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The Trump administration has approved media conglomerate Paramount’s $111 billion bid to acquire Warner Bros., one year after Paramount and Skydance Media signed a similar merger that placed Paramount’s movie studio, streaming service and broadcast network CBS under the control of the multibillionaire Ellison family, founders of Skydance and close allies of Donald Trump. The Warner Bros. merger, if completed, would bring an even larger slice of the industry’s market share into Ellison control. It’s been contested for months as a likely violation of antitrust laws amid a wider trend of corporate consolidation in the media and entertainment industry. “This has been one of the most shallow and corrupt merger review processes we’ve ever seen,” says Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the advocacy organizations Free Press and Free Press Action (not to be confused with Paramount Skydance’s conservative news outlet The Free Press), about the Justice Department’s greenlighting of the merger. The deal will place two of the largest U.S. broadcast news networks — CBS News and CNN — under the control of a single company that “has shown it is willing to warp and manipulate news coverage to please the president,” Aaron says. He warns that the many violations of press freedom committed by CBS News since its acquisition last year could soon be seen at CNN, including “getting rid of independent journalists asking hard questions [and] spiking stories about crimes being committed by the Trump administration.” In a consolidated media landscape, he adds, “we get fewer and fewer choices, and we get more and more of the same kind of cookie-cutter content produced.”

More than 200 million people are flexibly employed in China, but AI has made many of those jobs precarious.

The SunZia Wind Project in New Mexico will generate 3.65 gigawatts of electricity, enough to supply around a million homes.

Permanently installing a heat pump system in a building is expensive. But new window units can deliver many of the benefits with far less cost and go with renters when they move.

US investment firm KKR expects the Iran war to prompt greater investment in alternative supply routes to ensure goods keep moving during conflict.

Residential land prices in the Omani capital Muscat rose by 43.6% in the first quarter, and the market continued to climb during the war.

The Iran war has had a broader impact on the economies of the Middle East than any other conflict in the past 50 years.

This story was originally published by WIRED and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s behemoth company that launches rockets and runs data centers, went public on Friday with a target valuation above $1.75 trillion. The move will make Musk, already the richest man in the world, vastly wealthier. A public offering will allow SpaceX to raise even more […]

The proposal would separate the cost of producing electricity into distinct components and introduce a regulated wholesale market.