Author: KnowledgeHippo

Paramount’s board on Sunday signed a merger agreement with Skydance, according to two people familiar with the negotiations, ushering in a new era for CBS, Nickelodeon and the movie studio behind the “Top Gun” and “Mission: Impossible” franchises. “.The deal is a turning point for the Redstone family, whose fortunes have been intertwined with the rise and fall of the mainstream entertainment industry during the decades of tumultuous ownership of Paramount and its predecessors. Ms. Redstone, Paramount’s chairman, is cashing out much of her ownership in the company she has struggled to maintain and control.The merger will anoint a new…

In May, CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing services for artificial intelligence companies, raised $1.1 billion and followed that with $7.5 billion in debt, valuing it at $19 billion. Scale AI, a data provider for artificial intelligence companies, raised $1 billion, valuing it at $13.8 billion. And xAI, founded by Elon Musk, raised $6 billion, valuing it at $24 billion.Such funding rounds boosted the industry’s overall transactions by dollar amount and number of deals, said Kyle Stanford, research analyst at PitchBook.”It’s not going down anymore,” he said. “The bottom has already fallen out.”The activity prompted some venture capitalists to change…

Voters in France went to the polls in droves on Sunday in the final round of early parliamentary elections. The results could force President Emmanuel Macron to govern alongside far-right rivals or lead to chronic political instability weeks before the Paris Summer Olympics.Turnout at noon local time was the highest in two decades, at about 26.6 percent, the interior ministry said. This was much higher than in the previous parliamentary elections in 2022, when the turnout was at the same time less than 19 percent. It was also slightly higher than midday in the first round of voting last week,…

In 2009, botanist Naomi Fraga was hunting an unnamed flower near Carson City, Nev. Ms. Fraga saw the plant disappear in real time as its desert valley habitat was bulldozed to make way for Walmarts and housing. But to seek legal protection for it, he had to give it a name.The tiny yellow flower became the Carson Valley Monkeyflower, or, formally, Erythranthe carsonensis, allowing conservationists to petition the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect it under the Endangered Species Act. If their application is approved, the flower will go from unknown to extremely important in less than a generation,…

For Caroline Li and Colin Wang, moving in together after eight months of dating was a matter of calm and urgency.Last fall, Mr. Wang, 28, was finishing his final year of medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he learned that the two-bedroom apartment he shared with a roommate was infested with mold. He had to leave immediately, but found it difficult to find new housing.”It was very difficult to find something that was close enough to campus and reasonably priced, and it was also in the middle of the school year,” said Mr. Wang, who had…

The Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and provides behind-the-scenes information on how our journalism comes together.After recording about 90 episodes of “Hard Fork,” a weekly New York Times podcast about technology and business, life is pretty much the same for its hosts, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. That is, apart from the occasional encounter with a fan, which is a new and sometimes surprising experience for them.”Just last night, I had dinner with two friends who were visiting from out of town,” Mr. Newton said. “As I was returning from the bathroom, a man stopped…

The news shocked the collector car world. In May 2022, a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé — named after its creator, the company’s chief engineer Rudolf Uhlenhaut — sold for 135 million euros, (about $143 million). That was more than double the previous record of $70 million set by a 1963 Ferrari 250 GTO in 2018.Perhaps even more amazing is that a car built in the mid-1990s, a McLaren F1, sold in 2021 for over $20 million. Sales in the tens of millions of dollars are rare in the collector car market, but these three cars represent what high-end…

When voters in Tokyo cast their ballots for the governor of the world’s largest city on Sunday, they will be spoiled for choice.Fifty-six candidates are running for office, a record. A self-described “Joker” has proposed legalizing marijuana and says polygamy could counter the nation’s declining birth rate. Another is a professional wrestler who hides his face on camera and vows to use artificial intelligence to complete government tasks. There’s a 96-year-old inventor who says she’ll develop carbon-free gas-powered cars and a 31-year-old entrepreneur who took off her shirt during a campaign video and promised “fun stuff.”It can look like democracy…

The dean of Berkeley Law School is known as a staunch supporter of free speech, but things got personal for him when pro-Palestinian students disrupted a gala dinner for about 60 students at his home.Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school, hosted the dinner Tuesday night in the backyard of his home in Oakland, California. The party was supposed to be a community-building event, open to all third-year law students, with no speeches or formal activities.But a third-year law student and Palestinian activist, Malak Afaneh, stood up at the event, holding a microphone, and began a speech.As he began…

It was, after all, an interview as personal as it was political, an intersection that focused more on the psyche and the inescapable reality of aging than on any point of politics or governance.Respectfully but firmly, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos on Friday pressed President Biden, again and again, on the key questions Americans had been asking themselves over the past eight days, after 51 million people watched a diminished Mr. Biden struggle to play in the discussion. stage.”Are you weaker?””Were there more mistakes?””Have you had a neurologist, a specialist, do an exam?”And as Mr. Biden dismissed all those concerns one…