Paramount launches $108.4bn hostile bid for Warner Bros Discovery

David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance is not giving up in its aggressive campaign to acquire Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), launching a hostile bid for the entertainment company despite the announcement on Friday that Netflix had agreed to buy its studio and streaming operation.Netflix’s bid for WBD’s storied Hollywood movie studio, as well as its premier HBO cable network, valued the company at $82.7bn. But it did not agree to acquire WBD’s traditional television assets, including the news network CNN and the Discovery channel.Paramount’s all-cash tender offer sent directly to shareholders on Monday morning would be for the entire company, and puts a total enterprise value of $108

Anglo American’s merger bonus was a pay wheeze too far | Nils Pratley

Shareholder rebellions over executive pay aren’t what they used to be. In the past 18 months, bumper incentive arrangements for the bosses have been approved at AstraZeneca, the London Stock Exchange Group and Smith & Nephew. All those companies have managed to argue successfully that, since the bulk of their revenues are made on the other side of the Atlantic, the executives should be paid like Americans.Perhaps it was such favourable votes (for the executives) that persuaded the remuneration committee of FTSE 100 miner Anglo American that its cheeky “resolution 2” within the proposed $50bn all-share merger with the Canadian group Teck Resources wouldn’t cause a fuss.This resolution would have created, in effect, a £8

Social media use damages children’s ability to focus, say researchers

Increased use of social media by children damages their concentration levels and may be contributing to an increase in cases of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a study.The peer-reviewed report monitored the development of more than 8,300 US-based children from the age of 10 to 14 and linked social media use to “increased inattention symptoms”.Reseachers at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the Oregon Health & Science University in the US found that children spent an average of 2.3 hours a day watching television or online videos, 1.4 hours on social media and 1

‘It has to be genuine’: older influencers drive growth on social media

In 2022, Caroline Idiens was on holiday halfway up an Italian mountain when her brother called to tell her to check her Instagram account. “I said, ‘I haven’t got any wifi. And he said: ‘Every time you refresh, it’s adding 500 followers.’ So I had to try to get to the top of the hill with the phone to check for myself.”A personal trainer from Berkshire who began posting her fitness classes online at the start of lockdown in 2020, Idiens, 53, had already built a respectable following

‘Like a movie’: Lando Norris relives final lap to glory and partying till 6am as world champion

F1’s new superstar shares memories from road to glory Briton tells of ‘cool flashbacks’ on track in Abu DhabiAfter becoming Formula One world champion for the first time, Lando Norris revealed that he had enjoyed the final moments of the Abu Dhabi grand prix on Sunday by considering all the moments that had brought him to the pinnacle of the sport.Norris was speaking the day after he won the world championship by taking third place at the Yas Marina circuit. His title rival Max Verstappen won the race but fell short of Norris by just two points. The fight remained tight to the decisive last round with Norris’s McLaren teammate, Oscar Piastri, who had led the championship for a large part of the season, also in the mix for the final race but who ultimately finished third.“It was like a movie,” the 26-year-old said

Account closures and restrictions are angering racing punters but there is an answer

Racing enjoyed its biggest win for many years in last month’s budget. The threatened harmonisation of duty rates for betting and gaming was not simply seen off, but routed, with the differential between the two rates significantly increased. As an added bonus, meanwhile, racing was excluded from the small rise in the duty rate for bets on football and other sporting events.Having celebrated the win, though, the next step is to ensure that the benefits are maximised. And since, in relative terms, racing has just become a more attractive product for bookmakers, what better moment could there be to address one of the major obstacles that many punters face when they want to bet on the horses?That barrier is account closures and restrictions on punters who are – or appear to be – sufficiently smart to make a long-term profit on their betting