TheChek News Flow

BMW Vehicle Deliveries Rise as Strength in Europe Offsets China Weakness

The result marks a contrast to rival Mercedes-Benz, which earlier this week reported a 9% drop in vehicle sales

BMW BMW 0.63%increase; green up pointing triangle group vehicle deliveries rose slightly in the second quarter as the German automaker saw strong growth in Europe offset hefty declines in China, while deliveries in the U.S. edged higher.

The company, which houses its namesake brand as well as the Mini and Rolls-Royce marques and a motorcycles business, said sales rose 0.4% in the period to 621,271 million vehicles.

The result marks a contrast to rival Mercedes-Benz, which earlier this week reported a 9% drop in vehicle sales on weakness in the U.S. and China after President Trump slapped a 25% duty on imported cars and parts entering the U.S. in early April.

BMW has previously cautioned that tariffs would take a toll on its second-quarter results, but has expected levies to go down from July and that its impact on earnings would ease in the second half. In China, pricing was a headwind in the first months of this year, mainly due to challenges in the country’s highly competitive market.

The company said Thursday that sales of BMW branded cars and Minis in China fell 13.7% to 162,667 units in the second quarter. That compares to a 10.1% rise in European sales to 255,910 cars and a 1.4% rise to 98,504 cars in the U.S.

The group’s electrified models saw sales growth of 10.2% in the year, with BMW branded plug-in hybrids seeing a surge in demand and the Mini brand’s fully-electric models experiencing strong global demand.

“New orders across all drive technologies developed positively in the first six months, showing significant year-on-year growth,” the company said.

Companies hope content-sharing agreement will help them attract new subscribers in fiercely competitive market

Disney and ITV have struck a deal to show their programmes on each other’s platforms for the first time in the latest sign of the fast-changing relationships between traditional European broadcasters and US streaming platforms.

Under the terms of the agreement announced on Thursday, ITV will begin showing some of Disney’s hit programmes, such as The Bear, while giving the US streamer some of its biggest shows, including Love Island, in a promotional grab for each other’s audiences. Viewers will be able to watch the shows on each service from July 16.

Last month the Financial Times revealed plans by Netflix to show all of the channels broadcast by TF1 on its platform, in effect removing the need for audiences to use the French broadcaster’s own streaming service. 

ITV, however, is relying on its streaming platform as a source of future growth. Traditional TV groups such as ITV are struggling with declining linear audiences and advertising revenues as more people watch TV online.

The British broadcaster has so far sought to try to rival groups such as Disney and Netflix directly, although lacks the resources to produce the big budget global content made by the US streamers.  

Karl Holmes, general manager for Disney+ in Emea, said in an interview that the partnership would boost subscriptions and engagement for both platforms, given only a small overlap in their audience.

He said that the Disney audience tended to skew younger — with a larger number of children and families, as well as viewers between 15 and 34 — while ITV’s service had more viewers in the 55+ demographic.

Disney will offer some of its more adult-orientated programmes such as Andor, The Bear and Only Murders in the Building to ITV’s audience to encourage them to sign up to its platform.

“It would not work if our demographics were the same,” said Holmes, adding that this sort of arrangement was more attractive to free-to-air broadcasters that wanted to maintain their own streaming business than a wholesale deal to show all content.

ITV will provide Disney with hit shows including the award-winning drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, espionage thriller A Spy Among Friends and selected seasons of the reality hit Love Island.

Both companies will also be able to sell advertising on the programmes provided by their partner. ITVX is free to watch in the UK, supported by advertising, although a premium service is also available for viewers who want to watch ad-free. 

The promotional selection of hit shows and movies, billed as a “Taste of ITVX” and a “Taste of Disney+” respectively, will be regularly refreshed and presented on special “rails” on the platforms. 

Kevin Lygo, managing director of media and entertainment at ITV, said the tie-up “allows us to show our complementary audiences a specially selected collection of titles, regularly . . . that gives a flavour of the range in our respective offerings”. 

Chinese-made device can command the movements of bees, making them ideal to help search for survivors in earthquake ruins, scientists say

Worker bees carry nectar sacks weighing 80 per cent of their body mass. When airborne, they tuck their hind legs like landing gear to cut wind drag.

And they can fly 5km (3 miles) with no need for rest, an example of how nature’s genius shames human machinery.

Until now.

At Beijing Institute of Technology, Professor Zhao Jieliang’s team has built the world’s lightest insect brain controller. At 74 milligrams, it is lighter than a sack of nectar.

Strapped to the bee’s back, the device pierces its brain with three needles. It creates illusions with electronic pulses to command flight: turn left, turn right, advance, retreat.

Nine out of 10 times, the bee obeyed.

The cyborg bee could serve as military scouts or search for survivors in the ruins of an earthquake, according to a peer-reviewed paper published on June 11, in the Chinese Journal of Mechanical Engineering.

“Insect-based robots inherit the superior mobility, camouflage capabilities and environmental adaptability of their biological hosts,” wrote Zhao and his colleagues.

“Compared to synthetic alternatives, they demonstrate enhanced stealth and extended operational endurance, making them invaluable for covert reconnaissance in scenarios such as urban combat, counterterrorism and narcotics interdiction, as well as critical disaster relief operations,” they added.

Before this, the lightest cyborg controller came from Singapore and was triple the weight. It could command beetles and roaches but they crawled at relatively slow speeds in short ranges and fatigued quickly.

Zhao’s team printed circuits on polymer film. While flexible and as thin as insect wings, it hosts numerous chips including an infrared remote.

Tests were done in nine pulse settings. The researchers studied bee wings and cockroach turns. They mapped signals to motion, made bees bank and made roaches trace long straight paths with little deviation.

But some flaws remain.

Bees need wired power and roaches tire after 10 zaps. One signal stirs different moves in different bugs, according to the researchers.

A long-lasting battery weighs 600mg – far too heavy for a bee. Their legs and bellies also refuse commands.

“In future research, precision and repeatability of insect behaviour control will be enhanced by optimising stimulation signals and control techniques,” wrote Zhao’s team.

“Concurrently expanding functional modules of the control backpack will improve environmental perception capabilities of insect-based robots, advancing their deployment in complex operational settings such as reconnaissance and detection missions,” they added.

Nations have engaged in an intense race on cyborg tech. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) used to take the lead, with Japan trailing closely. But now China is smashing records in this field, thanks to ample government funding and a booming electronics industry.

June’s U.K. Home Buyer Demand Turns Positive for the First Time Since December

The result indicated stabilization, rather than a strong recovery

U.K. house buyer demand in June turned positive for the first time since December 2024, but challenges remain for both buyers and sellers, according to a report from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.

According to the report, the net balance for new buyer enquiries rose 3% in the month, an improvement from May’s minus 22%. Still, this indicates a period of stabilization rather than a strong recovery, RICS says.

Moreover, the national net balance for agreed sales improved significantly from previous months to minus 3%, representing a significant improvement from the minus 25% and minus 28% reported in earlier surveys. Nonetheless, sales momentum is expected to remain subdued in the near term despite this positive trend, the association’s survey said.

And although near-term expectations for sales volumes have turned marginally positive, with a net balance of plus 6%, a sharp contrast to May’s minus 2%, respondents foresee a broadly flat sales volumes landscape over the next 12 month, with a net balance of plus 5%.

House prices in the U.K. continue to follow a flat to marginally negative trend, with price activity seeing a deep regional variation. The South East, East Anglia and London have seen a more pronounced fall in prices, with Northern Ireland, the North West, Scotland and the East Midlands seeing clear growth.

“Encouragingly, near-term sales expectations have begun to edge higher, pointing to a modest shift in sentiment. That said, confidence in the market remains somewhat delicate, with economic uncertainty at both the domestic and global level still seen as a potential headwind,” RICS said.

Novel investment firm that trades off its reporters’ scoops raises fresh capital and plans move into litigation

Hunterbrook Global has been valued at $100mn after a recent fundraising, as the novel US newsroom-cum-hedge fund revealed to investors that it planned to move into litigation.

The new capital, raised by the parent company that oversees the hedge fund Hunterbrook Capital and the news outlet Hunterbrook Media, has come from investors, including the Ford Foundation and venture capital firm Floating Point, according to a person familiar with the fundraise.

Hunterbrook was launched in 2023 by investor Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz and writer Sam Koppelman, creating a newsroom that would gather exclusive information and a hedge fund that would trade off it.

The recent fundraise doubled Hunterbrook’s valuation from its 2023 seed round and is separate from the $100mn raised last year for the investment fund run by Hunterbrook Capital.

The new funds will be invested in building its newsroom further, according to a person close to the situation. Hunterbrook declined to comment.

Hunterbrook also revealed to investors in a letter that it planned to further exploit its news gathering by launching a litigation business that would partner with law firms on cases enabled by the newsroom’s reporting. The business is being led by led by media lawyer and litigator Joe Slaughter.

The fund, which started trading in April 2024, gets exclusive early access to the newsroom’s potentially market-moving stories, enabling it to trade on the scoops. Meanwhile, profits made from the fund are ploughed back into the newsroom to continue to build its expertise.

Hunterbrook initially envisaged that it would short stocks in instances where its newsroom exposed scandals, but this approach has been sidelined in an “irascible bull market”, according to the investor letter.

The letter also details how Hunterbrook is generating a sizeable portion of its returns by taking long positions in businesses its journalists have investigated and found to be sound.

Hunterbrook’s fund generated a 31 per cent return in the second quarter of 2025 and a 16 per cent return year to date.

“This won’t be the norm, though we’ll always aspire to it. But it also wasn’t a normal quarter to achieve these results, either,” the letter says. “The fund navigated the crash in April, the violent recovery into May, its unlikely continuation to new all-time highs in June, and kaleidoscopic skirmishes with misinformation along the way.”

The fund is closed to new investors but existing partners, including Horwitz and Koppelman, recently added to their holdings, according to the letter.

Hunterbrook’s investments in the period have included Core Scientific, a data centre infrastructure provider that is being acquired by CoreWeave for $9bn, as well as Evolv Technologies, Carpenter Technology and Rocket Companies.

The letter also pointed to one “untradable scoop”: on Saturday June 21, when markets were closed, Hunterbrook Media broke the news that B-2 stealth bombers had launched from an Air Force base in Missouri, indicating the US would imminently join Israel’s bombardment of Iran.