Sky puts 900 roles at risk in shake-up to compete with US streaming services

Sky has put 900 roles at risk as the broadcaster continues to reshape its business in the streaming era.The company, which employs about 23,000 staff in the UK, expects the consultation process to result in about 600 roles being cut, with 300 redeployed.The latest round of cuts – the third in a little over 18 months – follows a series of product launches including the second iteration of the Sky Glass smart TV and budget-friendly Sky Glass Air.The Comcast-owned broadcaster is focused on improving existing services, and the cuts will hit Sky’s technology and product teams and related corporate functions.Sky has cut almost 3,500 roles since the beginning of last year as the broadcaster looks to move away from traditional satellite pay-TV to streaming-based services in the fight against US giants such as Netflix

How an engineering student turned red Solo cups into stylish sweaters: ‘A lot of trial and error’

Lauren Choi wanted to give plastic a second life. Her experiment turned into The New Norm, a sustainable textile startupIf you’ve been on a college campus in the last 30 years, you’ve likely come across red party cups. Made by brands like Solo and Hefty, the iconic cups are beloved by frats, crucial to drinking games like beer pong – and very difficult to recycle because of the type of plastic they’re made from.But Lauren Choi, an engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, saw an opportunity: she wanted to turn these problematic cups into fabric. In 2019, during her senior year, she led a team that built an extruder machine that could spin plastic waste into textile filaments

UK pay growth stays high – but Britons are feeling the pinch

Tuesday’s latest snapshot of the UK jobs market shows what is becoming a familiar pattern: a gradual slowdown in hiring, rising unemployment, yet with wage growth still uncomfortably high for policymakers.Whether because of Rachel Reeves’s £25bn national insurance increase, uncertainty over her upcoming budget, AI-related disruption or Donald Trump’s tariffs – or perhaps all four – companies seem to be cautious about taking on staff.In the July to August period, the number of vacancies in the economy was down by 119,000 on a year earlier.The unemployment data only runs to July – but it shows 2.3 unemployed people for each vacancy, up from 2

Big pharma firms have paused nearly £2bn in UK investments this year

Big pharmaceutical companies have ditched or paused nearly £2bn in planned UK investments so far this year, causing “suffering” to patients, as ministers gear up for discussions with Donald Trump amid a row over drug pricing.The government’s plan for the life science sector, a key pillar of the economy, has been thrown into disarray, after US drugmaker MSD’s shock announcement last Wednesday that it would scrap its £1bn London research centre. Two days later, AstraZeneca decided to halt a planned £200m expansion of its research facilities in Cambridge.Combined with a scrapped project by AstraZeneca in Liverpool and a shelved Eli Lilly lab in London, four projects worth more than £1.8bn have been pulled or paused this year

Healthy, safe and getting along with each other: Australia attempts to look beyond GDP to measure what matters

Too often economists reduce important issues, like prosperity, to a narrow set of indicators such as gross domestic product to measure national progress.Anything that boosts GDP is good, right?Well, no, of course not. Growing the size of the economy while wrecking the environment or making people miserable is no step forward.So a number of countries around the world – including the UK, Canada and New Zealand – have introduced alternative ways to measure wellbeing that goes “beyond GDP”.Sign up: AU Breaking News emailTreasury, under the direction of Jim Chalmers, established the “Measuring What Matters” framework in 2023 to track our progress towards “a more healthy, secure, sustainable, cohesive and prosperous Australia”

Trump official confirmed to Fed board but court rejects Lisa Cook removal bid

Senate Republicans voted on Monday to confirm a senior Trump official to the Federal Reserve’s board of governors as the White House raced to strengthen the US president’s control over the central bank ahead of its latest meeting.Hours before Fed policymakers convene for their September decision on interest rates, the Senate voted 48 to 47 to confirm Stephen Miran – already chair of Donald Trump’s council of economic advisers – as a governor.The vote concluded just as a US appeals court declined the Trump administration’s request to fire Lisa Cook, a governor appointed by Joe Biden, before the two-day policy meeting begins on Tuesday. The ruling from the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit means Cook may remain in her position during the policy meeting where the Fed is expected to cut interest rates.Miran’s appointment marks the first time in the history of the modern Federal Reserve, which stretches back almost a century, that a sitting member of the executive branch would also work at the highest levels of the central bank