☕ Good Morning! 

Want to own one of those iconic red phone-boxes? Well, soon you’ll be able to. BT has announced that they're putting 1K+ of them for sale across the UK. The best part: you’ll be able to buy one for just £1. Now that's a damn good deal…

Today’s reading time: 4½ minutes.

TRAVEL

UK’s worst air traffic outage puts a damper on Bank Holiday

Looks like travel woes for British holidaymakers can't catch a break…

What happened: Monday, on one of the busiest days of the year, air travel across the country went into a full-blown meltdown as 1.2K+ flights were cancelled.

The morning mayhem got crowned the worst air traffic control outage in a decade as:

• Thousands of British travellers were stranded at airports.

• Many planes flew to/currently are in the wrong place.

• Huge backlog of flights that need to be dealt with.

What exactly caused this mess? The Nats flight data-processing system that glitched harder than a Grand Theft Auto NPC. It's called NERL and is supposed to coordinate all the flights that pass through the country each day (think: an automated air traffic controller watching over all flights).

This meant that the system was unable to automatically process flight plans = all the info had to be entered manually, which slowed down the whole shebang.

Hangover: Though the system-wide hitch was ‘identified and remedied’ in just a few hours, the impact of the meltdown seems far from over…

• The gov’t said yesterday that the disruption was “going to take some days” to resolve + will have knock-on effects on the rest of the week.

That's not all… Staff working at Wizz Air at Luton are due to go on three 24-hour strikes in August and September, which is expected to cause more delays and cancellations.

+ Section soundtrack: Tom Petty’s “Learning To Fly.”

WORLD

Tour de headlines

🇬🇧 Dibs: The Britain gov't has announced the world's first AI safety #IRL summit to lay out some ground rules for AI + explore how these systems can be safely developed. The two-day summit, set to take place on Nov 1, will involve “like-minded” countries and companies.

💭 Thought-to-speech: Thanks to AI, a paralyzed woman who lost her ability to speak a decade ago can talk again. Scientists hooked her brain up to a computer that could decode her thoughts into words, letting her speak just by thinking.

🔋 BatteryGate: Apple’s contesting a $2B mass lawsuit at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal for slowing down old iPhones to mask faulty batteries.

TECH

Here’s what’s up with Spain’s kissing scandal saga…

Luis Rubiales, Spain's soccer federation prez, is in major penalty trouble…

Rewind: Rubes grabbed player Jenni Hermoso's head and gave her one on the lips after the UK Women’s National team lost a heartbreaker to Spain last week.

He claims that the kiss was “mutual and consensual.” Hermoso wasn't down for the extra lip service and felt victim of a “sexist, out-of-place act.”

• Red card: On Saturday, FIFA (world’s soccer-governing body) benched Rubes with a 90-day suspension pending an investigation into the incident.

• Own goal: Officials of his own soccer fed are calling on him to step down as the president and the 50+ player team’s also refusing to represent the nation again unless Rubes and other federation leaders are removed.

• Law & order: Whether the incident was an act of sexual aggression offense… still TBD by Spain's National Court, which has opened a formal investigation on Monday.

Meanwhile, Rubiales’s mom started a hunger strike in a church to defend her son.

Big picture: With #SeAcabó — Spanish for “it’s over” — trending across Spanish social media, the nonconsensual kiss following the WWC has blown the whistle on a broader conversation about women’s equality in the country + women are using the controversy to spotlight their mistreatment by men that’s never made public…

ICYMI

The big squeeze

London’s bold step to curb pollution: The capital’s expansion of ultra-low emission zones is happening (think: a policy that imposes a £12.50/day charge on anyone driving a jalopy). The gov’t announced yesterday that the zone will double in size to reach outer London. Check your vehicle →

A new crypto platform lets you buy “shares” of friends: But only if they have an account on Twitter (er, X). Friend.tech’s gained 100K+ users since its launch 3 weeks ago and has already made over £20M+ in fees. How it’s going viral →

OpenAI is going enterprise: The co behind ChatGPT has officially launched a premium tier of its AI chatbot for biz, in what seems like a clear attempt to woo companies into paying for features like “enterprise-grade security and privacy.” But if want to get rid of unlimited across to the chatbot, ask your company to switch to the enterprise version →

The human Y chromosome has finally been completely sequenced: And the stuff it unveils could prove crucial to understanding the Y chromosome's puzzling origins, and how it affects male fertility. How this will affect us →

The only good media business: Owner of UK-based company OnlyFans is making £1M/day of profit. He took £400M+ of dividends out the last two years. The full accounts of the co on Company’s house →

DIGIT OF THE DAY

ADHD prescriptions soared sevenfold in just a decade

Prescriptions for ADHD meds have jumped a whopping 7x for grown-ups in Scotland over the past decade… which is not ideal, to say the least.

• Scots getting NHS prescriptions for ADHD went from 1.6K to 12K in 10 years.

• There has been a notable rise in prescriptions since the Covid-19 pandemic began.

EXTRA CROWN

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