CEO of consortium which walked away from bid said he should have closed deal for Spectator magazine ‘right away’

The US businessman who fronted a UAE-backed consortium’s failed £600m attempt to buy the Telegraph group has said he should have taken a “different” approach to the deal and immediately snapped up the Spectator magazine, after the takeover collapsed under political pressure.

Jeff Zucker, a former CNN chief executive, now runs RedBird IMI, which last week announced it was walking away from its planned deal for the newspaper group after saying that the transaction was “no longer feasible” because of new legislation which would block foreign states from owning newspaper assets in the UK.

‘Boring Milner’ and ‘Andy Robson’ accounts work with Fanwave Digital, a firm paid by Paddy Power Betfair to post betting tips

Popular social media accounts, including betting “tipsters” and a cult parody of the footballer James Milner, have been working as part of a marketing network directing users towards a major betting website.

One of the accounts, @AndyRobsonTips, gives the impression that it is run by an individual helping fans beat the bookies. Another, known as @BoringMilner, is widely known as a parody account that posts jokes about football for fun.

Editors of Sun, Times, Sunday Times and Mail on Sunday named in privacy and phone-hacking case in high court

Four national newspaper editors have been named in court documents filed by lawyers for Prince Harry in his legal case against the publisher of the Daily Mail.

The Duke of Sussex, Elton John, Doreen Lawrence, David Furnish, Sadie Frost, Liz Hurley and Simon Hughes have brought legal action against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) over multiple allegations of unlawful information gathering and “gross breaches of privacy”.

Two firms will offer Disney+, Hulu and Max in a single bundle on ad-supported or ad-free plans

Walt Disney and Warner Bros have said they will join forces to offer the video streaming services Disney+, Hulu and Max in a single bundle, in a move that will unite Game of Thrones with Star Wars.

The companies said the bundle would be available from this summer for customers in the US to buy on any of the three streaming platforms’ websites, with a choice of ad-supported or ad-free plans. They did not give an indication of pricing.

Industry’s digital watermarking scheme will add to existing safeguards on TikTok’s own tools

TikTok will flag users who upload artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) to the video-sharing site from other platforms, the company says, becoming the first big video site to automatically label such content for users to see.

Content created using TikTok’s own AI tools is already automatically marked as such to viewers, and the company has required creators to manually add the same labels to their own content, but until now they have been able to evade the rules and pass off generated material as authentic by uploading it from other platforms.

Organised populists are trying to drag our cherished institution into polarising and divisive rows. We won’t let them

• Celia Richardson is director of communications and marketing at the National Trust

In March this year, the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, gave a speech on the BBC’s future . He said unbalanced, unfair and overtly politicised attacks on institutions eroded the essence of what made Britain so globally admired. He was right. The increasing number of attacks on our institutions poses a risk to us all – at home as well as overseas. Strong, independent institutions are essential to functioning democracies. Remaining impartial allows them to put the public interest above political and business interests, take a long-term view of complex issues, and make decisions that benefit society as a whole. Their neutrality allows workers to apply expertise without fear of reprisal or coercion. And they act as roadblocks to extremism.

Too often, charities, public bodies and universities are becoming proxies in other people’s fights, and targets in other people’s schemes. It’s part of a populist approach: choose a well-known institution and level divisive accusations at it, and you can surprise people and grab headlines. The National Trust, where I work, will be 130 years old in January next year. Nearly 10% of the UK’s population are signed-up, paying members. It’s been called a peculiarly British miracle. It’s been achieved through cooperation towards a common goal – securing hundreds of miles of coast and countryside, nature reserves, historic landscapes and buildings, and priceless treasures, in perpetuity, for the benefit of the entire country.

Celia Richardson is director of communications and marketing at the National Trust

Sir Paul Marshall claimed ownership of thousands of silver bars, but finders are not always keepers

The joint owner of GB News has lost a legal battle with the South African government over £34m of silver secretly salvaged from a second world war shipwreck.

Sir Paul Marshall, who is lining up a bid for the Daily Telegraph , had claimed ownership of 2,364 silver bars his company had recovered from the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

As brick-and-mortar retail stores compete with e-commerce, chains are spending heavily to immerse customers in bespoke fragrances

When Dallas Pratt worked at an outpost of Aesop in an outdoor shopping mall outside Chicago, one of her and her co-workers’ favorite ways of drawing in new customers was making a concoction they called “sidewalk tea”. They would put a few drops of scented lotion in a cup of hot water, and then they would pour it onto the slab of concrete outside the shop. As the water evaporated, the smell of the lotion would fill the air.

“It drew people in,” Pratt tells me. “They asked questions. They spent time.” And, crucially, they bought stuff.

A new docuseries, from Insecure showrunner Prentice Penny, explores how a section of Twitter became an inventive and impactful community

How to explain Black Twitter? It’s less of an actual place than a general practice, sometimes a secret society and then sometimes a prominent advocacy bloc, neither a standalone digital platform nor its own hashtag per se. Yet when cops kill , Kendrick Lamar drops or Harlem shakes , we know Black Twitter when we see it.

In the almost 20 years that Twitter (or X now, if we must) has been a thing, Black Twitter has been the mystical life force that has kept it real, riveting and rich. But where does one even start, much less catalog a seemingly endless stream of killer punchlines? “I remember when the Alabama brawl stuff came out and there were a lot of jokes about Terrance Howard and the way he says mayne in Hustle and Flow,” says comedy guru Prentice Penny. “And then somebody calls the [teen who dived off a riverboat to join the fight] Aquamayne . “Just using the kid coming out of the water as a setup to call back to mayne is hilarious. Like, I just wanna keep being this funny.”