Yahoo will adopt a new corporate identity and slash the size of its board if the proposed $4.8 billion sale of its digital services to Verizon Communications goes through.
The company plans to change its name to Altaba Inc. after it turns over its email, websites, mobile apps and advertising tools to Verizon. The new name is meant to reflect Yahoo's transformation into a holding company for investments in China's e-commerce leader, Alibaba Group, and Yahoo Japan that are worth about more than $40 billion combined.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, co-founder David Filo and four other directors currently on the company's 11-member board will resign after the planned sale to Verizon closes. Verizon is expected to retain Yahoo's brand under its ownership.
But the Verizon deal has been jeopardized by Yahoo's recent discovery of two computer hacking attacks that stole personal information from more than 1 billion user accounts during two different intrusions that occurred in 2013 and 2014.
Verizon is reassessing whether it should renegotiate the sales price or perhaps cancel the deal light of hacking revelations that could trigger a backlash among Yahoo users upset about sensitive personal details being stolen. Yahoo is fighting to keep the deal intact.
In the only change that took effect Monday, Yahoo director Eric Brandt became the company's chairman. He replaces Maynard Webb, who becomes chairman emeritus until the Verizon deal closes.
Brandt, the former chief financial officer of chipmaker Broadcom, joined Yahoo's board 10 months ago. Webb had been Yahoo's chairman for nearly four years. If the Verizon deal closes, Webb will leave the board along with Mayer, Filo and Eddy Hartenstein, Richard Hill and Jane Shaw.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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