Cosm, the immersive technology company that broadcasts live sports events using what it calls “shared reality,” is partnering with the National Football League, the company announced Monday.

As part of the deal, Cosm will produce and distribute NFL games at its venues throughout the rest of the 2024 season.

The deal includes broadcasting every Thursday night football game on Amazon, all Sunday night games on NBC, every Monday night football game on ESPN and select games on Sunday with Fox.

The company, founded in 2020 by Mirasol Capital, uses a 360-degree dome with giant 12K+ LED screens to offer viewers a fully immersive “shared reality” experience that mirrors being at the game.

The domes fit about 700 people with the average ticket price ranging between $22 and $127. Cosm uses a dynamic pricing model, similar to concerts or live sports.

“What’s so unique about a property like the NFL is that fandom is everywhere,” said Jeb Terry, president and CEO at Cosm. “We see fans coming in wearing jerseys, bringing the Terrible Towel, bringing cow bells, having an absolute blast, like they’re at the stadium themselves.”

The company did not disclose the financial details of its deal with the NFL.

Cosm first opened its doors in Los Angeles and Dallas this summer and recently announced its third venue would be in downtown Atlanta, with future locations to be announced soon.

Cosm already has deals in place with the NBA, UFC, ESPN, NBC Sports, TNT Sports, Fox Sports and Amazon Prime Video, and broadcasts everything from the Summer Olympics in Paris to the current World Series.

Tickets for the first game of the World Series featuring the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees sold out in seven minutes, Cosm said. The second game sold out in one minute.

“Inventory is flying off the shelf,” Terry said.

While live sports act as the core anchor for Cosm, the company also has nonsports offerings, including an animated voyage beyond the planets through the eyes of astronauts and a Cirque du Soleil show. This allows the company to have programs throughout lunch and matinee hours when live sports may not be available.

As fans’ viewing habits are changing, Cosm is finding rapid success in its tech-forward model.

Terry said the venues are already seeing repeat customers and they will soon be introducing membership rewards and season passes.

In July, the company raised more than $250 million in funding to expand globally. Cosm is valued at more than $1 billion, and its investors include sports heavyweights such as former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert and co-managing partner of the Philadelphia 76ers and the New Jersey Devils David Blitzer.

Disclosure: Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

The Washington Post said Friday that it will not endorse a candidate in the presidential election this year — or ever again — breaking decades of tradition and sparking immediate criticism of the decision.

But the newspaper also published an article by two staff reporters revealing that editorial page staffers had drafted an endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over GOP nominee Donald Trump in the election.

“The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,” the article said, citing two sources briefed on the events.

Trump, while president, had been critical of the billionaire Bezos and the Post, which he purchased in 2013.

The newspaper in 2016 and again in 2020 endorsed Trump’s election opponents, Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden, in editorials that condemned the Republican in blunt terms.

In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it had lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to Microsoft because Trump had used “improper pressure … to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.

The Post since 1976 had regularly endorsed candidates for president, except for the 1988 race. All those endorsements had been for Democrats.

In a statement to CNBC, when asked about Bezos’ purported role in killing the endorsement, Post chief communications officer Kathy Baird said, “This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse, and I would refer you to the publisher’s statement in full.”

The Post on Friday evening published a third article, signed by opinion columnists for the newspaper, who said, “The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake.”

“It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love, and for which we have worked a combined 218 years,” the column said. “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.”

CNBC has requested comment from Amazon, where Bezos remains the largest shareholder.

Post publisher and chief executive Will Lewis, in an article published online explaining the decision, wrote, “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election.”

“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Lewis wrote.

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility,” he wrote.

“That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

Seven of the 13 paragraphs of Lewis’ article either quoted at length or referred to Post Editorial Board statements in 1960 and 1972 explaining the paper’s rationale for not endorsing presidential candidates in those years, which included its identity as “an independent newspaper.”

Lewis noted that the paper had endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976 “for understandable reasons at the times” — which he did not identify.

“But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to,” Lewis wrote.

“Our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent,” he wrote. “And that is what we are and will be.”

Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan, a member of the paper’s opinions section, resigned following the decision, multiple news outlets reported.

More than 10,000 reader comments were posted on Lewis’ article, many of them blasting the Post for its decision and saying they were canceling their subscriptions.

“The most consequential election in our country, a choice between Fascism and Democracy, and you sit out? Cowards. Unethical, fearful cowards,” wrote one comment. “Oh, and by the way, I’m canceling my subscription, because you are putting business ahead of ethics and morals.”

The announcement came days after Mariel Garza, the head of The Los Angeles Times‘ editorial board, resigned in protest after that paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, decided against running a presidential endorsement.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, is a billionaire.

Marty Baron, the former editor of The Washington Post, called that paper’s decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”

″@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others),” Baron wrote. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

The Washington Post Guild, the union that represents the newspaper’s staff, in a statement posted on the social media site X said it was “deeply concerned that The Washington Post — an American news institution in the nation’s capital — would make a decision to no longer endorse presidential candidates, especially a mere 11 days ahead of an immensely consequential election.”

“The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial,” the Guild said in the statement, which noted the paper’s reporting about Bezos’ role in the decision.

“We are already seeing cancellations from once loyal readers,” the Guild said. “This decision undercuts the work of our members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it.”

Former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose stories about the Watergate break-in during the Nixon administration won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, in a statement said, “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

“Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process,” Woodward and Bernstein said.

Post columnist Karen Attiah, in a post on the social media site Threads, wrote, “Today has been an absolute stab in the back.”

“What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line to call out threats to human rights and democracy,” Attiah wrote.

Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democrat from California, in his own tweet on the news wrote, “The first step towards fascism is when the free press cowers in fear.”

Trump in August told Fox Business News that Bezos called him after the Republican narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in July at a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania.

“He was very nice even though he owns The Washington Post,” Trump said of Bezos.

Bezos last posted on X on July 13, hours after the assassination attempt.

“Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight,” Bezos wrote in that tweet. “So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families.”

Trump on Friday met in Austin, Texas, with executives from the Bezos-owned space exploration company Blue Origin, among them CEO David Limp, the Associated Press reported

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Healthy Returns newsletter, which brings the latest health-care news straight to your inbox. Subscribe here to receive future editions.

Yet another study shows that blockbuster GLP-1 drugs may offer health benefits beyond diabetes and weight loss. 

This time, more research is showing that they may significantly curb addictive behaviors. 

Drugs such as Novo Nordisk‘s highly popular diabetes injection Ozempic can cut drug and alcohol abuse by around half, according to a new study published last week in the scientific journal Addiction. That suggests Ozempic and similar medications could potentially become a new treatment for opioid and alcohol use disorder. 

“This study not only contributes to the evolving landscape of substance use therapy but also opens avenues for more comprehensive and effective treatment strategies for those affected by” the two disorders, the study authors wrote. 

Here’s why that’s important. 

More tools are needed to address the ongoing U.S. opioid epidemic, which was declared a public health emergency in 2017. In 2021, an estimated 2.5 million people ages 18 or above in the U.S. had opioid use disorder in the past year, but only 22% received medications to treat it, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Opioids are a factor in around 72% of overdose deaths in the U.S., the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics says. 

Meanwhile, nearly 29 million people ages 12 and above had alcohol use disorder in the past year, according to a 2023 national survey. Excessive alcohol use is the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., as about 178,000 people die from it each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Let’s dive into the new data. 

Researchers from Loyola University Chicago examined the electronic health data of more than 500,000 people with a history of opioid use disorder, 8,000 of whom were taking either GLP-1s or similar treatments called GIPs, such as Eli Lilly‘s weight loss treatment Mounjaro. Mounjaro mimics GLP-1 and another gut hormone called GIP to tamp down appetite and regulate blood sugar, while Ozempic only targets GLP-1. 

People taking GLP-1s or GIPs had a 40% lower rate of opioid overdose compared with those who didn’t, the study found. Similarly, an analysis of more than 5,000 people with a history of alcohol use disorder and who took those treatments had a 50% lower rate of intoxication compared with those who didn’t take them. 

The results are no surprise. It’s consistent with other studies showing the potential of GLP-1s and GIPs to reduce substance-seeking behaviors such as alcohol and nicotine use. Other research has also shown their promise in treating kidney failure, fatty liver disease, Alzheimer’s disease and obstructive sleep apnea. 

Novo Nordisk’s weight loss drug Wegovy also won approval in the U.S. in March for slashing the risk of serious cardiovascular complications in adults with obesity and heart disease.

But more research is likely needed to confirm the findings of the new study. Researchers have called for more clinical trials that randomly assign patients with a substance use disorder to receive a GLP-1 or a placebo, to confirm the potential treatment benefits of drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. 

We’ll continue to monitor what other research in this area comes out, so stay tuned for our coverage. 

Feel free to send any tips, suggestions, story ideas and data to Annika at annikakim.constantino@nbcuni.com.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell Monday, giving back some of the strong gains from last week, as Treasury yields rose and investors awaited new earnings reports.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.3%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 330 points, or about 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite hovered just above the flatline.

Consumer and homebuilder stocks were among the biggest losers as fears about higher-for-longer interest rates crept up, with Target and Builders FirstSource each down more than 4%. Lennar also shed more than 3.5%.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury jumped, rising more than 10 basis points to 4.178%.

“Bond yields continue to back up, which implies to me that investors are now thinking that the Fed will be slower to lower interest rates because the economy remains resilient,” CFRA chief investment strategist Sam Stovall said. “As a result, the Fed will likely have a harder time pushing the inflation rate down to its target 2% level in the next year or so.”

Earnings will be key this week with roughly one-fifth of the S&P 500 set to report. Among the companies on deck are Tesla, Coca-Cola and GE Aerospace.

Thus far, the results have been mixed. Of the 14% of S&P 500 companies that have already posted third-quarter results, 79% have beaten expectations, according to FactSet’s John Butters. Analysts have significantly downgraded their earnings expectations for the quarter in recent months.

“I don’t think that we are in the beginnings of an earnings recession or anything like that, but the bar has been set very, very low … rarely does anybody injure themselves falling out of a basement window,” Stovall said. “So with earnings this low, chances are that this will be the 60th quarter out of the past 62 in which actual results exceed end-of-quarter estimates.”

Still, investors are largely optimistic equities still have further room to run, but they are mindful that stretched valuations, particularly ahead of the U.S. presidential election and amid rising geopolitical risks, could also mean further choppiness.

Monday’s moves come after both the S&P 500 and 30-stock Dow registered all-time highs on Friday, cementing a sixth straight weekly advance for both benchmarks.

Inflation may have cooled, but retailers are still staring down a holiday season with plenty of uncertainty.

Several hard-to-predict factors will influence consumers’ spending, as they deck the halls and look for the perfect gifts. Volatile weather, election distraction and a deal-hunting mindset may shape the season. And fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than last year will put shoppers on the clock.

Yet there’s reason for optimism for retailers: Shoppers are feeling more upbeat and plan to spend more compared with last holiday season, according to an annual survey by consulting firm Deloitte and a separate forecast by the National Retail Federation.

Holiday spending in November and December is expected to increase by 2.5% to 3.5% compared with 2023 and range between $979.5 billion and $989 billion, according to the National Retail Federation. That’s a more modest increase than the 3.9% year-over-year jump from the 2022 to 2023 holiday season, when spending totaled $955.6 billion. The NRF’s figure excludes automobile dealers, gasoline stations and restaurants.

Shoppers expect to spend an average of $1,778 on the holidays this year, 8% more than last holiday season, according to consulting firm Deloitte’s survey. The survey, which included about 4,000 consumers and was conducted in late August and early September, attributed that spending increase to a more favorable economic outlook, a perception among respondents that prices would be higher and more willingness to spend among higher-earning households with an annual income of between $100,000 and $199,000.

Low unemployment, a return to more typical inflation levels and a recent Federal Reserve interest rate cut are lifting consumers’ spirits, said Stephen Rogers, managing director of Deloitte’s Consumer Industry Center.

“People are still in a better frame of mind, despite the political chatter,” he said. “When they look at their bank account and think about what their financial situation is, they feel better.”