Author: News Room

Increased federal spending in recent years has helped to improve U.S. ports, roads, parks, public transit and levees, according to a report released on Tuesday by the American Society of Civil Engineers.But that progress could stagnate if those investments, some of which were put on hold after President Trump took office in January, aren’t sustained.Overall, the group gave the nation’s infrastructure a C grade, a mediocre rating but the best the country has received since the group’s first report card in 1998. Most infrastructure, including aviation, waterways and schools, earned a C or D grade; ports and rail did better.…

China has released five employees of an American corporate investigations firm, the Mintz Group, two years after they were detained as part of a crackdown by Beijing on foreign business consultancies.“We understand that the Mintz Group Beijing employees who were detained, all Chinese nationals, have now all been released,” the firm said in a statement on Tuesday.“We are grateful to the Chinese authorities that our former colleagues can now be home with their families,” the company said.The employees’ release comes as China is trying to revive overseas investment to help revive its sluggish economy. Dozens of foreign executives, including Tim…

Han Jong-Hee, the co-chief executive of Samsung Electronics and a nearly four-decade veteran of the South Korean consumer technology giant, died on Tuesday.Mr. Han, who was 63, suffered a sudden heart attack, according to a company spokeswoman.Mr. Han had shared chief executive duties with the head of Samsung’s semiconductor business since 2022, and was also a member of the board. He had run Samsung’s consumer electronics business since 2021 and a year later added the digital appliance operation to his brief. Previously he oversaw the group that makes the visual displays for Samsung’s wide variety of electronic devices.Mr. Han joined…

For most of the last three years, the most clever, artful and progressive act in K-pop has been NewJeans, a five-member girl group — Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, Hyein and Minji — with an almost preternatural musical and aesthetic sophistication. With one elegantly rendered chart-topping single after another, the artists, who range in age from 16 to 20, seemed invincible.Which is why the group’s announcement, last November, that it wished to terminate its contract with its label and management agency, Ador — a sublabel of the K-pop conglomerate Hybe — was such a watershed moment. NewJeans said that its differences with…

When the Wall Street veteran Frank Bisignano goes before Congress on Tuesday as President Trump’s pick to lead the Social Security Administration, he will confront questions about how he would run an agency suddenly in the grips of upheaval.In recent weeks, the billionaire Elon Musk has zeroed in on the agency, which is charged with the staid but critical work of providing retirement, survivor and disability payments to 73 million Americans each month.Mr. Musk has claimed that vast numbers of Americans are fraudulently drawing benefits from the agency, an assertion experts say is demonstrably false. Over the objections of longtime…

For just over two years, technology leaders at the forefront of developing artificial intelligence had made an unusual request of lawmakers. They wanted Washington to regulate them.The tech executives warned lawmakers that generative A.I., which can produce text and images that mimic human creations, had the potential to disrupt national security and elections, and could eventually eliminate millions of jobs.A.I. could go “quite wrong,” Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, testified in Congress in May 2023. “We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”But since President Trump’s election, tech leaders and their companies have changed…

In her first briefing as White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt said she was “committed to telling the truth from this podium every single day.” Moments later she announced that the new administration had blocked a $50 million contract for condoms in Gaza.“That is a preposterous waste of taxpayer money,” she said.It was also a preposterous claim, improbable on its face and quickly debunked. There were millions in federal grants awarded to prevent sexually transmitted diseases in Gaza, but in the province in Mozambique, not the Palestinian territory.The condoms claim went viral anyway, seeping into the political discourse that President…

One of President Trump’s former campaign managers, Chris LaCivita, on Monday filed a defamation lawsuit against The Daily Beast over its reporting on how much he was paid by the campaign.The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, accuses The Daily Beast of creating “the false impression that Mr. LaCivita was personally profiting excessively from his work on the campaign and that he was prioritizing personal gain over the campaign’s success.”It centers on an article published Oct. 15, 2024, with the headline: “Trump In Cash Crisis-As Campaign Chief’s $22m Pay Revealed.” The article was…

Hyundai Motor, a South Korean conglomerate known for its automobiles, will invest $21 billion to expand manufacturing in the United States in what President Trump said was proof that his tariff policies were creating jobs.The company, which also produces steel, said the investment through 2028 would include $6 billion for a steel factory in Louisiana that would employ 1,300 people and for other projects to supply Hyundai factories with parts and materials.The company will also spend $9 billion to expand production of Hyundai, Kia and Genesis vehicles in the United States. The rest of the money will be used for…

When the biotech company Humacyte designed a study to see if its lab-grown blood vessel worked, it decided to measure whether blood was flowing freely through the high-tech tube 30 days after it was implanted in a person.As those days passed, some of the 54 patients in the study ran into trouble. Doctors lost track of one. Four died. Four more had a limb amputated, including one who developed a clot and infection in the artificial vessel, Food and Drug Administration records show.Humacyte, which is traded on the Nasdaq, counted all those patients as proof of success in talks with…