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Europe
The Guardian

Ex-FCC officials warn agency sending ‘chilling message’ with ABC license review

The FCC chairman, Brendan Carr. Photograph: Kylie Cooper/ReutersView image in fullscreenThe FCC chairman, Brendan Carr. Photograph: Kylie Cooper/ReutersTrump administrationEx-FCC officials warn agency sending ‘chilling message’ with ABC license reviewEx-officials ask FCC to reject petitions to deny renewal of broadcast licenses for eight stations owned by ABC A group of prominent former Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officials, including key staffers and commissioners appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, issued a filing on Tuesday that warns the agency is trying to send a “chilling message” to broadcasters after it received petitions to deny ABC license renewals for eight of its local television stations. The network’s licenses are up for early renewal after an extremely unusual order from the Brendan Carr-led FCC in late April, following criticism of ABC by Donald Trump and Melania Trump. The group behind the filing includes Mark S Fowler, who served as FCC chair during Ronald Reagan’s presidency; Alfred C Sikes, who served as FCC chair during George HW Bush’s presidency; Thomas E Wheeler, who served as FCC chair during Barack Obama’s presidency; and several high-ranking lawyers and advisers to past commissioners. “This early license renewal proceeding is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Communications Commission and a grave violation of both the Communications Act and the Constitution,” the coalition wrote in the filing. “Through this proceeding, the FCC seeks to censor Disney’s and ABC’s speech and send a chilling message to all broadcasters: carry speech we don’t like at your peril.” Seeking to put the ABC license challenge into context, the group called the order “the latest attack in a sustained campaign by Chairman Carr and the Trump administration of threatening legal sanctions against licensees whose speech President Trump dislikes”. The filing is a response to petitions to deny ABC’s license renewals submitted by conservative media watchdog the Media Research Center (MRC) and the Center for American Rights (CAR), a conservative legal organization that is closely aligned with Carr and has initiated several complaints against television networks premised on accusations of liberal bias. CAR’s petition to deny ABC’s license renewal accused the network of “[ignoring] long-standing Commission precedents and principles protecting the integrity of the news” and “[engaging] in explicit racial and gender discrimination”. The coalition said in its Tuesday filing that the petitions should be denied because they ask the FCC to wade into “content and viewpoint regulation” and accusations of bias by punishing a network for their editorial decision-making – “a stunning – and plainly unconstitutional – expansion of the Commission’s role”. “As former Chairs, Commissioners, Chiefs of Staff, General Counsels and Bureau Chiefs, we call on the Commission to respect the constitutional and congressional prohibitions on its ‘power of censorship’ and terminate this proceeding,” the group wrote. Interested parties have until 5 August to reply to petitions to deny ABC’s licenses. After that time, the FCC could either grant the extension requests, a prospect that seems unlikely, or schedule hearings on the matter. The process has no clear timetable, leaving ABC and its eight local television stations mired in a cloud of uncertainty about their ability to continue broadcasting long-term.

Ex-FCC officials warn agency sending ‘chilling message’ with ABC license review
Europe
BBC Business

What you wear can help you get a job - here's how

Trying to secure her "dream job" with a fashion company, Taya Reed was highly aware she had to make a good first impression in the interviews. And how she dressed was going to be a key component. A London-based science graduate from two top universities in the UK capital, the 23-year-old had applied for a marketing job at a womenswear brand. She had done her homework, and devised a promotional campaign for the business. But Reed also put a great deal of thought into what she would wear for the interviews, the first online and another in person. "I find outfits can be a good conversation starter," she says, adding she showed up to her main interview wearing an all-white ensemble with ballet flats, a long maxi skirt, and a white vest, all "girly and summery". With youth unemployment stubbornly high on both sides of the Atlantic, young adults need to think of every possible way they can positively stand out in interviews. And while substance matters, research suggests a person's appearance is also important. In a 2020 UK study, 51% of employers admitted turning down a candidate because of the way they looked, with managers indicating they had been influenced by scruffy clothes or poorly dyed hair. Min-Hsuan Tu, a professor of human resources at the University of Buffalo, warns that job interviews can be unfair from the moment a candidate walks in. The main author of a 2021 paper, external on the topic, she says good-looking people get hired more often because people associate attractiveness with positive traits such as trustworthiness and intelligence. Individuals seen as attractive are likely to have received more positive attention and preferential treatment since childhood, helping them better learn non-verbal communication skills from an early age, Tu says. As a result, they can be more confident. "Studies show that attractive people tend to have better communication skills and networks. They also have a higher sense of power," she says. However, physical attractiveness is not limited to one's face or body shape but includes clothing and make-up. Making an effort to present well is important, says Tu. Matt Cohen, a 31-year-old American who moved to London two years ago, aimed for a confident demeanour in his recent job interviews.

What you wear can help you get a job - here's how
Asia
The Hindu BusinessLine

Sundaram Home Finance hikes interest rates for fixed deposits

The deposit base at Sundaram Home Finance stood at ₹2,295 crore as on 31 March 2026. Sundaram Home Finance, the wholly owned subsidiary of Sundaram Finance, has increased the interest rates on 3, 4 and 5 year deposits effective August 1. For regular category, the interest rate has been increased 0.25 per cent to 7.25 per cent for 3 year deposits and to 7.40 per cent for 4 and 5 year deposits. For senior citizens, the interest rate has been increased by 25 basis points to 7.75 per cent for 3, 4 and 5 year deposits. For trusts, the interest rate has been increased by 25 basis points to 7.50 per cent for 3, 4 and 5 year deposits. “Deposits have historically been an integral and important source of funding and constitute about one fourth of our funding basket. We have always valued the faith and trust placed in us by the depositors whose base has now increased to over 15,000 with a renewal rate of over 75 per cent,” said D Lakshminarayanan, MD, Sundaram Home Finance. The deposit base at Sundaram Home Finance stood at ₹2,295 crore as on 31 March 2026. Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments. We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.

Sundaram Home Finance hikes interest rates for fixed deposits
North America
CNBC Economy

Trump plans steep tariffs on generic drugs starting in 2028 to spur U.S. production

President Donald Trump said generic drugs imported into the U.S. will face zero tariffs for two years starting August 1, before a 100% levy takes effect in August 2028 and rises to 200% a year later. The phased schedule is intended to push generic drugmakers to move production onshore, Trump said in a social media post Tuesday, describing the escalation as "a penalty" for companies that don't build plants and facilities in the U.S. within the grace period. Tariffs on patented and branded drugs will remain unchanged, Trump said. The president imposed a 100% levy on patented pharmaceutical products and ingredients under Section 232 on April 2, while exempting generic drugs, biosimilars, and related ingredients. Larger drugmakers were given 120 days before the 100% tariff rate goes into effect, and smaller drugmakers, which rely on contract manufacturers, had 180 days before that rate hits. More than a dozen major drugmakers, including Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Novo Nordisk, have struck deals with Trump to lower the prices of new and existing medicines. Those agreements are part of the president's "most favored nation" policy, which ties U.S. drug prices to cheaper ones abroad, and exempts the companies from tariffs for three years. Trump has used tariff threats and his most-favored-nation pricing policy to press drugmakers into charging Americans no more than patients in other high-income countries. The stakes are high for India, as the country's pharmaceutical companies supply nearly 50% of all generic medicines consumed in America. The U.S. accounts for about a third of India's pharma exports, mostly cheaper versions of popular drugs, annually. Chinese firms dominate the upstream supply of active pharmaceutical ingredients, such as amoxicillin and heparin. Get this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services. Data is a real-time snapshot *Data is delayed at least 15 minutes. Global Business and Financial News, Stock Quotes, and Market Data and Analysis.

Trump plans steep tariffs on generic drugs starting in 2028 to spur U.S. production
North America
CNBC Finance

Moody's says 'unprecedented' AI spending threatens credit quality of Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and others

The race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure at a trillion-dollar annual clip is eroding the free cash flow and increasing balance-sheet risk at so-called hyperscalers, warned Moody's Ratings. In a research note released this week, Moody's said that the spending surge is forcing even the world's most cash-rich corporations like Alphabet and Microsoft to lean heavily on debt, stock sales and off-balance-sheet moves to fund their AI ambitions. "Previously, these companies relied on asset-light structures centered on software, intellectual property, and scalable cloud services that required modest capital investment," Moody's said in the Wednesday note. "The transition from asset-light to asset-heavy models requires unprecedented levels of investment and capital raising." The moves "threaten credit quality" for the six companies tracked by Moody's, which include Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Oracle and CoreWeave, according to the report. The ratings firm projects that capital expenditures — or capex, which are investment for physical assets like data centers — will hit $785 billion in 2026 before reaching about $1 trillion next year. The shift breaks a decades-long Silicon Valley formula that created the world's most valuable companies. Software costs little to replicate, yielding fat profit margins and fortress balance sheets. Generative AI, by contrast, demands a vast physical footprint: warehouses crammed with expensive and energy-hungry servers and chips. To finance the expansion, tech giants are increasingly turning to Wall Street, resulting in booming profits for the financial industry. Direct debt across the six hyperscalers has reached approximately $460 billion, according to Moody's. Tech companies are also tapping public markets for cash, including Google-parent Alphabet, which last month announced an $85 billion equity sale. The ratings firm noted that because AI hardware and infrastructure require massive up-front investment while revenue materializes over a longer time horizon, free cash flow across the sector is coming under pressure. To keep direct debt off their balance sheets, hyperscalers are leaning on off-balance-sheet financing, mostly through long-term data center leases, the report explained. Moody's said that lease commitments across the group have ballooned to $1.2 trillion. More than $820 billion of that total is from leases that haven't started yet, meaning the data centers are still being built. While these obligations don't show up as traditional debt, Moody's says it considers them as debt-equivalent liabilities that will bind companies to significant rent payments down the line.

Moody's says 'unprecedented' AI spending threatens credit quality of Amazon, Meta, Alphabet and others
Europe
BBC Business

Brits urged to avoid dangerous plug adaptors this summer - what to watch out for

Brits going on holiday abroad this summer have been warned to watch out for dangerous travel adaptors, after an investigation suggested thousands may be for sale online. Consumer safety group Electrical Safety First (ESF) tested 14 products from AliExpress, Amazon Marketplace, eBay and TikTok Shop - and found they all failed to meet UK safety requirements. It said in some instances the devices could expose users to risk of serious electric shock or electrocution. AliExpress, Amazon, eBay and TikTok all said they had removed the products ESF flagged from sale, and that they treated product safety as a top priority. But Giuseppe Capanna, ESF product safety engineer, urged those "heading abroad this summer to think before they buy". Capanna also said shoppers should buy travel adaptors from trusted retailers "so they can travel with confidence". ESF tested six regular travel adaptors and eight universal adaptors it suspected could pose safety concerns. To be sold in the UK, adaptors must not have accessible live parts and only one set of pins should come out at a time. But the charity found multiple sets could be exposed simultaneously in six out of eight of the universal adaptors it tested. None of the eight met the required dimensions and mechanical strength, while some pins snapped off under force during tests. ESF said anyone who tried to remove a broken pin from a socket would be at risk of electric shock. These included missing safety shutters - which protect people from coming into contact with a plug's live internal parts - missing fuses and oversized pin holes.

Brits urged to avoid dangerous plug adaptors this summer - what to watch out for
Europe
BBC Business

Sloppy and clumsy but overwhelming - inside the rogue ChatGPT hack

Image source, Getty ImagesByJoe TidyCyber correspondent, BBC World ServicePublished4 hours agoThe company that got hacked by a rogue version of ChatGPT has revealed what it was like to be on the receiving end of the world's first fully-autonomous AI hack. In an emergency video call with hundreds of cyber-security professionals, the firm described how the AI worked at superhuman speed but also made strange decisions and mistakes that no human hacker would have made. Hugging Face, which is like an app store for AI tools, said the hacking agents worked relentlessly with thousands of different methods trialled simultaneously. The company first revealed that it had been hacked, external by someone using powerful autonomous AI on 16 July and reported it to police. Nearly a week later, OpenAI admitted it was its AI that had escaped a closed environment and attacked Hugging Face on its own during a test. It was trying to find the answers to a hacking exam it had been set by OpenAI, and targeted Hugging Face. The industry body the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) wrote-up a report , externalbased on the emergency meeting with Hugging Face on Friday - which Hugging Face itself has reviewed. "The agents followed inefficient routes and exhibited clumsy behaviours that no human would choose", the CSA wrote. The agents repeated actions that they had already completed - a sign of an agentic AI losing its thread and context. The agents also hallucinated reams of incoherent commands and text and were sloppy and did not cover their tracks well. But among the errors and strange behaviour, Hugging Face warned the AI agents made brilliant technical moves and were able to rapidly adapt to new scenarios in the days-long hack. It took three days for them to be discovered inside the Hugging Face IT network and it took the company's AI and cyber-security experts many hours to contain and eject the AI agents - something standard companies might struggle with.

Sloppy and clumsy but overwhelming - inside the rogue ChatGPT hack
Europe
BBC Business

'Don't wait until you want revenge' - why prenups are on the rise

Celine Tsoi and Charles Mock met two years ago in Goleta, California when she was just 23 and he was 27. Eight months later they were engaged. "A lot of things could happen in a marriage and you want to discuss them when you still love each other rather than when things go bad and you want to take revenge," says Celine. These days its not just the rich and famous; more of us are deciding it makes sense to have a legal agreement that sets out what happens to the money if the marriage ends, with younger couples particularly likely to sign one, even when there aren't great wealth differences to consider. Charles, a nurse, earns more than Celine does as a PhD student, but she had a bit more saved, so the disparities weren't big, but they wanted to face up to important financial questions from the start. She was particularly touched that Charles wanted the prenup to say if they split up, she should have the house. Just having the conversation "can show you what the person you're going to marry is like", she says. There are no official figures, but in the US, where divorce courts have always tended to uphold prenups, nearly half of married millennials and more than one in three Gen Z report that they have a prenup. Overall in the US around one in five married couples has a prenup. In the UK research suggests around one in ten couples now has a prenup, following a legal shift in England towards greater recognition. Here too it is younger couples leading the way, with around one in three married under-35-year-olds having signed one, according to surveys. London lawyer Mark Gilmartin at JMW Solicitors says in the past 18 months he has seen a big increase in demand for prenups, with the billionaire-and-barmaid stereotype fast giving way to demand from "start-up professionals" including entrepreneurs and influencers. "It's the attempts to protect the fruits of what's going to be, rather than what is," he says. But beyond the would-be TikTok stars, he sees a significant trend towards "every-day you and I" couples wanting them, often in order to protect inherited wealth.

'Don't wait until you want revenge' - why prenups are on the rise
Europe
BBC Business

eBay agrees $56m settlement with bloggers over harassment case

Image source, ReutersByKali HaysTechnology reporterPublished28 July 2026eBay and some former executives have agreed to pay a couple $56m (£42m) after a campaign of harassment in retaliation for their online criticism of the firm. In a statement on Tuesday, David and Ina Steiner, said they and eBay had reached a settlement stemming from the 2019 harassment they faced from several of the company's executives, as well as internal communications by eBay's then chief executive. A group of now former company executives ultimately pleaded guilty to sending the couple a costume mask covered in pigs blood, a book on surviving the death of a spouse, among other threatening actions. Other actions, external perpetrated against the Steiners included eBay executives sending them a funeral wreath and harassing messages on Twitter (the social media platform now known as X). Some even paid visits to the couple's Massachusetts home in a bid to install a tracking device on their car. Seven former eBay executives pleaded guilty, external to the criminal charges between 2022 and 2024, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. An FBI agent involved in the investigation said in 2024 that the former executives' actions were an "unprecedented, relentless, and over-the-top harassment campaign". eBay was also criminally charged and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the DOJ and agreed to pay a fine of $3m. While eBay is paying the couple the bulk of the settlement, including $6m to "various non-profit organizations", Wenig is personally paying $1m toward the settlement. Wenig left eBay in 2019. The same year, he had sent eBay's top communications executive a text message regarding Ina Steiner which said: "Take her down." A representative of Wenig on Tuesday said earlier proceedings in the Steiners' lawsuit explained that his text was referring to a public relations strategy to combat purported errors in Ina Steiner's writing. Wenig added: "No one should ever have been subjected to what the Steiners endured in 2019, and I'm saddened by it, especially because it occurred during my time as CEO of eBay. The harassment was deliberately done in secret." His contribution is set to go to an unnamed charity that is "dedicated to protecting First Amendment rights" and will be gifted in the name of Ina Steiner, according to the couple's lawyers.

eBay agrees $56m settlement with bloggers over harassment case