Connect with us

Published

on

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Wednesday that he is optimistic about President-elect Donald Trumps second term and expressed some excitement about potential regulatory cutbacks in the coming years.

Im actually very optimistic this time around, Bezos said on stage during a wide-ranging interview at The New York Times DealBook Summit in New York. He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. If I can help do that, Im going to help him.

We do have too many regulations in this country, Bezos added.

The comments follow an October decision by Bezos to prohibit The Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate, a move that led to tens of thousands of people canceling their subscriptions and protests from journalists with a deep history at the newspaper.

At the time, Bezos wrote in an op-ed in the newspaper saying editorial endorsements create a perception of bias at a time when many Americans dont believe the media, and do nothing to tip the scales of an election.

On Wednesday, he said he would try to talk Trump out of the idea that the press is the enemy.

Youve probably grown in the last eight years, he said to journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin. He has, too. This is not the case. The press is not the enemy.

Trump had railed against Bezos and his companies, including Amazon and The Washington Post, during his first term. In 2019, Amazon argued in a court case that Trumps bias against the company harmed its chances of winning a $10 billion Pentagon contract. The Biden administration later pursued a contract with both Amazon and Microsoft.

In another part of the interview, Bezos said he doesnt expect Elon Musk, who has been tasked with cutting regulations in the upcoming Trump term, to use his power to hurt his business competitors. Bezos owns Blue Origin, a rival to Musks SpaceX.

Continue Reading

Politics

Indian town adopts Avalanche blockchain for tamper-proof land records

Published

on

By

Indian town adopts Avalanche blockchain for tamper-proof land records

A district administration in India digitized more than 700,000 land records, securing them on Avalanche blockchain to ensure transparency and prevent tampering.

Continue Reading

Entertainment

Glastonbury 2025 line-up revealed

Published

on

By

Glastonbury 2025 line-up revealed

The 1975 and Olivia Rodrigo will be among the stars headlining Glastonbury Festival this year, it has been announced.

Glastonbury organisers have revealed the line-up for this summer’s event, taking place between 25 June and 29 June, after months of speculation.

The 1975 will take to the iconic Pyramid Stage on the Friday to headline, then Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young will perform on Saturday and Olivia Rodrigo on the Sunday.

Other big names performing include British pop sensation Charli XCX, rapper Loyle Carner electronic group The Prodigy.

The announcement comes after Sir Rod Stewart was booked for the Sunday teatime legend slot and Young was confirmed as a headliner earlier this year.

Young’s announcement in January came amid some confusion, as he had days before told fans he was pulling out of the festival because the BBC’s involvement was a “corporate turn-off”.

The Canadian singer-songwriter later said this decision was down to “an error in the information I received”.

More on Glastonbury

The 1975 will be headlining for the first time, having made their Glastonbury debut in 2014.

The Cheshire band, known for hits such as Somebody Else and Chocolate, have regularly made headlines due to the antics of frontman Matty Healy.

Glastonbury, which takes place at Worthy Farm in Somerset in the summer, has worked closely with the BBC – its exclusive broadcast partner – since 1997.

Neil Young performing at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival last May. Pic: Amy Harris/Invision/AP
Image:
Neil Young performing at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival last May. Pic: Amy Harris/Invision/AP

Appetite for the esteemed festival saw standard tickets sell out in 35 minutes in November.

They cost £373.50 plus a £5 booking fee, up £18.50 from the price from the 2024 festival, and were sold exclusively through the See Tickets website.

The date for the resale – where tickets not fully paid for are put back up for purchase – is set for some time in spring.

The headliners last summer on the iconic Pyramid Stage were Dua Lipa, SZA and Coldplay, who made history as the first act to headline the festival five times.

2026 is likely to be a year off for Glastonbury, with the festival traditionally taking place four out of every five years, and the fifth year reserved for rehabilitation of the land.

Continue Reading

Business

Millions in compensation for customers impacted by Barclays outages

Published

on

By

Millions in compensation for customers impacted by Barclays outages

Barclays is to pay millions in compensation for recent IT outages which prevented customers from banking.

The lender said it expects to pay between £5m and £7.5m in compensation to customers for “inconvenience or distress” caused by a payday outage last month, the influential Treasury Committee of MPs said.

The glitch began at the end of January and lasted several days.

Money blog: Tourists banned from driving in Spanish town

This was caused by “severe degradation” in the performance of their mainframe computer, a large computer used by big organisations for bulk data processing.

It resulted in the failure of 56% of Barclays’s online payments.

Up to £12.5m, however, could be paid when all outages over the last two years from January 2023 and February 2025 are factored in, the committee said.

More on Banks

It would be by far the biggest amount of compensation paid by a firm in the last two years. Irish bank Bank of Ireland would be the second having issued £350,000 in compensation.

The committee is investigating IT problems at all banks that prevent or limit customer access.

Why does this keep happening?

As part of their inquiries, banks said common reasons for IT failures included problems with third-party suppliers, disruption caused by systems changes and internal software malfunctions.

The responses were received before last Friday’s online banking failures which caused difficulties for millions on payday but the committee said it would request data on the latest disruption.

A recurring problem

The nine top banks written to by the Treasury Committee accumulated 803 hours of unplanned outages, they said, equivalent to 33 days.

These hours were comprised of 158 individual IT failures. Barclays’ payday failure is not captured in the numbers.

As a result, the bank with the longest outages was NatWest with 194 hours of failures.

Continue Reading

Trending