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What Can Fans Expect From Reed Sheppard This Upcoming Season?
As a crowded backcourt threatens his minutes, the bulked-up sharpshooter must trade finesse for physicality to anchor Houston’s rotation and emerge as a Sixth Man contender.
Tales of our 250th variety show coming Aug. 20
JONESBOROUGH — Tales of Our 250th continues at the Jackson Theatre on Thursday, August 20. The Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, and the US Constitution did not guarantee freedom
Mourinho says he agreed to replace Ferguson at Man Utd
David Moyes succeeded Sir Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford in 2013 but things could have been so different, Jose Mourinho reveals in a new documentary.
Inside the Zay Flowers deal
Earlier this week, the Ravens and receiver Zay Flowers agreed to terms on a new deal that, by way of new money, put him in the Justin Jefferson tax bracket at $35 million annually.
Business Restructuring Review Vol. 25 No. 4 July-August 2026
In This Issue New York Bankruptcy Court: Premature Allegations of Creditor Mistreatment Insufficient to Deny Chapter 15 Recognition of Foreign Restructuring Proceeding In In re ARD Finance, S.A., No. 25-12794 (MG), 2026 WL 817458 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Mar. 25, 2026), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York was presented with a petition seeking chapter 15 recognition of Luxembourg's recently enacted bankruptcy law governing judicial reorganization proceedings. The court granted the petition, turning aside challenges to recognition voiced by a creditor group arguing that recognition should be denied based upon allegations of unfairness to creditors in the Luxembourg proceeding that would make recognition manifestly contrary to U.S. public policy. According to the bankruptcy court, recognition was warranted because: (i) the rules and procedures governing the proceeding under Luxembourg law were fundamentally fair; (ii) the petition otherwise satisfied chapter 15's recognition requirements; and (iii) the creditor group's allegations were premature, given the fact that the Luxembourg court presiding over the debtor's restructuring proceeding had not confirmed a restructuring plan, and all creditors had the right to participate fully and voice their objections in the proceeding (including the right to appeal an order approving a plan). [read more …] Florida Bankruptcy Court Examines Scope of Discovery in Chapter 15 Cases In In re Banco Master, S.A., No. 25-24568-SMG, 2026 WL 931729 (Bankr. S.D. Fla. Apr. 6, 2026), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida granted in part and denied in part post-recognition motions filed by an insider of a foreign debtor seeking to bar or limit discovery sought by the debtor's foreign representative concerning allegedly voidable transfers involving the debtors' U.S. real property. According to the court: (i) although chapter 15 includes its own discovery provisions among the relief that may be granted to a foreign representative, the expansive discovery available in cases under other chapters of the Bankruptcy Code is also available in chapter 15 cases; (ii) the discovery sought by the foreign representative was permissible; (iii) discovery regarding matters that were the subject of a pending adversary proceeding had to be undertaken under the more restrictive rules applicable to such proceedings; and (iv) a discovery request would be barred to the extent that it sought production of documents or testimony from a subpoenaed entity that exceeded the geographic limitations specified in such rules. [read more …] Delaware District Court Affirms Chapter 15 Recognition Order Enforcing Nonconsensual Third-Party Releases In U.S. Int'l Dev. Fin. Corp. v. Credito Real S.A.B. de C.V. SOFOM, E.N.R. (In re Credito Real S.A.B. de C.V. SOFOM, E.N.R.), 677 B.R. 192 (D. Del. 2026), appeal filed, No. 26-2356 (3d Cir. June 5, 2026), the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware affirmed a bankruptcy court order granting chapter 15 recognition to a Mexican "concurso mercantile" proceeding and enforcing nonconsensual third-party releases approved by the Mexican court. Agreeing with the bankruptcy court that the releases were not manifestly contrary to U.S. public policy, the district court concluded: "It is well settled that U.S. bankruptcy courts can give effect to foreign orders in recognized foreign proceedings pursuant to the authority granted in Chapter 15, even when those orders contain relief unavailable under U.S. law. [The appellant's] arguments misconstrue the Supreme Court's narrow holding in Purdue, applicable in Chapter 11 cases, as well as the statutory framework of Chapter 15 and its core policy objectives. Accordingly, I will affirm the Enforcement Order." The ruling has been appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. [read more …] Fifth Circuit: Bankruptcy Court, Not State Court, Had Jurisdiction to Allow or Disallow Administrative Expense Claim In Storey Minerals Ltd. v. EP Energy E&P Co., LP (Matter of EP Energy E&P Co., LP), 169 F.4th 609 (5th Cir. 2026), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed lower courts' rulings disallowing a creditor's administrative expense claim. It also rejected the creditor's argument that, because the claims were predicated on state law, a state court should adjudicate the merits of the state law causes of action before the bankruptcy court could allow or disallow the claim as an administrative expense. According to the Fifth Circuit, even though the causes of action were based on state law, the bankruptcy court had jurisdiction to determine whether the creditor's claims should be conferred with administrative expense priority in the debtors' chapter 11 case. [read more …] New York Bankruptcy Court: Dismissal of Involuntary Chapter 11 Case Filed Prior to Commencement of Foreign Restructuring Proceeding Unwarranted In In re Xinyuan Real Estate Co. Ltd., No. 25-10745 (PB), 2026 WL 592250 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Mar. 3. 2026), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York considered the bona fides of an involuntary chapter 11 petition filed by certain holders of U.S. dollar-denominated notes against a holding company for a group of Chinese property development companies that filed a restructuring proceeding in the Cayman Islands after the noteholders filed the involuntary chapter 11 petition. The court denied the debtor's motion to dismiss the chapter 11 case. Given the timing of the filing of the Cayman Islands restructuring proceeding, the absence of any progress in the proceeding for seven months, the debtor's need to restructure notes governed by U.S. law, and the debtor's lack of any meaningful contacts to the Cayman Islands, dismissal of the chapter 11 case was unwarranted under the applicable provision of the Bankruptcy Code, international comity, or the doctrine of forum non conveniens. [read more …] Bankruptcy Court Evaluates Trustee's Authority to Sell Avoidance Actions and Right of Target Defendants to Object In In re Law Enf't Officers Sec. Union, No. 24-70277-JAD, 2026 WL 560452 (Bankr. W.D. Pa. Feb. 27, 2026), a chapter 7 trustee sought court approval to sell certain avoidance actions to a creditor of the debtor's estate. Potential targets of the subject avoidance actions objected, arguing that such claims were nontransferable powers of the trustee rather than saleable estate property and urging the court to approve their competing settlement with the trustee. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania disagreed with the potential defendants, holding that they lacked standing to object to the proposed sale, that avoidance actions are indeed estate property, and that the sale—rather than the settlement—best served the estate's interests. [read more …] U.S. Supreme Court Bankruptcy Roundup in Brief In Keathley v. Buddy Ayers Construction Inc., No. 25-6, 2026 WL 1686028 (U.S. June 11, 2026), the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Fifth Circuit decision judicially estopping a chapter 13 debtor from asserting a personal injury claim against a construction company because the debtor failed to disclose the claim during his bankruptcy case. In so ruling, the Court held that "[t]he Fifth Circuit erred by artificially narrowing its inquiry to whether the debtor had knowledge of the underlying facts or a potential motive to conceal the claim." It represents the first time that the Court has applied judicial estoppel in the bankruptcy context, although it has suggested in other contexts that it may be inappropriate where an inconsistent legal position resulted from "inadvertence or mistake." Also in June, the Court denied petitions for certiorari in a few notable bankruptcy cases. [read more …] Newsworthy Heather Lennox (Cleveland/New York) (Star Individual), Bruce Bennett (Los Angeles) (Senior Statesperson), Kevyn D. Orr (Washington) (Eminent Practitioner), Gregory M. Gordon (Dallas) (Band 1), Carl E. Black (Cleveland), Corinne Ball (New York) (Senior Statesperson), Brad B. Erens (Chicago), Jeffrey B. Ellman (Atlanta), T. Daniel Reynolds (Cleveland), and Dan T. Moss (Washington/New York) were recognized as leading lawyers in the practice area Bankruptcy/Restructuring in the 2026 edition of Chambers USA: The World's Leading Lawyers for Business. The 2026 edition of Lawdragon 500 Leading Bankruptcy and Restructuring Lawyers ranked the following lawyers: Corinne Ball (New York) (Hall of Fame), Bruce Bennett (Los Angeles), Carl E. Black (Cleveland), Jeffrey B. Ellman (Atlanta), Brad B. Erens (Chicago), Gregory M. Gordon (Dallas), Heather Lennox (Cleveland/New York), Joshua M. Mester (Los Angeles), and Kevyn D. Orr (Washington). Fabienne Beuzit (Paris) and Jasper Berkenbosch (Amsterdam) were among the "Leading Individuals" ranked in the 2026 edition of The Legal 500 EMEA guide in the field of Restructuring and Insolvency or Insolvency. Rodolphe Carrière (Paris) was named a "Next Generation Partner" in the practice area Insolvency. Sid Pepels (Amsterdam) was selected by Global Restructuring Review's 40 under 40 2026. He was identified as a Rising Star within the global cross-border restructuring community. Global Restructuring Review is a leading digital subscription service, news outlet, and information platform dedicated exclusively to cross-border insolvency and corporate restructuring law. Fabienne Beuzit (Paris), Rodolphe Carrière (Paris), and Isabelle Maury (Paris) were recognized in the 2027 edition of The Best Lawyers in France™ in the practice area Insolvency and Reorganization Law. An article written by Corinne Ball (New York) titled "Comity and Fairness are Critical to Granting Additional Assistance under Chapter 15: A Canadian Reverse Vesting Order and Related Releases in Proceedings Involving Canadian and U.S.-Affiliated Companies Are Approved" was published in the June 24, 2026, edition of the New York Law Journal. An article written by Caitlin K. Cahow (Detroit) titled "New York Bankruptcy Court Weighs In on Adequate Assurance of Future Performance under Assigned Leases and Chapter 11 Plan Exculpation Provisions" was published on June 8, 2026, in Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Trisha L. Mowbray (Real Estate; Chicago) and Ryan Sims (Washington) titled "Chapter 11 Plan that Abridged Non-Debtor Lessee's Rights to Remain in Possession After Rejection Unconfirmable as Having Been Proposed in Bad Faith" was published on June 16, 2026, in the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable. An article written by Dan T. Moss (Washington/New York), Corinne Ball (New York), Isel M. Perez (Miami), and David S. Torborg (Washington) titled "Texas Bankruptcy Court Adopts Barnet Rule Requiring Foreign Debtor to Have U.S. Assets to Be Eligible for Chapter 15 Relief" was published on June 10, 2026, in Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Daniel J. Merrett (Atlanta) and Nathaniel Parr (Atlanta) titled "Southern District of Texas Clarifies Post-Purdue Course for Consensual Third-Party Releases and Gatekeeping Provisions" was published on June 11, 2026, in Lexis Practical Guidance. An article written by Corinne Ball (New York) titled "LMEs, Sophisticated Investors and Equitable Mootness: The Fifth and Third Circuits Warn Against Testing the Limits of Chapter 11" was published in the June 2026 issue of the American Bankruptcy Institute Journal. Nicholas J. Morin (New York) was quoted in an article titled "Serta Ruling Offers Damages Road Map in Lender-on-Lender Disputes," published by Bloomberg Law on July 7, 2026. The article discussed U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez's July 7, 2026, ruling that participating lenders in Serta Simmons Bedding's 2020 non-pro rata uptier exchange breached the credit agreement's ratable-sharing provision, and awarding excluded lenders more than $261 million in damages. The opinion resolves six years of litigation related to Serta's 2020 transaction, where it raised $200 million in new financing and exchanged $1.2 billion of term loans for $875 million in superpriority debt. Judge Lopez found that the debt-for-debt exchange constituted a "payment" under the credit agreement, requiring proportional sharing among lenders, and dismissed various defenses raised by the participating lenders. The case is Serta Simmons Bedding LLC v. AG Centre Street Partnership (In re Serta Simmons Bedding LLC), 2026 WL 1968535 (Bankr. S.D. Tex. Jul. 7, 2026). The New York Law Journal has recognized Andrew M. Butler (New York) as a 2026 "Rising Star" in Restructuring/Bankruptcy as part of the New York Legal Awards. The Rising Star category recognizes New York's most promising lawyers age 40 and under who have distinguished themselves through exceptional legal work, leadership, and contributions to the profession. Lawyer Spotlight: Daniel J. Merrett Dan Merrett, a partner in the Atlanta Office, has spent nearly 20 years representing all manner of stakeholders in complex corporate restructurings and chapter 11 reorganizations. His practice extends to related transactions and disputes involving acquisitions; divestitures; credit facilities; securities; environmental obligations; and vendor, employee, and governance matters. Dan has substantial experience managing mass tort liabilities, including the restructurings and related chapter 11 cases of affiliates of Georgia Pacific and Johnson & Johnson, implemented to resolve asbestos and talc liabilities. He also represents key parties in energy and infrastructure matters, including facility owners, EPC contractors, and joint-venture parties. Dan was a key player in the restructuring teams in the historic bankruptcies of the City of Detroit and Chrysler. His other significant representations in chapter 11 cases include AFA Foods, Alpha Natural Resources, Dana Corporation, M&G Chemicals, McDermott International, Monster/CareerBuilder, Transtar Industries, and Westinghouse. He is licensed in both the United States and England & Wales and recognized in restructuring by Chambers USA and Best Lawyers.
The Best Time To Sell Your Business Is When You Don’t Need To
The best time to sell your business is when you don't need to. Learn why early exit planning gives owners more leverage, stronger valuations and greater freedom.
OpenAI and four rivals just agreed on one standard for AI agents
OpenAI, Amazon, Microsoft, Cursor and Vercel launched Agent Plugins, an open standard letting an agent extension run across ChatGPT, Copilot and more.
ADF urges Senate to clarify college sports bill won’t preempt state women’s sports laws
The following quote may be attributed to Alliance Defending Freedom CEO, President, and Chief Counsel Kristen Waggoner regarding the Protect College Sports Act (S. 4668), a bill currently in the U.S. Senate that could be voted on this week: “For nearly a decade, Alliance Defending Freedom has worked with courageous female athletes, state and national […]
US Stand Up for Science movement expands to Europe
A grassroots movement by scientists in the US pushing back against threats to academic freedom is setting up a Swiss outpost to take the movement global. Stand Up for Science started in February 2025 to protest against politically-motivated grant cancellations by the Trump administration. Since then, it has organised numerous rallies by scientists and turned into a broader campaigning organisation, supporting “pro-science” political candidates and attempting to impeach Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary the group accuses of advancing “quack” science. Now, Stand Up for Science is establishing a Swiss office to take some of its campaigning beyond the US, and its leader is urging European academics to organise similar pro-science groups in case they face similar threats in Europe. There will likely be “spillover” to Europe from what the Trump administration is attempting in the US, said Colette Delawalla, chief executive of Stand Up for Science, who last month returned from a tour of Europe. “Are we going to see a Trump-style scientific [. . .] take over in the same way?” she asked.Delawalla, who is doing a PhD in clinical psychology, said she was driven to help found the organisation after the Trump administration started cancelling health research grants in politically taboo topics, such as transgender people, diversity and HIV, in early 2025. Since then, the administration has introduced several other measures that infringe academic and institutional autonomy.It threatened to cut Harvard University’s federal funding unless the university accepted a “critical mass” of new faculty and students to create “viewpoint diversity.” And this year, it proposed explosive new rules that would allow political appointees at research funders to screen grants to make sure they “advance the president's policy priorities.”US scientists have been at times stunned by the volume of announcements, and the country’s researchers were relatively unprepared. “We sit in front of the fire hose every day,” said Delawalla. For this reason, European scientists need to prepare now for similar assaults. “If you've got a little bit of extra time to start thinking through, and making those preparations and building community and solidarity,” then European researchers will “start five steps ahead of where we were.” She plans to return to Paris in September to share experiences with concerned French academics. Is Le Pen the same?During her European tour, Delawalla said that French academics were beginning to worry about a National Rally (RN) victory in presidential elections next year. She said there were “chilling similarities” between Trump and Marine Le Pen, the RN’s likely candidate. However, so far, the RN hasn’t proposed anything nearly as radical as the Trump administration has carried out. Its current manifesto is all but silent on university and research policy. Le Pen’s 2022 manifesto bemoaned a lack of French R&D spending, including in fundamental research, and promised to modernise labs and strip away grant bureaucracy. The party’s 2024 European election manifesto explicitly supported the Erasmus+ student exchange programme, scientific exchange and joint European technology projects. However, a Le Pen victory next year could see France drastically cut its contribution to the EU, which would hit the budget for science and innovation. Meanwhile, more restrictive immigration policies could hit university recruitment of faculty and students. Climate science denial?As heatwaves and wildfires have ravaged France, the RN has sought to distance itself from previous comments casting doubt on climate science.In the UK, the radical-right party Reform UK, now second in the polls, denied climate research in a draft of its 2024 election manifesto, but its leader, Nigel Farage, then appeared to quietly U-turn and said he was “not arguing the science.” By contrast, Trump has repeatedly and explicitly denied climate change science, in 2025 calling it “the greatest con job.” Like the RN, Reform UK has been light on research and university policy. However, it did say in its 2024 manifesto that universities should suffer “heavy financial penalties” for allowing “political bias or cancel culture” on campus, building on laws brought in by a previous Conservative government. Ahead of September state elections in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany, the poll-leading Alternative for Germany has proposed abolishing gender studies and postcolonial studies, and promised money for “critical” climate research and studies of Islam. Starts with rhetoricEven if European radical right parties aren’t currently planning the draconian policy measures of the Trump administration, Delawalla said that academics should not be complacent, and fight even small funding restrictions or anti-science talk from the start. “It starts off with sowing distrust about institutions,” she said. “It starts off with these small things, and then all of a sudden it's there.” There are other, more established science and university advocacy groups in the US aside from Stand Up for Science. But the group stands out because of Delawalla’s refusal to attempt to appear politically bipartisan or conciliatory. “I firmly believe that the US is experiencing fascism,” she said. “We’re not trying to win over the super Maga people,” she said, “and we never have been.” The lesson of the US is that even if universities or other institutions capitulate to government demands, this doesn’t save them from cuts and restrictions. “It doesn’t matter what people do,” she said. Global “pseudoscience”Another aim of Stand Up for Science’s push into Europe is to better coordinate a campaign to protect people in poorer countries from what the group describes as “pseudoscientific exploitation,” trials outside the US used to build a case against things like vaccines. Earlier this year, the group sent an investigator to Guinea-Bissau to investigate a controversial, Danish-run Hepatitis B vaccine project funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The study would have withheld a proven vaccine from newborns, Stand Up for Science argued in a briefing it presented to Congress, risking their health. Significantly, the research group based in Guinea-Bissau, known as Bandim, focuses on the “non-specific effects” of vaccines: impacts on health beyond preventing the target disease. Related articlesEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationData corner: which fields of health science is the US curbing? The US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to know The suspicion is that the study was funded as part of an attempt to shop around for results that could help build a case against vaccines in the US, said Delawalla. “This is just code for vaccines cause autism,” she said.Bandim has put out a rebuttal of Stand Up for Science’s criticisms, arguing its work has uncovered a number of vaccine side effects, both positive and negative, which need to be taken into account in public health. However, Congressional Democrats took up the Stand Up for Science cause, and in February, Guinea-Bissau said it had permanently halted the study. WatchdogBut for Delawalla, this is not the end of the fight. Kennedy has made a number of health claims that scientists think lack evidence, such as the idea that seed oils cause inflammation, for example. Delawalla worries that more studies could be launched in poorer countries to fish around for evidence to support this agenda. Stand Up for Science is talking to African science organisations to create a kind of “watchdog” to scrutinise any further trials. “Outsourcing the investigation to some of the most vulnerable children in the world who are desperate [. . .] is fundamentally wrong,” she said.
Medicover to sell India hospital business to KKR for €1.2 billion
Swedish healthcare provider Medicover agreed on Thursday to sell its India hospital business to funds managed by global investment firm KKR for €1.2 billion ($1.39 billion).
Leon Health System celebrates 30 years with drone show above downtown Miami
A celebratory moment was held inside Miami’s Freedom Tower on Wednesday night.
Viewpoint: Europe needs a new scientific contract
The White House's new science strategy should be required reading in the Berlaymont and every European capital.Not because Europe should copy it. Parts of it should concern Europeans deeply. But because it asks the question Europe has so far avoided while steadily losing ground in the global race for technological leadership.Europe already possesses many of the world's finest universities, scientists and research-intensive companies. It produces world-leading research in fields ranging from quantum technologies and biotechnology to climate science. Yet time and again Europe generates the scientific breakthroughs while others build the companies, industries and strategic advantages around them, particularly in digital technologies. Increasingly, we find ourselves regulating technologies whose underlying capabilities were developed elsewhere.This is not primarily a scientific failure. It is an institutional one.The settlement that shaped modern science policy emerged after the Second World War. In Science, the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush argued that governments should invest in fundamental research while protecting scientists from political direction. Public investment was justified precisely because no government, university or company could predict where the next transformative discovery would emerge.That scientific contract served liberal democracies extraordinarily well. It underpinned decades of advances in medicine, computing, energy and communications, but the world for which it was designed no longer exists.Artificial intelligence is transforming not only technology but the production of knowledge itself. Advanced chips, computing power, data and scientific instruments have become strategic assets. Scientific knowledge now diffuses globally almost instantly. Competitive advantage increasingly lies not in making discoveries first, but in possessing the infrastructure, capital, engineering capability and institutions required to translate those ideas into products, industries and strategic advantage.The old boundaries between science, industrial policy, national security and geopolitics have largely disappeared. Dual-use technologies now underpin both economic power and military deterrence.The US has recognised this shift. In July, the White House published Science: A New Golden Age, a comprehensive attempt to rethink the relationship between science and national power. The report builds on Bush's legacy, but departs from his framework in important ways. Science is no longer treated simply as the source of future discoveries. It is presented as the foundation of economic resilience, technological leadership and national security. AI, advanced infrastructure and the capacity to build become as important as discovery itself.Yet the report also reveals a striking paradox. The same administration calling for “a new golden age” of US science has simultaneously proposed deep cuts to the federal research enterprise while expanding political influence over the allocation of public research funding. Europe should therefore distinguish between the report's diagnosis and its prescription. The diagnosis, that science has become a strategic asset, is compelling. But the prescription is self-defeating. Long-term technological leadership depends on strong universities, academic freedom and the institutional autonomy that makes scientific discovery possible. This distinction matters. Bush's achievement was never simply to make science serve national strength. It was to establish a division of labour in which governments invested in research without attempting to direct discovery itself. Scientific breakthroughs emerge precisely because researchers retain the freedom to pursue questions whose value cannot yet be demonstrated and whose conclusions cannot be anticipated.Neither China, nor the USAs science becomes more strategically important, the temptation to politicise it inevitably grows. But scientific freedom is not an obstacle to technological leadership, it is an essential precondition.China represents the opposite model. For decades it has integrated science, manufacturing, infrastructure and industrial policy into a single national strategy. Its ability to mobilise resources around critical technologies is formidable. But it does so within an authoritarian system where scientific priorities are increasingly inseparable from political power.Europe should imitate neither model. It should learn from the strategic ambition of the US without importing its growing politicisation of science. And it should learn from China's capacity to build without adopting its concentration of power.Instead, Europe needs a scientific contract of its own. Bush's scientific contract protected the freedom to discover because the defining challenge of the 20th century was producing new knowledge. Europe's next scientific contract must preserve that freedom while ensuring that scientific discoveries can be converted into technological, industrial and strategic capability. Because in a transactional world, Europe's freedom to shape its own future depends on its capacity to build it.Related articlesThe US ‘golden age’ science strategy: what Europeans need to knowEuropean researchers sound the alarm that Trump rule changes will hit cooperationNIH turmoil risks reciprocal EU-US access to health research fundingThis does not mean subordinating free science to competitiveness or industrial policy. On the contrary. Scientific autonomy remains the first principle of Europe's next scientific contract. Governments should not direct scientific discovery. Their responsibility is to ensure that Europe's scientific, industrial, financial and regulatory institutions work together rather than in isolation.Meeting that responsibility requires far more than research funding. European researchers need access to world-class computing infrastructure, advanced laboratories, shared datasets and scientific facilities. Innovative companies need patient capital, testing environments and a genuine single market in which they can scale without facing 27 different regulatory regimes. Public procurement must evolve from purchasing existing technologies to creating markets for new ones. Regulators must become partners in experimentation rather than guardians of yesterday's rules.A connecting architectureEurope does not need to invent the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) model from scratch. Britain's Aria, Germany's Sprind and Wellcome Leap already show that Europe can build institutions capable of taking high-risk, mission-oriented bets while preserving democratic accountability. The challenge now is not to create more isolated initiatives, but to connect them to Europe's broader scientific, industrial and financial system so that breakthrough discoveries can scale.Above all, Europe must stop treating research, innovation, industrial policy, finance and security as separate policy domains. The challenge is no longer to create excellent institutions in each of these fields, but to make them work as one European innovation system. Europe's strength will increasingly depend not on excellence within institutions, but on excellence across them.Europe's ambition should be neither to imitate the US nor to emulate China. It should demonstrate that scientific freedom, democratic legitimacy and technological capability are not competing objectives, but mutually reinforcing strengths. In an age of geopolitical rivalry, Europe's greatest advantage may ultimately be its ability to attract the world's best talent by combining scientific freedom, democratic openness and technological ambition.Bush's scientific contract helped define the 20th century because it protected the freedom to discover. Europe's challenge is not to abandon that achievement but to extend it. The defining task of Europe's next scientific contract is to preserve the freedom to discover while building Europe's capacity to translate scientific discovery into technological power.Kaare Nielsen is founder of Pomus, a Danish think tank on science and innovation.
Byron business celebrates grand opening thanks to Business Builder Grant
"I've had this picture in my mind for, honestly, three to five years. I was like, ‘It would be great if we could have this little farm store.’ This grant helped make it happen." —Stacey Freitag, co-owner, Free Day Popcorn
Chartbook 464 The"China squeeze" - the politics of development counterfactuals.
There are three types of China shock discourse. Each has a distinct temporal register. China shock 1.0 was a phrase coined by US academics in the 2010s to retrospectively summarize the impact on particular US labour markets, which they identified through painstaking empirical investigation. China shock 2.0 on everyone’s lips in Europe in the mid 2020s is an alarm raised by trans-Atlantic policy thinkers warning of a coming disaster which they project onto Europe’s ailing car industry. The third type of China shock discourse - commonly known as the “China squeeze” launched most recently by Indian economists Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian in the pages of Foreign Affairs - mobilizes a different, more speculative temporal register: the counterfactual realm of alternate history. The China squeeze argument asks not what has happened, or what is going to happen, but what might have been. Specifically, what options for economic development might have been open to Global South economies like India or the economies of sub-Saharan Africa, had it not been for China’s spectacular industrialization since the late 1990s and the persistent competitiveness of China’s manufacture in low-skilled segments. Chatterjee and Subramanian’s argument is that whilst China has built a powerful position in electrical machinery and other high-skill manufacturing, which is now delivering China Shock 2.0, it also continues to run a trade surplus in low-skill, labour-intensive manufacturing. This surplus is large and has remained largely unchanged in fifteen years. Indeed, in the 2010s, in trade with low-income countries, China’s surplus rapidly increased. On their reading, this squeezes low-income producers in low-skill sectors in which they “should” be able to compete. Source: “China’s Mercantilist Squeeze on Developing Countries” Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian. Peterson Institute for International Economics 26-7 May 2026 Chatterjee and Subramanian’s wording is telling: (emphasis mine) The canonical trajectory of economic development in the post-World War II period is for countries to transition from agriculture to manufacturing, first in low-skilled manufacturing and then later on to high-skill manufacturing (Herrendorf, Rogerson, and Valentinyi 2013). At the global level, this implies that high-income countries (HICs) that once specialized in low-skilled activities cede manufacturing export space to poorer countries that come along to occupy that space. In 1965, advanced economies accounted for about 60 percent of global value-added exports in four key low-skilled manufacturing sectors, i.e., apparel, leather, textiles, and footwear. Over time this share declined and began to be occupied first by the East Asian tigers and, beginning in the late 1990s, by China. Today China accounts for about 50 percent of the global market. The question is whether China, with its rising prosperity, is continuing to behave like its richer counterparts and ceding export space to poorer followers or to behave unlike them and continuing to occupy space. In terms of the conceptual maneuvers it performs, of the three China shock discourses, the “China squeeze” argument is by far the most ambitious. After all, it bases its critique of China on a counterfactual imagining of the world. Like any counterfactual argument, to construct this alternative reality it must rely on a heuristic model. To make their argument Chatterjee and Subramanian mobilize two key claims. The first reference point is the actual history of rich-country industrialization, what they refer to as the “canonical path”. The idea is that countries transition from agriculture to light industry and low-skilled manufacturing and from there up the value chain. To make this useful as a standard of comparison and a means to construct a normative standard, they adjust sectoral export shares for two factors: 1. the underlying level of economic development of the exporting country, as measured by national income and 2. the degree to which the sector in question is internationalized. The idea being that for a high income country to have a high export share in low-skill sectors is anomalous and even more so if that particular product is highly internationalized and thus suitable for being “conceded” to lower-income competitors. Where should this process end? Here Chatterjee and Subramanian introduce their second benchmark. Their normative idea of a global development path is one in which, in due course, low-skill manufacturing exports are distributed in proportion to a country’s share in the global labour force. They imagine, in other words, a world of proportional, polycentric global development without much national specialization in low-skill manufacturing. A useful benchmark is that, in labor-intensive manufacturing sectors, a country’s share of world exports should be broadly commensurate with its share of the world’s low-skilled labor endowment. … In the Heckscher-Ohlin model, this would be true if value added per worker and export propensities, i.e., fraction of output that is exported, are the same across countries. It is this pleasant liberal vista of orderly global development, progressing towards a general distribution of low-skilled manufacturing against which they judge reality and conclude that the low-income countries are suffering a “China squeeze”. China is not exiting low-skill sectors fast enough Allowing for its gdp level and the degree of globalization, China’s share of low-skill manufacturing exports is far higher than it “should” be. Relative to population, its low-skill share of exports is far too high. That in turn yields the conclusion that huge numbers of jobs - the authors suggest tens of millions - are being hoarded by China. For the four sectors captured in figure 4, this excess in value-added exports is $110 billion in 2022. For all low-skilled sectors overall captured in appendix figure D.1, excess value-added exports amount to $365 billion. The crowding out of LMIC exports by China is therefore substantial. Both these claims have in common that they are strong structuralisms. The first is that development paths ought to resemble each other. The second is that broadly speaking as far as low-skilled manufacturing is concerned, all countries are alike. If the world currently diverges from the distribution of trade implied by these assumptions, if China is not following the advanced economy path and has huge exports, this must be the result of “policy”, which the authors then put in question as illegitimate or unfair. Thus the naturalistic construction of a canonical path leading to a “level” distribution of low-skilled manufacturing reveals itself to be a polemical tool. From the point of view of China shock polemics, this discourse is no doubt welcome. But as an account of economic history, it must surely be regarded as nothing short of bamboozling. Development paths do not follow a regular, natural sequence. As David Fishman put it aptly, “development is not a queue”. They are always and everywhere, through and through political. Development is not so much a process, as a project. Each such project is more or less well adjusted to its context. As Gerschenkron taught uneven and combined development implies differentiation rather than simple imitation on a single parth. It may be true that Europe and the US exited relatively early from low-skill work. But clearly technology has changed. As C&S themselves point out, China no longer enjoys a low wage environment. Do they really believe that such huge differences can be accounted for either by industrial policy, which as they admit does not operate powerfully in low-skill sectors, or by exchange rate manipulation? What is overwhelmingly dominant in explaining the persistence of “low-skill” manufacturing in China are surely the network effects of complex supply chains. Indeed the label of “low-skill” may miss the point. The degree of globalization which Chatterjee and Subramanian decide to conjure away in their model of the development path - to allow for the fact that Europe and American textiles exporters did not enjoy just-in-time logistics in the 1950s - obscures the point that the networks through which Chinese factories supply the world are themselves key parts of the low-skill industrialization project. China isn’t knocking out 1970s style “cheap”. It has redefined the entire product cycle. C&S’s casual reference to “T-shirts” is telling. In today’s “fast fashion”, there is weight on both terms. Fashion and fast. China’s success in delivering on both at unprecedentedly high speed and at unprecedentedly low cost, isn’t a low-skill operation at all. If we see development trajectories not as the serial repetition of the same, but as distinctive, crafted projects that cumulate in complex agglomerations of skill, technology and labor, then this explains why the assumption that low-skilled manufacturing should follow the distribution of population flies in the face of all experience. As countless cases attest, low-wage, low-income developed economies are not by themselves the makings of a competitive production base. As Leon Liao puts it quite fairly: “International trade has never been allocated according to population. A country’s population gives it no natural claim to an equivalent share of global exports." And the remarkable fact is that Subramanian alone and with co-authors has long been making this point, not to pillory China, as is the case of the tendentious _Foreign Affair_s and Peterson pieces, but to highlight the great counterpart to China’s industrial success, namely India’s relative failure. The much-quoted Foreign Affairs piece showed low-skill export shares only for China, not for India. If you put both countries in the picture as Chaterjee and Subramanian have done on other occasions, the picture looks like this. China is far above the line, but India, almost as large in terms of population, is no less anomalous, just in the opposite direction. As far as global populations are concerned, and the imagining of tens of millions of “squeezed” jobs, it is this Sino-Indian pair that account for a huge share of the action. What this graph reveals is not China’s cheating, but India’s “greatest development failure”, at least this is the argument made Arvind Subramanian, this time in co-authorship with Devesh Kapur, in their major book, A Sixth of Humanity. Independent India’s Development Odyssey which appeared with Oxford University Press earlier this year. In this highly critical work on India’s development, China is repeatedly evoked, not to criticize but as a benchmark against which to illuminate what India’s political economy has not delivered i.e. large-scale formal employment for hundreds of millions of citizens. Kapur and Subramanian leave no doubt, if you want to understand why China, not India was the main driver of manufacturing globalization from the 1980s, don’t look to slots opening up in the division of labour thanks to the liberal mindedness of advanced economies, look to the contrasting political economy of the Maoist PRC and India’s post-independence political economy. As Kapur and Subramian note: The great divergence between China and India did not begin in 1978 with the Deng reforms—it was well underway by then. In one of the great ironies of modern history, the conditions created by Maoism turned out to be a great launching pad for industrial globalization. As the comparison of India and China in 1980 makes clear, to imagine manufacturing would be equally distributed when populations are so differently endowed in terms of educational and nutritional is fanciful. Here is the data from Kapur and Subramanian, data which I explored back at the very beginning of Chartbook. As Kapur and Subramanian insist, the striking fact is that even as India’s growth accelerated from the 1980s, structural change has not. Formal employment in India lags woefully behind. Why? As Kapur and Subramanian note, the path-dependent impact of India’s poor early start was devastating. The list of factors they mention is long and weighty: We argue for a new five-fold explanation applicable at different stages of Indian history: in the initial stages, the legacy of two key pre-1980s policies, the neglect of agriculture and the strangling of the domestic private sector, were critical. The failure of broad-based agricultural growth militated against rural industrialization, which would have been devoted to satisfying local needs that would have necessarily been labour intensive. Then, when the boom came after 1980, the thicket of regulation and broader labour protections that were legislated prematurely in a nascent democracy, underpinned by a deep ideological aversion to private capital in general and big capital specifically, became a barrier to attaining the size that would be necessary to compete globally. Similarly, the reforms after 1991, while wide-ranging, did not quite encompass non-tradeable inputs critical to manufacturing, namely, land, logistics infrastructure and power. A combination of low investment (logistics infrastructure), regulation (land) and the continued monopoly supply by state governments (power), combined with residual socialism, kept costs at 75–100 per cent above efficient supply. These factors were compounded on the supply side by the government, which dominated the formal labour market and established exorbitantly high wages at the lower end of the skill spectrum. This made their employment in the labour-intensive sector by the private sector less attractive. Finally, when the services sector and its exports boomed, wages soared even further via a Dutch Disease effect: one successful tradeable sector killed and cannibalized another less-skilled tradable sector, namely, manufacturing. Thus, scarcity-inducing policies of the planning era, precocious democracy and a Gandhian aversion to size; inefficient, monopolistic supply of critical non-tradable inputs; the behemoth of government; and super-successful skill-intensive services successively undermined India’s unskilled labour employment opportunities. The employment failure seems to have been over-determined. … Less quantifiable but no less important are some of the sociological factors that have undermined manufacturing and factory jobs. Take the impact of the success of the IT sector—located in urban areas with better working conditions, such as air-conditioned offices, good schools for children and attractive entertainment options. It became a more attractive place for engineering and management graduates to flock to. … Consider manufacturing and female employment. Indian society makes it difficult for women to work, reflected in India’s unusually low female labour force participation (elaborated in Chapter XIII). Indian society, in particular the routine harassment of women in public spaces, makes it even more difficult for them to travel long distances to take up work.37 Combined with onerous regulations on creating hostels and dormitories for women—which, in turn, prevents multiple shifts of operation—factories need to be located in areas with a large female labour pool. While firms can take apparel plants to female labour or bring them to the plants by building large-scale dormitories, this raises costs. If there was a case for subsidies to encourage labour-intensive manufacturing, housing subsidies to build dormitories for women workers would be a good place to start. All of this meant, that when opportunities did open up, in part thanks to adjustments in China, India was in no position to take advantage. Here is the account of the 2020s from Kapur and Subramanian. It stands in dizzying contrast to the one-sided, “China squeeze” argument delivered in the Peterson and Foreign Affairs pieces: In 2022, for example, India’s share of global exports in clothing (the canonical labour-intensive sector) was 3.1 per cent compared to 32 per cent for China. This is extremely disappointing because China started vacating export space in this sector after the Global Financial Crisis as its wages started rising; it then vacated further space in the aftermath of geopolitical developments that led investors to seek alternative investment locations. Between its peak and today, China lost about 7.5 percentage points of global export share (worth about $43 billion in 2022); over this period, India’s export share remained stagnant at 3 per cent, while that of Vietnam and Bangladesh rose by 3.5 to 4 percentage points. China’s loss did not translate into any gain for India in terms of low-skill exports and employment. Put differently, when the conditions for dynamism and prosperity were established after 1991, and even more tantalizingly when the global export opportunities opened up, it was as if India was a high-wage economy and only skilled labour could benefit from the dynamism. It had converted its physically abundant unskilled workforce into an economically expensive resource, penalizing its use. It is not my mission here to argue for or against Kapur and Subramanian’s interpretation of India’s development trajectory. The point in this context is simply that the “China squeeze” such as it is can only be understood, in relation to the heavy burden of domestic constraints that Kapur and Subramanian so unsparingly enumerate. I am concentrating here on India because it is the great counterpart to China and the unspoken reference point of the “China squeeze” discourse. But the point is more general. Can anyone with a straight face suggest that the main problems afflicting the development of South Africa or Nigeria, the great centers of mass underemployment in sub-saharan Africa, are cheap competition from China driven by Beijing’s industrial policy and an undervalued RMB? Likewise, is the main problem of the American working-class the threat of Chinese competition or the manifest crisis of social reproduction in the United States itself? The point here, as in the discourse around China shock 2.0 in Europe, is to insist that we should not normalize the world and pathologize China, without actually investigating what is going on in America’s industrial wastelands, the German car industry, or India’s lopsided labour market. One-sided pathologization should be understood for what it is, a polemical gesture. Concepts like China shock and China squeeze are, what Reinhart Koselleck, following Carl Schmitt, would have described as “asymmetrische Kampfbegriffe”, or “asymmetrical counter-concepts” or “asymmetrical combat concepts”. If the function of arguments like the “China squeeze” is to alert elites in the rest of the world of the need to rejuvenate and energize their development projects, so be it. But let us see the resulting discourses as the mobilizing interventions that they are. Interestingly, a significant slice of China’s public sphere - the so-called industrial party - have been obsessed for the last twenty years with precisely these questions of counterfactual economic history. Since the mid 2000s, a massive online discourse developed around an alternative history in which Chinese techno-patriots were asked to imagine how they would proceed if they had the possibility of traveling back in time to transport modern technology into the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) thus averting the “great divergence” of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is a fantasy of course, but also a goad. The point was not directed at Westerners. The alternate history is dramatically nationalist, but few n the West had even heard of it until recently. The adherents of the industrial party are not liberal moralists. They don’t project natural ladders of international development and ask why others don’t cede space. They take the Realpolitik of global economic development for granted. Their pointe was directed against fellow Chinese. The rallying cry of the alternative narrative was this: Now that we are beginning to gain steam and push forward on our national development path, now that we are breaking out of the inferior position assigned to us even in the early years following WTO accession, do not lose yourself in humanistic imaginings about better futures. In the spirit of Deng, they called on China to embrace the hard truth of development. Perhaps one might of the Industrial Party as a cultural trend born out of desire for symbolic revenge against those who had inflicted the century of humiliation. In terms of the various temporalities of the “China shock” - retrospective, prospective and counterfactual - one might think of the Industrial Policy discourse as truly speculative, conjuring up the China shock that never was. Or perhaps one might better think of it as imagining a world in which a powerful China was no shock at all, but simply a defining fact of modern history. I love putting out Chartbook. I am particularly pleased that it goes out for free to thousands of subscribers around the world. But, writing this newsletter takes a lot of work. If you are enjoying it and would like to support the project, sign up for one of the subscription options here. It is the equivalent of a fancy cup of coffee per month! Subscribe
Newcastle captain to hold Arsenal medical after £75m fee agreed
Arsenal have agreed a fee for the signing of Bruno Guimaraes, with details of the deal emerging and the player receiving permission from Newcastle United to hold a medical.Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Im...
Singapore's UOB to shed asset management arm for $433.5 million to focus on wealth management
Singapore lender United Overseas Bank said on Wednesday that it had agreed to sell its asset management business to a unit of European insurer Allianz for S$555 million ($433.49 million).
Mountain West, Pac-12 finalize settlement over 'poaching' and exit fees
The Pac-12 and some of new the schools joining the conference filed a lawsuit in California in 2024, claiming the poaching clause the league agreed to when it signed a
NASA Engineers Help Prolong Voyager 2’s Science Mission
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have successfully freed up power on Voyager 2, extending how long the spacecraft can continue to do
Councilman says Midtown Costco will continue to provide pharmacy services in transition to business center
Costco leadership has reportedly agreed to continue to provide pharmacy services at the Midtown location if and when it transitions to a business center.
MrBeast Sales Slow, Angel Stock Falls, MUBI and Neon Look for Hits, and Will an NBA Franchise Set a Sales Record?
(Welcome to the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a newsletter on the entertainment industry and business strategy. I write a weekly Streaming Ratings Report and a bi-weekly strategy column, along with occasional deep dives into other topics, like today’s article. Please subscribe.) You probably remember egg prices spiking a few years ago. This led to a lot of debate between the pro-market/pro-competition/antitrust/Neo-Brandesian crowd and the center/center-right/center-left/abundance/libertarian crowd over the cause, whether it was the avian flu outbreak or whether industry consolidation led to price fixing, using avian flu as a convenient cover. Basel Musharbash wrote a whole investigation at BIG looking at it. Well, two years later, we have our answer: it was price fixing. The Justice Department found proof, via emails, of price fixing. Indeed, just the threat of an investigation brought prices down two years ago: I bring this up because at least half a dozen of my favorite political writers and pundits, who were skeptical about price fixing at the time, haven’t written any mea culpas on this issue. It’s really dispiriting and makes it much, much harder to trust their work on other issues. If you take a hard stand on an issue, then you get it wrong, you need to explain how and why you got it wrong. Or update your priors. This is how epistemological bubbles are formed! All of which is to say, it’s time for another installment of “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong”. Last issue, I mostly focused on the “wrong” side of the equation, so today’s is a bit more balanced, but with one big mea culpa (though I still stand by my original concerns). Let’s dive right in! Subscribe CORRECTION: UFC Didn’t Release Subscriber Data (But Seems to Have Bragged About It Internally) In my analysis of the viewership of UFC Freedom 250, I wrote... “Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers.” Well, that datecdote did not come from a PR rep, but from great reporting from James Faris at Business Insider. The actual quote was this: “Paramount’s flagship streaming service generated about a million new subscribers on the day of its first-ever UFC event, Paramount product chief Dane Glasgow told employees in a town hall on Tuesday morning, three staffers who attended the meeting told Business Insider.“ This wasn’t the biggest goof in the world; even Faris emphasized to me that this is more a “clarification” than a correction. Still, it sounds like, internally, the folks at Paramount were very happy about this result—and I’m guessing they were happy with this news getting out—even though the gains didn’t last through the quarter, dropping to 700K adds. RIGHT: MrBeast’s Struggles Continue... I’m very skeptical about MrBeast’s burgeoning media “empire” and, in particular, its $5 billion valuation, as I wrote earlier this year and last year. Sure enough, according to Business Insider, regarding its “booming” consumer products division_:_ “US sales volume grew 13% year-over-year in 2025, following a 33% leap the previous year, according to a presentation deck dated May 2026....A February 2025 investor deck viewed by Business Insider showed Feastables’ net revenue more than doubled in 2024 from 2023, to $215 million, and was forecast to grow 74% in 2025, to $375 million.” [Emphasis mine.] If you told investors that you projected 74% growth but delivered 13%,1 that’s not ideal. But it’s not just MrBeast. Logan Paul and KSI’s Prime had sales drop in half for their energy drinks. It’s one thing to build a successful entertainment company and an entirely different thing to succeed in the heavily-consolidated-but-also-very-competitive consumer packaged goods space! CPGs are dominated by a few firms with very wide moats compared to YouTube, which has few barriers to entry. These businesses require different skill sets and have completely different business environments. WRONG: Does the NBA Have an $8 Billion Bidder? Almost as soon as I published my article about the NBA’s finances, casting skepticism on NBA expansion, I saw this Front Office Sports headline: One group “claims to have already raised $8 billion” for the Vegas expansion team. I mean, wow. That’s just $2 billion less than what the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at when they were sold just last year. And they’re arguably the most popular team in the NBA. (Side note: the new owner is now under an investigation for fraud in how he went about financing the Lakers and the Dodgers purchases.) So much for the “dried up” language I used in that article. (This is why I usually stick to my “Entertainment Nuance Guy” tone in articles...) I went off old information—from April, when I read/heard about the NBA downplaying expansion efforts—instead of doing a quick double-check for new news. That said...if you read the article, the market for Seattle is “slow”, with just one reported bidder. So I wasn’t entirely off. This goof has annoyed me since I first published it, mainly because it undercut that article’s real point, which I stand by: NBA franchises are really overvalued right now. Now, I get why NBA teams are overvalued. When it comes to owning sports teams, it’s basically never wrong to assume that some rich person somewhere will care more about owning a team (or just being part of a group since they’re so expensive) than the actual financials. There are only so many teams to own, and opportunities to buy in preferred markets don’t come along very often. This explains why the teams sell for such high multiples (usually above a 10 to 12.5 revenue multiple, which is very high). You only need one person to overpay! Beyond the ultra-wealthy luxury good explanation, I worry NBA teams are becoming speculative assets. More and more private equity investors are buying into NBA teams. But the value, in owning a team, comes from selling it later, not any meaningful relationship to revenue or profit growth. In other words, the newer NBA owners are increasingly expecting someone later to buy their inflated asset. That’s not sound economics; that’s the “greater fool” theory at work.2 At some point, actually making money has to matter. Especially since revenue growth is now below the growth of the stock market. (And this matters because the NBA doesn’t have easy levers to pull to drastically lower their costs—half of their revenue has to go to players and then you actually have to run a team, including coaching, training, travel, media expenses, and more—or raise revenues aside from one-off expansions in America and overseas.) I just don’t see how investors make their money back buying NBA teams, except for selling at a higher price later on down the line. But if revenue/profit growth continues to slow, at some point, someone will be left holding the bag. RIGHT: Baseball and Basketball are about equally popular. Related to the above, I wanted to cite two quick pieces of evidence for one of my other theories: that the NBA and MLB are about as popular as each other, but the NBA gets much, much better media coverage. One YouGov survey has that fans prefer basketball to baseball by 52% to 48%, which I’m guessing is within the margin of error for that poll. That’s virtually even, meaning they’re about the same popularity. Over on NBC, a recent Red Sox-Yankees game averaged 4 million viewers, higher than Sunday Night Basketball’s average of 3.4 million on the same network. A Yankees-Dodgers game averaged 3.9 million two weeks ago. Not every game averages this much, but it shows you that baseball isn’t far off from basketball, depending on the matchup. Altogether, the NBA is just slightly more popular than baseball, but NBC is paying MLB a fraction of what they pay the NBA, a point I’ve made before. RIGHT: Angel, MUBI and Neon Updates... I’ve long been skeptical about many of Hollywood’s buzziest startups/smaller indie studios. It’s not that they don’t make great movies—films like Anora and Everything Everywhere All at Once are amazing—or that they’re not (rightfully) pushing the majors to make better films, but...they get a ton of hype, and that hype often doesn’t live up to the reality or difficulty in scaling up. Starting with MUBI, well, The Wall Street Journal wrote a feature on MUBI’s struggles last April, best summarized by the subheader “After Sequoia valued Mubi at $1 billion, a left-wing revolt sent the indie film company into a tailspin”. MUBI lost $7.3 million on $200 million in revenue in Q4 2025, but reportedly hit a record 1.7 million subscribers at the end of Q1. As for Neon, Department M purchased a “significant stake” in the company earlier this year. How much is that “stake” worth? According to Deadline, “No financial figures for the Neon-Department M deal were disclosed.” So...that’s not great! If it was a big valuation, we’d hear about. Also, I found this curious: “Both Neon and Department M already have separate partnerships with Qatar. The Qatar Film Committee has a slate deal in place with the former, and a biopic production pact with the latter.” Color me skeptical about much Middle Eastern investment dollars. See: LIV Golf. Finally, as for Angel (formerly Angel Studios), their stock very, very slightly popped last month after Young Washington ($20 million budget) which made $45 million in the US, but their stock is still way down from its opening. Smaller Updates RIGHT: The WGA should focus on antitrust concerns! I’ve been on this for years. Post-WGA/AMTPT deal in 2023, I wrote an article for the Ankler calling on the WGA to focus and organize against industry consolidation. Sure enough, the WGA filed a lawsuit against the Paramount-WBD merger, and people are organizing around this issue now. I wish this energy had coalesced earlier (specifically to lobby Washington much earlier), but better late than never! WRONG: Actually, the chip shortage might be due to market manipulation. In my last “Long Reads for the Long Summer” article, I shared an article about how LLMs are causing memory chip prices to spike, which will make all electronics more expensive. Well, turns out, three RAM manufacturers control 90% of the market, and now a private lawsuit accuses them of price-fixing. So yeah. WRONG/UPDATE: The Odyssey will hold! Two weeks ago, I wrote, “As of this moment, we haven’t had a super-blockbuster, though The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday could all cross the $500 million mark. (At this point, The Odyssey would need a very strong hold to get there.)” Well, it’s safe to say it’s going to have that hold! It only dropped 30% in weekend two and IMAX screenings are sold out all month. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is also off to a great start. RIGHT: People are rushing to get shows out yearly. I’ve long been bullish on yearly, weekly-released shows, and Leslie Goldberg at The Ankler wrote about how many people in town are now listening. WRONG: Mark Carney reverses Canada’s stance on homegrown production. After writing about Canada installing domestic production quotas, Canada has backed off. WRONG: I don’t trust Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s online “views”. When I originally wrote about the latest Spider-Man film’s record-breaking trailer, I thought this was just YouTube views, but after watching this Corridor Crew video and doing more research, well, it’s all social views of the trailer globally. Really? That stat includes TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts views. Basically, I don’t trust it anymore. (This film will probably set record, but I trust the pre-sales data more.) RIGHT: Celebrity Production companies are still struggling. I’ve written about this for years, but the company that I didn’t track was Kevin Hart’s HartBeat, which was valued at $650 million but is struggling now and might just end soon, especially after Kevin Hart pulled his endorsement deals. And Bad Robot is moving to NYC. CORRECTION: SpongeBob is a “second run” title. In my 2025 recap article, I had _SpongeBob SquarePants_labelled as a “library” title, when it is still a “second run” show, with new episodes still coming out on Nickelodeon. CORRECTION: In my last “What I Got Right, What I Got Wrong” update, I offered a correction from Doug Creutz and misspelled TD Cowen. Thanks, Grammarly! 1 Though he could have increased prices to make up for the gap, he couldn’t have increased them that much. 2 There’s a theory, which I think that Daryl Morey created and Bill Simmons popularized, that, to be successful building your team, you only need a handful of bad GMs in the league to take advantage of. To be clear, Daryl Morey’s theory was also for signing bad contracts, that you could always get out of bad contracts. Basically, there’s always someone who will make a bad trade. It’s not the same exact thing, but similar enough to the Greater Fool Theory that I really like it.
Jackie the eagle faces health complications as anemia worsens despite transfusion
KMPH Fox 26 is the Central Valley's news leader, covering Fresno, California and the surrounding area, including Clovis, Madera, Hanford, Visalia, Biola, Kerman, Tranquillity, San Joaquin, Reedley, Coalinga, Avenal, Lemoore, Tulare, Selma, Caruthers, Tollhouse, Three Rivers, Porterville, and Merced.
Board of Peace demands Netanyahu cease Gaza airstrikes
The Board of Peace is struggling to get Israel on board with its peace plan for Gaza as Israeli militia airstrikes continue to bombard the war-torn strip despite expectations for a ceasefire and de-escalation. Gaza City was hit repeatedly by Israeli airstrikes on Saturday and Sunday, despite Hamas having agreed to a framework for demilitarization […]
Geno Segers will no longer join Broadway’s ‘Hadestown’ after online backlash
The actor and producers say they mutually agreed to part ways following criticism over past comments about transgender people. “Hadestown”
Jacksonville-based Complete Health to pay $14M in Medicare Advantage settlement
Complete Health Partners Holdings has agreed to pay $14.1 million to settle allegations that it caused false diagnosis codes to be submitted to boost payments from the Medicare Advantage program, the Department of Justice said.
BUSINESS BRIEFS August 3, 2026: Business news in the Berkshires and beyond
Business news from Berkshire Community College, MountainOne Bank, Dewey Hall, and more
Scientists Discover More Than 1,000 Fish Nests Hiding Beneath Antarctica's Ice
"Critical evidence of unique, structured breeding habitats."
Entrepreneur who started business has regrets about work-life balance
The freedom of self-employment came with the motherhood cost I never saw coming. Instead of more flexibility, I got more stress.
OPEC+ has agreement in principle for September quota increase and pause thereafter, source says
OPEC+ has agreed in principle to raise oil output targets by about 188,000 barrels per day from September and then pause for the fourth quarter, a source with knowledge of OPEC+ talks said on Sunday.
Chile declares health alert for hantavirus
The Chile Ministry of Health issued a Health Alert for hantavirus and other diseases, such as some arboviruses and avian influenza. This is the first time this measure has been taken and it will be in effect until July 31, 2027 and it extends from the Atacama region to the Magallanes region. “Hantavirus causes a disease that is endemic to Chile, transmitted by the long-tailed pygmy rice rat that lives in rural and semi-rural areas throughout almost the entire country. As a ministry, we are constantly monitoring its behavior and are very concerned and actively working because this year the virus's lethality has increased, and for this reason, we decided to declare this alert. As of last week, there were 46 confirmed cases and 18 deaths, representing a 39% lethality rate,” reported the Undersecretary of Public Health, Dr. Alejandra Pizarro. Cases have occurred in the regions of Valparaíso, Metropolitan, O'Higgins, Maule, Ñuble, Biobío, La Araucanía, Los Ríos, Los Lagos, and Aysén. By comparison, in 2025, there were 44 infections and eight deaths (18% case fatality rate). The health alert, which is preventative and prepared, will allow for the granting of extraordinary powers in the event of serious health emergencies to strengthen surveillance, ensure timely resource management, hire specialized personnel, implement health control measures, and expedite the acquisition of supplies through direct procurement. The alert does not imply that there is an ongoing epidemic or that the healthcare system is overwhelmed. Subscribe to Outbreak News TV on YouTube “Hantavirus is not exclusively a summer virus, as the long-tailed pygmy rice rat is present year-round. Therefore, we urge everyone to take extreme precautions: avoid touching rodents, ventilate homes before entering if they have been closed, clean unused spaces with water and bleach, and keep garbage covered and food stored away. Furthermore, it is crucial to be aware of the symptoms: fever, intense muscle pain, and difficulty breathing. If someone experiences these symptoms and has been in rural or semi-rural areas where the long-tailed pygmy rice rat may have been present, they should immediately go to a health center and inform the medical staff so that a hantavirus diagnosis can be considered promptly,” the official added. Since December 2025, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has maintained an epidemiological alert due to the rise in hantavirus cases throughout the Southern Cone, and that the Ministry of Health had an epidemiological alert in place since November of last year. Chile eliminates leprosy As mentioned above, the Health Alert decree also covers diseases transmitted by the Aedes aegypti, Aedes vexans, and Anopheles pseudopunctipennis mosquitoes, such as dengue and Zika, which, according to the alert, “have a high epidemic potential, which could generate high demand and overload for health facilities.” For these diseases, the alert is in effect from Arica to Los Ríos. The authority stressed that it is essential to prevent mosquitoes from breeding in stagnant water and to monitor any suspected cases of people arriving from abroad infected with any of these diseases, in order to prevent any of these vectors from biting a sick person and starting to spread the disease. In the case of avian influenza, the alert was extended to the entire country, because unlike other years, the disease has been concentrated in wild and farm birds, not in poultry farms, increasing the risk of exposure for people. Outbreak News Today is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Big Ten, SEC support college sports bill, reviving Senate chances
The Big Ten and SEC conferences agreed Friday night to support a Senate bill that seeks to regulate college sports.
AI Will Make Our Politics Even More Emotional
Politics has always been about emotions as well as reason and self-interest. Great politicians such as Winston Churchill have been able to stir our most profound feelings. Great political moments such as Nelson Mandela’s walk to freedom from Robben Island have moved people to their core.
Minnesota Twins Officially Enter Buy-Mode, Strike Trade With Mets
The Twins and New York Mets agreed to a deal late Thursday night for left-handed reliever A.J. Minter.
Football and politics, brought to you by Big Business (and energy drinks)
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UK's IG Group agrees to buy sports gaming firm Underdog for up to $1.3 billion
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Helldivers 2 x Warhammer 40,000 Castellan's Creed Legendary Warbond Fully Revealed, Weapons and Armor Shown Off, Release Date Confirmed
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After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Greater Rochester Chamber's Small Business Council Affiliate Honors Jackling, Valerio with 2026 Business Person of the Year Awards
Greater Rochester Chamber News JULY 29, 2026 (ROCHESTER, NY) – The Small Business Council, a Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce affiliate, announced Glenn Jackling, President & CEO of Applied Image, Inc., and Anthony Valerio, Owner and Founder of Four Winds Chimney, as the recipients of the 43rd annual Business Person of the Year Awards. The…
Kawhi Leonard, Clippers Investigation Might Linger Into 2027
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US lawmakers press Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on vaccine settlement
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Banner Health; LifeStance Health Group Settle Tracking Technology Lawsuits
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Mike Boynton provides health updates on Jalen Reed, Marcus Moller
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Unilever agrees two-year worker protection after $65 billion McCormick merger, memo shows
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Eagles, defensive tackle Jalen Carter agree to record $152M extension
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Xbox Owners Get Free PC Copies Of Select Ubisoft Games
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Stellantis sells car-sharing business as CEO Filosa focuses on core auto-making
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BUSINESS MONDAY: Spotlight on Hotchkiss Mobiles in West Stockbridge
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Pedro Pascal teases Reed Richards’ dynamic with Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom in ‘Avengers: Doomsday’
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CNN Exclusive: How IndyCar’s most ambitious street race became a test of politics, security and spectacle in Trump’s DC
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Hidden genetic diversity helped inbred brown tree snakes conquer guam
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Breaking: LeBron James Agrees To Contract With Philadelphia 76ers
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Siri Settlement Approved: Apple to Pay Owners of Some iPhone Models
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LG Promises To Stop McAfee Spam Ads Following Pressure From Microsoft
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Secret Service agent on JD Vance's detail investigated for allegedly leaking operational security info
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Domo sells businesses for $400 million, giving Josh James a new start
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Business Briefs: July 24, 2026
Freedom Credit Union appoints new vice president of human resources SPRINGFIELD — Freedom Credit Union has named Jennifer McPherson as its new vice president of human resources. She brings more than 20 years of human resources leadership experience in the financial services and healthcare industries to the organization. “Jennifer’s experience and leadership will help us continue investing […]
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An Aggie and a Longhorn walk into a bar…
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Nestle to Offload Half of Waters Business in Joint Venture With Platinum Equity
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Andy Biggs wins Republican nomination to challenge Democrat for Arizona governor
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Dallas Stars, Jason Robertson agree to 1-year contract
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Dolphins sign NFL tackling leader to extension amid rebuild
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Michigan extends key tax breaks for billions of dollars of real estate development in Detroit
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Freedom, trust and the future of science: Nobel laureates reflect on the ideas shaping tomorrow
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Experts agree at landmark event that simulation should be built into health system
On 15 June 2026, over 80 representatives from simulation societies, ministries of health, hospitals, universities, international organizations, professional associations and industry partners met at the WHO Academy in Lyon for a joint event of WHO and the Society for Simulation in Europe (SESAM). Together they tackled a pressing question: how can simulation move from isolated initiatives to systematic integration within health systems? The consensus was clear: simulation is no longer a niche educational tool. Beyond training, it strengthens health systems by improving quality of care, patient safety, workforce preparedness, team performance and organizational resilience.Participants agreed the evidence for simulation’s value no longer needs to be demonstrated, but that implementation remains fragmented and too often dependent on individual local champions. Bridging that gap, they said, means both generating further evidence and raising awareness among decision-makers.Discussions pointed to a shared path forward. To achieve scale and lasting impact, simulation must be embedded in national policies, workforce development plans, education systems and financing mechanisms. No institution can do this alone; stronger collaboration between governments, health institutions, academia, professional societies, international organizations and industry partners will be essential.“At the WHO Academy, we see simulation not simply as a training methodology but as a strategic tool for capacity-building, workforce readiness and stronger health systems,” said Dr Bart Janssens, Unit Head, Health Learning and Capacity Building. “This event is not only about discussion; it is about moving from ideas to action.”As health systems worldwide face workforce shortages, growing complexity of care and rapidly evolving competency needs, participants concluded that the question is no longer “Why simulation?” but rather how to scale it, how to sustain it, and how to ensure it becomes an integral part of stronger health systems.Looking aheadThe event marked the beginning of a collaborative effort rather than the end of a conversation. Over the coming weeks, WHO and SESAM will consolidate the discussions, recommendations and priorities that emerged, with a joint WHO–SESAM report to be published soon.
UFC Freedom 250 Fails to Knock Out The Ratings
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) If UFC fans wanted one image to say, “Hey, Paramount+ is crushing it with their UFC rights deal,” I could provide that image. Here it is: (Reminder: this is my creation of the Nielsen Top 30, since Nielsen doesn’t combine the lists or include sports. I take all three lists and combine them. Some streaming TV shows probably have higher ratings than many of the films on this list.) Look at that! UFC Freedom 250 is number one! It topped the Nielsen “Top 30” list for shows and films that made the top ten the week of 15-June. So if you’re a UFC fan or supporter of Paramount+, that’s the good news for you this week. This program topped the ratings charts for one week. Everything else is bad news, or at least a huge caveat to that story, which I’ll explain today in the first part of this week’s Streaming Ratings Report—for the weeks of 8-June and 15-June—which is a double issue since I’ve been writing on a bunch of topics recently. UFC Freedom 250 is one of the biggest streaming events of the year, and super relevant to Paramount+’s strategy, so it merited its own article. Let’s dive in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of June 8th to June 21st 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Check Out My Interview on UFC 250 at MMA Draw After you read this article, if you want even more thoughts on UFC and Paramount-Skydance/Paramount+, I did a written interview with MMA Draw. They asked me to answer some questions about UFC Freedom 250, and I was happy to chat with them. Find it here: [ The MMA Draw Newsletter Did Paramount really overpay for the UFC? What the data tells us so far If you know the history of American television, you also know that combat sports is often a leading indicator of the future… Read more a day ago · 10 likes · 1 comment · Nate Wilcox and Zach Arnold ](https://www.themmadraw.com/p/did-paramount-really-overpay-for?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web) I never thought I’d need a combat sports newsletter in my life, but the good folks at MMA Draw publish an excellent one on UFC, MMA, pro wrestling, boxing and more, analyzing both the sports themselves and the politics, economics and antitrust issues that impact them. Check the article and their newsletter out! Paramount+ Has Its Best Sporting Event of All Time…But Was It Worth It? Before we look at the UFC Freedom 250 data in particular, let’s talk about what we can’t say. Namely, let’s start with the lack of comparisons. First off, I’d love to put a chart out comparing this fight to past UFC fights on Paramount+…but we don’t have the data. This is the first time we’ve gotten Nielsen data about a Paramount+ UFC fight. As far as I can tell, Paramount provided data for the first fight, but it was a proprietary datecdote (saying it had “an average minute audience” of 5 million “views”) and then, for two fights, we got the linear viewership numbers when they aired on CBS, but no streaming data. Everything else was crickets. We also can’t compare this fight to other fights/combat sports on streaming, in particular the MMA and boxing, because Netflix also didn’t use Nielsen to track those events, opting for TVision and VideoAmp, respectively. (This isn’t Paramount’s fault, but does still suck.) We also can’t compare to UFC’s fights that used to be on ESPN+, since we don’t have any data for that, plus Disney+ didn’t have marquee fights. The comparisons would not be apples-to-apples. Can we compare to past Pay-Per-View fights? Absolutely not. The comparisons would absolutely NOT be apples-to-apples. That didn’t stop Paramount+, though, who bragged that their UFC events have reached drastically more people than past PPV fights. Duh. Sorry, but I gotta make this point again. A basic tenet of economics is that the cheaper something becomes, the more people consume or buy it. That’s Econ 101. (Sometimes pundits call things “Econ 101” that are actually like Econ 210 or even PhD-level economics, but no, this is really like first or second class basic economics.) Yet I still see one analytics firm consistently say that more people watch films on streaming than PVOD proves streaming which means that the streaming window is more valuable than the PVOD window. No, it’s not! Same thing here. Pay-Per-View events back in the day could be really, really, really expensive! So whole groups of people pitched in to buy them. That increased the perceived value of, say, the Mike Tyson fight. Or a UFC numbered event. So yes, the fact that Paramount+ makes numbered UFC fights essentially “free” if you’re already a Paramount+ member means consumption will go up. Obviously. Same for Netflix and their boxing matches. They’re talking about fights that used to cost consumers, in some cases, $50 in 1996…which is over $100 in today’s dollars. Over 1.6 million people paid that to watch the Tyson-Holyfield fight! Again, streaming is essentially “free”. Or $10 to $20, depending on what streamer we’re talking about and what tier you’re on. No wonder more people are “watching”. (Plus, Nielsen’s out-of-home viewing also helps these numbers.) UFC Freedom 250 Did Well…But I Have A Lot of Worries So what can we compare the fights to? Well, the good news is Nielsen put out that the fight averaged 7.0 million viewers for UFC Freedom 250, which is a solid number for a fight. We also know the length, at roughly 4 and a half hours. (I saw different run times, but this seems to be the consensus considering it started at 8 pm, had a delay and then finished after midnight on the East Coast. If you assume a shorter run time, then yes, the total hours viewed would go down.) That means I have the two numbers needed to add this to my Nielsen database. And then…I can compare this viewership to the NFL: And, uh, not great. But also within striking distance, mainly because the runtime for this event was so long. I’d also add that this event had viewership equal to a regular season NFL game on streaming, but if anything, it was more comparable to an NFL playoff or Super Bowl-esque event. And you can compare viewership to the top football games on broadcast, cable and streaming, and it’s not impressive at all: We can also compare it to other sports that week, including the NBA Finals and start of the World Cup: Again, not great. The NBA generated roughly four times as many average viewers each game for its NBA Finals. The World Cup has similarly big numbers. Also, that’s just a tiny fraction of the 25 most watched sporting events each week. The NBA, NHL and FIFA World Cup had many, many more games racking up hours. We could also compare this to other streaming programs to get an idea of “is this a good investment?” and here is how it ranks compared to other top Paramount+ programs: The worry here? Well, unlike scripted programming, which has rewatchability, older fights/sporting events have very little library value. Very, very few people are rewatching these fights, especially years from now. Paramount has also released datecdotes bragging about their subscriber numbers. Earlier this year, they claimed that the first UFC fight on Paramount+ brought in 1 million subscribers. Then, in their quarterly earnings report, they only ended up with 700K subs. Not great! They claimed they dropped lower-value international subscribers, but that’s why I tend to discount subscriber additions when they’re leaked to the press.1 I expect we may see a bump again for UFC Freedom 250, but I’d caution using subscriber growth so soon after these events to judge the success, since new subs with high churn (see Peacock) aren’t great either. Also, analysts often want to attribute all subscriber growth to their favorite/pet show, and that just doesn’t make sense. The biggest caveat for UFC Freedom 250 and Paramount’s very first UFC marquee event is that these could be high watermarks for the sport. UFC Freedom 250 had an incredible amount of earned media coverage compared to most UFC fights. I mean, it had wall-to-wall national news coverage in the lead up to the event. (The first fight also had a lot of promotion from Paramount since it was first.) Other fights could reach this bar—say the Conor McGregor return to the Octagon—but they’ll be fewer and far between. Was This Deal Worth It? All to ask: is this Paramount deal worth it? In this case, I think the UFC Freedom 250 numbers are more distracting than helpful. This fight did well and compares well to other top sporting events. But we know that the first marquee event was at least a third smaller, if Paramount’s own data is to be believed. And it’s likely the other fights are much, much, much smaller. And then you get to the paycheck that Paramount-Skydance paid. FIFA’s World Cup cost about the same for Fox, but clearly generated multiples more total viewership. (Though it’s only every four years.) The NBA is much more expensive, but until the playoffs, they likely didn’t pay for itself. Even still, Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon Prime Video likely overpaid. So, in that context, the NBA may be an overpay that makes the UFC look not so bad. But two overpays don’t make an underpay, to paraphrase the old cliché about wrongs and rights. And looking at UFC Freedom 250 as the likely ceiling of MMA on Paramount+, Paramount-Skydance likely paid too much. Share 1 I would love regular reports on subscriber additions by programs, but as is, it’s mostly leaked or rumored in haphazard ways.
Cardinal Health to buy AdaptHealth diabetes unit, Strive Medical for $360 million
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LSU cancels home-and-home series with ASU
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Freedom of Choice
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An ambassador for WSU’s signature apple
Kate Evans navigated the male-dominated world of plant breeding to become the face of WSU's biggest, and tastiest, commercialization project.
BP to Sell Austrian Mobility Business to Volenergy for Undisclosed Sum
The energy company agreed to sell its Austrian petrol station and EV charging businesses to Volenergy for an undisclosed sum, as it continues to exit the retail space.
Why Epidemics Breed Rage at Health Workers
Some people have fought Ebola containment measures in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Scholars have seen similar responses across societies and throughout history.
BUSINESS MONDAY: Spotlight on Berkshire Mountain Distillers in Sheffield
After nearly two decades, the local business is expanding its scope with Two Lanterns Brewing Co., as well as more seating and culinary offerings.
BUSINESS BRIEFS July 20, 2026: Business news in the Berkshires and beyond
Business news from The Clark, Great Barrington Public Theater, MountainOne Bank, Timberlyn Heights, and more
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced Director Asks Fans to Please Play the Game When GTA Comes Out; Confirms Updates to Add New Game+ and New Features
AC Black Flag Resynced's director pleasds fans to still play game when GTA 6 is released, confirms New Game+ and other features to be added.
Why I Agreed to Lead the UAP Science Advisory Council for the U.S. Government
A month and a half ago, I was visited by a representative from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). He raised a…
Governance Fragmentation and Collapsing Health in Wartime Yemen
Humanitarian groups need international support to overcome funding shortages and the country’s divided politics.
Bill Montevecchi, seabird ornithologist and science communicator
The North Atlantic can look empty until someone begins paying attention. A stretch of gray water off Newfoundland may appear to hold little more than waves and scattered birds. To Bill Montevecchi, those birds were evidence. Their breeding success, feeding trips, and changing numbers revealed what was happening beneath the surface, offering clues about fish [Continue reading]
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced sells over 3 million copies, New Game+ is coming
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced seems to be a much-needed Ubisoft hit as it sails past 3 million copies sold in its first week.
Blackhawks' Connor Bedard agrees to lucrative five-year deal
The Chicago Blackhawks and Connor Bedard agreed to a five-year, $75 million contract as he rehabs from shoulder surgery.
Is Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME) Undervalued After Its CTF Life Awards Deal?
Tencent Music Entertainment Group (TME) is back in focus after CTF Life agreed to become the exclusive title sponsor of the 2026 TMElive International Music Awards, bringing the event to Hong Kong for the first time. See our latest analysis for Tencent Music Entertainment Group. Despite the CTF Life partnership putting Tencent Music Entertainment Group back in the headlines, the stock’s recent performance has been mixed, with a 1 month share price return of 4.95% contrasting with a year to...
Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced: Our Optimised Settings For A Terrific PC Release
No storms face this port.
Texas A&M’s 2026 Title Dream Isn’t Crazy ... Just Complicated
Texas A&M enters 2026 with Marcel Reed, a rebuilt line and a loaded defense. The Aggies aren’t title favorites, but their playoff ceiling is very real.
Nuclear deal that would permit uranium enrichment by Saudi Arabia in limbo awaiting Trump admin sign off
The Trump administration has tentatively agreed to allow Saudi Arabia to enrich uranium without enacting international safeguards intended to prevent nuclear weapons development, according to sources familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by CNN.
Country diary: Breeding ferrets is a wonderfully chaotic business
Cranbrook, Kent: Right now the young are hellbent on seeking adventure, much to the dismay of their mothers
Tariffs cause delays for Texoma business development
Denison city officials agreed Thursday night to extend construction deadlines at the Foundation Business Park north of town after tariffs slowed progress, forcing companies off their original timelines.
Smoky skies didn’t stop Festa Italiana as crowds filled Freedom Hill County Park in Sterling Heights
Festa Italiana continued at Freedom Hill County Park in Sterling Heights despite hazardous air quality across southeast Michigan caused by smoke from Canadian wildfires.
Ubisoft Celebrates 3 Million Sales for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced and Promises New Game+ Content
Exactly a week after the game crossed the two-million-sales mark—in less than 24 hours, no less—Ubisoft has announced that Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced has officially sold three million units. Black Flag Resynced has also managed fairly decent player retention, with SteamDBstill reporting...
The heart of service: Charmaine Reeder and Community Health
Charmaine Reeder, on behalf of the ECU Health’s work with Pitt County Meals on Wheels, received a Governor’s Volunteer Service Award.