Newspapers are banking on online revenue to replace falling circulation
When actress Sorcha Cusack left the BBC drama Father Brown in January, it made headlines, including for the newspapers owned by Reach, among them The Mirror, and the Daily Express.
But the story did not generate the traction the Reach newspapers would have expected a year ago, or even at the start of the year.
Reach put this down to AI Overviews (AIO) – the AI summary at the top of the Google results page.
Instead of clicking through to the story on a Reach newspaper site, readers were happy with the AI overview.
The feature is a concern for newspapers and other media publishers, who have already seen much of their advertising revenue siphoned off by social media.
In a tough market, readers coming via Google search is a valuable source of traffic.
“A major worry, backed by some individual datapoints, has been that AI overviews would lead to fewer people clicking through to the content behind them, with negative knock-on effects for publishers,” says Dr Felix Simon, research fellow in AI and news at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford.
He points out that it’s hard to know the scale of the problem, as Google does not publish data on click-through rates.
DMG Media, owner of MailOnline, Metro and other outlets, said AIO resulted in a fall in click-through-rates by as much as 89%, in a statement to the Competition and Markets Authority made in July.
It means publishers are not being fairly rewarded for their work, says David Higgerson, chief digital publisher at Reach.
“Publishers provide the accurate, timely, trustworthy content that basically fuels Google, and in return we get a click… that hopefully we can monetise to our subscription service.
“Now with Google Overviews it’s reducing the need for somebody to click through to us in the first place, but for no financial benefit for the publisher.”
“It’s another example of the distributor of information not being the creator of information but taking all the financial reward for it.”
There is also concern over Google’s new tool called AI Mode, which shows search results in a conversational style with far fewer links than traditional search.
“If Google flips onto full AI Mode, and there is a big uptake in that…that [will be] completely quite devastating for the industry,” says Mr Higgerson.
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The Daily Mail has one of the UK’s biggest online news operations
“We are definitely moving into the era of lower clicks and lower referral traffic for publishers,” says Stuart Forrest, global director of SEO digital publishing at Bauer Media.
“For most of the last decade Google has introduced more and more features into the SERP [Search Engine Results Page], which reduces the need for consumers to visit a website. That is the challenge that we as a sector face.”
Mr Forrest says he hasn’t noticed a drop in traffic across Bauer’s sites, which include brands Grazia and Empire, as a result of the overview feature. But that could change.
“I absolutely think that as time goes on, as consumers get used to these panels, it’s without doubt going to be a challenge. We are absolutely behaving as if we have to respond to that threat.”
In its defence, a Google spokesperson said: “More than any other company, Google prioritises sending traffic to the web, and we continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day.
In an August blog post, Google’s head of search Liz Reid said the volume of clicks from Google search to websites had been “relatively stable” year-over-year.
She also said the number of quality of clicks had improved slightly compared to a year ago – quality clicks are when a user does not immediately click back from the link.
“With AI Overviews, people are searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more complex. In addition, with AI Overviews people are seeing more links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked,” she said in the blog.
Publishers are trying to work out how to appear in Google summaries
Some in the publishing industry are turning to the courts for redress.
In July, a group of organisations including the Independent Publishers Alliance, tech justice non-profit Foxglove, and the campaign group Movement for an Open Web filed a legal complaint to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority alleging that Google AI Overviews is using publishers’ content at a cost to the newspapers.
It is asking the CMA to introduce interim measures to prevent Google from “misusing” publisher content in AI-generated responses.
In the meantime publishers are trying to understand how to feature in AIO and hopeful win some click-throughs.
“Google doesn’t give us a manual on how to do it. We have to run tests and optimise copy in a way that doesn’t damage the primary purpose of the content, which is to satisfy a reader’s desire for information,” explains Mr Higgerson.
“We need to make sure that it’s us being cited and not our rivals,” says Mr Forrest. “Things like writing good quality content… it’s amazing the number of publishers that just give up on that.”
Like other publishers, Reach is looking at other ways to build traffic to its news platforms.
“We need to go and find where audiences are elsewhere and build relationships with them there. We’ve got millions of people who receive our alerts on WhatsApp,” Mr Higgerson says.
“We’ve built newsletters. It’s all about giving people what they want when they’re on our website and our brand, so the next time they’re looking, hopefully they aren’t going to a third party to get to us.”
What if artificial intelligence isn’t coming for your job, but perhaps offering a career change instead? In Brazil, that’s exactly what new data suggest. Drawing on a national registry of nearly every commercial AI program developed since the 1980s, in a recent paper (de Souza 2025) I find that artificial intelligence is used not just in the office, but on the factory floor as well. There, it optimises processes, runs quality control, and guides equipment operation. Among office workers, AI reduces employment and wages, particularly for middle-wage earners. But in production, it increases employment of low-skilled and young workers operating machinery. These results suggest that AI displaces routine office tasks while making machines more productive and easier to operate, leading to a net increase in employment.
To see how AI can increase factory jobs while automating office work, consider a concrete example. imachine, a predictive maintenance system developed by a Brazilian tech firm, analyses real-time data from sensors embedded in factory equipment to detect failures before they occur, schedule repairs, and assist with machine operation. These tools can cut unplanned downtime by as much as 50% and make complex machinery easier to operate (Agoro 2025, Benhanifia et al. 2025). That keeps machines running longer and increase demand for workers to operate them. However, with the same breath that imachine raises productivity on the factory floor, it automates tasks in the office. Performance analysis, maintenance planning, and inventory control are now done by imachine rather than humans. This case captures the broader pattern in the data: AI increases employment in low-skilled production roles by making machines easier to operate and more productive, while reducing demand for routine office work through automation.
The administrative software registry
The reason why I can tell vivid stories about AI development in Brazil is that most commercial AI applications are part of an administrative software registry. Since 1987, Brazilian firms have registered nearly every commercial software they create with the National Institute of Industrial Property (NIIP), thanks to a law granting copyright protection to registered code. Registering commercial software is a standard industry practice: 96% of software development firms have at least one program registered. Among firms with more than 20 workers, 99.9% of them have registered at least one software.
I collected data on all AI-related software ever registered with the NIIP, containing de- tailed information on ownership, programmers, intended use of the software, and technical features. Compared to patents or job ads, which are common metrics of AI adoption in the literature, the NIIP registry has the advantage of containing detailed technical and application information on actual software products, including software developed by specialised IT companies and adopted elsewhere.
The AI boom
The NIIP dataset offers two key insights into AI development. First, there was a marked boom in AI development around 2013, following global breakthroughs in machine learning. Figure 1 shows this surge by plotting the number of unique firms with at least one AI software. Importantly, about 30% of these firms are technology providers that build AI tools for multiple external clients. In some cases, the same software may be deployed across dozens or even thousands of firms. As a result, the number of developers understates the true scale of AI adoption. Therefore, I consider Figure 1 as illustrative of the trend in AI adoption but not of its levels.
Starting around 2013, the development of AI software accelerated rapidly. The number of firms owning AI technologies increased sevenfold, reaching 1,434 by 2022. This period, often referred to as the AI boom, is marked by a surge in innovation and investment in artificial intelligence (Toosi et al. 2021, Chauvet 2018, Sevilla et al. 2022, Bughin 2017).
Figure 1 Number of firms owning AI software
AI is used in management and production
The second fact coming out of the NIIP dataset is that AI is used in both management and production. When firms register their software, they indicate its application domain, i.e. a list of areas where the software is intended to be used. Figure 2 presents the ten most common broad application domains for AI software. Managerial uses, such as information management and administration, are the most frequent but account for only 27% of registrations. AI is also widely applied in fields like healthcare, manufacturing, and agriculture, which together represent 16.7% of the total.
Figure 2b groups all application domains into three categories: management, production, and academic. AI registrations are nearly evenly distributed between management and production applications, each accounting for about 40% of filings. This distributional balance challenges the prevailing view that AI primarily targets high-skill, white-collar occupations (Frey and Osborne 2017, Webb 2020, Felten et al. 2021). With a comparable share of AI tools applied in production, blue-collar workers may be just as exposed to AI as administrative workers.
Figure 2 AI software registrations by intended use
AI exposure correlates with employment growth
To measure the exposure of each occupation to AI, I calculate the text similarity between the tasks workers perform and the descriptions of AI software. This measure captures the overlap between AI applications and worker’s tasks, either due to task replacement or complementarity, and evolves over time according to the number of AI software developed in Brazil.
Figure 3 plots the employment share of occupations in the top and bottom deciles of the 2022 AI exposure distribution, normalising both series to 1 in 2003. From 2003 to 2012, the two employment trajectories moved in parallel. Starting in the first year of the AI boom (2013), when the development of AI software in Brazil exploded, employment in high-exposure occupations began to rise relative to low-exposure ones. By 2022, employment share in the most exposed occupations increased by 20%.
Figure 3 Occupations more exposed to AI grew faster after AI boom
Notes: Figure plots the log employment of occupations in the top and bottom deciles of the 2022 AI-exposure distribution, normalizing both series to 1 in 2003.
Instrument: AI ease of development
To identify the causal effect of AI on employment, I construct an instrument that exploits differences in how easy it is to build AI software for different occupations over time. The key idea is that AI software becomes cheaper to develop when certain programming languages gain popularity. But this cost decline doesn’t affect all types of AI equally because each programming language is better suited for certain applications. For example, COBOL, a language commonly used in banking systems due to legacy code, has declined in popularity, making it harder to find programmers and resources, while R, used for statistical analysis, has grown rapidly and benefits from abundant support. As a result, it is now relatively more costly to build AI tools for banking automation than for statistical tasks. Therefore, bank tellers are relatively less exposed to AI when compared to archivists because it is relatively more costly to build banking automation software, which requires COBOL, a dying programming language. The instrument builds on this intuition to construct an AI easy-of-development shifter for each occupation over-time.
Figure 4 Illustration of the instrument
Notes: This figure illustrates how the instrument is constructed.
AI increases employment of low-skilled workers
I find that AI leads to a net increase in employment, primarily by expanding job opportunities for low-skilled workers. Figure 5 show that occupations more exposed to AI experience higher employment growth, with a one standard deviation increase in AI exposure raising employment by about 2% in the current period, and by as much as 7% after three years. Importantly, this growth is not evenly distributed: AI disproportionately boosts employment among younger, less educated, less experienced, and lower ability workers.
Figure 5 Effect of AI on employment
Figure 6 shows the effect of AI in different deciles of the wage distribution. AI reduces inequality by lowering wages at the top of the wage distribution. A one standard deviation increase in AI exposure has no significant effect at wages in the lowest decile, while wages in the 9th decile fall by about 2.8%.
Figure 6 AI decreases wages at the top of the wage distribution
The finding that AI rises employment among low-skilled workers and decreases wages at the top suggests that it acts as a skill-replacing technology. By substituting for expertise, it allows lower-skilled workers to perform tasks that once required significant experience. This shift reduces the barriers to entry in high-exposed occupations, increased the hiring of lower- skilled workers, and erodes the wage premium for high-skilled individuals. This conclusion is supported by multiple micro-level experiments but has been shown to hold in scale only now (Kanazawa et al. 2022, Brynjolfsson et al. 2025, Gruber et al. 2020, Choi et al. 2023, Dell’Acqua et al. 2023, Noy and Zhang 2023, Peng et al. 2023).
AI shrinks the office and expands the factory
AI has sharply contrasting effects on the office and the factory. As shown in Figure 7, it significantly increases employment in production-related occupations, such as manufacturing, maintenance, and agriculture, while reducing employment in administrative jobs. The expansion in factory employment is driven by a shift toward low-skilled workers: AI enables younger, less educated, and less experienced individuals to take on tasks that previously required more training. In contrast, the decline in administrative employment is not accompanied by any change in worker composition. These findings indicate that AI acts as a substitute for labour in routine office tasks but as a complement to low-skilled labour in production settings.
Figure 7 Effect of AI on employment for different occupations
AI increases employment among machine operators
Moreover, AI increases employment among machine operators and decreases inequality across occupations. Figure 8 shows heterogeneity in the effect of AI across different occupations. AI increases employment most strongly in occupations involving machine operation, where it leads to an influx of younger, less educated, and less experienced workers.
Figure 8 AI has larger employment effects in machine-operating jobs
In my paper, I also show that AI reduces wages more in occupations that initially had higher average wages and education levels. These results suggest that AI lowers barriers to entry and allows less qualified workers to take on roles once reserved for specialists.
Conclusion: AI increases employment and decreases inequality
These results are consistent with AI affecting the labour market in two distinct ways. In the factory, AI increases employment of low-skilled workers by making machines more productive and easier to operate. In the office, however, it automates tasks previously done by workers. Because the effect on production workers dominates, AI increases employment and decreases inequality – a far more positive outcome than the Terminator-like conjecture that many make nowadays.
Authors’ note: This column represents my opinions and not those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago or the Federal Reserve System.
References
Agoro, H (2025), “Reducing Downtime in Production Lines Through Proactive Maintenance Strategies”.
Benhanifia, A, Z B Cheikh, P M Oliveira, A Valente, and J Lima (2025), “Systematic review of predictive maintenance practices in the manufacturing sector,” Intelligent Systems with Applications 26, 200501.
Brynjolfsson, E, D Li, and L Raymond (2025), “Generative AI at Work”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 140: 889–942.
Bughin, J (2017), “The new spring of artificial intelligence: A few early economies”, VoxEU.org, 21 August.
Chauvet, J-M (2018), “The 30-Year Cycle In The AI Debate”.
Choi, J H, D Schwarcz, and K E Yeh (2023), “AI Assistance in Legal Analysis: An Empirical Study”, Legal Studies Research Paper 23-22, University of Minnesota Law School.
Dell’Acqua, F, E McFowland III, E Mollick et al. (2023), “Nav- igating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality”, Working Paper 24-013, Harvard Business School.
De Souza, G (2025), “Artificial Intelligence in the Office and the Factory: Evidence from Administrative Software Registry Data”, Federal Reserve bank of Chicago Working Paper 2025-11.
Felten, E, M Raj, and R Seamans (2021), “Occupational, industry, and geographic exposure to artificial intelligence: A novel dataset and its potential uses”, Strategic Management Journal 42: 2195–2217.
Frey, C B and M A Osborne (2017), “The future of employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114: 254–280.
Gruber, J, B R Handel, S H Kina, and J T Kolstad (2020), “Managing Intelligence: Skilled Experts and AI in Markets for Complex Products”, NBER Working Papers 27038.
Kanazawa, K, D Kawaguchi, H Shigeoka, and Y Watanabe (2022): “AI, Skill, and Productivity: The Case of Taxi Drivers”, CIRJE F-Series No, CIRJE-F-1202, CIRJE, University of Tokyo.
Noy, S and W Zhang (2023), “Experimental evidence on the productivity effects of generative artificial intelligence”, Science 381: 187–192.
Peng, S, E Kalliamvakou, P Cihon, and M Demirer (2023), “The Impact of AI on Developer Productivity: Evidence from GitHub Copilot”.
Sevilla, J, L Heim, A Ho, T Besiroglu, M Hobbhahn, and P Villalobos (2022): “Compute Trends Across Three Eras of Machine Learning”, in Proceedings of the 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, pp. 1–8.
Toosi, A, A G Bottino, B Saboury, E Siegel, and A Rahmim (2021), “A Brief History of AI: How to Prevent Another Winter (A Critical Review)”, PET Clinics 16: 449–469.
Webb, M (2020), “The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Labor Market”.
General public tickets on sale Friday, 12 September at 10am local.
TUESDAY 9 SEPTEMBER 2025: Australia’s pop prodigy Ruel today announces a special hometown show at one of the world’s most spectacular outdoor venues, On The Steps at Sydney Opera House on Tuesday December 9.
After becoming the youngest artist to sell out the Sydney Opera House’s Concert Hall, twice, in 2019, the show is a triumphant return to the venue, with Ruel now conquering the venue’s outdoor Forecourt off the back of announcing his sophomore album, Kicking My Feet.
General public tickets on sale Friday, 12 September at 10am local.
Mastercard cardholders have special access to presale tickets to the Sydney Opera House Forecourt show. Mastercard presale starts Wednesday, 10 September at 10am local, and concludes at Friday, 12 September at 9am local. Check out priceless.com/music for details.
A Live Nation pre-sale will commence Thursday 11 September at 10am local, concluding Friday, 12 September at 9am local. For tickets and information, head to livenation.com.au.
Ruel is growing up, and it shows on his highly anticipated sophomore album Kicking My Feet. Pop’s newest It Boy has been on the rise since he was a teenager, adorning his studio walls with an ever-growing collection of platinum plaques and award statues from the likes of RIAA, MTV, ARIA, and Nickelodeon.
He has amassed over three billion streams, sold out multiple world tours, and regularly attends fashion shows at the invitation of luxury haute couture such as Louis Vuitton and Hermès. Away from the runway, Ruel’s admiration for unique, highly conceptualised style can be seen in his editorials with Prada and Fendi, and through his extensive list of features on the pages of Vogue, GQ, and The Face.
Kicking My Feet showcases the 22-year-old’s sharpened songwriting as he explores the innocence and embarassment of being young and in love, as the album title teases. Alongside frequent collaborator M-Phazes, the album as Ruel expanding his roster of creative partners, including Dan Wilson, Joel Little, Kenny Beats, and Julian Bunetta. The experimentation with his sound and artistry has Ruel evolving himself into a bolder musician on an unmissable trajectory.
RUEL
ON THE STEPS AT SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE TUESDAY DECEMBER 9
Mastercard Presale: Wednesday, September 10 10am – Friday, 12 September 9am Live Nation Presale: Thursday, September 11 10am – Friday, 12 September, 9am
General public tickets on sale Friday, 12 September at 10am local. Tickets and more information at livenation.com.au
The Sydney Opera House honours our First Nations by fostering a shared sense of belonging for all Australians, and acknowledges the Gadigal traditional custodians of Tubowgule, the land on which the Opera House stands.
Over complex tech stack, generic VAT transaction checks and heavy manual demands
VAT compliance teams know the promise of automation: faster returns, fewer errors, and lower costs. But in reality, many companies discover their VAT reporting process is anything but automated. Here are the top five signs you’ve outgrown your current set-up — and why VATCalc’s Filer is the smarter choice.
1. Endless Customisation Projects
Most legacy providers weren’t built for VAT — they were adapted from US sales tax systems or just focused on the boom in Amazon e-commerce returns. That means months of tailoring just to prepare European VAT returns, and more projects every time you add ESLs, Intrastat, SAF-T, or control statements.
With VATCalc: Filer is built for complex VAT business models from day one. Every report linked to a VAT registration is included, out of the box.
2. A patchwork of compliance tools
If you’re running separate systems for data extraction, enrichment, workflow tracking, and approvals — plus email chains to glue it all together — you don’t have automation. You have complexity. And audit trail risk.
With VATCalc: Data mapping, workflow, user rights, and audit logs are all built in. One application does it all, replacing Alteryx VAT data tools.
3. Weak or Generic Checks
Many systems only run surface-level validations. But VAT is law-driven. If your solution isn’t checking every transaction against actual legislation, you’re exposed.
With VATCalc: Every return runs through Auditor — the only legislative audit engine. 100% of transactions are validated against codified VAT law, with article references.
4. Manual reconciliations never end
Separate tools mean separate results — which means finance teams wasting hours reconciling VAT in invoices, reports, and returns.
With VATCalc: One application is the single source of truth. Our single application seamlessly allows transaction data from our tax engine, Calculator, or Auditor, to flow to your next return in VAT Filer.
5. Rising costs, not saving
Licensing multiple vendors, relying on expensive consultants, and firefighting errors add up fast. If your “automation” costs more each year, it’s not working.
With VATCalc: One provider, one license, one streamlined process. Lower IT dependency, faster onboarding, and major cost savings.
The modern way forward for live reporting challenge
VAT Filer gives you true automation: every return type, every workflow step, and every legislative check in one modern cloud application. That means stronger controls, faster reporting, and peace of mind — without the patchwork of legacy systems.
What’s more, it’s already adapted for VAT in the Digital Age reforms and other global digital mandates.
VAT compliance doesn’t need to be complicated. With VATCalc, it isn’t.
Navin Singh KhadkaEnvironment correspondent, BBC World Service
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Heavy rainfall in several parts has caused landslides and floods, killing hundreds
India’s monsoon has turned wild.
Half of the country is reeling under floods after extraordinary downpours, with Punjab facing its worst deluge since 1988.
Some parts of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan saw rains more than 1,000% above normal in just 24 hours, the Indian Meteorology Department (IMD) says.
Between 28 August and 3 September, rainfall in northwest India was 180% above average, and in the south, it was 73%.
More heavy rain is forecast across large parts of the country this week.
The rains have caused landslides and floods in several parts of the country, inundating villages and towns and killing hundreds.
But how did the rainfall become so intense?
Changing monsoon
The climate crisis is changing the behaviour of the monsoon.
Scientists say one of the main changes is that there is a much higher amount of moisture in the air now, from both the Indian Ocean and the Arabian due to warmer climate.
Also, in the past, monsoon rains were steady and spread evenly over the four months – June, July, August and September. But meteorologists say they have observed that rains now often fall in huge volumes within a small area in a short span of time after a prolonged dry spell.
Experts say this is increasingly happening in the mountainous regions where massive moisture-laden clouds hit the hills, pouring huge amounts of rain very quickly in a small area – a phenomenon that is known as cloudburst.
This was one of the main causes for the havoc in the Himalayan states of Uttarakhand, Indian-administered Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh during the first week of August.
But the reasons change as you start travelling down south from the Himalayan states.
Westerly disturbances
In August, prolonged heavy and even extremely heavy rainfall lashed states like Punjab and Haryana for days.
Meteorologists say it was mainly because of the interaction between the already existing monsoon system in the Indian subcontinent and westerly disturbances, a low pressure system that originates in the Mediterranean region and travels eastward.
This westerly disturbance often carries a mass of cold air from the upper levels of the atmosphere and when it meets the relatively warmer and moisture-laden air in lower levels – like the current monsoon has – it can lead to intense weather activity.
“It’s the result of a rare ‘atmospheric tango’ between the monsoon and the westerly disturbance,” said Akshay Deoras, a research scientist with the department of meteorology at University of Reading in the UK.
“Think of the monsoon as a loaded water cannon, and western disturbances as the trigger,” he explained. This trigger, he said, was pulled with force, drenching several northern states.
IMD has also confirmed that the extreme rainfall for a sustained period in northern India and other parts of the country was mainly because of the clash of the monsoon system and the westerly disturbances.
“Such interactions during the peak monsoon season are uncommon since western disturbances typically retreat northward during this time,” said Mr Deoras.
So, why did it detour towards the east this year?
Scientists put that down to jet streams – narrow, fast-flowing currents of air in the upper atmosphere that travel from west to east around the globe. They say that global warming is making these currents increasingly “wavier”, which means it’s meandering and not following a steady path. And that influences other weather systems too.
Studies have shown that wavy jet streams are leading to extreme weather events around the world, including in India recently, where the subtropical jet stream steered the westerly disturbances unusually far south into northern parts.
“It is a vivid reminder of how global wind patterns can supercharge local monsoon dynamics, turning the monsoon into mayhem, rivers into raging torrents and the Himalayas into a graveyard,” said Mr Deoras.
Getty Images
Half of the country is reeling under floods after extraordinary downpours, with Punjab facing its worst deluge since 1988
Unstable mountains
Extreme rainfalls during the ongoing monsoon season are a major source of floods in several parts of India. But other factors play a role too – particularly when it comes to flash-floods and landslides.
Several parts of northern India and Pakistan, which are downstream from the rivers originating in the Himalayas, have seen devastating floods even when there were no cloudbursts or significant rainfall.
Scientists offer several possible explanations – such as bursting of over-filled glacial lakes due to rapid melting of glaciers, swelling of underground lakes that open up through cracks, and landslides blocking rivers creating artificial lakes that then unleash floods.
While the exact reasons are yet to be established, experts say mountains are becoming unstable with fast melting glaciers, snow-fields, snowpacks and permafrost (permanent frozen ground that remains hidden under the soil) due to global warming.
The ice and snow act like cement to keep mountain slopes stable.
And rains play a spoilsport here as well.
Experts say that global warming means that rains are increasingly being reported in higher reaches where it mostly snowed in the past, destabilising mountains further with water percolating and loosening the ground.
“We are seeing entire snowfields melting within a day or two when rains fall on them and the huge quantity of water gushes down as floods,” said Jakob Steiner, a geoscientist with University of Graz.
Man-made disasters
These factors are further complicated by human activities. Human settlements have encroached paths of rivers and floodplains, both in the mountains and plains, blocking their way.
Rampant infrastructure development such as highways, tunnels and hydropower plants further weaken the mountains.
Despite warning of an above-normal monsoon rainfall this year, river-embankments and age-old drains in many places remain unrepaired, while plastic waste clogs waterways meant to reduce urban floods.
Experts say these issues must be addressed timely to minimise the impacts and losses caused by rains and floods.
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Pret a Manger is finally caving in to competition from supermarkets by launching meal deals, after the value of the chain was slashed by a third amid “intense strains” on the hospitality industry.
The sandwich and coffee chain said it intends to test the meal deal format in the last quarter of this year, as a medium-term strategy to grow the Pret brand and return to sustainable profits. It did not say how much the meal deals will cost.
In the UK, meal deals will be tested across two parts of the day – a croissant and coffee for breakfast; crisps and a bread-based sandwich; and also any lunch main, snack and a drink.
In January Pret launched a meal deal in France, which is performing well.
“Going forward our priority will be to drive transactions and sustainable growth by offering great value for money for Pret customers,” said Pano Christou, the chief executive of Pret.
Supermarkets and other high street retailers have long offered meal deals, offering a sandwich, snack and drink for a set price. These have been creeping up in price amid rising food inflation, with Tesco recently increasing the price of its meal deal by 25p to £3.85 for Clubcard holders, its third increase since 2022.
Pret’s parent company, JAB, which bought the chain from the British private equity company Bridgepoint for £1.5bn in 2018, revealed that Pret made a £525.5m pre-tax loss last year.
The company, which made a £61.7m loss in 2023, was hit by a £552.9m non-cash writedown, which is understood to relate to how JAB assessed the value of the brand, its properties and other assets linked to Pret.
The writedown equates to slashing the value of the chain by about a third compared with its acquisition price.
In a filing, the company said that it had never previously recorded an impairment charge for the business but considered last year to be the first since the onset of Covid with “consistent trading data to base future forecasts”.
The company said the impairment in value had taken into account the current uncertain global macroeconomic environment, as well as additional costs arising from last autumn’s budget, which included a rise in employer national insurance contributions and an increase in the minimum wage.
After adjusting for the non-cash impairments, Pret made a £98m operational profit, a 36% year-on-year increase.
Like-for-like sales grew 2.8% and total revenues including new openings grew by 10% to £1.2bn.
“2024 was another year of growth for Pret, where we took disciplined decisions to protect sales, despite intense strains on the hospitality industry,” Christou said.
The company revealed that the total number of directly employed staff fell by almost 1,400 last year, a 14% drop from 9,541 to 8,165, because of the sale of stores. Overall, including in franchise stores, the company has 12,000 staff worldwide.
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Over the course of last year Pret increased its international presence, growing its number of shops by 11% to 717, with a focus on the US. Pret opened its first store in London in 1986.
“Our focus will be on growing Pret’s market share in the UK and internationally, prioritising city centres and travel hubs,” Christou said.
Last year Pret scrapped its popular five-drinks-a-day subscription service priced at £30, replacing it with a £5-a-month “Club Pret” giving members 50% off up to five barista-made drinks daily.
Last month it emerged that Coca-Cola had met potential buyers to discuss a cut-price deal to sell Costa Coffee.
The fizzy drinks company bought the chain in 2018 from Whitbread, the owner of the Premier Inn hotel chain, for £3.9bn.
However, high street chains have struggled with rising costs, including a steep increase in coffee bean prices, higher employment costs and competition.
According to the report, potential suitors may only be willing to pay £2bn for Costa Coffee, nearly half what Coca-Cola paid for the business.
The great Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, from 1991, imagines a bureaucratic heaven that prepares the recently departed for their next phase of existence. The movie is a wry look at the petty foibles of life, the fears and neuroses that can impede a person’s path to fulfillment and enlightenment. There’s a romance involved, but the film is more about the individual.
The new film Eternity puts the romance right at the center. Directed by Dating Amber helmer David Freyne from a Black List script by Pat Cunnane, Eternity sets two marriages at odds with one another in the afterlife. Larry (Miles Teller) has just died (as an old man) and arrives at a train depot-esque limbo, where he is told he will have to choose what kind of forever he’d like for himself. Will it be an unending day at the beach? A million lifetimes spent as a libertine in Queer World? (Sounds interesting!) Maybe a trip to the political eden of Marxist World — though we’re told that one’s all booked up.
Eternity
The Bottom Line
The rare high-concept commercial movie with wit, heart and no franchise potential.
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations) Release date: Friday, November 14 Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, John Early Director: David Freyne Screenwriter: Pat Cunnane, David Freyne
1 hour 53 minutes
While he’s deciding, his wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) also dies and the two are reunited in this busy waystation between mortality and immortality. It’s a happy occasion but for one major flaw: Also waiting for Joan is her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), a dashing war pilot who was killed in Korea only two years into their marriage. He’s been holding out for Joan all the while, biding his time as a bartender at Elysium’s version of Grand Central. Which throws a serious wrench into Larry’s plan to mostly just continue on as normal with his wife of 65 years.
The premise is so cute it’s surprising a movie hasn’t done it already. Eternity mines its compelling conceit for both peppery comedy and bleary sentiment. It is asking a rather complex question, too, one that many couples looking back at their life together may not want to confront: Is this the best it could have been, or was it just good enough? There is Joan’s first love, this tall drink of youthful passion and excitement, waiting to pick up where they left off. And then there’s trusty, maybe boring old Larry, with whom Joan raised a thriving family. Can decades of quotidian contentment really hold a candle to the mad blush of first love? Joan, and I suppose we in the audience, will have to decide.
Eternity ably keeps the audience guessing which way she’ll go, inviting in a few minor complications to tilt the scales one way or another, but mostly depicting a wholly credible ambivalence. Both are solid options in their own ways, and picking one would no doubt harm the other. The film grows the teensiest bit repetitive as Joan agonizes over her options, but the stakes are high enough and the film’s imagination lively enough that we don’t mind a few delays. It’s also easy to forgive the film’s rather lax sense of rules; while the world-building could be more thorough, we also wouldn’t want Eternity bogged down in too many details.
Olsen plays Joan’s indecision with winsome fluster, at first breathy and trembling but eventually finding her resolve. Many jokes are made about Turner’s matinee-idol looks, and he graciously accepts the attention while successfully working to define Luke as an actual flawed human being (or former human being). Teller plays a good second-fiddle, gradually building the case for Larry’s unassuming appeal. The trio’s nimble performances are given sprightly support by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as consultants trying to guide their clients to the best possible hereafter.
It’s all quite clever and sweet, even as a great current of sadness runs under just about every conversation in the film. Freyne does a lot with a modest budget, finding smart ways to show us fantastical things — memories playing out as if dioramas at the Natural History Museum, a vast expo hall filled with stalls advertising various paradises — on an economical scale. The film’s conclusions may be a tad trad and predictable (are marriage and family really all there is?), but there is also some value in its more abstract lessons — an urging to balance the practical and the irrational in matters of the heart, to approach life with a kind of ever-fluid understanding that all things are relative.
Maybe the most endearing aspect of the film, though, is that it exists at all. Are we truly, finally arriving in the promised land, where standalone, commercial works of wit and invention like this can exist again? The high-concept, broadly appealing movie with no franchise potential has long been an endangered species. And yet Eternity is one of several films that roughly fit that bill to premiere at Toronto this year. One dares to hope that Hollywood, for all its current ills, may finally be turning a corner, reverting back to when new ideas were held at a premium. Or I’ve simply died and this is the humble little great-beyond I’ve chosen for myself. Either way, it’s happy news.
BEIJING, Sept. 8, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888 (HKD Counter) and 89888 (RMB Counter)), (“Baidu” or the “Company”), a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, today announced the pricing of its offering of CNY4.4 billion aggregate principal amount of 1.90% senior unsecured notes due 2029 (the “Notes”). The Notes were offered in offshore transactions outside the United States to certain non-U.S. persons (the “Notes Offering”) in reliance on Regulation S under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”). The Company expects to close the Notes Offering on or about September 15, 2025, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions.
The Company intends to use the net proceeds from the Notes Offering for general corporate purposes, including repayment of certain existing indebtedness, payment of interest and general corporate purposes.
The Notes have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act or any state securities laws. They may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefits of, U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S under the Securities Act) except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements of the Securities Act.
The Notes are expected to be listed on The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited (the “Hong Kong Stock Exchange”).
This announcement shall not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities, in the United States or elsewhere, and shall not constitute an offer, solicitation or sale of the securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such an offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful. Any offering of securities will be made by means of one or more offering documents, which will contain detailed material information about the Company and its operational and financial performance.
This announcement contains information about the pending Notes Offering, and there can be no assurance that the Notes Offering will be completed.
About Baidu
Founded in 2000, Baidu’s mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, trading on Nasdaq under “BIDU” and HKEX under “9888”. One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.
Safe Harbor Statement
This announcement contains forward-looking statements. These statements are made under the “safe harbor” provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements can be identified by terminology such as “will,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “future,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates,” “confident” and similar statements. Baidu may also make written or oral forward-looking statements in its periodic reports to the SEC, in announcements made on the website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, in its annual report to shareholders, in press releases and other written materials and in oral statements made by its officers, directors or employees to third parties. Statements that are not historical facts, including but not limited to statements about Baidu’s beliefs and expectations, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement, including but not limited to the following: Baidu’s growth strategies; its future business development, including development of new products and services; its ability to attract and retain users and customers; competition in the Chinese Internet search and newsfeed market; competition for online marketing customers; changes in the Company’s revenues and certain cost or expense items as a percentage of its revenues; the outcome of ongoing, or any future, litigation or arbitration, including those relating to intellectual property rights; the expected growth of the Chinese-language Internet search and newsfeed market and the number of Internet and broadband users in China; Chinese governmental policies relating to the Internet and Internet search providers, and general economic conditions in China and elsewhere. Further information regarding these and other risks is included in the Company’s annual report on Form 20-F and other documents filed with the SEC, and announcements on the website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Baidu does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statement, except as required under applicable law. All information provided in this announcement is as of the date of the announcement, and Baidu undertakes no duty to update such information, except as required under applicable law.
More than half a century has passed since the BBC aired 13 episodes of the story of a somnolent pink-and-white striped cat which cemented Bagpuss’s place in the annals of TV history. Now Bagpuss, “the most important, the most beautiful, the most magical saggy old cloth cat in the whole wide world” has been dusted off to star in a new film.
The original show was primarily stop-motion with some paper cutout and conventional animation work, while the big screen reboot will combine live action and animation, with a projected release date of 2027.
Voted the the all-time favourite children’s programme in 1999, the show was made by the Clangers co-creators Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate, and filmed in the former’s barn in Blean, Kent.
Firmin’s daughter, Emily, played a little girl of the same name who runs a shop for lost property which focuses on repair, rather than resale. Each episode featured a new item being brought in and then inspected by Bagpuss and fellow shop residents including Madeleine the rag doll, Gabriel the toad, and a woodpecker called Professor Yaffle based on Bertrand Russell.
The series also featured a huge number of specially written songs, largely derived from folk tunes, and has since proved especially popular with musicians. The 2003 Radiohead single There Three has the subtitle “The Boney King of Nowhere”, which was a song from Bagpuss.
While the series was set in the Victorian era – with a sepia-tinted photograph in the opening credits giving way to colour as the toys come alive – the film will be set in the modern day.
According to Birmingham-based production company Threewise Entertainment, which is developing the film, the story will involve Bagpuss and friends awakening to find themselves in contemporary Britain, where they continue their work mending broken items.
It will be, says the company, a “quest that blends heartfelt storytelling, comedy and music, while staying true to the spirit of the classic series”. The estates of both creators are involved in the reboot, with Emily Firmin saying:
“Bagpuss was an integral part of my childhood. To me he wasn’t just a character on the screen, he was a friend who taught me about kindness, care and imagination.
“To see our most magical cat return now is incredibly moving and I’m thrilled that new fans will have the chance to discover him, and that his magic will live on and be shared with the next generation.”
In 2009, Daniel Postgate, Oliver’s son and a Bafta-winning writer in his own right, blocked a proposed CGI TV return for the cat, saying he did not want a “lightweight” remake and adding that he felt CGI had “a slightly lurid quality, even at the best of times”.
Threewise said that the film was developed with and approved by Daniel Postgate before his death in June.
Other classics of British children’s TV to have made the leap to the big screen include Postman Pat, Wallace & Gromit, Fireman Sam and Thomas the Tank Engine.
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