TheChek News Flow

Redstone likely to pursue sale of National Amusements, the family company that controls Paramount, with other potential bidders

Shari Redstone isn’t ready to exit the entertainment business just yet.

The media heiress has ended discussions with David Ellison’s Skydance Media, according to people familiar with the matter, drawing to a close months of negotiations in one of the messiest deal dramas to play out in recent years.

Redstone will now likely pursue a sale of just National Amusements, without trying to merge Paramount into another company, some of the people said. NAI has received interest from two potential parties—an investor consortium led by Hollywood producer Steven Paul, as well as from media executive Edgar Bronfman Jr., backed by private-equity firm Bain Capital, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Under Skydance’s proposed deal, the production company would have bought National Amusements for around $1.7 billion in cash. Then, in a second step of the deal, it would have merged Paramount into Skydance, in a stock deal.

That second step was subject to review by a committee of Paramount directors. The committee had approved the economic terms of the merger but continued to negotiate with Skydance about other deal points.

Those points included pushing for the transaction to be subject to a vote of all other shareholders. National Amusements was supportive of such a vote, the Journal previously reported. Skydance has said such a vote is a nonstarter, said some of the people.

The committee was scheduled to vote on the Paramount merger with Skydance Tuesday afternoon, but it is unclear if the vote happened.

Mistral AI has closed its much-rumored Series B funding round, raising €600 million (around $640 million at today’s exchange rate) in a mix of equity and debt. General Catalyst led the round. As TechCrunch previously reported, the startup is now valued at $6 billion following this funding round.

As a reminder, Mistral AI is a relatively new entrant in the artificial intelligence space. The company raised a massive $112 million seed round about a year ago to set up a European rival to OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI giants.

Co-founded by alumni from Meta and Google’s DeepMind, the company is working on foundational models with the aim to rival the best performing models today, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3 and Meta’s Llama 3.

Mistral AI has also released pre-trained and fine-tuned models under an open source license with open weights. For instance, Mistral 7B, Mistral 8x7B and Mistral 8x22B were released under the Apache 2.0 license, an open source license that has no restrictions on use or reproduction beyond attribution.

Mistral AI’s most advanced models, such as Mistral Large, are proprietary models designed to be repackaged as API-first products. Codestral, the company’s first generative AI model for code, has a restrictive license, as its outputs can’t be used for commercial activities.

Companies can use Mistral Large through an API that they’ll have to pay for according to how much they use it. The company also offers a chat assistant called Le Chat that is currently free to use. The company also has distribution partnerships with cloud providers, such as Microsoft Azure — Microsoft is also a minor shareholder in Mistral AI.

“I am delighted to see new and existing investors renew their confidence in our business and provide new support for its expansion. This new round puts us in a unique position to push the frontier of AI and bring state-of-the-art technology to everyone’s hands,” Mistral AI co-founder and CEO, Arthur Mensch, said in a statement. “It guarantees the company’s continued independence, which remains fully under the founders’ control.”

General Catalyst, which led the Series B round, was an existing investor in the startup. According to the Financial Times, Mistral AI raised €468 million in equity and €132 million in debt (around $500 million and $140 million, respectively). The long, long list of investors includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, and Salesforce Ventures.

Other investors include Belfius, Bertelsmann Investment, BNP Paribas, Bpifrance (through its Digital Venture fund), Cisco, Eurazeo, Headline, Hanwha Asset Management’s venture fund, IBM, Korelya Capital, Latitude, Millennium New Horizons, Sanabil Investments, ServiceNow and SV Angel.

Mistral AI’s work over the past 18 months has been impressive when it comes to releasing foundational models. Now let’s see if it can attract corporate customers to turn this engineering work into revenue.

Rescued Israeli Hostages Endured Punishments, Fear and Isolation

First details emerge about captivity of three men, held in a dark room and told no one would come for them

TEL AVIV—For six months, the three men lived in a single dark room, sleeping on small mattresses on the ground.

Their sole contact with the outside world came from the guards who brought them food and at times abused them. They could hear the Gazan family that lived downstairs, including children, but never met them. One day, when the family went out, they were allowed downstairs to use the kitchen.

Their captors doled out punishments if the captives didn’t follow their strict rules, including locking them in the bathroom and piling blankets on them during the hot summer. They repeatedly threatened to kill them.

The hostages played cards, studied Arabic, taught each other Hebrew or Russian and kept time in journals. The three became close friends, and it was that bond that helped them through the ordeal.

Their guards at times told them that no one cared about them or was coming for them.

But one day, they were allowed to watch Al Jazeera’s Arabic broadcast and saw a rally in Tel Aviv by the families of the hostages. One of them spotted his own face among those whose freedom was being demanded. It also happened to be his birthday, which he knew because the captives had a notebook and were able to keep track of the date.

“It made him feel he hadn’t been forgotten,” said Aviram Meir, the uncle of one of the hostages.

When Israeli special forces burst into a building in central Gaza on Saturday in a high-risk daylight operation, they got to the room where Almog Meir Jan, 22 years old, Andrei Kozlov, 27, and Shlomi Ziv, 41, had spent most of their time since they were taken captive from a music festival in Israel in the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7.

The account of their time as captives in Gaza is based on interviews with relatives of the hostages, and Israeli security and medical officials. Some of the details are being reported for the first time.

Much remains to be revealed about what the three men and Noa Argamani, 26, who was also taken captive at the music festival and rescued in the same operation from a building about 200 yards away, went through as captives. Relatives of the hostages said they were advised to not probe for details, and expect to learn more about their loved ones’ ordeals as time passes.

Israeli security officials have asked the hostages and their relatives to keep details of their captivity a secret.

A full account of the abuses suffered by other hostages who were released earlier only emerged more than a month after their release. They have described being kept in tunnels underground, as well as psychological, physical and sexual abuse.

The four hostages who were rescued on Saturday smiled in videos released from their return to Israel and their recovery in an Israeli hospital. None looked emaciated as they were greeted by family and friends.

But a doctor who has been treating groups of rescued or released hostages since Oct. 7 said that despite the initial positive assessments based on their cheerful demeanor on TV, they had endured “physical and mental torture.”

Dr. Itai Pessach, who is part of a team at Sheba Medical Center in central Israel and treated the hostages rescued on Saturday, said their initial appearances had a lot to do with the adrenaline running through their bodies, and jubilation on being released, he said.

Israeli security forces and the hostages identified Palestinian journalist Abdullah Aljamal, who lived in the apartment, as one of their captors. Abdullah and his father Ahmad Aljamal—a doctor and imam at a local mosque that is run by Hamas—were both killed during the operation. Their neighbors said they always knew that Abdullah Aljamal was affiliated with Hamas.

The rescue operation sparked heavy fighting in the crowded streets of Nuseirat in central Gaza. Palestinian health authorities said 274 Gazans were killed and almost 700 injured from airstrikes, shelling and gunfire. The Israeli military said about 100 Palestinians were killed or wounded, including Hamas militants and civilians caught in the crossfire.

The Biden administration is pushing Hamas and Israel to accept a deal that would see the war come to a halt and the release of hostages being held in Gaza. Many of the relatives of those being held captive support such a deal, as do relatives of the four hostages recently rescued.

Pessach said it is likely that the captives’ weight fluctuated during their captivity due to fear, stress and maltreatment. He said they showed signs of having suffered muscle atrophy and malnutrition and have lost the ability to perform certain activities.

“We’ve heard stories that are beyond anything you can imagine,” Pessach said.

When the three male hostages arrived in Israel they looked freshly shorn—well groomed, with buzzed heads and clean beards.

Aviram Meir, the uncle of Meir Jan, said the three were able to groom themselves while in captivity. He described his nephew’s skin as pale.

“They hadn’t seen the sun for eight months,” he said.

The successful rescue operation will force Hamas to change how it hides hostages, but won’t necessarily increase the harshness of conditions in which they are held, said Younis Al-Zuraie, a Palestinian political analyst.

“They will likely ensure that no more than one hostage is in the same location and will move hostages frequently to avoid detection. Their security apparatus will manage these arrangements,” Al-Zuraie said.

It isn’t clear yet where the three male hostages were held before moving to the home where they were rescued. Argamani had been held in homes with other hostages before arriving at her final place of captivity. Other released hostages said they were held underground in tunnels.

U.S. intelligence officials in Israel have been helping to locate hostages, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fact that the three male hostages were kept together for such a long period without a rescue mission shows the high level of intelligence necessary to pull one off, said Avi Kalo, a former hostage-affairs commander in the Israeli military.

“They need to be verified with high standards of intelligence,” he said.

Optimism over deepwater rigs is warranted amid consolidation and rising day rates

Working on offshore oil rigs, miles from anywhere, can be a lonely business. Onshore executives at specialist drilling companies might have suffered similar pangs. Big oil companies have not had much need for deepwater rigs as exploration budgets tightened. Demand for the largest drillships has hardly changed in the past decade, meanwhile supply has collapsed as much as 40 per cent.

Hence the industry’s keenness to consolidate. Noble Corporation this week announced it would acquire its US rival Diamond Offshore in a cash and shares deal worth about$1.6bn. Diamond relisted itself in 2022 after exiting bankruptcy with a reduced debt load. The pro forma Noble, along with leading deepwater rig operator Transocean, will dominate the sector with a combined third of the global supply of this equipment.

This deal works out for both sides, highlighting the value available in this market. Noble will pay the equivalent of $350mn per Diamond rig, says Bård Rosef at Pareto. It would pay nearly double that for a brand new deepwater drillship. Noble’s planned pre-tax annual cost cuts of $100mn will easily cover the smallish premium of 11 per cent paid on Friday’s closing price.

Indeed, Noble has promised a 25 per cent lift to its dividend on the expectation of having more free cash flow once the deal closes. Diamond shareholders should receive a price near the highs since it relisted. Shares of both buyer and seller rose on the day.

This optimism is warranted. With fewer deepwater vessels around, day rates (rentals) have climbed to $450,000 daily, on Pareto’s data. Take away the operating expenses and drillers can clear around $300,000 per day. If an oil company needs a deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil, or new exploration hotspot Namibia it has to deal with these higher costs.

No surprise that French oil company TotalEnergies recently chose to hedge these rising costs. It bought 75 per cent of the Tungsten Explorer drillship from Vantage Drilling in February for $199mn. Oil companies for the most part prefer to lease not own rigs.

There are other drilling operators that might attract takeover attention, or seek consolidation deals. Companies with appropriate fleets include the fourth largest deepwater driller US-listed Seadrill and Norway’s Eldorado.

Business may have improved for these deepwater drillers, but only after much belt tightening over many years. As the sector’s fortunes start to pick up, companies will find it is cheaper to buy extra capacity than build it.

The listed water company has proposed a 36% increase to customer bills

Severn Trent has awarded its chief executive a total pay package of £3.2mn, including a £584,000 bonus, just months after the water utility received a £2mn fine for water pollution.

Liv Garfield, the chief executive of FTSE 100-listed Severn Trent, which provides 4.6mn households and businesses in England with sewerage and water services, saw her total pay increase by 2.1 per cent on last year, according to the annual report released on Tuesday. This was despite Garfield’s bonus being cut because of the fine.

Garfield has earned at least £27.7mn in total remuneration since becoming chief executive in April 2014, according to a study by the Financial Times of the company’s accounts.

The industry is under intense scrutiny over the unknown quantities of sewage pouring into rivers and coastal waters, which is set to be a critical issue during the general election next month. The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have discussed restricting water company bonuses in cases of severe sewage pollution.

The pay awards come as water companies ask customers to pay for steep increases in bills, with a draft decision expected by regulator Ofwat in July. Severn Trent has proposed a 36 per cent increase in bills to £546 a year per household excluding inflation by 2030.

Susan Davy, the chief executive of FTSE-listed Pennon, which owns South West Water, said on Monday that she had forgone her annual bonus that would have been worth £237,000. Davy’s pay rose to £860,000, up from £543,000 in 2022-23 as she picked up a long-term performance award to be held for two years and reinvested in Pennon stock.

Pennon was already under fire for paying a £127mn dividend to shareholders, days after a parasitic outbreak in drinking water in Devon.

Severn Trent said Garfield had her bonus reduced because of the £2mn fine received for pollution in February. This allowed huge amounts of raw sewage to flow into the river Trent near Stoke between 2019 and February 2020.

About 260mn litres of this — the equivalent of 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools — was discharged illegally and in breach of permits.

An Environment Agency investigation found that a pump at the Strongford wastewater treatment works near Stoke-on-Trent had been broken for 52 days prior to the incident.

Severn Trent said Garfield’s bonus was justified as the company had delivered against “operational targets for customers” and achieved a “4-star rating from the Environmental Agency for a fourth consecutive year”.

“Just under three-quarters of executive pay is directly linked to performance, with stretching targets in place,” the company added.

Shares in the company closed down 0.8 per cent to £23.87 a share in Tuesday trading.

Although water companies are required as of last year to have electronic monitors on combined sewage overflow pipes, these measure the frequency but not the volume of spills.

There are also an additional 7,000 emergency pipes, which are meant to operate only in urgent circumstances such as power outages, that do not yet have monitors, but will be required to have them installed by 2030.

Yahya Sinwar’s correspondence with compatriots and mediators shows he is confident that Hamas can outlast Israel

For months, Yahya Sinwar has resisted pressure to cut a ceasefire-and-hostages deal with Israel. Behind his decision, messages the Hamas military leader in Gaza has sent to mediators show, is a calculation that more fighting—and more Palestinian civilian deaths—work to his advantage.

“We have the Israelis right where we want them,” Sinwar said in a recent message to Hamas officials seeking to broker an agreement with Qatari and Egyptian officials.

Fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas units in the Gaza Strip’s south has disrupted humanitarian-aid shipments, caused mounting civilian casualties and intensified international criticism of Israel’s efforts to eradicate the Islamist extremist group.

For much of Sinwar’s political life, shaped by bloody conflict with an Israeli state that he says has no right to exist, he has stuck to a simple playbook. Backed into a corner, he looks to violence for a way out. The current fight in Gaza is no exception.

In dozens of messages—reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—that Sinwar has transmitted to cease-fire negotiators, Hamas compatriots outside Gaza and others, he’s shown a cold disregard for human life and made clear he believes Israel has more to lose from the war than Hamas. The messages were shared by multiple people with differing views of Sinwar.

More than 37,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, most of them civilians, Palestinian officials say. The figure doesn’t specify how many were combatants. Health authorities said almost 300 Palestinians were killed Saturday in an Israeli raid that rescued four hostages kept in captivity in homes surrounded by civilians—driving home for some Palestinians their role as pawns for Hamas.

In one message to Hamas leaders in Doha, Sinwar cited civilian losses in national-liberation conflicts in places such as Algeria, where hundreds of thousands of people died fighting for independence from France, saying, “these are necessary sacrifices.”

In an April 11 letter to Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh after three of Haniyeh’s adult sons were killed by an Israeli airstrike, Sinwar wrote that their deaths and those of other Palestinians would “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.”

Sinwar isn’t the first Palestinian leader to embrace bloodshed as a means to pressure Israel. But the scale of the collateral damage in this war—civilians killed and destruction wrought—is unprecedented between Israelis and Palestinians.

Despite Israel’s ferocious effort to kill him, Sinwar has survived and micromanaged Hamas’s war effort, drafting letters, sending messages to cease-fire negotiators and deciding when the U.S.-designated terrorist group ramps up or dials back its attacks.

His ultimate goal appears to be to win a permanent cease-fire that allows Hamas to declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel and claim leadership of the Palestinian national cause.

President Biden is trying to force Israel and Hamas to halt the war. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is opposed to permanently ending the fight before what he calls “total victory” over Hamas.

Even without a lasting truce, Sinwar believes Netanyahu has few options other than occupying Gaza and getting bogged down fighting a Hamas-led insurgency for months or years.

It is an outcome that Sinwar foreshadowed six years ago when he first became leader in the Gaza Strip. Hamas might lose a war with Israel, but it would cause an Israeli occupation of more than two million Palestinians.

“For Netanyahu, a victory would be even worse than a defeat,” Sinwar told an Italian journalist writing in 2018 in an Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronoth.

Sinwar, now in his early 60s, was roughly 5 years old when the 1967 war brought him his first experience of significant violence between Israelis and Arabs. That brief fight reordered the Middle East. Israel took control of the Golan Heights from Syria and the West Bank from Jordan. It also captured the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, as well as the Gaza Strip, where Sinwar grew up in a United Nations-run refugee camp.

The conflict was a constant presence. Sinwar published a novel in 2004 while in Israeli prison and wrote in the preface that it was based on his own experiences. In the book, a father digs a deep hole in the yard of the refugee camp during the 1967 war, covering it with wood and metal to make a shelter.

A young son waits in the hole with his family, crying and hearing the sounds of explosions grow louder as the Israeli army approaches. The boy tries to climb out, only for his mother to yell: “It’s war out there! Don’t you know what war means?”

Sinwar joined the movement that eventually became Hamas in the 1980s, becoming close to founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and setting up an internal-security police that hunted and killed suspected informants, according to the transcript of his confession to Israeli interrogators in 1988.

He received multiple life sentences for murder and spent 22 years in prison before being freed in a swap along with a thousand other Palestinians in 2011 for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

During the negotiations between Israel and Hamas over the Shalit swap, Sinwar was influential in pushing for the freedom of Palestinians who were jailed for murdering Israelis.

He wanted to release even those who were involved in bombings that had killed large numbers of Israelis and was so maximalist in his demands that Israel put him in solitary confinement so he wouldn’t disrupt progress.

When he became leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2017, violence was a constant in his repertoire. Hamas had wrested control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in a bloody conflict a decade earlier, and while Sinwar moved early in his tenure to reconcile Hamas with other Palestinian factions, he warned that he would “break the neck” of anyone who stood in the way.

In 2018, Sinwar supported weekly protests at the fence between Gaza and Israeli territory. Fearful of a breach in the barrier, the Israeli military fired on Palestinians and agitators who came too close. It was all part of the plan.

“We make the headlines only with blood,” Sinwar said in the interview at the time with an Italian journalist. “No blood, no news.”

In 2021, reconciliation talks between Hamas and Palestinian factions appeared to be progressing toward legislative and presidential elections for the Palestinian Authority, the first in 15 years. But at the last moment, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas canceled polls. With the political track closed, Sinwar days later turned to bloodshed to change the status quo, firing rockets on Jerusalem amid tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the city. The ensuing 11-day conflict killed 242 Palestinians and 12 people in Israel.

Israeli airstrikes caused such damage that Israeli officials believed Sinwar would be deterred from again attacking Israelis.

But the opposite happened: Israeli officials now believe Sinwar then began planning the Oct. 7 attacks. One aim was to end the paralysis in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and revive its global diplomatic importance, said Arab and Hamas officials familiar with Sinwar’s thinking.

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories had lasted more than half a century, and Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners were talking about annexing land in the West Bank that Palestinians wanted for a future state. Saudi Arabia, once a champion of the Palestinian cause, was in talks to normalize relations with Israel.

Though Sinwar planned and greenlighted the Oct. 7 attacks, early messages to cease-fire negotiators show he seemed surprised by the brutality of Hamas’s armed wing and other Palestinians, and how easily they committed civilian atrocities.

“Things went out of control,” Sinwar said in one of his messages, referring to gangs taking civilian women and children as hostages. “People got caught up in this, and that should not have happened.”

This became a talking point for Hamas to explain away the Oct. 7 civilian toll.

Early in the war, Sinwar focused on using the hostages as a bargaining chip to delay an Israeli ground operation in Gaza. A day after Israeli soldiers entered the strip, Sinwar said Hamas was ready for an immediate deal to exchange its hostages for the release of all Palestinian prisoners held in Israel.

But Sinwar had misread how Israel would react to Oct. 7. Netanyahu declared Israel was going to destroy Hamas and said the only way to force the group to release hostages was through military pressure.

Sinwar appears to have also misinterpreted the support that Iran and Lebanese militia Hezbollah were willing to offer.

When Hamas political chief Haniyeh and deputy Saleh al-Arouri traveled to Tehran in November for a meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, they were told that Tehran backed Hamas but wouldn’t be entering the conflict.

“He was partly misled by them and partly misled himself,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israeli commentator who has known Sinwar since his days in prison. “He was extremely disappointed.”

By November, Hamas’s political leadership privately began distancing themselves from Sinwar, saying he launched the Oct. 7 attacks without telling them, Arab officials who spoke to Hamas said.

At the end of November, Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire and the release of some hostages held by the militants. But the deal collapsed after a week.

As Israel’s army quickly dismantled Hamas’s military structures, the group’s political leadership began meeting other Palestinian factions in early December to discuss reconciliation and a postwar plan. Sinwar wasn’t consulted.

Sinwar in a message sent to the political leaders blasted the end-around as “shameful and outrageous.”

“As long as fighters are still standing and we have not lost the war, such contacts should be immediately terminated,” he said. “We have the capabilities to continue fighting for months.”

On Jan. 2, Arouri was killed in a suspected Israeli strike in Beirut, and Sinwar began to change the way he communicated, said Arab officials. He used aliases and relayed notes only through a handful of trusted aides and via codes, switching between audio, messages spoken to intermediaries and written messages, they said.

Still, his communications indicate he began to feel things were turning Hamas’s way.

By the end of that month, Israel’s military advance had slowed to a grueling battle in the city of Khan Younis, Sinwar’s hometown. Israel began to lose more troops. On Jan. 23, about two dozen Israeli troops were killed in central and southern Gaza, the invasion’s deadliest day for the military.

Arab mediators hastened to speed up talks about a cease-fire, and on Feb. 19, Israel set a deadline of Ramadan—a month later—for Hamas to return the hostages or face a ground offensive in Rafah, what Israeli officials described as the militant group’s last stronghold.

Sinwar in a message urged his comrades in Hamas’s political leadership outside Gaza not to make concessions and instead to push for a permanent end to the war. High civilian casualties would create worldwide pressure on Israel, Sinwar said. The group’s armed wing was ready for the onslaught, Sinwar’s messages said.

“Israel’s journey in Rafah won’t be a walk in the park,” Sinwar told Hamas leaders in Doha in a message.

At the end of February, an aid delivery in Gaza turned deadly as Israeli forces fired on Palestinian civilians crowding trucks, adding U.S. pressure on Israel to limit casualties.

Disagreements among Israel’s wartime leaders erupted into public view, as Netanyahu failed to articulate a postwar governance plan for Gaza and his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, privately warned against reoccupying the strip. Israelis grew concerned the country was losing the war.

In May, Israel again threatened to attack Rafah if cease-fire talks remained deadlocked, a move Hamas viewed as purely a negotiating tactic.

Netanyahu said Israel needed to expand into Rafah to destroy Hamas’s military structure there and disrupt smuggling from Egypt.

Sinwar’s response: Hamas fired on Kerem Shalom crossing May 5, killing four soldiers. Hamas officials outside Gaza began to echo Sinwar’s confident posture.

Israel has since launched its Rafah operation. But as Sinwar predicted, it has come at a humanitarian and diplomatic cost.

Sinwar’s messages, meanwhile, indicate he’s willing to die in the fighting.

In a recent message to allies, the Hamas leader likened the war to a 7th-century battle in Karbala, Iraq, where the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad was controversially slain.

“We have to move forward on the same path we started,” Sinwar wrote. “Or let it be a new Karbala.”