Business
Britain’s inflation rate climbed to 7 percent, the highest in 30 years.

In Britain, a number of items of dispiriting financial information arrived this week: Costs are rising at their quickest tempo in 30 years, wages adjusted for inflation fell essentially the most in almost eight years and the economic system hardly grew in February.
It’s mounting proof of what’s turning out to be a difficult yr for a lot of, with the tightest squeeze on family budgets forecast since data started in 1956.
Even earlier than Russia invaded Ukraine, Britain’s financial development had slowed. However that conflict has weakened Britain’s financial outlook, as is the case in lots of different international locations. Rising vitality prices are passing via to family payments. Producers, farmers and supermarkets have warned concerning the rising value of important inputs into their provide chain from items produced in Russia and Ukraine — together with metals, wheat, fertilizer and sunflower oil. The ache is wide-reaching: even fish and chips, a historically low-cost British staple, has jumped in worth.
The Shopper Costs Index rose by 7 p.c in March in contrast with the identical interval a yr earlier, up from 6.2 p.c the earlier month, the Workplace for Nationwide Statistics stated Wednesday. That exceeded economists’ predictions. Inflation was pushed greater by document costs for gasoline and diesel, in addition to by giant will increase at eating places and inns, for meals and drinks, and clothes and furnishings.
This broad-based improve in costs for merchandise often seen as much less risky “will likely be considered with explicit discomfort by the Financial institution of England,” Sandra Horsfield, an economist at Investec, wrote in a be aware. The central financial institution has raised rates of interest thrice since December to their prepandemic degree in an effort to arrest worth will increase, at the same time as policymakers have reduce the outlook for financial development.
The statistics company additionally stated on Wednesday that wholesale costs had been rising at their quickest tempo since September 2008. Output costs of producers rose almost 12 p.c in March from a yr earlier, whereas their enter costs rose 19 p.c, a document excessive.
On Tuesday, knowledge confirmed Britain’s unemployment charge fell to three.8 p.c, again to its prepandemic low, whereas there are a document variety of vacancies. Indicators of a good labor market are fueling expectations that employees will likely be able to demand bigger salaries. Wages, excluding bonuses, in December to February rose 4 p.c in contrast with a yr earlier, however in the mean time the positive factors are being eaten away by inflation. As soon as adjusted for worth will increase, pay fell 1 p.c, essentially the most since mid-2014.
The British economic system has recovered from its pandemic droop, however development is waning. After the Omicron wave subsided in February, bookings for lodging and journey companies elevated, providing the principle contributor to financial development that month. The economic system grew simply 0.1 p.c, as manufacturing of automobiles, electrical merchandise and chemical substances all declined, the statistics company stated on Monday.

Business
Trump Met PGA Commissioner About Saudi Golf Tour Deal

President Trump met this week with the PGA Tour commissioner, the tour said on Thursday, as the Justice Department considers whether to approve a venture between the United States’ premier golf circuit and one backed by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.
The meeting at the White House on Tuesday was an unusual foray for an American president into global sports diplomacy but squared with his decades-long ambitions to act as a sports power broker. It was also the latest expression of his closeness to LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed tour.
In addition to the PGA Tour commissioner, Jay Monahan, Mr. Trump hosted Adam Scott, who won the Masters Tournament in 2013 and sits on the PGA Tour’s board.
During the Oval Office meeting, Mr. Trump also spoke by telephone with Yasir al-Rumayyan, the Saudi wealth fund’s governor and one of the most influential figures in Saudi Arabia, according to two people familiar with the session who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private talks.
“We asked the president to get involved for the good of the game, the good of the country and for all the countries involved,” Mr. Monahan, Mr. Scott and Tiger Woods said in a joint statement on Thursday afternoon after The New York Times asked on Wednesday night about the meeting. “We are grateful that his leadership has brought us closer to a final deal, paving the way for reunification of men’s professional golf.”
Mr. Woods, the most celebrated player of his generation and another member of the tour’s board, had been scheduled to attend but did not participate because of the death of his mother, according to one of the people briefed on the meeting.
Mr. Woods’s agent did not respond to a request for comment. The wealth fund did not comment.
Since LIV thundered onto the professional golf scene three years ago, Mr. Trump, stung by the professional golf establishment’s distancing itself from him after his entry into politics, has been one of its most steadfast supporters and one of its most essential vendors.
His company has hosted LIV tournaments at courses up and down the East Coast — the circuit is scheduled to return to Trump National Doral, near Miami, in April — and Mr. Trump has been a regular presence. As he played in LIV’s professional-amateur competitions, he would routinely denigrate the PGA Tour and praise its rival and its Saudi patrons to anyone who would listen.
Now Mr. Trump is acting as something of a mediator for the prestigious American tour and the Saudi upstart that defied legions of naysayers to become a force in the sport. On Wednesday, the U.S. Open’s organizer announced a smoother pathway for LIV players to compete at the event, one of the sport’s four major tournaments.
Only two years ago, such a détente seemed improbable. The PGA Tour and LIV had spent 2022 and the first months of 2023 at bitter odds, as the Saudi league swept in to sign well-established stars to some of the most lucrative deals in sports history. LIV encouraged the Justice Department to investigate the PGA Tour for potential violations of antitrust law, and the tour spent months denouncing LIV and its Saudi financiers.
But in June 2023, after about two months of secret talks that stretched from San Francisco to Venice, the tour and LIV abruptly announced a plan to try to combine their businesses. The tentative agreement led to a truce of sorts in their clash over power, money and morality in global sports.
The two sides have yet to close a final deal, though. Federal antitrust officials have been reviewing a term sheet that called for the wealth fund to put $1.5 billion into a commercial arm that the PGA Tour and a group of top American sports investors created.
Justice Department officials have been particularly attuned to whether LIV and the PGA Tour, whose tournaments differ in format and length, are direct rivals and whether a deal might stifle competition in the United States.
In December, Mr. Woods said the talks were “very fluid,” though he also described them as “constructive.”
Mr. Trump, an avid golfer, has spent years predicting some kind of deal between the PGA Tour and LIV. But even as he enjoyed rounds with top players, Mr. Trump has had a complex relationship with America’s golf elite in recent years.
The PGA Tour, which used to hold events at the Trump property in Doral, Fla., ended its relationship with Mr. Trump’s company during the 2016 campaign. Tim Finchem, who was then the tour’s commissioner, said the move was not “a political exercise” but “fundamentally a sponsorship issue.”
Mr. Trump also had a particular falling-out with the P.G.A. of America, which pulled its men’s championship tournament from a Trump course after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. The Trump Organization and the group, which is distinct from the PGA Tour, later reached a settlement.
Soon after his election in November, Mr. Trump signaled his continued interest in the fate of professional golf’s negotiations. As president-elect, Mr. Trump hosted Mr. Monahan for a round of golf at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. The next day, he saw Mr. al-Rumayyan at an event in New York.
Asked in November whether Mr. Trump could perhaps break the logjam, Rory McIlroy, one of the world’s top players, replied, “He might be able to.”
“Obviously Trump has a great relationship with Saudi Arabia,” added Mr. McIlroy, a former PGA Tour board member who played with Mr. Trump in 2017. “He’s got a great relationship with golf. He’s a lover of golf. So, maybe. Who knows? But I think as the president of the United States again, he’s probably got bigger things to focus on than golf.”
But for at least a short time on Tuesday, the day he publicly floated an American takeover of Gaza, Mr. Trump was firmly focused on golf.
Business
Sonos lays off 200 employees amid ongoing troubles
Sonos, which pioneered affordable home speaker systems, announced this week it is cutting 200 jobs in an attempt to restructure following mismanagement and financial losses that have roiled the Santa Barbara company.
The layoffs, which represent about 12% of Sonos’ workforce, come after months of trouble, including a disastrous relaunch of the company’s app last year that left customers leery and led to Chief Executive Patrick Spence’s exit last month.
“There’s no way around the fact that this is a terrible outcome,” interim CEO Tom Conrad, who was a long-standing board member, said in a statement on the company’s website.
Sonos will restructure into smaller teams based on function — hardware, software, design, quality and operations — instead of around the various products it sells to help in decision-making and collaboration, according to the announcement.
“Being smaller and more focused will require us to do a much better job of prioritizing our work — lately we’ve let too many projects run under a cloud of half-commitment. We’re going to fix this too,” Conrad wrote.
The company’s troubles were spurred in large part by the release in May of a new Sonos controller app that was nearly unusable, customers said.
The speaker manufacturer said it would spend $20 million to $30 million to get the app rolling again and provide better customer service, but took a major hit to revenue in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 despite releasing new products.
In an earnings report released Thursday morning, Sonos said revenue in the last three months of 2024 decreased about 10% from the same period in 2023 to roughly $551,000. Operating income dropped almost 40% in the same period.
Shares of the company’s stock were trading at about $15 late Thursday afternoon — an increase of more than 6% for the day, but down nearly 8% over the last 12 months.
News of cuts at Sonos came on the same day that Workday, a human resources management software company also based in California, announced it would cull about 8.5% of its workforce, or about 1,750 jobs. Workday plans to refocus on artificial intelligence and platform development in the new fiscal year, CEO Carl Eschenbach said in a memo sent to employees Wednesday morning.
Business
Fox News Adds Lara Trump as a Host

President Trump persuaded several Fox News hosts to leave the network and take up major roles in his administration.
Now a Trump is joining the network.
Lara Trump, Mr. Trump’s daughter-in-law and a former co-chair of the Republican Party, will begin hosting a new weekend show on Fox News on Feb. 22, the network announced on Wednesday.
The president and his children are frequent guests on Fox News. But there is no precedent for the close relative of a sitting president to host a high-profile show on a major television news channel.
“My View With Lara Trump,” expected to air on Saturdays at 9 p.m. Eastern, will include a mix of analysis and interviews with influential figures. The network is describing the show as focused on “the return of common sense to all corners of American life,” echoing a term, “common sense,” that the Trump administration has frequently deployed.
Ms. Trump, 42, who is married to the president’s son Eric, is no stranger to a television studio. She worked for several years as a producer on “Inside Edition,” and served as an on-air contributor to Fox News from March 2021 to December 2022.
“Lara was a total professional and a natural when she was with us years ago,” Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, told The New York Times in a message on Wednesday. “She is very talented and is a strong, effective communicator with great potential as a host.”
Last year, at the urging of her father-in-law, Ms. Trump ran for and was elected co-chair of the Republican National Committee. She helped oversee the party’s finances, electoral operations and nominating convention in Milwaukee. She stepped down from the role last month.
Ms. Trump told a reporter in December that she “would seriously consider” pursuing the Senate seat in Florida vacated by Marco Rubio, who is now secretary of state. By January, however, she was in discussions with Ms. Scott about a formal role with the network.
Presidential progeny have taken jobs at television news networks in the past, but not while their father (or, in Ms. Trump’s case, father-in-law) was running the country.
Jenna Bush Hager joined NBC’s “Today” in 2009, a few months after her father, George W. Bush, finished his second term; she is now a staple of NBC’s morning programming. Chelsea Clinton worked at NBC News from 2011 to 2014, after her father was president, though during a period when her mother, Hillary Clinton, was serving as secretary of state. Chelsea Clinton was a special correspondent who focused on human-interest feature stories.
Ms. Trump is rejoining Fox News as the network reaches new levels of ratings dominance. Since Election Day, Fox News has had the 636 most-watched telecasts across all of cable news; last month, the network recorded its highest-rated January since its founding in 1996.
The president occasionally laments his coverage on Fox News, and he and the network have gone through periods of iciness, including a four-month stretch, in late 2022 and early 2023, when Mr. Trump — who had just announced his candidacy for re-election — did not appear on a single broadcast.
The Trump-Fox relationship is now on quite solid ground. Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who controls the network, attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration and on Monday spent time in the Oval Office with the president. Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy exited their on-air Fox positions in the fall to become Mr. Trump’s secretaries of defense and transportation.
Ms. Trump, who grew up in Wilmington, N.C., married Eric Trump in 2014. She told The Times in July that she spoke frequently with her father-in-law, mostly about political matters and sometimes about music. (Ms. Trump is an amateur singer.) Last year, while serving as Republican Party co-chair, she pledged “four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House.”
The current occupant of Fox News’s 9 p.m. Saturday slot, Brian Kilmeade, will have his show moved to Sundays at 10 p.m.
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