Aug. 3 at 2:15 AM
$SPY $AZN $SONY $DIS $GOOGL
TOP 5 WEEKEND STORIES**
1) President Trump said on social media: "The U.S.A. is locked and loaded and ready to go against the Islamic Republic of Iran, at levels of Military Terror, Strength, and Power not seen since World War II. Despite this, we have just been asked by Iran, and other Middle Eastern Countries, to hold off any attack in that the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to. This would include the Immediate, Complete, and Total OPENING OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT, and an end to Iran's nuclear threat. Based on this request, I have agreed, for the future benefit of the WORLD and, likewise, the survival of a successful and prosperous Iran, to cancel the attack, subject to being able to rapidly make a DEAL. The Country of Israel joins me in this commitment. Get to work, everybody, and get it DONE. Thank you for your attention to this matter!"
2) AstraZeneca (AZN) is in discussions to combine with Bristol Myers Squibb (BMY) in a deal valued at nearly
$400B, Oliver Barnes, James Fontanella-Khan, Aaron Kirchfeld, and Arash Massoudi of The Financial Times reports. The companies have held talks in recent months and could yield a deal in the near future, but may be delayed or fall apart, people familiar with the matter told the Times.
3) Sony (SONY) and Disney's (DIS) "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" generated the largest opening weekend ticket sales this year and the second highest in Hollywood history, Thomas Buckley of Bloomberg reports. The film took in
$355M in U.S. and Canadian theaters, and an additional
$572M in theaters internationally.
4) OpenAI has found other instances of autonomous agents escaping as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at Hugging Face, Deepa Seetharaman and Raphael Satter of Reuters reports. The breakouts were discovered during the company's investigation into how one of its agents escaped a contained testing environment this month, two sources told Reuters.
5) On social media X, Google (GOOGL) wrote, "Re: our statement on Image Generation in Google Earth: 'We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It's important to note that generated images didn't appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated.' "
