Aurelia Butler

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -SpaceX on Friday challenged the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to deny the space company’s satellite internet unit $885.5 million in rural broadband subsidies, calling the move “flawed” and “grossly unfair,” in a regulatory filing.The FCC last month turned down applications from billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX and LTD Broadband for funds that had been tentatively awarded in 2020 under the commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a multibillion dollar program in which SpaceX was poised to receive $885.5 million to beam satellite internet to U.S. regions with little to no internet connections.”The decision appears to have been rendered in service to a clear bias towards fiber, rather than a merits-based decision to actually connect unserved Americans,” SpaceX’s senior director of satellite policy, David Goldman, wrote in a scathing appeal filed Friday evening.The FCC declined to comment.SpaceX’s Starlink, a fast-growing network of more than 3,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit, has tens of thousands of users in the U.S. so far, with consumers paying at least $599 for a user terminal and $110 a month for service.Announcing the rejection in August, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said Starlink’s technology “has real promise” but that it could not meet the program’s requirements, citing data that showed a steady decline in speeds over the past year and casting the service’s price as too steep for consumers.SpaceX under the program had sought to provide 100/20 Mbps service to 642,925 locations in 35 states. The company in its appeal said the FCC erroneously evaluated Starlink’s performance.FCC commissioner Brendan Carr in a statement last month opposed the FCC’s decision and slammed the agency for rejecting the funds without a full commission vote. “To be clear, this is a decision that tells families in states across the country that they should just keep waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide even though we have the technology to improve their lives now,” Carr said. More

WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) – Elon Musk contended that Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)’s decision to pay millions of dollars to a whistleblower it had fired gives the world’s richest person another justification for terminating his $44 billion agreement to buy the social media company.In a Friday letter to Twitter, lawyers for Musk said Twitter’s failure to seek his consent before paying $7.75 million to Peiter Zatko and his lawyers violated the merger agreement, which restricted when Twitter could make such payments.The payment, which included $7 million for Zatko, “cannot be cured,” and Musk is therefore “not required” to complete the merger, the letter said. A copy was filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.It has said it was committed to completing the merger, which calls for Musk to pay $54.20 per share for the San Francisco-based company. Twitter shares closed Friday at $42.19.Zatko, known as Mudge, had been Twitter’s top security executive before being fired in January.He later told regulators that Twitter misled them and the public about its security practices and how it fights hackers and spam.Lawyers for Musk said the severance payment was made under a June 28 separation agreement between Twitter and Zatko.Musk, who also runs the electric car company Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Inc, declared the merger void 10 days later, accusing Twitter of misrepresenting the prevalence of spam or bot accounts on its platform.Twitter rejected Musk’s claims and sued him to hold him to the merger, claiming he had gotten cold feet as geopolitical concerns and rising inflation rattled markets.Musk later countersued Twitter, and on Friday amended his case to incorporate Zatko’s claims, court records show.A trial in Delaware Chancery Court is scheduled to begin on Oct. 17. More

The latest forecast for surging consumer prices is 4.8 percentage points higher than the previous month’s estimate. Analysts estimated that Argentine inflation rose 6.5% in August.By next year, the South American nation’s annual inflation rate is expected to reach 84%, and drop to 63% in 2024, according to the poll.The analysts consulted by the central bank moderately raised their projection for Argentina’s economic growth this year to 3.6%, up barely 0.2 percentage points compared to last month’s poll.The third-largest economy in Latin America has long suffered from high inflation, which has been aggravated by the effects of the war between Ukraine and Russia.Poll participants also expected the average official exchange rate in Argentina in December to reach 170.11 pesos per U.S. dollar, though Argentine traders have increasingly turned to black market foreign exchange. More