- New film ‘Civil War’ explores a divided America at war with itself PBS NewsHour
- Opinion | What It Would Really Take to Have an American Civil War The New York Times
- ‘Civil War,’ ‘Independence Day’ and the movies that love to blow up DC – The Washington Post The Washington Post
- ‘Civil War’ Director Says ‘I Honestly Don’t Know’ If It’s ‘Responsible or Irresponsible’ to Release the Movie in an Election Year, but Asks: ‘What’s the Consequence of Silence?’ Variety
- Civil War Rotten Tomatoes
Tag Archives: Explores
Biden administration explores compensation rule for canceled flights – The Washington Post
- Biden administration explores compensation rule for canceled flights The Washington Post
- Department of Transportation to propose requirements for airlines to compensate stranded passengers Fox Business
- Biden administration will propose rule requiring airlines to compensate passengers for canceled or delayed flights CNN
- Biden to Propose Airline Rule to Compensate Passengers for Delays, Cancellations The Wall Street Journal
- New airline refund rules proposed for travelers hit with flight delays, cancellations WRAL News
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tyler Perry, Byron Allen Eye BET Majority Stake as Paramount Explores Sale – Hollywood Reporter
- Tyler Perry, Byron Allen Eye BET Majority Stake as Paramount Explores Sale Hollywood Reporter
- Byron Allen & Tyler Perry Eyeing BET As Paramount Explores Sale Of Majority Stake – Update Deadline
- Paramount Global considers selling majority stake of BET Media Group, sources say CNBC
- Tyler Perry Expressed Interest in Buying Majority Stake of BET Media Group From Paramount Global The Wall Street Journal
- Tyler Perry in Talks to Buy Majority Stake in BET as Paramount Global Explores Sale, Byron Allen Also Pursuing Network Variety
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tyler Perry in Talks to Buy Majority Stake in BET as Paramount Global Explores Sale, Byron Allen Also Pursuing Network – Variety
- Tyler Perry in Talks to Buy Majority Stake in BET as Paramount Global Explores Sale, Byron Allen Also Pursuing Network Variety
- Tyler Perry, Byron Allen Eye BET Majority Stake as Paramount Explores Sale Hollywood Reporter
- Paramount Global considers selling majority stake of BET Media Group, sources say CNBC
- Byron Allen & Tyler Perry Eyeing BET As Paramount Explores Sale Of Majority Stake – Update Deadline
- Tyler Perry Expressed Interest in Buying Majority Stake of BET Media Group From Paramount Global The Wall Street Journal
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Elon Musk Explores Raising Up to $3 Billion to Help Pay Off Twitter Debt
Elon Musk
‘s team has been exploring using as much as $3 billion in potential new fundraising to help repay some of the $13 billion in debt tacked onto Twitter Inc. for his buyout of the company, people familiar with the matter said.
In December, Mr. Musk’s representatives discussed selling up to $3 billion in new Twitter shares, people familiar with the matter said.
Mr. Musk’s team has said to people familiar with the finances of the company that an equity raise, if successful, could be used to pay down an unsecured portion of the debt that carries the highest interest rate within the $13 billion Twitter loan package, people familiar with the matter said.
Paying off the debt would provide welcome financial relief to Twitter, which has struggled to keep advertisers on the platform. In November, Mr. Musk said Twitter had suffered “a massive drop in revenue” and was losing over $4 million a day. He also said that month that bankruptcy was a possibility for the company, although Mr. Musk later shared more upbeat prospects for the company, saying he expects Twitter to be roughly cash-flow break-even in 2023 as he has slashed some 6,000 jobs.
The state of the fundraising talks couldn’t be learned. In mid-December, Mr. Musk’s team reached out to new and existing backers about raising new equity capital at the original Twitter takeover price.
Mr. Musk’s advisers had hoped to reach a deal to raise cash at the initial takeover price by the end of 2022, according to an email sent to prospective investors at the time. However, some prospective backers said they balked at the terms, given concerns about Twitter’s financial performance. The Musk team didn’t specify a funding amount or purpose for the fundraise in the email.
Fidelity, one of the co-investors that backed Mr. Musk’s takeover of Twitter, wrote down its stake in Twitter by 56% in November, public filings show, suggesting Mr. Musk would face an uphill battle raising funds at the original valuation from outside investors. The banks holding the $13 billion in debt that backed his takeover of the company haven’t yet received any formal notice of any repayments, people familiar with the matter said.
Layoffs Across the Tech Industry
Representatives for Mr. Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Twitter’s unsecured bridge loans, which total $3 billion, are the most expensive portion of the $13 billion debt package Mr. Musk incurred as part of his $44 billion acquisition of the social-media company. They carry an interest rate of 10% plus the secured overnight financing rate, a benchmark interest rate that has shot up in recent months and currently sits at 4.3%.
With every quarter that passes without Twitter refinancing the debt, the interest rate goes up by an additional 0.50 percentage point, according to regulatory filings. Twitter’s first quarterly interest payment is due at the end of the month, the filings show.
Twitter’s annual interest burden has increased by over $100 million since he announced the takeover deal last April, as the overnight rate has increased. At the time of the announcement, the overnight rate was 0.3%.
Elon Musk has said that Twitter is losing over than $4 million a day.
Photo:
Marlena Sloss/Bloomberg News
Twitter’s total interest expense has been estimated to be roughly $1.25 billion a year, according to a December analysis by
Jeffrey Davies,
a former credit analyst and founder of data provider Enersection LLC. By that estimate, Twitter is incurring roughly $3.4 million every day in interest-payment obligations.
On Dec. 13, Mr. Musk tweeted “beware of debt in turbulent macroeconomic conditions, especially when Fed keeps raising rates.”
Repaying the unsecured bridge loans would leave Twitter with a debt burden that has much more manageable interest rates. Twitter’s $6.5 billion in term loans and $3 billion in secured bridge loans carry an annual interest burden of 4.75% and 6.75%, respectively, plus the overnight rate, according to public filings.
A potential deal would also provide a degree of relief for the banks that backed Mr. Musk’s takeover of the social-media company and that intended to sell the debt to third-party investors but changed course after deteriorating market conditions sank Wall Street’s appetite for exposure to risky bonds and loans.
The $13 billion of Twitter debt on bank balance sheets, one of the biggest “hung deals” of all time, has helped contribute to a drag in the number of mergers and acquisitions as banks’ firepower to back deals is tied up.
Morgan Stanley,
the lead bank on Twitter’s debt deal, has approximately $807 million in unsecured bridge debt on its balance sheet, while
Bank of America Corp.
,
Barclays
PLC and MUFG Bank Ltd. each have approximately $623 million of exposure, according to public documents and calculations by The Wall Street Journal.
Each of the four banks have more than $2 billion in other Twitter debt commitments on their balance sheets separate from the unsecured bridge facility, including term loans and other secured debt, the documents show.
Representatives of those banks declined to comment.
—Corrie Driebusch, Alexa Corse and Laura Cooper contributed to this article.
Write to Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com and Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Study explores incidence, severity, and long COVID associations of SARS-CoV-2 reinfections
In a recent study posted to the medRxiv* preprint server, a team of researchers from the United States used electronic health records to characterize the incidence, biomarkers, attributes, and severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) reinfections and evaluated the association between reinfections and long coronavirus disease (COVID).
Background
The emergent SARS-CoV-2 variants are increasing the incidence of breakthrough infections. Mutations in spike protein regions of these variants that increase immune escape, combined with the waning of the immunity induced by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines and previous SARS-CoV-2 infections are resulting in a rise in reinfections. Studies based on whole genome sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 variants isolated from reinfected patients have revealed that the variants responsible for reinfections are distinct from those that caused the earlier infections. However, there is a dearth of information on whether reinfections differ from the initial infection in their incidence, severity, and attributes, as well as on the long COVID complications after SARS-CoV-2 reinfections.
About the study
In the present study, the team used electronic health record data of a cohort exceeding 1.5 million individuals involved in the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which is a part of the National Institute of Health’s Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative. This data was used to evaluate the incidence, biomarkers, and attributes of SARS-CoV-2 reinfections and understand the association between post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) and reinfections.
Reinfection was defined based on a positive SARS-CoV-2 antigen or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test more than 60 days after the index date for the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection. Long COVID was defined based on the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) codes.
Reinfections were also examined according to the epochs of SARS-CoV-2 variants, with the epoch of the wild-type strain spanning the March to November 2020 period, the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma variants dominating the December 2020–May 2021 period, and the Delta variant epoch spanning the June 2021–October 2022 period. The Omicron epoch was divided into two parts for the Omicron variant and the Omicron BA variants, corresponding to November 2021–March 2022 and March–August 2022, respectively.
Biomarkers such as inflammation, coagulopathies, and organ dysfunction can be used to characterize SARS-CoV-2 infections. A wide range of biomarkers, including laboratory measurements of white blood cell counts, erythrocyte sedimentation rates, C-reactive protein, serum creatinine, albumin, and many more, were used to characterize reinfections.
COVID-associated hospitalization data was used to determine the severity of reinfections. Mild infections included those that did not require a visit to the emergency department or hospitalization, while those requiring hospitalization were categorized as moderately severe, and cases requiring hospitalization, invasive mechanical ventilators, vasopressors, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation were considered severe infections.
The period between reinfection and long COVID diagnoses was compared with that between the initial infection and diagnosis of long COVID to understand the relationship between reinfections and PASC.
Results
The results indicated that most individuals in the cohort had one reinfection, with a small group comprising largely of non-Hispanic White males and older individuals having had three or more reinfections. The largest number of reinfections during the Omicron epoch were among individuals who had initial SARS-CoV-2 infections during the epochs of the wild-type, Alpha, Beta, and Gamma strains, followed by reinfections among those with initial Delta infections.
Analyses of biomarkers revealed that compared to the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection, reinfections showed lower elevation of hepatic inflammation markers such as alanine transaminase (ALT) and aspartate transaminase (AST). However, albumin levels were consistently low in reinfection patients.
Furthermore, the severity of reinfections was found to be associated with the severity of the initial SARS-CoV-2 infections. A majority of the cohort experienced mild symptoms during the initial infections and reinfections and did not require hospitalization or a visit to the emergency department. Compared to the initial infection, the percentage of individuals who required hospitalization or succumbed to the infection after reinfection was marginally lower (14.4% vs. 12.6%). Close to half the patients who experienced a severe initial SARS-CoV-2 infection had moderate symptoms requiring hospitalization or emergency department visits during reinfection. Additionally, 7.4% of the individuals who had a severe initial infection had severe infections, and 5.7% succumbed to the reinfection.
Long COVID diagnoses also occurred in a shorter time frame for infections or reinfections during the Omicron epoch, as compared to infections during the Delta epoch or those with other variants.
Conclusions
Overall, the results indicated that the severity of SARS-CoV-2 reinfections was similar to those of the initial infection, with individuals who experienced mild to moderate symptoms during the first infection having similar symptoms during reinfection, while individuals who experienced a severe initial infection having similar reinfection symptoms or succumbing to the disease after reinfection.
Additionally, the study reported that long COVID diagnoses during the Omicron epoch occurred much closer to the index date of the infection or reinfection, and the number of long COVID diagnoses also showed an increase after reinfections with recent variants.
*Important notice
medRxiv publishes preliminary scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed and, therefore, should not be regarded as conclusive, guide clinical practice/health-related behavior, or treated as established information.
Journal reference:
- Emily Hadley, Yun Jae Yoo, Saaya Patel, Andrea Zhou, Bryan Laraway, Rachel Wong, Alexander Preiss, Rob Chew, Hannah Davis, Christopher G Chute, Emily R Pfaff, Johanna Loomba, Melissa Haendel, Elaine Hill, Richard Moffitt. (2023). SARS-CoV-2 Reinfection is Preceded by Unique Biomarkers and Related to Initial Infection Timing and Severity: an N3C RECOVER EHR-Based Cohort Study: and the N3C and RECOVER consortia. medRxiv. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.01.03.22284042 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.03.22284042v1
NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars – Otherworldly Holiday Scene With Cube-Shaped Snow
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured these images of sand dunes covered by frost just after winter solstice. The frost here is a mixture of carbon dioxide (dry) ice and water ice and will disappear in a few months when spring arrives. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.
When winter comes to
Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.
Snow falls and ice and frost form on Mars, too.
Two Kinds of Snow
Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.
“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”
HiRISE captured these “megadunes,” also called barchans. Carbon dioxide frost and ice have formed over the dunes during the winter; as this starts to sublimate during spring, the darker-colored dune sand is revealed. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
How We Know It Snows
Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.
NASA scientists can measure the size and shape distribution of snow particles, layer by layer, in a storm. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission is an international satellite project that provides next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Ryan Fitzgibbons
Cubic Snowflakes
Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.
“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”
The HiRISE camera captured this image of the edge of a crater in the middle of winter. The south-facing slope of the crater, which receives less sunlight, has formed patchy, bright frost, seen in blue in this enhanced-color image. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Jack Frost Nipping at Your Rover
Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning Sun.
HiRISE captured this spring scene, when water ice frozen in the soil had split the ground into polygons. Translucent carbon dioxide ice allows sunlight to shine through and heat gases that escape through vents, releasing fans of darker material onto the surface (shown as blue in this enhanced-color image). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Winter’s Wondrous End
Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.
This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
NASA explores a winter wonderland on Mars
Cube-shaped snow, icy landscapes, and frost are all part of the Red Planet’s coldest season.
When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season’s sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet’s poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).
Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars gets more than a few feet of snow, most of which falls over extremely flat areas. And the Red Planet’s elliptical orbit means it takes many more months for winter to come around: a single Mars year is around two Earth years.
Still, the planet offers unique winter phenomena that scientists have been able to study, thanks to NASA’s robotic Mars explorers. Here are a few of the things they’ve discovered:
Two kinds of snow
Martian snow comes in two varieties: water ice and carbon dioxide, or dry ice. Because Martian air is so thin and the temperatures so cold, water-ice snow sublimates, or becomes a gas, before it even touches the ground. Dry-ice snow actually does reach the ground.
“Enough falls that you could snowshoe across it,” said Sylvain Piqueux, a Mars scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California whose research includes a variety of winter phenomena. “If you were looking for skiing, though, you’d have to go into a crater or cliffside, where snow could build up on a sloped surface.”
How we know it snows
Snow occurs only at the coldest extremes of Mars: at the poles, under cloud cover, and at night. Cameras on orbiting spacecraft can’t see through those clouds, and surface missions can’t survive in the extreme cold. As a result, no images of falling snow have ever been captured. But scientists know it happens, thanks to a few special science instruments.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter can peer through cloud cover using its Mars Climate Sounder instrument, which detects light in wavelengths imperceptible to the human eye. That ability has allowed scientists to detect carbon dioxide snow falling to the ground. And in 2008, NASA sent the Phoenix lander within 1,000 miles (about 1,600 kilometers) of Mars’ north pole, where it used a laser instrument to detect water-ice snow falling to the surface.
Cubic snowflakes
Because of how water molecules bond together when they freeze, snowflakes on Earth have six sides. The same principle applies to all crystals: The way in which atoms arrange themselves determines a crystal’s shape. In the case of carbon dioxide, molecules in dry ice always bond in forms of four when frozen.
“Because carbon dioxide ice has a symmetry of four, we know dry-ice snowflakes would be cube-shaped,” Piqueux said. “Thanks to the Mars Climate Sounder, we can tell these snowflakes would be smaller than the width of a human hair.”
Jack Frost nipping at your rover
Water and carbon dioxide can each form frost on Mars, and both types of frost appear far more widely across the planet than snow does. The Viking landers saw water frost when they studied Mars in the 1970s, while NASA’s Odyssey orbiter has observed frost forming and sublimating away in the morning sun.
Winter’s wondrous end
Perhaps the most fabulous discovery comes at the end of winter, when all the ice that built up begins to “thaw” and sublimate into the atmosphere. As it does so, this ice takes on bizarre and beautiful shapes that have reminded scientists of spiders, Dalmatian spots, fried eggs, and Swiss cheese.
This “thawing” also causes geysers to erupt: Translucent ice allows sunlight to heat up gas underneath it, and that gas eventually bursts out, sending fans of dust onto the surface. Scientists have actually begun to study these fans as a way to learn more about which way Martian winds are blowing.
Citation:
NASA explores a winter wonderland on Mars (2022, December 23)
retrieved 24 December 2022
from https://phys.org/news/2022-12-nasa-explores-winter-wonderland-mars.html
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Study explores how emotions elicited by chewing gum affect cortical activity
Some neuroscience studies suggest that distinct human emotional states are associated with greater activity in different regions of the brain. For instance, while some parts of the brain have been associated with all emotional responses, the hypothalamus has often been linked to sexual responses and feelings of intimacy, the hippocampus to the retrieval of emotion-eliciting memories, and the amygdala to fear and anger.
Humans can experience emotional responses to an extremely wide range of sensory and environmental stimuli, including the food they consume. So far, however, relatively few studies have explored the link between emotional states elicited by different food flavors and activity in different parts the cortex (i.e., the part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive processes).
Researchers at Niigata University, Hyogo College of Medicine, Meiji University, the Sakagami Dental Clinic and Otemae Junior College have recently carried out a study investigating the emotional responses elicited by differently flavored chewing gums and the cortical activity associated with these responses. Their findings, published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, highlight the potential role of the left prefrontal cortex in eliciting emotional states during the consumption of palatable (i.e., pleasant-tasting) or less flavorful foods.
“Cortical activity may be modulated by emotional states that are triggered by flavors during food intake,” Yoko Hasegawa and her colleagues wrote in their paper. “We examined cortical activity during chewing with different tastes/odors using multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy.”
Hasegawa and her colleagues conducted their experiments on 36 volunteers. These volunteers were asked to chew different types of gum, some more flavorful and other less flavorful, for 5 minutes each, and then rate these gums in terms of taste, odor and deliciousness.
As the participants chewed these different types of gum, activity in their cortical area was recorded using multichannel near-infrared spectroscopy. This is a well-established neuroimaging technique that can be used to monitor cerebral oxygenation non-invasively and in real-time.
“The participants rated the taste, odor, and deliciousness of each gum using a visual analog scale,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Bilateral hemodynamic responses in the frontal and parietal lobes, bilateral masseter muscle activation, and heart rate were measured during gum chewing. Changes in all measured data during gum chewing were also evaluated.”
Non-surprisingly, Hasegawa and her colleagues found that the participants rated each type of gum differently, based on their individual preferences. Nonetheless, they observed that a specific area of the prefrontal cortex, namely the left section, was differently activated while chewing more and less palatable gums.
“Hemodynamic responses were significantly elevated in the bilateral primary sensorimotor cortex during chewing as compared to resting,” the researchers wrote in their paper. “Although the hemodynamic responses of wide brain regions showed little difference between resting and gum chewing states, a difference was detected in the corresponding left frontopolar/dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Muscle activation and heart rate were not significantly different between different gum types. Differential processing in the left prefrontal cortex might be responsible for the emotional states caused by palatable and unpalatable foods.”
The results of this recent study could contribute to the current understanding of the emotional states elicited by eating tastier or less flavorful foods, as well as cortical regions linked to these states. In the future, they could inspire other teams to conduct similar investigations, potentially leading to new discoveries about how the brain processes and creates different eating experiences.
More information:
Yoko Hasegawa et al, Emotional modulation of cortical activity during gum chewing: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study, Frontiers in Neuroscience (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.964351. www.frontiersin.org/articles/1 … 2022.964351/abstract
Yoko Hasegawa et al, Emotional modulation of cortical activity during gum chewing: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study, Frontiers in Neuroscience (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2022.964351. www.frontiersin.org/articles/1 … 2022.964351/abstract
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Rupert Murdoch Explores Reuniting His Media Empire by Recombining Fox and News Corp
Rupert Murdoch
has proposed a recombination of
Fox Corp.
FOX -0.75%
and
News Corp,
NWSA -2.13%
the two wings of his media empire, nearly a decade after they split, according to people familiar with the situation.
Special board committees have recently been established by both companies to study a possible deal and evaluate potential financial terms, the people said. The discussions are at an early stage, they added.
Reuniting the companies would bring Mr. Murdoch’s highest-profile properties back under one roof. Fox Corp. owns Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, along with local TV stations and the Tubi streaming service. News Corp is the parent company of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, as well as other assets including HarperCollins Publishers and news organizations in the U.K. and Australia.
Mr. Murdoch is executive chairman of News Corp and chairman of Fox Corp. His son
Lachlan Murdoch
is co-chairman of News Corp and executive chairman and chief executive of Fox.
The Murdoch family trust has a roughly 39% voting stake in News Corp and about a 42% voting stake in Fox Corp., according to securities filings from the companies. The trust’s ownership of the combined company would be expected to stay roughly around those levels, some of the people said.
The merger would likely be structured as a stock deal, some of the people said. The exchange ratio, reflecting the relative value of each company, would be negotiated by the board committees, they said. Fox had a market value of about $17 billion as of the close of trading Friday, while News Corp’s was about $9 billion.
It is possible a combination of the companies won’t occur. Other strategic alternatives also could be considered, some of the people said.
The elder Mr. Murdoch, 91 years old, built an empire over several decades, turning an Australian newspaper company into a global business spanning publishing, entertainment and TV news, as he acquired or created iconic brands.
In 2013, he split up his holdings. The publishing assets went into a new publicly traded company, which took on the company’s legacy name, News Corp. The other business, including TV and film assets, was named 21st Century Fox and eventually became Fox Corp.
Write to Cara Lombardo at cara.lombardo@wsj.com, Dana Cimilluca at dana.cimilluca@wsj.com and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at jeffrey.trachtenberg@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8