticise them for trying to copy Twitter in their new Threads project.
Musk replied to this by saying that, I'm sure Earth can't wait to be exclusively under Zuck's thumb with no other options. Someone replied to this saying that Elon had better be careful as Zuckerberg does jiu-jitsu now. This is where Musk's offer comes in. He replied saying, I'm up for a cage match if he is, lol.
Zuckerberg seemed interested in this idea, with him screenshotting this and posting it on his Instagram reels with the caption, send me location. Musk doubled down and said, if this is real, I will do it. Before later tweeting, Vegas octagon, a venue which is often used for UFC fights. Whether this actually ever ends up happening is another question entirely.
Now, while we've seen YouTubers manufacture drama in order to get paid exorbitant amounts to box one another, we haven't really seen this with CEOs before. So this really would be a first. There's more on the way, but be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to make the daily briefing part of your daily routine or to search for us on your podcast app to listen along. At least 37 people have been injured following a large explosion in central Paris.
The explosion, which has tentatively been described as a gas explosion, occurred in a building next to the Val-de-Grace church in Paris' fifth arrondissement. Witnesses, quoted by French media, reported a strong smell of gas just before the blast. Authorities have, however, not yet made a formal determination regarding the cause of the blast. The building, according to reports, housed the Paris American Academy, a bilingual fashion and design school, as well as the headquarters of the Catholic education system.
Locals described a war scene after the blast, with at least 275 fire officers, 75 fire engines and nine doctors sent to the scene. The area was evacuated by French police over concerns that other buildings could collapse. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, promptly triggered the city's crisis unit, declaring that, My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones. An involuntary ruling investigation has also been opened by Paris' state prosecutor.
So that's the explosion in Paris. Let's move on and discuss what's been happening in relation to Amazon. Amazon has been tricking customers into enrolling in its paid subscription programme, Amazon Prime, and making it difficult to cancel once enrolled. That's according to the US Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, who made the claims in a federal lawsuit.
The FTC in particular alleges that Amazon knowingly duped millions of customers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime and staying enrolled through a secret project dubbed Project Iliad, a nod to the Greek epic poem about the long and arduous Trojan War. The suit further alleges that the tech giant used manipulative, coercive or deceptive user interface designs, known as dark patterns, to trick customers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions, highlighting the cumbersome four-page, six-click, 15-option process to cancel a subscription. The FTC's complaint notes that customers trying to check out were often presented with a button to complete the purchase that would also sign them up for Prime, without it being clear that the button was doing so. At time of writing, Amazon has not yet commented on the FTC suit, though it is worth noting that Amazon changed this cancellation process shortly before the lawsuit was filed.
The FTC are seeking a court order demanding Amazon change its practices and an unspecified financial penalty. The Bank of England has today raised its base rate by 50 basis points to 5%. This move comes after figures published on Wednesday showed UK inflation holding steady at 8.7%. And whilst that might sound like a good thing, most economists and the Bank of England had actually expected a slight fall to 8.3%.
What's particularly concerning for the bank, and the main reason the Bank has continued to hike rates, is that core inflation in the UK is not only remaining stubbornly high, it's continuing to climb. For some context, in the vast majority of other countries, core inflation is actually falling, and falling fast. Whilst the UK recorded an uptick in core inflation of 0.35 percentage points from April, Spain saw a 0.5 point decline, Portugal a 1.1 point decline, and Hungary a huge 2 point decline. The hike comes at an incredibly difficult time for many up and down the country.
As we covered in a recent TLDR UK video, the bank's aggressive monetary tightening to try and get inflation under control has led to mortgage repayments increasing by hundreds of pounds a month for many. President Zelensky has this morning claimed that Ukrainian intelligence agencies have found that Moscow is planning for a terrorist act at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Specifically, he said that intelligence suggests that they're planning for a release of radiation. He pointed out that unfortunately, I had to be reminded more than once that radiation knows no national borders, and who it hits is determined only by the direction of the wind.
This comes only hours after Ukraine itself was accused by Russia of striking the Chinhai Bridge to Crimea. The bridge is the shortest route from Crimea to the Ukrainian front line in the south, and is used by Russia as a way to connect Crimea and Melitopol. For this reason, it's thought to be one of the targets of Ukraine's counteroffensive. Russia has claimed the attack used British Storm Shadow missiles, which they claim demonstrates that the attack was ordered by London.
In the final uplifting story today, we discuss lab-grown meat. The US has, for the first time, approved chicken which has been made from cultivated animal cells. This makes it, in essence, a lab-grown meat. Firms have, for a while now, been racing to be the first to offer this meat, which, by its very design, doesn't come from slaughtered animals and is therefore a much more ethical product.
The chief executive of Good Meat, the company that offers this kind of meat, has said that, instead of all that land and all that water that's used to feed all these animals that are then slaughtered, we can do it in a different way. That's all we have time for on YouTube today, but the briefing isn't over. That's because we explain why funding for Ukraine's reconstruction has stalled in the extended, ad-free edition of the Daily Briefing, only on Nebula. That's the streaming service we're building with a bunch of our creator friends, many of whom you're likely to be already watching.
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