Here are the business stories making the headlines across Scotland and the UK this morning.
Fifa says 'nobody selling football' as plan continues
Fifa says that "nobody is selling football" as it vowed to continue with the controversial plan to sell stakes in its competitions to private investors.
Uefa - the body that governs European football - voted on Thursday to boycott World Cups if the plan proceeded.
Concacaf, which governs football in North and Central America and hosted this year's World Cup, said its 41 member associations also "rejected" the proposal made by Fifa president Gianni Infantino.
Find out more on the BBC website.
Anthropic says Claude AI hacked three organisations during cyber tests
US technology firm Anthropic says its artificial intelligence (AI) models hacked into the systems of three organisations during a cybersecurity test due to an error that gave them access to the internet.
It comes just days after rival OpenAI said that its models had breached the systems of other companies, including AI tools hub Hugging Face.
The announcement prompted Anthropic to check whether its own models had carried out similar attacks. It says it uncovered three cases that have since been reported to the affected companies.
Read the full BBC story here.
Exclusive: £900k of Aberdeen tourist tax could be used to hire experts ‘to promote city as a destination’
Aberdeen City Council bosses have floated £900,000 plans to turn the city into a destination.
The local authority is looking into hiring experts to showcase the Granite City to the world.
Bosses have outlined their hopes of securing a “city-focused Aberdeen destination marketing and development service”.
Read the P&J exclusive here.
Apple beats estimates on iPhone sales
Apple beat quarterly sales and profit estimates after reporting strong demand for the iPhone in Tim Cook’s last earnings report as chief executive.
The world’s most valuable publicly traded company said sales for the third fiscal quarter ended June 27 were up 16.4 per cent to $109.4 billion, compared with analyst estimates of $108.65 billion.
Profit rose 27 per cent year-on-year to $29.8 billion, beating Wall Street’s forecast of $27.8 billion. The shares, however, fell $12.54, or 3.8 per cent, to $320.71 in late trading after Apple’s fourth-quarter outlook disappointed investors.
Read more in The Times.
Bond markets rally after interest rate decision
UK government borrowing costs fell and traders cut back bets on interest rate rises this year after the Bank of England said there were no signs that rising oil prices were spilling into other parts of the economy.
Yields on two-year government bonds, known as gilts, fell by 0.13 percentage points to 4.33 per cent after the central bank kept the base rate on hold for the fifth time this year at 3.75 per cent. The Bank has made no change to interest rates since the outbreak of the US-Iran conflict in late February and last cut borrowing costs in December 2025.
Short-dated gilts are sensitive to the monetary policy outlook, suggesting that traders are cutting back expectations that the Bank will raise rates over the coming months. Yields fall when bond prices rally. Before the decision, traders had put a 50 per cent probability on the first interest rate rise of the year coming in September. This fell to below 40 per cent on Thursday afternoon.
Read The Times' article here.
Hiring apprentices too expensive and complex, says Screwfix boss
Bureaucracy and rising employment costs are discouraging businesses from hiring young workers through apprenticeships, the boss of Screwfix has warned.
In a letter to The Times, John Mewett, chief executive of the trade retailer, said many employers, including sole traders, wanted to train the next generation but were walking away from apprenticeship schemes because the process had become “too complex”.
“They want to take on apprentices, but they tell us that each stage of the process is too complicated, from the paperwork, to hiring, to managing apprentice workload,” Mewett wrote. “Too often, this puts them off.”
Hundreds of jobs to go at Jaguar Land Rover
Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) plans to cut hundreds of jobs, less than a year after a cyber attack brought production to a halt for more than a month.
In a statement, the firm said: "Impacted colleagues will be supported to find alternative roles wherever possible, alongside the option of voluntary early exit."
The company said it expected fewer than 300 people would leave the firm under the plans.
Read more from the BBC.