ITV assessing US tariffs after in line first quarter

Britain's ITV has today reported a first-quarter performance in line with guidance and said while it was assessing the impact of tariffs, it did not expect its television-making unit to be hit by US President Donald Trump's proposed film levies.
For the first quarter, the group, which is made up of two units, said its Studios production business reported a 1% rise in revenues, and its Media & Entertainment broadcast and streaming unit, posted total advertising revenue down 2%, as expected.
Trump's tariffs have made the economic outlook more uncertain for most businesses with international revenues, and ITV Studios said it was continuing to assess the possibility of trade tariffs in the US.
"While the macroeconomic environment is uncertain, we remain confident," chief executive Carolyn McCall said in a statement today.
The outlook for Studios, which made "Rivals" for Disney, and whose output in the first three months of 2025 included "Run Away" for Netflix and "The Devil's Hour" for Amazon Prime Video, remains unchanged, ITV said.

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Irish Examiner

31 minutes ago

• Irish Examiner

Israel-Iran war stretches into a second week without diplomatic breakthrough

Hours of talks aimed at de-escalating fighting between Israel and Iran failed to produce a diplomatic breakthrough as the war entered its second week with a fresh round of strikes between the two adversaries. European ministers and Iran's top diplomat met for four hours on Friday in Geneva, as President Donald Trump continued to weigh US military involvement and worries rose over potential strikes on nuclear reactors. European officials expressed hope for future negotiations, and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said he was open to further dialogue while emphasising that Tehran had no interest in negotiating with the US while Israel continued attacking. 'Iran is ready to consider diplomacy if aggression ceases and the aggressor is held accountable for its committed crimes,' he told reporters. Benjamin Netanyahu visits the site of the Weizmann Institute of Science, which was hit by missiles fired from Iran (Jack Guez/Pool Photo via AP) No date was set for the next round of talks. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel's military operation in Iran would continue 'for as long as it takes' to eliminate what he called the existential threat of Iran's nuclear programme and arsenal of ballistic missiles. Israel's top general echoed the warning, saying the Israeli military was ready 'for a prolonged campaign'. But Mr Netanyahu's goal could be out of reach without US help. Iran's underground Fordo uranium enrichment facility is considered to be out of reach to all but America's 'bunker-buster' bombs. Mr Trump said he would put off deciding whether to join Israel's air campaign against Iran for up to two weeks. The war between Israel and Iran erupted on June 13, with Israeli airstrikes targeting nuclear and military sites, top generals and nuclear scientists. At least 657 people, including 263 civilians, have been killed in Iran and more than 2,000 wounded, according to a Washington-based Iranian human rights group. Iran has retaliated by firing 450 missiles and 1,000 drones at Israel, according to Israeli army estimates. Most have been shot down by Israel's multi-tiered air defences, but at least 24 people in Israel have been killed and hundreds wounded. Israel's defence minister said on Saturday it killed a commander in Iran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard who financed and armed Hamas in preparation for the October 7 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the 20-month long war in Gaza. Israel said Saeed Izadi was commander of the Palestine Corps for the Iranian Quds Force, an elite arm of the Guard that conducts military and intelligence operations outside Iran, and that he was killed in an apartment in the city of Qom.

RTÉ News​

an hour ago

• RTÉ News​

Putin's counter-narratives and stalled talks

If you were to only listen to Russian President Vladimir Putin's account of the war in Ukraine (as many millions of Russians do), you might conclude that Russia somehow stumbled into the conflict unwittingly, almost as if it were forced to invade its neighbour. Russia's leader told reporters at this week's St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he had told former US President Joe Biden during one of their last phone conversations (clearly, just before Moscow began its full-scale invasion in February 2022), that "conflicts, especially hot conflicts, must be avoided, and that all issues should be resolved through peaceful means." It was a brazen-faced claim from the man who started the largest conventional war in Europe since World War II. Mr Putin, just like current US President Donald Trump, is running a narrative that the Biden administration was at fault for not trying to stop a war that, in truth, Russia was hell-bent on starting anyway. Since returning to the White House in January, Mr Trump has repeatedly said that the conflict is "Biden's war". Mr Trump has also repeatedly claimed that the war would not have started if he had been president. On this hypothetical point, Mr Putin, is now in agreement too. "Indeed, had Trump been the president, perhaps this conflict would not have happened. I fully acknowledge that possibility," said the Russian leader during the same press event on Thursday in St Petersburg. What Mr Putin really means is: the Biden administration opposed Russia's demands to subjugate Ukraine, whereas Mr Trump, had he been the US president in the months leading up to February 2022, would have been more likely to pressure Ukraine to give in to Russia's demands. For his part, Mr Trump blames another former US President, Barack Obama, also a Democrat, for not dealing with Russia a decade ago. At the G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies earlier this week, he said the war in Ukraine would not have happened if Russia had still been a member of the club, or G8 as it was known. (Russia was kicked out of the G8 in 2014 after its illegal annexation of Crimea). Despite Mr Trump's claims about how he could have averted the war from starting had he been president, he has failed in his promise to end it quickly since returning to the White House in January. It was always an unrealistic pledge. To its credit, the US, aided by Turkey, managed to get both Ukraine and Russia to hold two sets of brief, but direct talks in Istanbul in May, albeit at a low diplomatic level. Getting Ukraine to the table was never an issue. As early as the second week of March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said his country was ready to sign up to a US proposal to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire. The barrier to any ceasefire deal has been Russia, which has repeatedly rejected the US and European-backed ceasefire proposal. Those two sets of direct talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations last month in Istanbul have delivered large-scale prisoner exchanges, humanitarian gestures that do just about enough to keep the US engaged in the process. But otherwise, the talks are at a standstill. Russia is talking about a third set of direct talks, but the Ukrainian side say they have heard nothing from Moscow. Yesterday, at the same conference in St Petersburg, Mr Putin said, as he has done previously, that he considers Russians and Ukrainians to be "one people". "In that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours," he said. That statement shows that Russia's position has not changed since it launched the war. It still disregards Ukraine's sovereignty, although Mr Putin also says that Russia is not seeking Ukraine's capitulation. According to Ukraine's first deputy foreign minister Serhii Kyslytsia, during the second meeting in Instanbul, the head of the Russian delegation, Vladimir Medinsky, described the war as "Russians killing Russians". Mr Medinsky, an ultranationalist historian, has previously questioned the existence of the Ukrainian and Mr Putin's decision to appoint him as the head of the Russian delegation is a clear signal that Moscow has no intention to negotiate. "The talks in Istanbul have demonstrated that Russia has no interest in pursuing peace and is pursuing its maximalist demands," Peter Dickinson, a Kyiv-based editor of the Atlantic Council's Ukraine Alert, told RTÉ News. Instead of pursuing peace, Russia, emboldened by a lack of pressure from the US to end the war, is intensifying its drone and missile assaults on Ukrainian cities. Last Tuesday morning's deadly Russian drone and missile assault on Kyiv – a nine-hour assault and the largest so far this year – killed 30 people and injured more than 170. Twenty-three of the victims, a death toll that included children, were residents of a 9-storey block of flats in the city's western suburb of Solomianskyi. It was struck by a Russian missile. "I think people in Kyiv are very alarmed about the rising number of attacks," said Mr Dickinson. "There's a feeling that people are sitting ducks". This week, Mr Putin also said that he was willing to meet with Mr Zelensky during a final phase of negotiations. However, he quickly followed that statement by questioning the legitimacy of Mr Zelensky's presidency – a long-running Kremlin propaganda narrative that Mr Trump briefly bought into back in March, wrongly labelling the Ukrainian president as "a dictator without elections". Russia argues that Ukraine must hold new presidential elections given that Mr Zelensky's term as president officially ended in May 2024. It was the stuff of more counter-narrative fantasy. Mr Zelensky is a democratically elected leader whereas Russia's elections are rigged like a piece of scripted theatre. While Mr Putin continues his counter-narratives and Russia continues its attacks, Ukraine is still pursuing its strategy of calling for a ceasefire first before there is any talk over territorial issues. Mr Zelensky had arrived in the Canadian Rockies for the G7 meeting on Tuesday - the same day that Russia launched its massive drone and missile on Kyiv - hoping to get some face time with Mr Trump. But his long journey had been in vain. Mr Trump had left early to deal with the escalating situation in the Middle East, according to the White House. And so Mr Zelensky ended up meeting his European partners (plus Canada's new PM Mark Carney), just as he could have done in Europe. Mr Trump's departure may have been a coincidence but, either way, it demonstrated just how low down Ukraine features on the US president's list of priorities. "As of now, no productive talks are possible," said Oleksandr Kraiev, a Ukrainian foreign policy expert at the Ukrainian Prism thinktank in Kyiv. The West, he argues, needs to considering targeting Russia's trading partners in Asia, particularly China, with "proper second-grade sanctions" in order to pressure Moscow to stop the war. "The idea from the Ukrainian side is to find a new format that could change the pressure on Russia," said Mr Kraeiv. That new diplomatic format would need Europe to play more of a role in pressuring Russia to seriously negotiate given the Trump administration's reluctance to introduce new sanctions on Moscow. But more than a month after the leaders of France, Germany, Poland and the UK travelled to Kyiv and gave Russia a 48-hour ultimatum to agree to a ceasefire (or face new sanctions and increased military aid to Kyiv), the steam seems to have run out of European efforts to up the pressure on Russia. Mr Putin had torpedoed that ultimatum by offering direct talks in Istanbul, which Mr Trump approved. 'The Coalition of the Willing', a British and French-led initiative to shore up support for a European peace monitoring force in a post-war scenario, has gone quiet too, perhaps waiting for the outcome of this week's NATO annual summit in The Hague. Crucially, it also lacked US support. "The question now is how do you get Russia to be interested in peace," said Mr Dickinson, who believes it's "futile" to expect the US to make the breakthrough. "Now it's up to Europe to step up and take action but there is still no political will".

Irish Times

4 hours ago

• Irish Times

If Netanyahu wants regime change in Iran, it is unlikely to end well

It is not yet certain whether Donald Trump will approve US involvement in Israel 's assault on Iran which began last week. While Israel has inflicted severe losses on Iran and appears to have disabled its air defences, there is a broad consensus that, without US intervention, the goal of disabling Iran's nuclear programme will be unachievable. To this end, a great deal of attention has been paid to the Fordow nuclear facility , close to the city of Qom, which is at the heart of the programme of uranium enrichment and much of which is located 80-90m underground. In 2009, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that the facility held about 3,000 centrifuges which are central to the enrichment process. Under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the deal which Iran signed in 2015, uranium enrichment ceased at Fordow. But, when the US pulled out of that agreement under the first Trump administration, production restarted. Now the assumption is that only the so-called 'bunker buster' bombs possessed by the US are capable of destroying the facility at Fordow. However, the US president's announcement of a two-week deadline to decide if his country will join Israel's attack speaks to uncertainty regarding its likely success and divisions within his support base. Either way, the one-sided nature of the conflict so far – which has seen Israel inflict far more significant losses on Iran, both in terms of military leadership and civilian casualties, than it has sustained – raises the question of whether regime-change in Tehran is on the agenda. From the outset, Israeli leaders have expressly stated that this is not a key objective. However, they have made it equally clear that they would welcome the fall of the Islamic Republic should it happen. Indeed, Binyamin Netanyahu has called on Iranians to 'stand up for their freedom'. As for Trump, his rhetoric has shifted dramatically over the course of the past several weeks, from an initial position which saw him urge restraint on Netanyahu, and talk up the prospect of success in negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programme, to his more recent darker utterances regarding the prospect of direct US involvement to put an end to Iran's nuclear ambitions. All of this, in turn, suggests Trump has been bounced into supporting Israel's assault on Iran through Netanyahu's pre-emptive actions last Thursday. READ MORE Israel needs Trump's 'bunker buster' but will US enter the war? Listen | 31:22 Since Israel launched air strikes on Iran last Friday, the two states have traded missiles with mounting casualties on both military leaders have been killed as have some of its nuclear scientists but the country's citizens have borne the brunt of the air has said its rationale for the middle-of-the-night attack that sparked the war was its need to ensure, for its own protection, that Iran's nuclear programme is close Iran is to actually having a nuclear bomb is unclear but for Israel to obliterate entirely the nuclear threat it needs the US to join the war, to send its 'bunker buster' mega bomb to destroy the Fordo uranium enrichment facility buried deep in the by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Declan Conlon. While the likely course of US action on Iran remains unpredictable, it is clear that neither Israel nor the United States has a plan for – or indeed any coherent understanding of – what might follow from the fall of the regime in Tehran, beyond wilfully optimistic assumptions regarding its positive impact on the country and the region. However, history teaches us that such optimistic assumptions are rarely well placed. The reality is that when we have seen external involvement in the affairs of Iran and the Middle East more generally, the results have never been straightforward and rarely positive. [ Could Israel's attacks on Iran create a nuclear contamination risk? Opens in new window ] In Iran in 1953, the country's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, was overthrown in a coup orchestrated by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Mossadeq's government nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which was a forerunner to BP), a move that was widely popular in the country but alarming to the UK and the US. As events unfolded, the Shah of Iran, fearing the worst, left the country. However, Mossadeq was removed from power in August 1953 and the Shah returned to preside over an increasingly repressive regime, until his removal during the revolution of 1979. As is so often the case with external interventions of this nature, Mossadeq's removal had unintended consequences. The events of 1953 dealt a severe blow to liberal and democratic politics in Iran while the Shah was seen as little more than an American puppet – factors contributing to the revolution which ended his rule in 1979 and inaugurated the Islamic Republic of Iran. More recently, the ill-conceived US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 brought years of violent conflict to the country, led to the sectarianisation of its politics and helped pave the way for the emergence of the so-called Islamic State , while strengthening the position of the Iranian regime in the region, along the way. Likewise, western intervention in Libya in 2011 did nothing to contribute to peace and stability in that country. This is not to say that Iranians cannot mobilise in the face of a repressive regime; Iran has a long history of such mobilisation. As far back as the early 20th century, the 'constitutional revolution' of the period from 1906 to 1911 saw mass demonstrations that forced the Shah to agree to a written constitution and the establishment of an elected parliament. That mobilisation was motivated by a number of grievances, including disillusionment with the ruling elite, as well as resentment at foreign influence and interference in the affairs of the country. While many of the gains of this period were subsequently reversed, the constitution remained in place until the revolution of 1979. Decades later, mass mobilisation led to the end of the Pahlavi dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1925 with significant western support. However, the post-1979 period has also witnessed expressions of dissent from the governing orthodoxy in the country. In 2009, mass protests broke out when the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed victory in the presidential election of June 12th that year, despite widespread electoral irregularities and claims by opposition candidates that the vote was rigged. After the announcement of the results, supporters of opposition candidates took to the streets in protest. By June 15th, as many as two million people were on the streets of Tehran. The protests were ultimately suppressed with the deaths of dozens of protesters and the arrests of thousands. Thirteen years later, unrest and protests broke out again on a mass scale following the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, whose 'crime' was the violation of Iran's mandatory hijab law by wearing hers 'improperly'. The protest movement that followed adopted the slogan 'Women, Life, Freedom' but subsequently grew into open calls for the removal of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. Once more the protests were violently suppressed, and 500 people lost their lives. Popular mobilisation in Iran for more than 100 years has been driven by domestic actors in pursuit of domestic agendas and never by external forces. It is unlikely that Netanyahu's call on the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government will alter that record. Dr Vincent Durac lectures in Middle East politics in the UCD school of politics and international relations