Stephen King

German media group Bertelsmann will acquire U.S. publisher Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS for more than $2 billion. Bertelsmann, the owner of Penguin Random House, outbid Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for the publisher of authors Dan Brown, Hillary Clinton and Stephen King that Viacom put up for sale earlier this year.

CEO Thomas Rabe is restructuring the group to reduce its exposure to declining areas such as printing, has merged its Arvato CRM customer services unit and made a string of smaller technology bets.

In what locals described as "something out of a Stephen King movie", feral chickens have invaded and disturbed peaceful Auckland suburb Titirangi, leaving the neighbourhood "wrecked". In 2019, the number of feral chickens in Titirangi had grown to 250 but most of them were captured and relocated to nearby farms. Amid the lockdown, the birds have returned and are once again disrupting the residents' sleep and damaging the area.

The author has said that fans told him that the coronavirus pandemic feels "like we're living in a Stephen King story" and said his "only response to that is, 'I'm sorry'". Having covered the topic of a global pandemic in his book "The Stand" from 1978 the author added, "that sooner or later, there was going to be a virus that was going to communicate to the public at large".