Gray Television will spend $2.7 billion to buy the local TV stations of Meredith, a purchase that will make it the second-largest local broadcaster in the U.S., the company announced Monday.

In the deal, Gray will acquire Meredith’s Local Media Group, which owns 17 television stations in 12 local markets including Atlanta, Phoenix, St. Louis, Nashville, Kansas City and Las Vegas.

Gray expects the deal to close at the end of the year, after which it will own stations in 113 local markets and serve approximately 36 percent of U.S. television households, according to the announcement.

Nexstar is the largest U.S. broadcast company, with stations in 116 markets serving nearly 62 percent of U.S. television households, according to its website.

As part of the deal, Meredith will spin off its National Media Group into a separate company.

National media owns numerous magazine brands including People, Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, InStyle, Allrecipes, Real Simple, Shape and Southern Living, as well as digital and marketing assets.

The Gray/Meredith deal is the latest of several significant media deals announced this year.

Apollo Global Management Inc. agreed to pay about $5 billion to acquire Yahoo and AOL from Verizon Communications Inc. as the wireless company exits its ill-fated foray into the media business.

The private-equity firm is paying $4.25 billion in cash for a 90% share of the media assets. Verizon will keep a 10% stake and $750 million of additional preferred stock in the new company, called Yahoo, that will be formed to operate the business.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the potential sale of Verizon’s media assets to Apollo. Verizon Media, which mostly struggled to grow against Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook Inc., generated $7 billion in revenue last year.

Apollo’s strategy for the business revolves around getting more revenue from each of its 900 million active monthly users. Verizon’s positioning of the media business as a complement to its core mobile business—aimed at helping it add subscribers and reduce the number of people who quit—meant it hasn’t pursued some opportunities to maximize the value of each asset, executives at the private-equity firm

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is giving astronomers a rare look at a Jupiter-sized, still-forming planet that is feeding off material surrounding a young star.

“We just don’t know very much about how giant planets grow,” said Brendan Bowler of the University of Texas at Austin. “This planetary system gives us the first opportunity to witness material falling onto a planet. Our results open up a new area for this research.”

Though over 4,000 exoplanets have been cataloged so far, only about 15 have been directly imaged to date by telescopes. And the planets are so far away and small, they are simply dots in the best photos. The team’s fresh technique for using Hubble to directly image this planet paves a new route for further exoplanet research, especially during a planet’s formative years.

Boeing fired 65 employees and disciplined 53 others for “racist, discriminatory or otherwise hateful conduct,” according to a report.

Britons now trust Amazon more than Royal Mail when it comes to deliveries (but we still have faith in its postmen!).

• Royal Mail CCO Nick Landon sent an internal message to his 140,000 staff
• He said ‘all of our pride should be dented by Amazon Logistics taking top spot’
• The Royal Mail was privatised in 2013 and is still the biggest courier in the UK

By Brian X. Chen, The New York Times Company

If we had a choice, would any of us want to be tracked online for the sake of seeing more relevant digital ads?

We are about to find out.

On Monday, Apple released iOS 14.5, one of its most anticipated software updates for iPhones and iPads in years. It includes App Tracking Transparency, a new privacy tool that could give us more control over how our data is shared.

Here’s how it works: When an app wants to follow our activities to share information with third parties such as advertisers, a window will appear on our Apple device to ask for our permission to do so. If we say no, the app must stop monitoring and sharing our data.

A pop-up window may sound like a minor design tweak, but it has thrown the online advertising industry into upheaval. Most notably, Facebook has gone on the warpath. Last year, the social network created a website and took out full-page ads in newspapers denouncing Apple’s privacy feature as harmful to small businesses.

A big motivator, of course, was that the privacy setting could hurt Facebook’s own business. If we choose not to let Facebook track us, it will be harder for the company to see what we are shopping for or doing inside other apps, which will make it more difficult for brands to target us with ads. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has disputed that his company’s business will be hurt by Apple’s policy.)

“This is a huge step in the right direction, if only because it’s making Facebook sweat,” said Gennie Gebhart, a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit.

But, she added, “One big question is: Will it work?”

Gebhart and other privacy experts said Apple’s new feature might not be enough to put an end to shady tracking on iPhones. It could simply push developers and ad-technology firms to find loopholes so they can continue tracking people in different ways, she and others said.

Michael Collins was part of an extraordinary team of astronauts when most Americans were still looking forward filled with hope and optimism instead of looking back filled with hate and loathing. Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first men to land on the moon, a monumental achievement in human history. He was born October 31, 1930 and passed away on April 28, 2021.

When Apollo 11‘s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to do something hard: Wait. They were scheduled to open the door of their lunar lander and step onto the unknown surface of a completely different world. But for now, their mission ordered them to take a pause before the big event.

And so Aldrin spent his time doing something unexpected, something no man had ever attempted before. Alone and overwhelmed by anticipation, he took part in the first Christian sacrament ever performed on the moon—a rite of Christian communion.

Aldrin’s lunar communion has since become shrouded in mystery and confusion, but the rite itself was relatively simple.The astronaut was also an elder at Webster Presbyterian Church, and before he headed into space in 1969, he got special permission to take bread and wine with him to space and give himself communion.

Men had already prayed in space, but Aldrin was about to go one step further—literally and figuratively. Part of his mission was not just to land on the moon, but to walk on it. To prepare, he took communion after the Eagle lunar module landed on the moon’s Sea of Tranquility during an hours-long downtime period designed to let the astronauts recover from their space flight and prepare for their moon walk.

The company contracted to run Minneapolis’ pay-by-phone parking app said somebody hacked its system and stole users’ license plate numbers, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, mailing addresses.

No credit card information was accessed and no information related to users’ parking transaction history was taken during the data breach last month, according to Parkmobile, the Georgia company that operates the MPLS Parking App. The breach affected customers in Minneapolis and 90 other U.S. cities where Parkmoblie operates mobile parking apps, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City and Tampa.

Marketing startup Iterable Inc. dismissed its chief executive officer over violations of company policy, Iterable said in a note to employees on Monday.

The fired CEO, Justin Zhu, said the board’s chief reason for ousting him was that he took LSD, an illegal drug in the U.S., before a meeting in 2019. Zhu told Bloomberg he was experimenting by taking a limited amount of the drug, or microdosing, in an effort to boost his focus.

In an email to staff, co-founder Andrew Boni said Zhu’s dismissal was over unspecified violations of “Iterable’s Employee Handbook, policies and values.” The board replaced Zhu with Boni as CEO, Boni wrote. A spokeswoman for the San Francisco-based company didn’t immediately provide a comment.